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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/33505-8.txt b/33505-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..28c0693 --- /dev/null +++ b/33505-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,6825 @@ +Project Gutenberg's The Trembling of the Veil, by William Butler Yeats + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere 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 + + +Title: The Trembling of the Veil + +Author: William Butler Yeats + +Release Date: August 23, 2010 [EBook #33505] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL *** + + + + +Produced by Brian Foley and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was +produced from images generously made available by The +Internet Archive/American Libraries.) + + + + + + + + + +_THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL_ + + + + + PRIVATELY PRINTED BOOKS + + (_Uniform with this Volume_) + + THE STORY-TELLER'S HOLIDAY (_George Moore_) _July 1918_ + + AVOWALS (_George Moore_) _September 1919_ + + ESTHER WATERS (_George Moore_) _October 1920_ + + THE COMING OF GABRIELLE (_George Moore_) _December 1920_ + + HÉLOISE AND ABÉLARD (_George Moore_) _February 1921_ + + NINE TALES FROM "LES CONTES DROLATIQUES" OF BALZAC + (_Translated by Robert Crawford_) _November 1921_ + + A PORTRAIT OF GEORGE MOORE IN A STUDY OF HIS WORK + (_John Freeman_) _May 1922_ + + THE CAULDRON OF ANNWN (_Thomas Evelyn Ellis_) _June 1922_ + + + + +[Illustration: _Emery Walker Ph.oc. From a picture by Charles Shannon_] + + + + + THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL + + + By W. B. YEATS + + + LONDON + PRIVATELY PRINTED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY BY + T. WERNER LAURIE, LTD. + 1922 + + + + + _To_ + JOHN QUINN + _my friend and helper, + and friend and helper of certain people + mentioned in this book_. + + + GIFT + + PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN + + + + + THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL + + _This edition consists of one thousand copies numbered and signed._ + + _This is No._ 24 + + + + +PREFACE + + +_I have found in an old diary a quotation from Stephane Mallarmé, saying +that his epoch was troubled by the trembling of the veil of the Temple. As +those words were still true, during the years of my life described in this +book, I have chosen The Trembling of the Veil for its title._ + +_Except in one or two trivial details, where I have the warrant of old +friendship, I have not, without permission, quoted conversation or +described occurrence from the private life of named or recognisable +persons. I have not felt my freedom abated, for most of the friends of my +youth are dead and over the dead I have an historian's rights. They were +artists and writers and certain among them men of genius, and the life of +a man of genius, because of his greater sincerity, is often an experiment +that needs analysis and record. At least my generation so valued +personality that it thought so. I have said all the good I know and all +the evil: I have kept nothing back necessary to understanding._ + +_W. B. YEATS._ + + + _May, 1922. + Thoor Ballylee._ + + + + +CONTENTS + + + PAGE + + BOOK I FOUR YEARS 1887-1891 3 + + BOOK II IRELAND AFTER THE FALL OF PARNELL 83 + + BOOK III HODOS CAMELIONIS 135 + + BOOK IV THE TRAGIC GENERATION 157 + + BOOK V THE STIRRING OF THE BONES 225 + + + + +BOOK I FOUR YEARS--1887-1891 + + + + +THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL + + + + +_FOUR YEARS_ 1887-1891 + + +I + +At the end of the 'eighties my father and mother, my brother and sisters +and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were settled in Bedford Park in +a red-brick house with several mantelpieces of wood, copied from marble +mantelpieces designed by the brothers Adam, a balcony and a little garden +shadowed by a great horse-chestnut tree. Years before we had lived there, +when the crooked ostentatiously picturesque streets with great trees +casting great shadows had been a new enthusiasm: the Pre-Raphaelite +movement at last affecting life. But now exaggerated criticism had taken +the place of enthusiasm, the tiled roofs, the first in modern London, were +said to leak, which they did not, and the drains to be bad, though that +was no longer true; and I imagine that houses were cheap. I remember +feeling disappointed because the co-operative stores, with their little +seventeenth century panes, had lost the romance they had when I had passed +them still unfinished on my way to school; and because the public house, +called The Tabard after Chaucer's Inn, was so plainly a common public +house; and because the great sign of a trumpeter designed by Rooke, the +Pre-Raphaelite artist, had been freshened by some inferior hand. The big +red-brick church had never pleased me, and I was accustomed, when I saw +the wooden balustrade that ran along the slanting edge of the roof where +nobody ever walked or could walk, to remember the opinion of some +architect friend of my father's, that it had been put there to keep the +birds from falling off. Still, however, it had some village characters and +helped us to feel not wholly lost in the metropolis. I no longer went to +church as a regular habit, but go I sometimes did, for one Sunday morning +I saw these words painted on a board in the porch: "The congregation are +requested to kneel during prayers; the kneelers are afterwards to be hung +upon pegs provided for the purpose." In front of every seat hung a little +cushion and these cushions were called "kneelers." Presently the joke ran +through the community, where there were many artists who considered +religion at best an unimportant accessory to good architecture and who +disliked that particular church. + + +II + +I could not understand where the charm had gone that I had felt, when as a +school-boy of twelve or thirteen I had played among the unfinished houses, +once leaving the marks of my two hands, blacked by a fall among some +paint, upon a white balustrade. Sometimes I thought it was because these +were real houses, while my play had been among toy-houses some day to be +inhabited by imaginary people full of the happiness that one can see in +picture books. + +I was in all things Pre-Raphaelite. When I was fifteen or sixteen my +father had told me about Rossetti and Blake and given me their poetry to +read; and once at Liverpool on my way to Sligo I had seen Dante's Dream in +the gallery there, a picture painted when Rossetti had lost his dramatic +power and to-day not very pleasing to me, and its colour, its people, its +romantic architecture had blotted all other pictures away. It was a +perpetual bewilderment that my father, who had begun life as a +Pre-Raphaelite painter, now painted portraits of the first comer, children +selling newspapers, or a consumptive girl with a basket of fish upon her +head, and that when, moved perhaps by some memory of his youth, he chose +some theme from poetic tradition, he would soon weary and leave it +unfinished. I had seen the change coming bit by bit and its defence +elaborated by young men fresh from the Paris art-schools. "We must paint +what is in front of us," or "A man must be of his own time," they would +say, and if I spoke of Blake or Rossetti they would point out his bad +drawing and tell me to admire Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage. Then, too, +they were very ignorant men; they read nothing, for nothing mattered but +"knowing how to paint," being in reaction against a generation that seemed +to have wasted its time upon so many things. I thought myself alone in +hating these young men, now indeed getting towards middle life, their +contempt for the past, their monopoly of the future, but in a few months I +was to discover others of my own age, who thought as I did, for it is not +true that youth looks before it with the mechanical gaze of a well-drilled +soldier. Its quarrel is not with the past, but with the present, where its +elders are so obviously powerful and no cause seems lost if it seem to +threaten that power. Does cultivated youth ever really love the future, +where the eye can discover no persecuted Royalty hidden among oak leaves, +though from it certainly does come so much proletarian rhetoric? + +I was unlike others of my generation in one thing only. I am very +religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the +simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion, almost +an infallible church out of poetic tradition: a fardel of stories, and of +personages, and of emotions, inseparable from their first expression, +passed on from generation to generation by poets and painters with some +help from philosophers and theologians. I wished for a world, where I +could discover this tradition perpetually, and not in pictures and in +poems only, but in tiles round the chimney-piece and in the hangings that +kept out the draught. I had even created a dogma: "Because those imaginary +people are created out of the deepest instinct of man, to be his measure +and his norm, whatever I can imagine those mouths speaking may be the +nearest I can go to truth." When I listened they seemed always to speak of +one thing only: they, their loves, every incident of their lives, were +steeped in the supernatural. Could even Titian's "Ariosto" that I loved +beyond other portraits have its grave look, as if waiting for some perfect +final event, if the painters before Titian had not learned portraiture, +while painting into the corner of compositions full of saints and +Madonnas, their kneeling patrons? At seventeen years old I was already an +old-fashioned brass cannon full of shot, and nothing had kept me from +going off but a doubt as to my capacity to shoot straight. + + +III + +I was not an industrious student and knew only what I had found by +accident and I found nothing I cared for after Titian, and Titian I knew +from an imitation of his _Supper of Emmaus_ in Dublin, till Blake and the +Pre-Raphaelites; and among my father's friends were no Pre-Raphaelites. +Some indeed had come to Bedford Park in the enthusiasm of the first +building and others to be near those that had. There was Todhunter, a +well-off man who had bought my father's pictures while my father was still +Pre-Raphaelite; once a Dublin doctor he was now a poet and a writer of +poetical plays; a tall, sallow, lank, melancholy man, a good scholar and a +good intellect; and with him my father carried on a warm exasperated +friendship, fed I think by old memories and wasted by quarrels over +matters of opinion. Of all the survivors he was the most dejected and the +least estranged, and I remember encouraging him, with a sense of worship +shared, to buy a very expensive carpet designed by Morris. He displayed it +without strong liking and would have agreed had there been any to find +fault. If he had liked anything strongly he might have been a famous man, +for a few years later he was to write, under some casual patriotic +impulse, certain excellent verses now in all Irish anthologies; but with +him every book was a new planting, and not a new bud on an old bough. He +had I think no peace in himself. But my father's chief friend was York +Powell, a famous Oxford Professor of history, a broad-built, broad-headed, +brown-bearded man clothed in heavy blue cloth and looking, but for his +glasses and the dim sight of a student, like some captain in the merchant +service. One often passed with pleasure from Todhunter's company to that +of one who was almost ostentatiously at peace. He cared nothing for +philosophy, nothing for economics, nothing for the policy of nations; for +history, as he saw it, was a memory of men who were amusing or exciting to +think about. He impressed all who met him, and seemed to some a man of +genius, but he had not enough ambition to shape his thought, or conviction +to give rhythm to his style and remained always a poor writer. I was too +full of unfinished speculations and premature convictions to value rightly +his conversation, informed by a vast erudition, which would give itself to +every casual association of speech and company, precisely because he had +neither cause nor design. My father, however, found Powell's concrete +narrative manner in talk a necessary completion of his own, and when I +asked him in a letter many years later where he got his philosophy replied +"from York Powell" and thereon added, no doubt remembering that Powell was +without ideas, "by looking at him." Then there was a good listener, a +painter in whose hall hung a big picture painted in his student days of +Ulysses sailing home from the Phaeacian court, an orange and a skin of +wine at his side, blue mountains towering behind; but who lived by drawing +domestic scenes and lovers' meetings for a weekly magazine that had an +immense circulation among the imperfectly educated. To escape the boredom +of work, which he never turned to but under pressure of necessity and +usually late at night, with the publisher's messenger in the hall, he had +half-filled his studio with mechanical toys, of his own invention, and +perpetually increased their number. A model railway train at intervals +puffed its way along the walls, passing several railway stations and +signal boxes; and on the floor lay a camp with attacking and defending +soldiers and a fortification that blew up when the attackers fired a pea +through a certain window; while a large model of a Thames barge hung from +the ceiling. Opposite our house lived an old artist who worked also for +the illustrated papers for a living, but painted landscapes for his +pleasure, and of him I remember nothing except that he had outlived +ambition, was a good listener, and that my father explained his gaunt +appearance by his descent from Pocahontas. If all these men were a little +like becalmed ships, there was certainly one man whose sails were full. +Three or four doors off on our side of the road lived a decorative artist +in all the naïve confidence of popular ideals and the public approval. He +was our daily comedy. "I myself and Sir Frederick Leighton are the +greatest decorative artists of the age," was among his sayings, and a +great Lych-gate, bought from some country church-yard, reared its thatched +roof, meant to shelter bearers and coffin, above the entrance to his front +garden to show that he at any rate knew nothing of discouragement. In this +fairly numerous company--there were others though no other face rises +before me--my father and York Powell found listeners for a conversation +that had no special loyalties, or antagonisms; while I could only talk +upon set topics, being in the heat of my youth, and the topics that filled +me with excitement were never spoken of. + + +IV + +Bedford Park had a red brick clubhouse with a little theatre that began to +stir my imagination. I persuaded Todhunter to write a pastoral play and +have it performed there. + +A couple of years before, while we were still in Dublin, he had given at +Hengler's Circus, remodelled as a Greek Theatre, a most expensive +performance of his _Helena of Troas_, an oratorical Swinburnian play which +I had thought as unactable as it was unreadable. Since I was seventeen I +had constantly tested my own ambition with Keats's praise of him who "left +great verses to a little clan," so it was but natural that I should spend +an evening persuading him that we had nothing to do with the great public, +that it should be a point of honour to be content with our own little +public, that he should write of shepherds and shepherdesses because people +would expect them to talk poetry and move without melodrama. He wrote his +_Sicilian Idyll_, which I have not looked at for thirty years, and never +rated very high as poetry, and had the one unmistakable success of his +life. The little theatre was full for twice the number of performances +intended, for artists, men of letters and students had come from all over +London. + +I made through these performances a close friend and a discovery that was +to influence my life. Todhunter had engaged several professional actors +with a little reputation, but had given the chief woman's part to Florence +Farr, who had qualities no contemporary professional practice could have +increased, the chief man's part to an amateur, Heron Allen, solicitor, +fiddler and popular writer on palmistry. Heron Allen and Florence Farr +read poetry for their pleasure. While they were upon the stage no one else +could hold an eye or an ear. Their speech was music, the poetry acquired a +nobility, a passionate austerity that made it seem akin for certain +moments to the great poetry of the world. Heron Allen, who had never +spoken in public before except to lecture upon the violin, had the wisdom +to reduce his acting to a series of poses, to be the stately shepherd with +not more gesture than was needed to "twitch his mantle blue" and to let +his grace be foil to Florence Farr's more impassioned delivery. When they +closed their mouths, and some other player opened his, breaking up the +verse to make it conversational, jerking his body or his arms that he +might seem no austere poetical image but very man, I listened in raging +hatred. I kept my seat with difficulty, I searched my memory for insulting +phrases, I even muttered them to myself that the people about might hear. +I had discovered for the first time that in the performance of all drama +that depends for its effect upon beauty of language, poetical culture may +be more important than professional experience. + +Florence Farr lived in lodgings some twenty minutes' walk away at Brook +Green, and I was soon a constant caller, talking over plays that I would +some day write her. She had three great gifts, a tranquil beauty like that +of Demeter's image near the British Museum reading room door, and an +incomparable sense of rhythm and a beautiful voice, the seeming natural +expression of the image. And yet there was scarce another gift that she +did not value above those three. We all have our simplifying image, our +genius, and such hard burden does it lay upon us that, but for the praise +of others, we would deride it and hunt it away. She could only express +hers through an unfashionable art, an art that has scarce existed since +the seventeenth century, and so could only earn unimportant occasional +praise. She would dress without care or calculation as if to hide her +beauty and seem contemptuous of its power. If a man fell in love with her +she would notice that she had seen just that movement upon the stage or +had heard just that intonation and all seemed unreal. If she read out some +poem in English or in French all was passion, all a traditional splendour, +but she spoke of actual things with a cold wit or under the strain of +paradox. Wit and paradox alike sought to pull down whatever had tradition +or passion and she was soon to spend her days in the British Museum +reading room and become erudite in many heterogeneous studies moved by an +insatiable, destroying curiosity. I formed with her an enduring friendship +that was an enduring exasperation--"why do you play the part with a bent +back and a squeak in the voice? How can you be a character actor, you who +hate all our life, you who belong to a life that is a vision?" But +argument was no use, and some Nurse in Euripedes must be played with all +an old woman's infirmities and not as I would have it, with all a Sybil's +majesty, because "it is no use doing what nobody wants," or because she +would show that she "could do what the others did." + +I used in my rage to compare her thoughts, when her worst mood was upon +her, to a game called Spillikens which I had seen played in my childhood +with little pieces of bone that you had to draw out with a hook from a +bundle of like pieces. A bundle of bones instead of Demeter's golden +sheaf! Her sitting room at the Brook Green lodging house was soon a +reflection of her mind, the walls covered with musical instruments, pieces +of oriental drapery, and Egyptian gods and goddesses painted by herself in +the British Museum. + + +V + +Presently a hansom drove up to our door at Bedford Park with Miss Maud +Gonne, who brought an introduction to my father from old John O'Leary, the +Fenian leader. She vexed my father by praise of war, war for its own sake, +not as the creator of certain virtues but as if there were some virtue in +excitement itself. I supported her against my father, which vexed him the +more, though he might have understood that, apart from the fact that +Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage were somehow involved, a man so young as +I could not have differed from a woman so beautiful and so young. To-day, +with her great height and the unchangeable lineaments of her form, she +looks the Sybil I would have had played by Florence Farr, but in that day +she seemed a classical impersonation of the Spring, the Virgilian +commendation "She walks like a goddess" made for her alone. Her complexion +was luminous, like that of apple blossom through which the light falls, +and I remember her standing that first day by a great heap of such +blossoms in the window. In the next few years I saw her always when she +passed to and fro between Dublin and Paris, surrounded, no matter how +rapid her journey and how brief her stay at either end of it, by cages +full of birds, canaries, finches of all kinds, dogs, a parrot, and once a +full-grown hawk from Donegal. Once when I saw her to her railway carriage +I noticed how the cages obstructed wraps and cushions and wondered what +her fellow travellers would say, but the carriage remained empty. It was +years before I could see into the mind that lay hidden under so much +beauty and so much energy. + + +VI + +Some quarter of an hour's walk from Bedford Park, out on the high road to +Richmond, lived W. E. Henley, and I, like many others, began under him my +education. His portrait, a lithograph by Rothenstein, hangs over my +mantelpiece among portraits of other friends. He is drawn standing, but +because doubtless of his crippled legs he leans forward, resting his +elbows upon some slightly suggested object--a table or a window-sill. His +heavy figure and powerful head, the disordered hair standing upright, his +short irregular beard and moustache, his lined and wrinkled face, his eyes +steadily fixed upon some object, in complete confidence and +self-possession, and yet as in half-broken reverie, all are there exactly +as I remember him. I have seen other portraits and they too show him +exactly as I remember him, as though he had but one appearance and that +seen fully at the first glance and by all alike. He was most human--human +I used to say like one of Shakespeare's characters--and yet pressed and +pummelled, as it were, into a single attitude, almost into a gesture and a +speech as by some overwhelming situation. I disagreed with him about +everything, but I admired him beyond words. With the exception of some +early poems founded upon old French models I disliked his poetry, mainly +because he wrote in _vers libre_, which I associated with Tyndall and +Huxley, and Bastien-Lepage's clownish peasant staring with vacant eyes at +her great boots; and filled it with unimpassioned description of an +hospital ward where his leg had been amputated. I wanted the strongest +passions, passions that had nothing to do with observation, sung in +metrical forms that seemed old enough to be sung by men half-asleep or +riding upon a journey. Furthermore, Pre-Raphaelism affected him as some +people are affected by a cat in the room, and though he professed himself +at our first meeting without political interests or convictions, he soon +grew into a violent unionist and imperialist. I used to say when I spoke +of his poems: "He is like a great actor with a bad part; yet who would +look at Hamlet in the grave scene if Salvini played the grave-digger?" and +I might so have explained much that he said and did. I meant that he was +like a great actor of passion--character-acting meant nothing to me for +many years--and an actor of passion will display some one quality of soul, +personified again and again, just as a great poetical painter, Titian, +Botticelli, Rossetti, may depend for his greatness upon a type of beauty +which presently we call by his name. Irving, the last of the sort on the +English stage, and in modern England and France it is the rarest sort, +never moved me but in the expression of intellectual pride and though I +saw Salvini but once I am convinced that his genius was a kind of animal +nobility. Henley, half inarticulate--"I am very costive," he would +say--beset with personal quarrels, built up an image of power and +magnanimity till it became, at moments, when seen as it were by lightning, +his true self. Half his opinions were the contrivance of a +sub-consciousness that sought always to bring life to the dramatic crisis +and expression to that point of artifice where the true self could find +its tongue. Without opponents there had been no drama, and in his youth +Ruskinism and Pre-Raphaelitism, for he was of my father's generation, were +the only possible opponents. How could one resent his prejudice when, that +he himself might play a worthy part, he must find beyond the common rout, +whom he derided and flouted daily, opponents he could imagine moulded like +himself? Once he said to me in the height of his imperial propaganda, +"Tell those young men in Ireland that this great thing must go on. They +say Ireland is not fit for self-government, but that is nonsense. It is as +fit as any other European country, but we cannot grant it." And then he +spoke of his desire to found and edit a Dublin newspaper. It would have +expounded the Gaelic propaganda then beginning, though Dr Hyde had, as +yet, no league, our old stories, our modern literature--everything that +did not demand any shred or patch of government. He dreamed of a tyranny, +but it was that of Cosimo de' Medici. + + +VII + +We gathered on Sunday evenings in two rooms, with folding doors between, +and hung, I think, with photographs from Dutch masters, and in one room +there was always, I think, a table with cold meat. I can recall but one +elderly man--Dunn his name was--rather silent and full of good sense, an +old friend of Henley's. We were young men, none as yet established in his +own, or in the world's opinion, and Henley was our leader and our +confidant. One evening, I found him alone amused and exasperated: "Young +A----," he cried "has just been round to ask my advice. Would I think it a +wise thing if he bolted with Mrs B----? 'Have you quite determined to do +it?' I asked him. 'Quite.' 'Well,' I said, 'in that case I refuse to give +you any advice.'" Mrs B---- was a beautiful talented woman, who, as the +Welsh Triad said of Guinievere, "was much given to being carried off." I +think we listened to him, and often obeyed him, partly because he was +quite plainly not upon the side of our parents. We might have a different +ground of quarrel, but the result seemed more important than the ground, +and his confident manner and speech made us believe, perhaps for the first +time, in victory. And besides, if he did denounce, and in my case he +certainly did, what we held in secret reverence, he never failed to +associate it with things or persons that did not move us to reverence. +Once I found him just returned from some art congress in Liverpool or in +Manchester. "The salvation armyism of art," he called it, and gave a +grotesque description of some city councillor he had found admiring +Turner. Henley, who hated all that Ruskin praised, thereupon derided +Turner, and finding the city councillor the next day on the other side of +the gallery, admiring some Pre-Raphaelite there, derided that +Pre-Raphaelite. The third day Henley discovered the poor man on a chair in +the middle of the room staring disconsolately upon the floor. He terrified +us also and certainly I did not dare, and I think none of us dared, to +speak our admiration for book or picture he condemned, but he made us feel +always our importance, and no man among us could do good work, or show the +promise of it, and lack his praise. I can remember meeting of a Sunday +night Charles Whibley, Kenneth Grahame, author of _The Golden Age_, Barry +Pain, now a well-known novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a +famous talker, George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chief +secretary, and now or later Oscar Wilde, who was some ten years older than +the rest of us. But faces and names are vague to me and while faces that +I met but once may rise clearly before me, a face met on many a Sunday has +perhaps vanished. Kipling came sometimes, I think, but I never met him; +and Stepniak, the Nihilist, whom I knew well elsewhere but not there, +said--"I cannot go more than once a year, it is too exhausting." Henley +got the best out of us all, because he had made us accept him as our judge +and we knew that his judgment could neither sleep, nor be softened, nor +changed, nor turned aside. When I think of him, the antithesis that is the +foundation of human nature being ever in my sight, I see his crippled legs +as though he were some Vulcan perpetually forging swords for other men to +use; and certainly I always thought of C----, a fine classical scholar, a +pale and seemingly gentle man, as our chief swordsman and bravo. When +Henley founded his weekly newspaper, first _The Scots_, afterwards _The +National Observer_, this young man wrote articles and reviews notorious +for savage wit; and years afterwards when _The National Observer_ was +dead, Henley dying, and our cavern of outlaws empty, I met him in Paris +very sad and I think very poor. "Nobody will employ me now," he said. +"Your master is gone," I answered, "and you are like the spear in an old +Irish story that had to be kept dipped in poppy-juice that it might not go +about killing people on its own account." I wrote my first good lyrics and +tolerable essays for _The National Observer_, and as I always signed my +work could go my own road in some measure. Henley often revised my lyrics, +crossing out a line or a stanza and writing in one of his own, and I was +comforted by my belief that he also rewrote Kipling then in the first +flood of popularity. At first, indeed, I was ashamed of being rewritten +and thought that others were not, and only began investigation when the +editorial characteristics--epigrams, archaisms, and all--appeared in the +article upon Paris fashions and in that upon opium by an Egyptian Pasha. I +was not compelled to full conformity for verse is plainly stubborn; and in +prose, that I might avoid unacceptable opinions, I wrote nothing but ghost +or fairy stories, picked up from my mother or some pilot at Rosses Point +and Henley saw that I must needs mix a palette fitted to my subject +matter. But if he had changed every "has" into "hath" I would have let +him, for had not we sunned ourselves in his generosity? "My young men +outdo me and they write better than I," he wrote in some letter praising +Charles Whibley's work, and to another friend with a copy of my _Man Who +Dreamed of Fairyland_: "See what a fine thing has been written by one of +my lads." + + +VIII + +My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never before +heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all +over night with labour and yet all spontaneous. There was present that +night at Henley's, by right of propinquity or of accident, a man full of +the secret spite of dulness, who interrupted from time to time, and always +to check or disorder thought; and I noticed with what mastery he was +foiled and thrown. I noticed, too, that the impression of artificiality +that I think all Wilde's listeners have recorded came from the perfect +rounding of the sentences and from the deliberation that made it possible. +That very impression helped him, as the effect of metre, or of the +antithetical prose of the seventeenth century, which is itself a true +metre, helped its writers, for he could pass without incongruity from some +unforeseen, swift stroke of wit to elaborate reverie. I heard him say a +few nights later: "Give me _The Winter's Tale_, 'Daffodils that come +before the swallow dare' but not _King Lear_. What is _King Lear_ but poor +life staggering in the fog?" and the slow, carefully modulated cadence +sounded natural to my ears. That first night he praised Walter Pater's +_Studies in the History of the Renaissance_: "It is my golden book; I +never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of decadence: +the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written." "But," +said the dull man, "would you not have given us time to read it?" "Oh no," +was the retort, "there would have been plenty of time afterwards--in +either world." I think he seemed to us, baffled as we were by youth, or by +infirmity, a triumphant figure, and to some of us a figure from another +age, an audacious Italian fifteenth century figure. A few weeks before I +had heard one of my father's friends, an official in a publishing firm +that had employed both Wilde and Henley as editors, blaming Henley who was +"no use except under control" and praising Wilde, "so indolent but such a +genius"; and now the firm became the topic of our talk. "How often do you +go to the office?" said Henley. "I used to go three times a week," said +Wilde, "for an hour a day but I have since struck off one of the days." +"My God," said Henley, "I went five times a week for five hours a day and +when I wanted to strike off a day they had a special committee meeting." +"Furthermore," was Wilde's answer, "I never answered their letters. I have +known men come to London full of bright prospects and seen them complete +wrecks in a few months through a habit of answering letters." He too knew +how to keep our elders in their place, and his method was plainly the more +successful, for Henley had been dismissed. "No he is not an aesthete," +Henley commented later, being somewhat embarrassed by Wilde's +Pre-Raphaelite entanglement; "one soon finds that he is a scholar and a +gentleman." And when I dined with Wilde a few days afterwards he began at +once, "I had to strain every nerve to equal that man at all"; and I was +too loyal to speak my thought: "You and not he said all the brilliant +things." He like the rest of us had felt the strain of an intensity that +seemed to hold life at the point of drama. He had said on that first +meeting "The basis of literary friendship is mixing the poisoned bowl"; +and for a few weeks Henley and he became close friends till, the +astonishment of their meeting over, diversity of character and ambition +pushed them apart, and, with half the cavern helping, Henley began mixing +the poisoned bowl for Wilde. Yet Henley never wholly lost that first +admiration, for after Wilde's downfall he said to me: "Why did he do it? I +told my lads to attack him and yet we might have fought under his banner." + + +IX + +It became the custom, both at Henley's and at Bedford Park, to say that R. +A. M. Stevenson, who frequented both circles, was the better talker. Wilde +had been trussed up like a turkey by undergraduates, dragged up and down a +hill, his champagne emptied into the ice tub, hooted in the streets of +various towns, and I think stoned, and no newspaper named him but in +scorn; his manner had hardened to meet opposition and at times he allowed +one to see an unpardonable insolence. His charm was acquired and +systematized, a mask which he wore only when it pleased him, while the +charm of Stevenson belonged to him like the colour of his hair. If +Stevenson's talk became monologue we did not know it, because our one +object was to show by our attention that he need never leave off. If +thought failed him we would not combat what he had said, or start some new +theme, but would encourage him with a question; and one felt that it had +been always so from childhood up. His mind was full of phantasy for +phantasy's sake and he gave as good entertainment in monologue as his +cousin Robert Louis in poem or story. He was always "supposing"; "Suppose +you had two millions what would you do with it?" and "Suppose you were in +Spain and in love how would you propose?" I recall him one afternoon at +our house at Bedford Park, surrounded by my brother and sisters and a +little group of my father's friends, describing proposals in half a dozen +countries. There your father did it, dressed in such and such a way with +such and such words, and there a friend must wait for the lady outside the +chapel door, sprinkle her with holy water and say, "My friend Jones is +dying for love of you." But when it was over those quaint descriptions, so +full of laughter and sympathy, faded or remained in the memory as +something alien from one's own life, like a dance I once saw in a great +house, where beautifully dressed children wound a long ribbon in and out +as they danced. I was not of Stevenson's party and mainly I think because +he had written a book in praise of Velasquez, praise at that time +universal wherever Pre-Raphaelism was accurst, and to my mind, that had +to pick its symbols where its ignorance permitted, Velasquez seemed the +first bored celebrant of boredom. I was convinced from some obscure +meditation that Stevenson's conversational method had joined him to my +elders and to the indifferent world, as though it were right for old men, +and unambitious men and all women, to be content with charm and humour. It +was the prerogative of youth to take sides and when Wilde said: "Mr +Bernard Shaw has no enemies but is intensely disliked by all his friends," +I knew it to be a phrase I should never forget, and felt revenged upon a +notorious hater of romance, whose generosity and courage I could not +fathom. + + +X + +I saw a good deal of Wilde at that time--was it 1887 or 1888?--I have no +way of fixing the date except that I had published my first book _The +Wanderings of Usheen_ and that Wilde had not yet published his _Decay of +Lying_. He had, before our first meeting, reviewed my book and despite its +vagueness of intention, and the inexactness of its speech, praised without +qualification; and what was worth more than any review he had talked about +it and now he asked me to eat my Christmas dinner with him believing, I +imagine, that I was alone in London. He had just renounced his velveteen, +and even those cuffs turned backward over the sleeves, and had begun to +dress very carefully in the fashion of the moment. He lived in a little +house at Chelsea that the architect Godwin had decorated with an elegance +that owed something to Whistler. There was nothing mediaeval, nor +Pre-Raphaelite, no cupboard door with figures upon flat gold, no peacock +blue, no dark background. I remember vaguely a white drawing room with +Whistler etchings, "let in" to white panels, and a dining room all white, +chairs, walls, mantelpiece, carpet, except for a diamond-shaped piece of +red cloth in the middle of the table under a terra-cotta statuette, and I +think a red shaded lamp hanging from the ceiling to a little above the +statuette. It was perhaps too perfect in its unity, his past of a few +years before had gone too completely, and I remember thinking that the +perfect harmony of his life there, with his beautiful wife and his two +young children, suggested some deliberate artistic composition. + +He commended and dispraised himself during dinner by attributing +characteristics like his own to his country: "We Irish are too poetical to +be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest +talkers since the Greeks." When dinner was over he read me from the proofs +of _The Decay of Lying_ and when he came to the sentence: "Schopenhauer +has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet +invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once +melancholy," I said, "Why do you change 'sad' to 'melancholy'?" He replied +that he wanted a full sound at the close of his sentence, and I thought it +no excuse and an example of the vague impressiveness that spoilt his +writing for me. Only when he spoke, or when his writing was the mirror of +his speech, or in some simple fairy tale, had he words exact enough to +hold a subtle ear. He alarmed me, though not as Henley did, for I never +left his house thinking myself fool or dunce. He flattered the intellect +of every man he liked; he made me tell him long Irish stories and +compared my art of storytelling to Homer's; and once when he had described +himself as writing in the census paper "age 19, profession genius, +infirmity talent" the other guest, a young journalist fresh from Oxford or +Cambridge, said, "What should I have written?" and was told that it should +have been "profession talent, infirmity genius." When, however, I called, +wearing shoes a little too yellow--unblackened leather had just become +fashionable--I realized their extravagance when I saw his eyes fixed upon +them; and another day Wilde asked me to tell his little boy a fairy story, +and I had but got as far as "Once upon a time there was a giant" when the +little boy screamed and ran out of the room. Wilde looked grave and I was +plunged into the shame of clumsiness that afflicts the young. When I asked +for some literary gossip for some provincial newspaper, that paid me a few +shillings a month, he explained very explicitly that writing literary +gossip was no job for a gentleman. + +Though to be compared to Homer passed the time pleasantly, I had not been +greatly perturbed had he stopped me with: "Is it a long story?" as Henley +would certainly have done. I was abashed before him as wit and man of the +world alone. I remember that he deprecated the very general belief in his +success or his efficiency, and I think with sincerity. One form of success +had gone: he was no more the lion of the season and he had not discovered +his gift for writing comedy, yet I think I knew him at the happiest moment +of his life. No scandal had touched his name, his fame as a talker was +growing among his equals, and he seemed to live in the enjoyment of his +own spontaneity. One day he began: "I have been inventing a Christian +heresy," and he told a detailed story, in the style of some early father, +of how Christ recovered after the Crucifixion, and escaping from the tomb, +lived on for many years, the one man upon earth who knew the falsehood of +Christianity. Once St Paul visited his town and he alone in the +carpenters' quarter did not go to hear him preach. The other carpenters +noticed that henceforth, for some unknown reason, he kept his hands +covered. A few days afterwards I found Wilde with smock frocks in various +colours spread out upon the floor in front of him, while a missionary +explained that he did not object to the heathen going naked upon week +days, but insisted upon clothes in church. He had brought the smock frocks +in a cab that the only art-critic whose fame had reached Central Africa +might select a colour; so Wilde sat there weighing all with a conscious +ecclesiastic solemnity. + + +XI + +Of late years I have often explained Wilde to myself by his family +history. His father was a friend or acquaintance of my father's father and +among my family traditions there is an old Dublin riddle: "Why are Sir +William Wilde's nails so black?" Answer, "Because he has scratched +himself." And there is an old story still current in Dublin of Lady Wilde +saying to a servant, "Why do you put the plates on the coal-scuttle? What +are the chairs meant for?" They were famous people and there are many like +stories; and even a horrible folk story, the invention of some Connaught +peasant, that tells how Sir William Wilde took out the eyes of some men, +who had come to consult him as an oculist, and laid them upon a plate, +intending to replace them in a moment, and how the eyes were eaten by a +cat. As a certain friend of mine, who has made a prolonged study of the +nature of cats, said when he first heard the tale, "Cats love eyes." The +Wilde family was clearly of the sort that fed the imagination of Charles +Lever, dirty, untidy, daring, and what Charles Lever, who loved more +normal activities, might not have valued so highly, very imaginative and +learned. Lady Wilde, who when I knew her received her friends with blinds +drawn and shutters closed that none might see her withered face, longed +always perhaps, though certainly amid much self-mockery, for some +impossible splendour of character and circumstance. She lived near her son +in level Chelsea, but I have heard her say, "I want to live on some high +place, Primrose Hill or Highgate, because I was an eagle in my youth." I +think her son lived with no self-mockery at all an imaginary life; +perpetually performed a play which was in all things the opposite of all +that he had known in childhood and early youth; never put off completely +his wonder at opening his eyes every morning on his own beautiful house, +and in remembering that he had dined yesterday with a duchess, and that he +delighted in Flaubert and Pater, read Homer in the original and not as a +schoolmaster reads him for the grammar. I think, too, that because of all +that half-civilized blood in his veins he could not endure the sedentary +toil of creative art and so remained a man of action, exaggerating, for +the sake of immediate effect, every trick learned from his masters, +turning their easel painting into painted scenes. He was a parvenu, but a +parvenu whose whole bearing proved that if he did dedicate every story in +_The House of Pomegranates_ to a lady of title, it was but to show that he +was Jack and the social ladder his pantomime beanstalk. "Did you ever +hear him say 'Marquess of Dimmesdale'?" a friend of his once asked me. "He +does not say 'the Duke of York' with any pleasure." + +He told me once that he had been offered a safe seat in Parliament and, +had he accepted, he might have had a career like that of Beaconsfield, +whose early style resembles his, being meant for crowds, for excitement, +for hurried decisions, for immediate triumphs. Such men get their +sincerity, if at all, from the contact of events; the dinner table was +Wilde's event and made him the greatest talker of his time, and his plays +and dialogues have what merit they possess from being now an imitation, +now a record, of his talk. Even in those days I would often defend him by +saying that his very admiration for his predecessors in poetry, for +Browning, for Swinburne and Rossetti, in their first vogue while he was a +very young man, made any success seem impossible that could satisfy his +immense ambition: never but once before had the artist seemed so great, +never had the work of art seemed so difficult. I would then compare him +with Benvenuto Cellini who, coming after Michael Angelo, found nothing +left to do so satisfactory as to turn bravo and quarrel with the man who +broke Michael Angelo's nose. + + +XII + +I cannot remember who first brought me to the old stable beside Kelmscott +House, William Morris's house at Hammersmith, and to the debates held +there upon Sunday evenings by the Socialist League. I was soon of the +little group who had supper with Morris afterwards. I met at these +suppers very constantly Walter Crane, Emery Walker, in association with +Cobden Sanderson, the printer of many fine books, and less constantly +Bernard Shaw and Cockerell, now of the Museum of Cambridge, and perhaps +but once or twice Hyndman the Socialist and the Anarchist Prince +Kropotkin. There, too, one always met certain more or less educated +workmen, rough of speech and manner, with a conviction to meet every turn. +I was told by one of them, on a night when I had done perhaps more than my +share of the talking, that I had talked more nonsense in one evening than +he had heard in the whole course of his past life. I had merely preferred +Parnell, then at the height of his career, to Michael Davitt, who had +wrecked his Irish influence by international politics. We sat round a long +unpolished and unpainted trestle table of new wood in a room where hung +Rossetti's _Pomegranate_, a portrait of Mrs. Morris, and where one wall +and part of the ceiling were covered by a great Persian carpet. Morris had +said somewhere or other that carpets were meant for people who took their +shoes off when they entered a house and were most in place upon a tent +floor. I was a little disappointed in the house, for Morris was an old man +content at last to gather beautiful things rather than to arrange a +beautiful house. I saw the drawing-room once or twice, and there alone all +my sense of decoration, founded upon the background of Rossetti's +pictures, was satisfied by a big cupboard painted with a scene from +Chaucer by Burne-Jones; but even there were objects, perhaps a chair or a +little table, that seemed accidental, bought hurriedly perhaps and with +little thought, to make wife or daughter comfortable. I had read as a boy, +in books belonging to my father, the third volume of _The Earthly +Paradise_, and _The Defence of Guenevere_, which pleased me less, but had +not opened either for a long time. _The Man Who Never Laughed Again_ had +seemed the most wonderful of tales till my father had accused me of +preferring Morris to Keats, got angry about it, and put me altogether out +of countenance. He had spoiled my pleasure, for now I questioned while I +read and at last ceased to read; nor had Morris written as yet those prose +romances that became after his death so great a joy that they were the +only books I was ever to read slowly that I might not come too quickly to +the end. It was now Morris himself that stirred my interest, and I took to +him first because of some little tricks of speech and body that reminded +me of my old grandfather in Sligo, but soon discovered his spontaneity and +joy and made him my chief of men. To-day I do not set his poetry very +high, but for an odd altogether wonderful line, or thought; and yet, if +some angel offered me the choice, I would choose to live his life, poetry +and all, rather than my own or any other man's. A reproduction of his +portrait by Watts hangs over my mantelpiece with Henley's, and those of +other friends. Its grave wide-open eyes, like the eyes of some dreaming +beast, remind me of the open eyes of Titian's "Ariosto," while the broad +vigorous body suggests a mind that has no need of the intellect to remain +sane, though it give itself to every phantasy: the dreamer of the middle +ages. It is "the fool of fairy ... wide and wild as a hill," the resolute +European image that yet half remembers Buddha's motionless meditation, and +has no trait in common with the wavering, lean image of hungry +speculation, that cannot but fill the mind's eye because of certain famous +Hamlets of our stage. Shakespeare himself foreshadowed a symbolic change, +that shows a change in the whole temperament of the world, for though he +called his Hamlet "fat" and even "scant of breath," he thrust between his +fingers agile rapier and dagger. + +The dream world of Morris was as much the antithesis of daily life as with +other men of genius, but he was never conscious of the antithesis and so +knew nothing of intellectual suffering. His intellect, unexhausted by +speculation or casuistry, was wholly at the service of hand and eye, and +whatever he pleased he did with an unheard of ease and simplicity, and if +style and vocabulary were at times monotonous, he could not have made them +otherwise without ceasing to be himself. Instead of the language of +Chaucer and Shakespeare, its warp fresh from field and market, if the woof +were learned, his age offered him a speech, exhausted from abstraction, +that only returned to its full vitality when written learnedly and slowly. + +The roots of his antithetical dream were visible enough: a never idle man +of great physical strength and extremely irascible--did he not fling a +badly baked plum pudding through the window upon Christmas Day?--a man +more joyous than any intellectual man of our world, called himself "the +idle singer of an empty day," created new forms of melancholy, and faint +persons, like the knights and ladies of Burne-Jones, who are never, no not +once in forty volumes, put out of temper. A blunderer who had said to the +only unconverted man at a Socialist picnic in Dublin, to prove that +equality came easy, "I was brought up a gentleman and now as you can see +associate with all sorts" and left wounds thereby that rankled after +twenty years, a man of whom I have heard it said "He is always afraid that +he is doing something wrong and generally is," wrote long stories with +apparently no other object than that his persons might show to one +another, through situations of poignant difficulty the most exquisite +tact. + +He did not project like Henley or like Wilde, an image of himself, because +having all his imagination set upon making and doing he had little self +knowledge. He imagined instead new conditions of making and doing; and in +the teeth of those scientific generalizations that cowed my boyhood, I can +see some like imagining in every great change, believing that the first +flying fish first leaped, not because it sought "adaptation" to the air, +but out of horror of the sea. + + +XIII + +Soon after I began to attend the lectures a French class was started in +the old coach-house for certain young Socialists who planned a tour in +France, and I joined it, and was for a time a model student constantly +encouraged by the compliments of the old French mistress. I told my father +of the class, and he asked me to get my sisters admitted. I made +difficulties and put off speaking of the matter, for I knew that the new +and admirable self I was making would turn, under family eyes, into plain +rag-doll. How could I pretend to be industrious, and even carry +dramatisation to the point of learning my lessons, when my sisters were +there and knew that I was nothing of the kind? But I had no argument I +could use, and my sisters were admitted. They said nothing unkind, so far +as I can remember, but in a week or two I was my old procrastinating idle +self and had soon left the class altogether. My elder sister stayed on +and became an embroideress under Miss May Morris, and the hangings round +Morris's big bed at Kelmscott House, Oxfordshire, with their verses about +lying happily in bed when "all birds sing in the town of the tree," were +from her needle, though not from her design. She worked for the first few +months at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, and in my imagination I cannot +always separate what I saw and heard from her report, or indeed from the +report of that tribe or guild who looked up to Morris as to some +worshipped mediaeval king. He had no need for other people. I doubt if +their marriage or death made him sad or glad, and yet no man I have known +was so well loved; you saw him producing everywhere organisation and +beauty, seeming, almost in the same instant, helpless and triumphant; and +people loved him as children are loved. People much in his neighbourhood +became gradually occupied with him or about his affairs, and, without any +wish on his part, as simple people become occupied with children. I +remember a man who was proud and pleased because he had distracted +Morris's thoughts from an attack of gout by leading the conversation +delicately to the hated name of Milton. He began at Swinburne: "O, +Swinburne," said Morris, "is a rhetorician; my masters have been Keats and +Chaucer, for they make pictures." "Does not Milton make pictures?" asked +my informant. "No," was the answer, "Dante makes pictures, but Milton, +though he had a great earnest mind, expressed himself as a rhetorician." +"Great earnest mind" sounded strange to me, and I doubt not that were his +questioner not a simple man Morris had been more violent. Another day the +same man started by praising Chaucer, but the gout was worse, and Morris +cursed Chaucer for destroying the English language with foreign words. + +He had few detachable phrases, and I can remember little of his speech, +which many thought the best of all good talk, except that it matched his +burly body and seemed within definite boundaries inexhaustible in fact and +expression. He alone of all the men I have known seemed guided by some +beast-like instinct and never ate strange meat. "Balzac! Balzac!" he said +to me once, "oh, that was the man the French Bourgeoisie read so much a +few years ago." I can remember him at supper praising wine: "Why do people +say it is prosaic to be inspired by wine? Has it not been made by the +sunlight and the sap?" and his dispraising houses decorated by himself: +"Do you suppose I like that kind of house? I would like a house like a big +barn, where one ate in one corner, cooked in another corner, slept in the +third corner, and in the fourth received one's friends"; and his +complaining of Ruskin's objection to the underground railway: "If you must +have a railway the best thing you can do with it is to put it in a tube +with a cork at each end." I remember, too, that when I asked what led up +to his movement, he replied: "Oh, Ruskin and Carlyle, but somebody should +have been beside Carlyle and punched his head every five minutes." Though +I remember little, I do not doubt that, had I continued going there on +Sunday evenings, I should have caught fire from his words and turned my +hand to some mediaeval work or other. + +Just before I had ceased to go there I had sent my _Wanderings of Usheen_ +to his daughter, hoping of course that it might meet his eyes, and soon +after sending it I came upon him by chance in Holborn--"You write my sort +of poetry," he said and began to praise me and to promise to send his +praise to _The Commonwealth_, the League organ, and he would have said +more had he not caught sight of a new ornamental cast-iron lamp post and +got very heated upon that subject. + +I did not read economics, having turned socialist because of Morris's +lectures and pamphlets, and I think it unlikely that Morris himself could +read economics. That old dogma of mine seemed germane to the matter. If +the men and women imagined by the poets were the norm, and if Morris had, +in let us say "News from Nowhere," then running through _The +Commonwealth_, described such men and women, living under their natural +conditions, or as they would desire to live, then those conditions +themselves must be the norm and could we but get rid of certain +institutions the world would turn from eccentricity. Perhaps Morris +himself justified himself in his own heart by as simple an argument, and +was, as the socialist D---- said to me one night, walking home after some +lecture, "an anarchist without knowing it." Certainly I and all about me, +including D---- himself, were for chopping up the old king for Medea's +pot. Morris had told us to have nothing to do with the parliamentary +socialists, represented for men in general by the Fabian Society and +Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation and for us in particular by D----. +During the period of transition mistakes must be made, and the discredit +of these mistakes must be left to "the Bourgeoisie"; and besides, when you +begin to talk of this measure, or that other, you lose sight of the goal, +and see, to reverse Swinburne's description of Tiresias, "Light on the way +but darkness on the goal." By mistakes Morris meant vexatious restrictions +and compromises--"If any man puts me into a labour squad, I will lie on +my back and kick." That phrase very much expresses our idea of +revolutionary tactics: we all intended to lie upon our back and kick. +D----, pale and sedentary, did not dislike labour squads and we all hated +him with the left side of our heads, while admiring him immensely with the +right side. He alone was invited to entertain Mrs Morris, having many +tales of his Irish uncles, more especially of one particular uncle who had +tried to commit suicide by shutting his head into a carpet-bag. At that +time he was an obscure man, known only for a witty speaker at street +corners and in Park demonstrations. He had, with an assumed truculence and +fury, cold logic, an invariable gentleness, an unruffled courtesy, and yet +could never close a speech without being denounced by a journeyman hatter, +with an Italian name. Converted to socialism by D----, and to anarchism by +himself, with swinging arm and uplifted voice, this man put, and perhaps, +exaggerated our scruple about Parliament. "I lack," said D----, "the bump +of reverence"; whereon the wild man shouted: "You 'ave a 'ole." There are +moments when looking back I somewhat confuse my own figure with that of +the hatter, image of our hysteria, for I too became violent with the +violent solemnity of a religious devotee. I can even remember sitting +behind D---- and saying some rude thing or other over his shoulder. + +I don't remember why I gave it up but I did quite suddenly and the push +may have come from a young workman who was educating himself between +Morris and Karl Marx. He had planned a history of the Navy, and when I had +spoken of the battleships of Nelson's day had said, "O, that was the +decadence of the battleship," but if his naval interests were mediæval, +his ideas about religion were pure Karl Marx, and we were soon in +perpetual argument. Then gradually the attitude towards religion of almost +everybody but Morris, who avoided the subject altogether, got upon my +nerves, for I broke out after some lecture or other with all the arrogance +of raging youth. They attacked religion, I said, or some such words, and +yet there must be a change of heart and only religion could make it. What +was the use of talking about some new revolution putting all things right, +when the change must come, if come it did, with astronomical slowness, +like the cooling of the sun, or it may have been like the drying of the +moon? Morris rang his chairman's bell, but I was too angry to listen, and +he had to ring it a second time before I sat down. He said that night at +supper, "Of course I know there must be a change of heart, but it will not +come as slowly as all that. I rang my bell because you were not being +understood." He did not show any vexation, but I never returned after that +night; and yet I did not always believe what I had said, and only +gradually gave up thinking of and planning for some near sudden change for +the better. + + +XIV + +I spent my days at the British Museum and must, I think, have been +delicate, for I remember often putting off hour after hour consulting some +necessary book because I shrank from lifting the heavy volumes of the +catalogue; and yet to save money for my afternoon coffee and roll I often +walked the whole way home to Bedford Park. I was compiling, for a series +of shilling books, an anthology of Irish fairy-stories and, for an +American publisher, a two-volume selection from the Irish novelists that +would be somewhat dearer. I was not well paid, for each book cost me more +than three months' reading; and I was paid for the first some twelve +pounds ("O, Mr. E.," said publisher to editor, "you must never again pay +so much!") and for the second twenty, but I did not think myself badly +paid, for I had chosen the work for my own purposes. + +Though I went to Sligo every summer, I was compelled to live out of +Ireland the greater part of every year, and was but keeping my mind upon +what I knew must be the subject-matter of my poetry. I believed that if +Morris had set his stories amid the scenery of his own Wales, for I knew +him to be of Welsh extraction and supposed wrongly that he had spent his +childhood there, that if Shelley had nailed his _Prometheus_, or some +equal symbol, upon some Welsh or Scottish rock, their art had entered more +intimately, more microscopically, as it were, into our thought and had +given perhaps to modern poetry a breadth and stability like that of +ancient poetry. The statues of Mausolus and Artemisia at the British +Museum, private, half-animal, half-divine figures, all unlike the Grecian +athletes and Egyptian kings in their near neighbourhood, that stand in the +middle of the crowd's applause, or sit above measuring it out +unpersuadable justice, became to me, now or later, images of an +unpremeditated joyous energy, that neither I nor any other man, racked by +doubt and inquiry, can achieve; and that yet, if once achieved, might seem +to men and women of Connemara or of Galway their very soul. In our study +of that ruined tomb raised by a queen to her dead lover, and finished by +the unpaid labour of great sculptors, after her death from grief, or so +runs the tale, we cannot distinguish the handiworks of Scopas and +Praxiteles; and I wanted to create once more an art where the artist's +handiwork would hide as under those half anonymous chisels, or as we find +it in some old Scots ballads, or in some twelfth or thirteenth century +Arthurian Romance. That handiwork assured, I had martyred no man for +modelling his own image upon Pallas Athena's buckler; for I took great +pleasure in certain allusions to the singer's life, one finds in old +romances and ballads, and thought his presence there all the more poignant +because we discover it half lost, like portly Chaucer, behind his own +maunciple and pardoner upon the Canterbury roads. Wolfram von Eschenbach, +singing his German Parsifal, broke off some description of a famished city +to remember that in his own house at home the very mice lacked food, and +what old ballad singer was it who claimed to have fought by day in the +very battle he sang by night? So masterful indeed was that instinct that +when the minstrel knew not who his poet was, he must needs make up a man: +"When any stranger asks who is the sweetest of singers, answer with one +voice: 'a blind man; he dwells upon rocky Chios; his songs shall be the +most beautiful for ever.'" Elaborate modern psychology sounds egotistical, +I thought, when it speaks in the first person, but not those simple +emotions which resemble the more, the more powerful they are, everybody's +emotion, and I was soon to write many poems where an always personal +emotion was woven into a general pattern of myth and symbol. When the +Fenian poet says that his heart has grown cold and callous--"For thy +hapless fate, dear Ireland, and sorrows of my own"--he but follows +tradition and if he does not move us deeply, it is because he has no +sensuous musical vocabulary that comes at need, without compelling him to +sedentary toil and so driving him out from his fellows. I thought to +create that sensuous, musical vocabulary, and not for myself only, but +that I might leave it to later Irish poets, much as a mediæval Japanese +painter left his style as an inheritance to his family, and was careful to +use a traditional manner and matter, yet did something altogether +different, changed by that toil, impelled by my share in Cain's curse, by +all that sterile modern complication, by my "originality," as the +newspapers call it. Morris set out to make a revolution that the persons +of his _Well at the World's End_ or his _Waters of the Wondrous Isles_, +always, to my mind, in the likeness of Artemisia and her man, might walk +his native scenery; and I, that my native scenery might find imaginary +inhabitants, half-planned a new method and a new culture. My mind began +drifting vaguely towards that doctrine of "the mask" which has convinced +me that every passionate man (I have nothing to do with mechanist, or +philanthropist, or man whose eyes have no preference) is, as it were, +linked with another age, historical or imaginary, where alone he finds +images that rouse his energy. Napoleon was never of his own time, as the +naturalistic writers and painters bid all men be, but had some Roman +emperor's image in his head and some condottiere blood in his heart; and +when he crowned that head at Rome with his own hands he had covered, as +may be seen from David's painting, his hesitation with that emperor's old +suit. + + +XV + +I had various women friends on whom I would call towards five o'clock +mainly to discuss my thoughts that I could not bring to a man without +meeting some competing thought, but partly because their tea and toast +saved my pennies for the 'bus ride home; but with women, apart from their +intimate exchanges of thought, I was timid and abashed. I was sitting on a +seat in front of the British Museum feeding pigeons when a couple of girls +sat near and began enticing my pigeons away, laughing and whispering to +one another, and I looked straight in front of me, very indignant, and +presently went into the Museum without turning my head towards them. Since +then I have often wondered if they were pretty or merely very young. +Sometimes I told myself very adventurous love-stories with myself for +hero, and at other times I planned out a life of lonely austerity, and at +other times mixed the ideals and planned a life of lonely austerity +mitigated by periodical lapses. I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo +in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little +island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick +I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which +balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. +From the sudden remembrance came my poem _Innisfree_, my first lyric with +anything in its rhythm of my own music. I had begun to loosen rhythm as an +escape from rhetoric and from that emotion of the crowd that rhetoric +brings, but I only understood vaguely and occasionally that I must for my +special purpose use nothing but the common syntax. A couple of years +later I would not have written that first line with its conventional +archaism--"Arise and go"--nor the inversion in the last stanza. Passing +another day by the new Law Courts, a building that I admired because it +was Gothic--"It is not very good," Morris had said, "but it is better than +anything else they have got and so they hate it"--I grew suddenly +oppressed by the great weight of stone, and thought, "There are miles and +miles of stone and brick all round me," and presently added, "If John the +Baptist or his like were to come again and had his mind set upon it, he +could make all these people go out into some wilderness leaving their +buildings empty," and that thought, which does not seem very valuable now, +so enlightened the day that it is still vivid in the memory. I spent a few +days at Oxford copying out a seventeenth century translation of Poggio's +_Liber Facetiarum_ or the _Hypneroto-machia_ of Poliphili for a publisher; +I forget which, for I copied both; and returned very pale to my troubled +family. I had lived upon bread and tea because I thought that if antiquity +found locust and wild honey nutritive, my soul was strong enough to need +no better. I was always planning some great gesture, putting the whole +world into one scale of the balance and my soul into the other and +imagining that the whole world somehow kicked the beam. More than thirty +years have passed and I have seen no forcible young man of letters brave +the metropolis, without some like stimulant; and all after two or three, +or twelve or fifteen years, according to obstinacy, have understood that +we achieve, if we do achieve, in little sedentary stitches as though we +were making lace. I had one unmeasured advantage from my stimulant: I +could ink my socks, that they might not show through my shoes, with a most +haughty mind, imagining myself, and my torn tackle, somewhere else, in +some far place "under the canopy ... i' the city of kites and crows." + +In London I saw nothing good and constantly remembered that Ruskin had +said to some friend of my father's--"As I go to my work at the British +Museum I see the faces of the people become daily more corrupt." I +convinced myself for a time, that on the same journey I saw but what he +saw. Certain old women's faces filled me with horror, faces that are no +longer there, or if they are pass before me unnoticed: the fat blotched +faces, rising above double chins, of women who have drunk too much beer +and eaten much meat. In Dublin I had often seen old women walking with +erect heads and gaunt bodies, talking to themselves with loud voices, mad +with drink and poverty, but they were different, they belonged to romance. +Da Vinci had drawn women who looked so and so carried their bodies. + + +XVI + +I attempted to restore one old friend of my father's to the practice of +his youth, but failed, though he, unlike my father, had not changed his +belief. My father brought me to dine with Jack Nettleship at Wigmore +Street, once inventor of imaginative designs and now a painter of +melodramatic lions. At dinner I had talked a great deal--too much, I +imagine, for so young a man, or maybe for any man--and on the way home my +father, who had been plainly anxious that I should make a good impression, +was very angry. He said I had talked for effect and that talking for +effect was precisely what one must never do; he had always hated rhetoric +and emphasis and had made me hate it; and his anger plunged me into great +dejection. I called at Nettleship's studio the next day to apologise, and +Nettleship opened the door himself and received me with enthusiasm. He had +explained to some woman guest that I would probably talk well, being an +Irishman, but the reality had surpassed, etc., etc. I was not flattered, +though relieved at not having to apologise, for I soon discovered that +what he really admired was my volubility, for he himself was very silent. +He seemed about sixty, had a bald head, a grey beard, and a nose, as one +of my father's friends used to say, like an opera-glass, and sipped cocoa +all the afternoon and evening from an enormous tea-cup that must have been +designed for him alone, not caring how cold the cocoa grew. Years before +he had been thrown from his horse, while hunting, and broke his arm, and +because it had been badly set suffered great pain for a long time. A +little whisky would always stop the pain, and soon a little became a great +deal and he found himself a drunkard, but having signed his liberty away +for certain months he was completely cured. He had acquired, however, the +need of some liquid which he could sip constantly. I brought him an +admiration settled in early boyhood, for my father had always said, +"George Wilson was our born painter, but Nettleship our genius," and even +had he shown me nothing I could care for, I had admired him still because +my admiration was in my bones. He showed me his early designs, and they, +though often badly drawn, fulfilled my hopes. Something of Blake they +certainly did show, but had in place of Blake's joyous, intellectual +energy a Saturnian passion and melancholy. "God Creating Evil," the +death-like head with a woman and a tiger coming from the forehead, which +Rossetti--or was it Browning?--had described "as the most sublime design +of ancient or modern art," had been lost, but there was another version of +the same thought, and other designs never published or exhibited. They +rise before me even now in meditation, especially a blind Titan-like ghost +floating with groping hands above the tree-tops. I wrote a criticism, and +arranged for reproductions with the editor of an art magazine, but after +it was written and accepted the proprietor, lifting what I considered an +obsequious caw in the Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage +rookery, insisted upon its rejection. Nettleship did not mind its +rejection, saying, "Who cares for such things now? Not ten people," but he +did mind my refusal to show him what I had written. Though what I had +written was all eulogy, I dreaded his judgment for it was my first art +criticism. I hated his big lion pictures, where he attempted an art too +much concerned with the sense of touch, with the softness or roughness, +the minutely observed irregularity of surfaces, for his genius; and I +think he knew it. "Rossetti used to call my pictures pot-boilers," he +said, "but they are all--all"--and he waved his arm to the +canvasses--"symbols." When I wanted him to design gods, and angels, and +lost spirits once more, he always came back to the point "Nobody would be +pleased." "Everybody should have a _raison d'être_" was one of his +phrases. "Mrs ----'s articles are not good but they are her _raison +d'être_." I had but little knowledge of art for there was little +scholarship in the Dublin art school, so I overrated the quality of +anything that could be connected with my general beliefs about the world. +If I had been able to give angelical or diabolical names to his lions I +might have liked them also and I think that Nettleship himself would have +liked them better and liking them better have become a better painter. We +had the same kind of religious feeling, but I could give a crude +philosophical expression to mine while he could only express his in action +or with brush and pencil. He often told me of certain ascetic ambitions, +very much like my own, for he had kept all the moral ambition of youth, as +for instance--"Yeats, the other night I was arrested by a policeman--was +walking round Regent's Park barefooted to keep the flesh under--good sort +of thing to do. I was carrying my boots in my hand and he thought I was a +burglar and even when I explained and gave him half a crown, he would not +let me go till I had promised to put on my boots before I met the next +policeman." + +He was very proud and shy and I could not imagine anybody asking him +questions and so I was content to take these stories as they came: +confirmations of what I had heard of him in boyhood. One story in +particular had stirred my imagination for, ashamed all my boyhood of my +lack of physical courage, I admired what was beyond my imitation. He +thought that any weakness, even a weakness of body, had the character of +sin and while at breakfast with his brother, with whom he shared a room on +the third floor of a corner house, he said that his nerves were out of +order. Presently he left the table, and got out through the window and on +to a stone ledge that ran along the wall under the windowsills. He sidled +along the ledge, and turning the corner with it, got in at a different +window and returned to the table. "My nerves," he said, "are better than I +thought." + +Nettleship said to me: "Has Edwin Ellis ever said anything about the +effect of drink upon my genius?" "No," I answered. "I ask," he said, +"because I have always thought that Ellis has some strange medical +insight." Though I had answered no, Ellis had only a few days before used +these words: "Nettleship drank his genius away." Ellis, but lately +returned from Perugia where he had lived many years, was another old +friend of my father's but some years younger than Nettleship or my father. +Nettleship had found his simplifying image, but in his painting had turned +away from it, while Ellis, the son of Alexander Ellis, a once famous man +of science, who was perhaps the last man in England to run the circle of +the sciences without superficiality, had never found that image at all. He +was a painter and poet, but his painting, which did not interest me, +showed no influence but that of Leighton. He had started perhaps a couple +of years too late for Pre-Raphaelite influence, for no great +Pre-Raphaelite picture was painted after 1870, and left England too soon +for that of the French painters. He was, however, sometimes moving as a +poet and still more often an astonishment. I have known him cast something +just said into a dozen lines of musical verse, without apparently ceasing +to talk; but the work once done he could not or would not amend it, and my +father thought he lacked all ambition. Yet he had at times nobility of +rhythm--an instinct for grandeur, and after thirty years I still repeat to +myself his address to Mother Earth-- + + "O mother of the hills, forgive our towers, + O mother of the clouds forgive our dreams." + +And there are certain whole poems that I read from time to time or try to +make others read. There is that poem where the manner is unworthy of the +matter, being loose and facile, describing Adam and Eve fleeing from +Paradise. Adam asks Eve what she carries so carefully, and Eve replies +that it is a little of the apple-core kept for their children. There is +that vision concerning _Christ the Less_, a too hurriedly written ballad, +where the half of Christ sacrificed to the divine half "that fled to seek +felicity" wanders wailing through Golgotha, and there is _The Saint and +the Youth_, in which I can discover no fault at all. He loved +complexities--"Seven silences like candles round her face" is a line of +his--and whether he wrote well or ill had always a manner which I would +have known from that of any other poet. He would say to me, "I am a +mathematician with the mathematics left out"--his father was a great +mathematician--or "A woman once said to me, 'Mr Ellis, why are your poems +like sums?'" And certainly he loved symbols and abstractions. He said +once, when I had asked him not to mention something or other, "Surely you +have discovered by this time that I know of no means whereby I can mention +a fact in conversation." + +He had a passion for Blake, picked up in Pre-Raphaelite studios, and early +in our acquaintance put into my hands a scrap of notepaper on which he had +written some years before an interpretation of the poem that begins + + "The fields from Islington to Marylebone, + To Primrose Hill and St. John's Wood, + Were builded over with pillars of gold, + And there Jerusalem's pillars stood." + +The four quarters of London represented Blake's four great mythological +personages, the Zoas, and also the four elements. These few sentences were +the foundation of all study of the philosophy of William Blake that +requires an exact knowledge for its pursuit and that traces the +connection between his system and that of Swedenborg or of Boehme. I +recognised certain attributions, from what is sometimes called the +Christian Cabbala, of which Ellis had never heard, and with this proof +that his interpretation was more than fantasy he and I began our four +years' work upon the Prophetic Books of William Blake. We took it as +almost a sign of Blake's personal help when we discovered that the spring +of 1889, when we first joined our knowledge, was one hundred years from +the publication of _The Book of Thel_, the first published of the +Prophetic Books, as though it were firmly established that the dead +delight in anniversaries. After months of discussion and reading we made a +concordance of all Blake's mystical terms, and there was much copying to +be done in the Museum and at Red Hill, where the descendants of Blake's +friend and patron, the landscape painter John Linnell, had many +manuscripts. The Linnells were narrow in their religious ideas and +doubtful of Blake's orthodoxy, whom they held, however, in great honour, +and I remember a timid old lady who had known Blake when a child saying, +"He had very wrong ideas, he did not believe in the historical Jesus." One +old man sat always beside us, ostensibly to sharpen our pencils but +perhaps really to see that we did not steal the manuscripts, and they gave +us very old port at lunch, and I have upon my dining-room walls their +present of Blake's Dante engravings. Going thither and returning Ellis +would entertain me by philosophical discussion varied with improvised +stories, at first folk-tales which he professed to have picked up in +Scotland, and, though I had read and collected many folk tales, I did not +see through the deceit. I have a partial memory of two more elaborate +tales, one of an Italian conspirator flying barefoot, from I forget what +adventure through I forget what Italian city, in the early morning. +Fearing to be recognised by his bare feet, he slipped past the sleepy +porter at an hotel, calling out "number so and so" as if he were some +belated guest. Then passing from bedroom door to door he tried on the +boots, and just as he got a pair to fit, a voice cried from the room: "Who +is that?" "Merely me, sir," he called back, "taking your boots." The other +was of a martyr's Bible, round which the cardinal virtues had taken +personal form--this a fragment of Blake's philosophy. It was in the +possession of an old clergyman when a certain jockey called upon him, and +the cardinal virtues, confused between jockey and clergyman, devoted +themselves to the jockey. As whenever he sinned a cardinal virtue +interfered and turned him back to virtue, he lived in great credit, and +made, but for one sentence, a very holy death. As his wife and family +knelt round in admiration and grief he suddenly said "damn." "O my dear," +said his wife, "what a dreadful expression." He answered, "I am going to +heaven," and straightway died. It was a long tale, for there were all the +jockey's vain attempts to sin, as well as all the adventures of the +clergyman, who became very sinful indeed, but it ended happily for when +the jockey died the cardinal virtues returned to the clergyman. I think he +would talk to any audience that offered, one audience being the same as +another in his eyes, and it may have been for this reason that my father +called him unambitious. When he was a young man he had befriended a +reformed thief and had asked the grateful thief to take him round the +thieves' quarters of London. The thief, however, hurried him away from the +worst saying, "Another minute and they would have found you out. If they +were not the stupidest of men in London, they had done so already." Ellis +had gone through a detailed, romantic and witty account of all the houses +he had robbed and all the throats he had cut in one short life. + +His conversation would often pass out of my comprehension, or indeed I +think of any man's, into a labyrinth of abstraction and subtlety and then +suddenly return with some verbal conceit or turn of wit. The mind is known +to attain in certain conditions of trance a quickness so extraordinary +that we are compelled at times to imagine a condition of unendurable +intellectual intensity from which we are saved by the merciful stupidity +of the body, and I think that the mind of Edwin Ellis was constantly upon +the edge of trance. Once we were discussing the symbolism of sex in the +philosophy of Blake and had been in disagreement all the afternoon. I +began talking with a new sense of conviction and after a moment Ellis, who +was at his easel, threw down his brush and said that he had just seen the +same explanation in a series of symbolic visions. "In another moment," he +said, "I should have been off." We went into the open air and walked up +and down to get rid of that feeling, but presently we came in again and I +began again my explanation, Ellis lying upon the sofa. I had been talking +some time when Mrs Ellis came into the room and said, "Why are you sitting +in the dark?" Ellis answered, "But we are not," and then added in a voice +of wonder, "I thought the lamp was lit, and that I was sitting up, and +now I find that I am lying down and that we are in darkness." I had seen a +flicker of light over the ceiling but thought it a reflection from some +light outside the house, which may have been the case. + + +XVII + +I had already met most of the poets of my generation. I had said, soon +after the publication of _The Wanderings of Usheen_, to the editor of a +series of shilling reprints, who had set me to compile tales of the Irish +fairies, "I am growing jealous of other poets and we will all grow jealous +of each other unless we know each other and so feel a share in each +other's triumph." He was a Welshman, lately a mining engineer, Ernest +Rhys, a writer of Welsh translations and original poems, that have often +moved me greatly though I can think of no one else who has read them. He +was perhaps a dozen years older than myself and through his work as editor +knew everybody who would compile a book for seven or eight pounds. Between +us we founded The Rhymers' Club, which for some years was to meet every +night in an upper room with a sanded floor in an ancient eating house in +the Strand called The Cheshire Cheese. Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, +Victor Plarr, Ernest Radford, John Davidson, Richard le Gallienne, T. W. +Rolleston, Selwyn Image, Edwin Ellis, and John Todhunter came constantly +for a time, Arthur Symons and Herbert Home, less constantly, while William +Watson joined but never came and Francis Thompson came once but never +joined; and sometimes if we met in a private house, which we did +occasionally, Oscar Wilde came. It had been useless to invite him to The +Cheshire Cheese for he hated Bohemia. "Olive Schreiner," he said once to +me, "is staying in the East End because that is the only place where +people do not wear masks upon their faces, but I have told her that I live +in the West End because nothing in life interests me but the mask." + +We read our poems to one another and talked criticism and drank a little +wine. I sometimes say when I speak of the club, "We had such and such +ideas, such and such a quarrel with the great Victorians, we set before us +such and such aims," as though we had many philosophical ideas. I say this +because I am ashamed to admit that I had these ideas and that whenever I +began to talk of them a gloomy silence fell upon the room. A young Irish +poet, who wrote excellently but had the worst manners, was to say a few +years later, "You do not talk like a poet, you talk like a man of +letters," and if all the Rhymers had not been polite, if most of them had +not been to Oxford or Cambridge, the greater number would have said the +same thing. I was full of thought, often very abstract thought, longing +all the while to be full of images, because I had gone to the art school +instead of a university. Yet even if I had gone to a university, and +learned all the classical foundations of English literature and English +culture, all that great erudition which once accepted frees the mind from +restlessness, I should have had to give up my Irish subject matter, or +attempt to found a new tradition. Lacking sufficient recognized precedent +I must needs find out some reason for all I did. I knew almost from the +start that to overflow with reasons was to be not quite well-born, and +when I could I hid them, as men hide a disagreeable ancestry; and that +there was no help for it seeing that my country was not born at all. I was +of those doomed to imperfect achievement, and under a curse, as it were, +like some race of birds compelled to spend the time, needed for the making +of the nest, in argument as to the convenience of moss and twig and +lichen. Le Gallienne and Davidson, and even Symons, were provincial at +their setting out, but their provincialism was curable, mine incurable; +while the one conviction shared by all the younger men, but principally by +Johnson and Home, who imposed their personalities upon us, was an +opposition to all ideas, all generalizations that can be explained and +debated. E---- fresh from Paris would sometimes say--"We are concerned +with nothing but impressions," but that itself was a generalization and +met but stony silence. Conversation constantly dwindled into "Do you like +so and so's last book?" "No, I prefer the book before it," and I think +that but for its Irish members, who said whatever came into their heads, +the club would not have survived its first difficult months. I saw--now +ashamed that I saw "like a man of letters," now exasperated at their +indifference to the fashion of their own river-bed--that Swinburne in one +way, Browning in another, and Tennyson in a third, had filled their work +with what I called "impurities," curiosities about politics, about +science, about history, about religion; and that we must create once more +the pure work. + +Our clothes were, for the most part unadventurous like our conversation, +though I indeed wore a brown velveteen coat, a loose tie, and a very old +inverness cape, discarded by my father twenty years before and preserved +by my Sligo-born mother whose actions were unreasoning and habitual like +the seasons. But no other member of the club, except Le Gallienne, who +wore a loose tie, and Symons, who had an inverness cape that was quite new +and almost fashionable, would have shown himself for the world in any +costume but "that of an English gentleman." "One should be quite +unnoticeable," Johnson explained to me. Those who conformed most carefully +to the fashion in their clothes, generally departed furthest from it in +their handwriting, which was small, neat, and studied, one poet--which, I +forget--having founded his upon the handwriting of George Herbert. Dowson +and Symons I was to know better in later years when Symons became a very +dear friend, and I never got behind John Davidson's Scottish roughness and +exasperation, though I saw much of him, but from the first I devoted +myself to Lionel Johnson. He and Horne and Image and one or two others, +shared a man-servant and an old house in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, +typical figures of transition, doing as an achievement of learning and of +exquisite taste what their predecessors did in careless abundance. All +were Pre-Raphaelite, and sometimes one might meet in the rooms of one or +other a ragged figure, as of some fallen dynasty, Simeon Solomon the +Pre-Raphaelite painter, once the friend of Rossetti and of Swinburne, but +fresh now from some low public house. Condemned to a long term of +imprisonment for a criminal offence, he had sunk into drunkenness and +misery. Introduced one night, however, to some man who mistook him, in the +dim candle light, for another Solomon, a successful academic painter and +R.A., he started to his feet in a rage with, "Sir, do you dare to mistake +me for that mountebank?" Though not one had hearkened to the feeblest +caw, or been spattered by the smallest dropping from any Huxley, Tyndall, +Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage bundle of old twigs I began by suspecting +them of lukewarmness, and even backsliding, and I owe it to that suspicion +that I never became intimate with Horne, who lived to become the greatest +English authority upon Italian life in the fourteenth century and to write +the one standard work on Botticelli. Connoisseur in several arts, he had +designed a little church in the manner of Inigo Jones for a burial ground +near the Marble Arch. Though I now think his little church a masterpiece, +its style was more than a century too late to hit my fancy, at two or +three and twenty; and I accused him of leaning towards that eighteenth +century + + "That taught a school + Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit + Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit, + Their verses tallied." + +Another fanaticism delayed my friendship with two men, who are now my +friends and in certain matters my chief instructors. Somebody, probably +Lionel Johnson, brought me to the studio of Charles Ricketts and Charles +Shannon, certainly heirs of the great generation, and the first thing I +saw was a Shannon picture of a lady and child, arrayed in lace silk and +satin, suggesting that hated century. My eyes were full of some more +mythological mother and child and I would have none of it and I told +Shannon that he had not painted a mother and child, but elegant people +expecting visitors and I thought that a great reproach. Somebody writing +in _The Germ_ had said that a picture of a pheasant and an apple was +merely a picture of something to eat and I was so angry with the +indifference to subject, which was the commonplace of all art criticism +since Bastien-Lepage, that I could at times see nothing else but subject. +I thought that, though it might not matter to the man himself whether he +loved a white woman or a black, a female pickpocket or a regular +communicant of the Church of England, if only he loved strongly, it +certainly did matter to his relations and even under some circumstances to +his whole neighbourhood. Sometimes indeed, like some father in Molière, I +ignored the lover's feelings altogether and even refused to admit that a +trace of the devil, perhaps a trace of colour, may lend piquancy, +especially if the connection be not permanent. + +Among these men, of whom so many of the greatest talents were to live such +passionate lives and die such tragic deaths, one serene man, T. W. +Rolleston, seemed always out of place; it was I brought him there, +intending to set him to some work in Ireland later on. I have known young +Dublin working men slip out of their workshop to see the second Thomas +Davis passing by, and even remember a conspiracy, by some three or four, +to make him "the leader of the Irish race at home and abroad," and all +because he had regular features; and when all is said Alexander the Great +and Alcibiades were personable men, and the Founder of the Christian +religion was the only man who was neither a little too tall nor a little +too short, but exactly six feet high. We in Ireland thought as do the +plays and ballads, not understanding that, from the first moment wherein +nature foresaw the birth of Bastien-Lepage, she has only granted great +creative power to men whose faces are contorted with extravagance or +curiosity, or dulled with some protecting stupidity. + +I had now met all those who were to make the 'nineties of the last century +tragic in the history of literature, but as yet we were all seemingly +equal, whether in talent or in luck, and scarce even personalties to one +another. I remember saying one night at the Cheshire Cheese, when more +poets than usual had come, "None of us can say who will succeed, or even +who has or has not talent. The only thing certain about us is that we are +too many." + + +XVIII + +I have described what image--always opposite to the natural self or the +natural world--Wilde, Henley, Morris, copied or tried to copy, but I have +not said if I found an image for myself. I know very little about myself +and much less of that anti-self: probably the woman who cooks my dinner or +the woman who sweeps out my study knows more than I. It is perhaps because +nature made me a gregarious man, going hither and thither looking for +conversation, and ready to deny from fear or favour his dearest +conviction, that I love proud and lonely things. When I was a child and +went daily to the sexton's daughter for writing lessons, I found one poem +in her School Reader that delighted me beyond all others: a fragment of +some metrical translation from Aristophanes wherein the birds sing scorn +upon mankind. In later years my mind gave itself to gregarious Shelley's +dream of a young man, his hair blanched with sorrow, studying philosophy +in some lonely tower, or of his old man, master of all human knowledge, +hidden from human sight in some shell-strewn cavern on the Mediterranean +shore. One passage above all ran perpetually in my ears-- + + "Some feign that he is Enoch: others dream + He was pre-Adamite, and has survived + Cycles of generation and of ruin. + The sage, in truth, by dreadful abstinence, + And conquering penance of the mutinous flesh, + Deep contemplation and unwearied study, + In years outstretched beyond the date of man, + May have attained to sovereignty and science + Over those strong and secret things and thoughts + Which others fear and know not. + _Mahmud._ I would talk + With this old Jew. + _Hassan._ Thy will is even now + Made known to him where he dwells in a sea-cavern + 'Mid the Demonesi, less accessible + Than thou or God! He who would question him + Must sail alone at sunset where the stream + Of ocean sleeps around those foamless isles, + When the young moon is westering as now, + And evening airs wander upon the wave; + And, when the pines of that bee-pasturing isle, + Green Erebinthus, quench the fiery shadow + Of his gilt prow within the sapphire water, + Then must the lonely helmsman cry aloud + 'Ahasuerus!' and the caverns round + Will answer 'Ahasuerus!' If his prayer + Be granted, a faint meteor will arise, + Lighting him over Marmora; and a wind + Will rush out of the sighing pine-forest, + And with the wind a storm of harmony + Unutterably sweet, and pilot him + Through the soft twilight to the Bosphorus: + Thence, at the hour and place and circumstance + Fit for the matter of their conference, + The Jew appears. Few dare, and few who dare + Win the desired communion." + +Already in Dublin, I had been attracted to the Theosophists because they +had affirmed the real existence of the Jew, or of his like, and, apart +from whatever might have been imagined by Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, +and Bastien-Lepage, I saw nothing against his reality. Presently having +heard that Madame Blavatsky had arrived from France, or from India, I +thought it time to look the matter up. Certainly if wisdom existed +anywhere in the world it must be in some such lonely mind admitting no +duty to us, communing with God only, conceding nothing from fear or +favour. Have not all peoples, while bound together in a single mind and +taste, believed that such men existed and paid them that honour, or paid +it to their mere shadow, which they have refused to philanthropists and to +men of learning. + + +XIX + +I found Madame Blavatsky in a little house at Norwood, with but, as she +said, three followers left--the Society of Psychical Research had just +reported on her Indian phenomena--and as one of the three followers sat in +an outer room to keep out undesirable visitors, I was kept a long time +kicking my heels. Presently I was admitted and found an old woman in a +plain loose dark dress: a sort of old Irish peasant woman with an air of +humour and audacious power. I was still kept waiting, for she was deep in +conversation with a woman visitor. I strayed through folding doors into +the next room and stood, in sheer idleness of mind, looking at a cuckoo +clock. It was certainly stopped, for the weights were off and lying upon +the ground, and yet, as I stood there the cuckoo came out and cuckooed at +me. I interrupted Madame Blavatsky to say, "Your clock has hooted me." +"It oftens hoots at a stranger," she replied. "Is there a spirit in it?" I +said. "I do not know," she said, "I should have to be alone to know what +is in it." I went back to the clock and began examining it and heard her +say: "Do not break my clock." I wondered if there was some hidden +mechanism and I should have been put out, I suppose, had I found any, +though Henley had said to me, "Of course she gets up fraudulent miracles, +but a person of genius has to do something; Sarah Bernhardt sleeps in her +coffin." Presently the visitor went away and Madame Blavatsky explained +that she was a propagandist for women's rights who had called to find out +"why men were so bad." "What explanation did you give her?" I said. "That +men were born bad, but women made themselves so," and then she explained +that I had been kept waiting because she had mistaken me for some man, +whose name resembled mine and who wanted to persuade her of the flatness +of the earth. + +When I next saw her she had moved into a house at Holland Park, and some +time must have passed--probably I had been in Sligo where I returned +constantly for long visits--for she was surrounded by followers. She sat +nightly before a little table covered with green baize and on this green +baize she scribbled constantly with a piece of white chalk. She would +scribble symbols, sometimes humorously explained, and sometimes +unintelligible figures, but the chalk was intended to mark down her score +when she played patience. One saw in the next room a large table where +every night her followers and guests, often a great number, sat down to +their vegetable meal, while she encouraged or mocked through the folding +doors. A great passionate nature, a sort of female Dr Johnson, impressive +I think to every man or woman who had themselves any richness, she seemed +impatient of the formalism of the shrill abstract idealism of those about +her, and this impatience broke out in railing and many nicknames: "O you +are a flap-doodle, but then you are a theosophist and a brother." The most +devout and learned of all her followers said to me, "H. P. B. has just +told me that there is another globe stuck on to this at the north pole, so +that the earth has really a shape something like a dumb-bell." I said, for +I knew that her imagination contained all the folklore of the world, "That +must be some piece of Eastern mythology." "O no it is not," he said, "of +that I am certain, and there must be something in it or she would not have +said it." Her mockery was not kept for her followers alone, and her voice +would become harsh, and her mockery lose fantasy and humour, when she +spoke of what seemed to her scientific materialism. Once I saw this +antagonism, guided by some kind of telepathic divination, take a form of +brutal fantasy. I brought a very able Dublin woman to see her and this +woman had a brother, a physiologist whose reputation, though known to +specialists alone, was European, and because of this brother a family +pride in everything scientific and modern. The Dublin woman scarcely +opened her mouth the whole evening and her name was certainly unknown to +Madame Blavatsky, yet I saw at once in that wrinkled old face bent over +the cards, and the only time I ever saw it there, a personal hostility, +the dislike of one woman for another. Madame Blavatsky seemed to bundle +herself up, becoming all primeval peasant, and began complaining of her +ailments, more especially of her bad leg. But of late her master--her +"old Jew," her "Ahasuerus"--cured it, or set it on the way to be cured. "I +was sitting here in my chair," said she, "when the master came in and +brought something with him which he put over my knee, something warm which +enclosed my knee--it was a live dog which he had cut open." I recognized a +cure used sometimes in mediaeval medicine. She had two masters and their +portraits, ideal Indian heads, painted by some most incompetent artist, +stood upon either side of the folding doors. One night when talk was +impersonal and general, I sat gazing through the folding doors into the +dimly lighted dining room beyond. I noticed a curious red light shining +upon a picture and got up to see where the red light came from. It was the +picture of an Indian and as I came near it slowly vanished. When I +returned to my seat, Madame Blavatsky said, "What did you see?" "A +picture," I said. "Tell it to go away." "It is already gone." "So much the +better," she said, "I was afraid it was mediumship. But it is only +clairvoyance." "What is the difference?" "If it had been mediumship, it +would have stayed in spite of you. Beware of mediumship; it is a kind of +madness; I know for I have been through it." + +I found her almost always full of gaiety that, unlike the occasional +joking of those about her, was illogical and incalculable and yet always +kindly and tolerant. I had called one evening to find her absent but +expected every moment. She had been somewhere at the seaside for her +health and arrived with a little suite of followers. She sat down at once +in her big chair, and began unfolding a brown paper parcel while all +looked on full of curiosity. It contained a large family Bible. "This is a +present for my maid," she said. "What a Bible and not even annotated!" +said some shocked voice. "Well, my children," was the answer, "what is the +good of giving lemons to those who want oranges?" When I first began to +frequent her house, as I soon did very constantly, I noticed a handsome +clever woman of the world there, who seemed certainly very much out of +place, penitent though she thought herself. Presently there was much +scandal and gossip for the penitent was plainly entangled with two young +men, who were expected to grow into ascetic sages. The scandal was so +great that Madame Blavatsky had to call the penitent before her and to +speak after this fashion, "We think that it is necessary to crush the +animal nature; you should live in chastity in act and thought. Initiation +is granted only to those who are entirely chaste," and so it ran on for +some time. However, after some minutes in that vehement style, the +penitent standing crushed and shamed before her, she had wound up, "I +cannot permit you more than one." She was quite sincere but thought that +nothing mattered but what happened in the mind, and that if we could not +master the mind our actions were of little importance. One young man +filled her with exasperation for she thought that his settled gloom came +from his chastity. I had known him in Dublin where he had been accustomed +to interrupt long periods of asceticism, in which he would eat vegetables +and drink water, with brief outbreaks of what he considered the devil. +After an outbreak he would for a few hours dazzle the imagination of the +members of the local theosophical society with poetical rhapsodies about +harlots and street lamps, and then sink into weeks of melancholy. A +fellow-theosophist once found him hanging from the windowpole, but cut him +down in the nick of time. I said to the man who cut him down, "What did +you say to each other?" He said, "We spent the night telling comic stories +and laughing a great deal." This man, torn between sensuality and +visionary ambition, was now the most devout of all, and told me that in +the middle of the night he could often hear the ringing of the little +"astral bell" whereby Madame Blavatsky's master called her attention, and +that, although it was a silvery low tone, it made the whole house shake. +Another night I found him waiting in the hall to show in those who had +right of entrance, on some night when the discussion was private, and as I +passed he whispered into my ear, "Madame Blavatsky is perhaps not a real +woman at all. They say that her dead body was found many years ago upon +some Russian battlefield." She had two dominant moods, both of extreme +activity, one calm and philosophic, and this was the mood always on that +night in the week when she answered questions upon her system, and as I +look back after thirty years I often ask myself, "Was her speech +automatic? Was she a trance medium, or in some similar state, one night in +every week?" In the other mood she was full of fantasy and inconsequent +raillery. "That is the Greek Church, a triangle like all true religion," I +recall her saying, as she chalked out a triangle on the green baize, and +then as she made it disappear in meaningless scribbles, "it spread out and +became a bramble bush like the Church of Rome." Then rubbing it all out +except one straight line, "Now they have lopped off the branches and +turned it into a broomstick and that is protestantism." And so it was +night after night always varied and unforeseen. I have observed a like +sudden extreme change in others, half whose thought was supernatural and +Lawrence Oliphant records somewhere or other like observations. I can +remember only once finding her in a mood of reverie, something had +happened to damp her spirits, some attack upon her movement, or upon +herself. She spoke of Balzac, whom she had seen but once, of Alfred de +Musset, whom she had known well enough to dislike for his morbidity, and +George Sand, whom she had known so well that they had dabbled in magic +together of which "neither knew anything at all" in those days; and she +ran on, as if there was nobody there to overhear her, "I used to wonder at +and pity the people who sell their souls to the devil, but now I only pity +them. They do it to have somebody on their side," and added to that, after +some words I have forgotten, "I write, write, write as the Wandering Jew +walks, walks, walks." + +Besides the devotees, who came to listen and to turn every doctrine into a +new sanction for the puritanical convictions of their Victorian childhood, +cranks came from half Europe and from all America, and they came that they +might talk. One American said to me, "She has become the most famous woman +in the world by sitting in a big chair and permitting us to talk." They +talked and she played patience, and totted up her score on the green +baize, and generally seemed to listen, but sometimes she would listen no +more. There was a woman who talked perpetually of "the divine spark" +within her, until Madame Blavatsky stopped her with--"Yes, my dear, you +have a divine spark within you and if you are not very careful you will +hear it snore." A certain Salvation Army captain probably pleased her, for +if vociferous and loud of voice, he had much animation. He had known +hardship and spoke of his visions while starving in the streets and he +was still perhaps a little light in the head. I wondered what he could +preach to ignorant men, his head ablaze with wild mysticism, till I met a +man who had heard him talking near Covent Garden to some crowd in the +street. "My friends," he was saying, "you have the kingdom of heaven +within you and it would take a pretty big pill to get that out." + +Meanwhile I had got no nearer to proving that the sage Ahasuerus "dwells +in a sea cavern 'mid the Demonesi," nor did I learn any more of those +"Masters" whose representative Madame Blavatsky claimed to be. All there +seemed to feel their presence, and all spoke of them as if they were more +important than any visible inhabitant of the house. When Madame Blavatsky +was more silent, less vivid than usual, it was "because her Masters were +angry;" they had rebuked her because of some error, and she professed +constant error. Once I seemed in their presence, or that of some messenger +of theirs. It was about nine at night, and half a dozen of us sat round +her big table cloth, when the room seemed to fill with the odour of +incense. Somebody came from upstairs, but could smell nothing--had been +outside the influence it seems--but to myself and the others, it was very +strong. Madame Blavatsky said it was a common Indian incense, and that +some pupil of her master's was present; she seemed anxious to make light +of the matter and turned the conversation to something else. Certainly it +was a romantic house, and I did not separate myself from it by my own +will. I had learned from Blake to hate all abstraction, and, affected by +the abstraction of what were called "esoteric teachings," I began a series +of experiments. Some book or magazine published by the society had quoted +from that essay of magic, which Sibley, the eighteenth century astrologer, +had bound up with his big book upon astrology. If you burnt a flower to +ashes and put the ashes under, I think, the receiver of an air pump, and +stood the receiver in the moonlight for so many nights, the ghost of the +flower would appear hovering over its ashes. I got together a committee +which performed this experiment without results. The "esoteric teachings" +had declared that a certain very pure kind of indigo was the symbol of one +of the seven principles into which they divided human nature. I got with +some difficulty a little of this pure indigo, and gave portions of it to +members of the committee, and asked them to put it under their pillows at +night and record their dreams. I argued that all natural scenery must be +divided into seven types according to these principles, and by their study +we could rid the mind of abstraction. Presently a secretary, a friendly, +intelligent man, asked me to come and see him, and, when I did, complained +that I was causing discussion and disturbance. A certain fanatical hungry +face had been noticed red and tearful, and it was quite plain that I was +not in agreement with their methods or their philosophy. "We have certain +definite ideas," he said, "and we have but one duty, to spread them +through the world. I know that all these people become dogmatic, that they +believe what they can never prove, that their withdrawal from family life +is for them a great misfortune, but what are we to do? We have been told +that all spiritual influx into the society will come to an end in 1897 for +exactly one hundred years; before that date our fundamental ideas must be +spread in all countries." I knew the doctrine, and it made me wonder why +that old woman, or the "masters" from whom, whatever they were or were +not, her genius had come, insisted upon it; for influx of some kind there +must always be. Did they dread heresy, or had they no purpose but the +greatest possible immediate effect? + + +XX + +At the British Museum reading room I often saw a man of thirty-six, or +thirty-seven, in a brown velveteen coat, with a gaunt resolute face, and +an athletic body, who seemed before I heard his name, or knew the nature +of his studies, a figure of romance. Presently I was introduced, where or +by what man or woman I do not remember. He was called Liddle Mathers, but +would soon, under the touch of "The Celtic Movement," become Macgregor +Mathers, and then plain Macgregor. He was the author of _The Kabbala +Unveiled_, and his studies were two only--magic and the theory of war, for +he believed himself a born commander and all but equal in wisdom and in +power to that old Jew. He had copied many manuscripts on magic ceremonial +and doctrine in the British Museum, and was to copy many more in +Continental libraries, and it was through him mainly that I began certain +studies and experiences, that were to convince me that images well up +before the mind's eye from a deeper source than conscious or subconscious +memory. I believe that his mind in those early days did not belie his face +and body, though in later years it became unhinged, for he kept a proud +head amid great poverty. One that boxed with him nightly has told me that +for many weeks he could knock him down, though Mathers was the stronger +man, and only knew long after that during those weeks Mathers starved. +With him I met an old white-haired Oxfordshire clergyman, the most +panic-stricken person I have ever known, though Mathers' introduction had +been "he unites us to the great adepts of antiquity." This old man took me +aside that he might say--"I hope you never invoke spirits--that is a very +dangerous thing to do. I am told that even the planetary spirits turn upon +us in the end." I said, "Have you ever seen an apparition?" "O yes, once," +he said. "I have my alchemical laboratory in a cellar under my house where +the Bishop cannot see it. One day I was walking up and down there when I +heard another footstep walking up and down beside me. I turned and saw a +girl I had been in love with when I was a young man, but she died long +ago. She wanted me to kiss her. O no, I would not do that." "Why not?" I +said. "O she might have got power over me." "Has your alchemical research +had any success?" I said. "Yes, I once made the elixir of life. A French +alchemist said it had the right smell and the right colour" (the alchemist +may have been Eliphas Levi, who visited England in the 'sixties, and would +have said anything) "but the first effect of the elixir is that your nails +fall out and your hair falls off. I was afraid that I might have made a +mistake and that nothing else might happen, so I put it away on a shelf. I +meant to drink it when I was an old man, but when I got it down the other +day it had all dried up." + +Soon after my first meeting with Mathers he emerged into brief prosperity, +becoming for two or three years Curator of a private museum at Forest +Hill, and marrying a young and beautiful wife, the sister of the +philosopher, Henri Bergson. His house at Forest Hill was soon a romantic +place to a little group, Florence Farr, myself, and some dozen fellow +students. I think that it was she, her curiosity being insatiable, who +first brought news of that house and that she brought it in mockery and in +wonder. Mathers had taken her for a walk through a field of sheep and had +said, "Look at the sheep. I am going to imagine myself a ram," and at once +all the sheep ran after him; another day he had tried to quell a thunder +storm by making symbols in the air with a masonic sword, but the storm had +not been quelled; and then came the crowning wonder. He had given her a +piece of cardboard on which was a coloured geometrical symbol and had told +her to hold it to her forehead and she had found herself walking upon a +cliff above the sea, seagulls shrieking overhead. I did not think the ram +story impossible, and even tried half a dozen times to excite a cat by +imagining a mouse in front of its nose, but still some chance movement of +the flock might have deceived her. But what could have deceived her in +that final marvel? Then another brought a like report, and presently my +own turn came. He gave me a cardboard symbol and I closed my eyes. Sight +came slowly, there was not that sudden miracle as if the darkness had been +cut with a knife, for that miracle is mostly a woman's privilege, but +there rose before me mental images that I could not control: a desert and +black Titan raising himself up by his two hands from the middle of a heap +of ancient ruins. Mathers explained that I had seen a being of the order +of Salamanders because he had shown me their symbol, but it was not +necessary even to show the symbol, it would have been sufficient that he +imagined it. I had already written in my diary, under some date in 1887, +that Madame Blavatsky's Masters were "trance personalities," and I must +have meant such beings as my black Titan, only more lasting and more +powerful. I had found when a boy in Dublin on a table in the Royal Irish +Academy a pamphlet on Japanese art and read there of an animal painter so +remarkable that horses he had painted upon a Temple wall, had slipped down +after dark and trampled the neighbours' fields of rice. Somebody had come +into the temple in the early morning, had been startled by a shower of +water drops, had looked up and seen painted horses still wet from the +dew-covered fields, but now "trembling into stillness." + +I had soon mastered Mathers' symbolic system, and discovered that for a +considerable minority--whom I could select by certain unanalysable +characteristics--the visible world would completely vanish, and that +world, summoned by the symbol, take its place. One day when alone in a +third-class carriage, in the very middle of the railway bridge that +crosses the Thames near Victoria, I smelt incense. I was on my way to +Forest Hill; might it not come from some spirit Mathers had called up? I +had wondered when I smelt it at Madame Blavatsky's--if there might be some +contrivance, some secret censer, but that explanation was no longer +possible. I believed that Salamander of his but an image, and presently I +found analogies between smell and image. It must be from thought but what +certainty had I, that what had taken me by surprise, could be from my own +thought, and if a thought could affect the sense of smell, why not the +sense of touch? Then I discovered among that group of students that +surrounded Macgregor, a man who had fought a cat in his dreams and awaked +to find his breast covered with scratches. Was there an impassable +barrier between those scratches and the trampled fields of rice? It would +seem so, and yet all was uncertainty. What fixed law would our experiments +leave to our imagination? + +Mathers had learning but no scholarship, much imagination and imperfect +taste, but if he made some absurd statement, some incredible claim, some +hackneyed joke, we would half consciously change claim, statement or joke, +as though he were a figure in a play of our composition. He was a +necessary extravagance, and he had carried further than anyone else, a +claim implicit in the romantic movement from the time of Shelley and of +Goethe; and in body and in voice at least he was perfect; so might Faust +have looked at the end of his hundred years. In the credulity of our youth +we secretly wondered if he had not met with, perhaps even been taught by +some old man who had found the elixir. Nor did he undeceive us. "If you +find the elixir," he was accustomed to say, "you always look a few years +younger than the age at which you found it. If you find it at sixty you +will look fifty for a hundred years." None of us would have admitted that +we believed in stone or elixir, the old Oxfordshire clergyman excited no +belief, yet one among us certainly laboured with crucible or athanor. Ten +years ago I called upon an elderly solicitor, on some business, but at his +private house, and I remembered whose pupil he had been when I found among +the ashes of the hearth a little earthen pot. He pretended that he studied +alchemy that he might some day write its history, and I found when I +questioned others, that for twenty years there had been just such a little +pot among the ashes. + + +XXI + +I generalized a great deal and was ashamed of it. I thought it was my +business in life to be an artist and a poet, and that there could be no +business comparable to that. I refused to read books and even to meet +people who excited me to generalization, all to no purpose. I said my +prayers much as in childhood, though without the old regularity of hour +and place, and I began to pray that my imagination might somehow be +rescued from abstraction and became as preoccupied with life as had been +the imagination of Chaucer. For ten or twelve years more I suffered +continual remorse, and only became content when my abstractions had +composed themselves into picture and dramatization. My very remorse helped +to spoil my early poetry, giving it an element of sentimentality through +my refusal to permit it any share of an intellect which I considered +impure. Even in practical life I only very gradually began to use +generalizations, that have since become the foundation of all I have done, +or shall do, in Ireland. For all I know all men may have been so timid, +for I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we +shall ever find, but as yet we do not know truths that belong to us from +opinions, caught up in casual irritation or momentary fantasy. As life +goes on we discover that certain thoughts sustain us in defeat, or give us +victory, whether over ourselves or others, and it is these thoughts, +tested by passion, that we call convictions. Among subjective men (in all +those, that is, who must spin a web out of their own bowels) the victory +is an intellectual daily recreation of all that exterior fate snatches +away, and so that fate's antithesis; while what I have called "the Mask" +is an emotional antithesis to all that comes out of their internal nature. +We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy. + + +XXII + +A conviction that the world was now but a bundle of fragments possessed me +without ceasing. I had tried this conviction on the Rhymers, thereby +plunging into greater silence an already too silent evening. "Johnson," I +was accustomed to say, "you are the only man I know whose silence has beak +and claw." I had lectured on it to some London Irish society, and I was to +lecture upon it later on in Dublin, but I never found but one interested +man, an official of the Primrose League, who was also an active member of +the Fenian Brotherhood. "I am an extreme conservative apart from Ireland," +I have heard him explain; and I have no doubt that personal experience +made him share the sight of any eye that saw the world in fragments. I had +been put into a rage by the followers of Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, +and Bastien-Lepage, who not only asserted the unimportance of subject +whether in art or literature, but the independence of the arts from one +another. Upon the other hand, I delighted in every age where poet and +artist confined themselves gladly to some inherited subject matter known +to the whole people, for I thought that in man and race alike there is +something called "Unity of Being," using that term as Dante used it when +he compared beauty in the _Convito_ to a perfectly proportioned human +body. My father, from whom I had learned the term, preferred a comparison +to a musical instrument so strung that if we touch a string all the +strings murmur faintly. There is not more desire, he had said, in lust +than in true love, but in true love desire awakens pity, hope, affection, +admiration, and, given appropriate circumstance, every emotion possible to +man. When I began, however, to apply this thought to the state and to +argue for a law-made balance among trades and occupations my father +displayed at once the violent free trader and propagandist of liberty. I +thought that the enemy of this unity was abstraction, meaning by +abstraction not the distinction but the isolation of occupation, or class +or faculty-- + + "Call down the hawk from the air + Let him be hooded, or caged, + Till the yellow eye has grown mild, + For larder and spit are bare, + The old cook enraged, + The scullion gone wild." + +I knew no mediaeval cathedral, and Westminster, being a part of abhorred +London, did not interest me, but I thought constantly of Homer and Dante, +and the tombs of Mausolus and Artemisia, the great figures of King and +Queen and the lesser figures of Greek and Amazon, Centaur and Greek. I +thought that all art should be a Centaur finding in the popular lore its +back and its strong legs. I got great pleasure too from remembering that +Homer was sung, and from that tale of Dante hearing a common man sing some +stanza from _The Divine Comedy_, and from Don Quixote's meeting with some +common man that sang Ariosto. Morris had never seemed to care greatly for +any poet later than Chaucer and though I preferred Shakespeare to Chaucer +I begrudged my own preference. Had not Europe shared one mind and heart, +until both mind and heart began to break into fragments a little before +Shakespeare's birth? Music and verse began to fall apart when Chaucer +robbed verse of its speed that he might give it greater meditation, though +for another generation or so minstrels were to sing his lengthy elaborated +_Troilus and Criseyde_; painting parted from religion in the later +Renaissance that it might study effects of tangibility undisturbed; while, +that it might characterize, where it had once personified, it renounced, +in our own age, all that inherited subject matter which we have named +poetry. Presently I was indeed to number character itself among the +abstractions, encouraged by Congreve's saying that "passions are too +powerful in the fair sex to let humour," or as we say character, "have its +course." Nor have we fared better under the common daylight, for pure +reason has notoriously made but light of practical reason, and has been +made light of in its turn from that morning when Descartes discovered that +he could think better in his bed than out of it; nor needed I original +thought to discover, being so late of the school of Morris, that machinery +had not separated from handicraft wholly for the world's good, nor to +notice that the distinction of classes had become their isolation. If the +London merchants of our day competed together in writing lyrics they would +not, like the Tudor merchants, dance in the open street before the house +of the victor; nor do the great ladies of London finish their balls on the +pavement before their doors as did the great Venetian ladies, even in the +eighteenth century, conscious of an all enfolding sympathy. Doubtless +because fragments broke into ever smaller fragments we saw one another in +a light of bitter comedy, and in the arts, where now one technical element +reigned and now another, generation hated generation, and accomplished +beauty was snatched away when it had most engaged our affections. One +thing I did not foresee, not having the courage of my own thought: the +growing murderousness of the world. + + "Turning and turning in the widening gyre + The falcon cannot hear the falconer; + Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; + Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, + The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere + The ceremony of innocence is drowned; + The best lack all conviction while the worst + Are full of passionate intensity." + + +XXIII + +If abstraction had reached, or all but reached its climax, escape might be +possible for many, and if it had not, individual men might still escape. +If Chaucer's personages had disengaged themselves from Chaucer's crowd, +forgot their common goal and shrine, and after sundry magnifications +became each in turn the centre of some Elizabethan play, and had after +split into their elements and so given birth to romantic poetry, must I +reverse the cinematograph? I thought that the general movement of +literature must be such a reversal, men being there displayed in casual, +temporary, contact as at the Tabard door. I had lately read Tolstoy's +_Anna Karenina_ and thought that where his theoretical capacity had not +awakened there was such a turning back: but a nation or an individual with +great emotional intensity might follow the pilgrims as it were to some +unknown shrine, and give to all those separated elements and to all that +abstract love and melancholy, a symbolical, a mythological coherence. Not +Chaucer's rough tongued riders, but rather an ended pilgrimage, a +procession of the Gods! Arthur Symons brought back from Paris stories of +Verhaeren and Maeterlinck, and so brought me confirmation, as I thought, +and I began to announce a poetry like that of the Sufi's. I could not +endure, however, an international art, picking stories and symbols where +it pleased. Might I not, with health and good luck to aid me, create some +new _Prometheus Unbound_; Patrick or Columbkil, Oisin or Fion, in +Prometheus' stead; and, instead of Caucasus, Cro-Patric or Ben Bulben? +Have not all races had their first unity from a polytheism, that marries +them to rock and hill? We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which the +uneducated classes knew and even sang, and might we not make those stories +current among the educated classes, rediscovering for the work's sake what +I have called "the applied arts of literature," the association of +literature, that is, with music, speech, and dance; and at last, it might +be, so deepen the political passion of the nation that all, artist and +poet, craftsman and day-labourer would accept a common design? Perhaps +even these images, once created and associated with river and mountain, +might move of themselves and with some powerful, even turbulent life, like +those painted horses that trampled the rice fields of Japan. + + +XXIV + +I used to tell the few friends to whom I could speak these secret thoughts +that I would make the attempt in Ireland but fail, for our civilization, +its elements multiplying by division like certain low forms of life, was +all-powerful; but in reality I had the wildest hopes. To-day I add to that +first conviction, to that first desire for unity, this other conviction, +long a mere opinion vaguely or intermittently apprehended: Nations, races, +and individual men are unified by an image, or bundle of related images, +symbolical or evocative of the state of mind, which is of all states of +mind not impossible, the most difficult to that man, race, or nation; +because only the greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without +despair, rouses the will to full intensity. + +A powerful class by terror, rhetoric, and organized sentimentality, may +drive their people to war but the day draws near when they cannot keep +them there; and how shall they face the pure nations of the East when the +day comes to do it with but equal arms? I had seen Ireland in my own time +turn from the bragging rhetoric and gregarious humour of O'Connell's +generation and school, and offer herself to the solitary and proud Parnell +as to her anti-self, buskin following hard on sock, and I had begun to +hope, or to half hope, that we might be the first in Europe to seek unity +as deliberately as it had been sought by theologian, poet, sculptor, +architect, from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. Doubtless we must +seek it differently, no longer considering it convenient to epitomize all +human knowledge, but find it we well might could we first find philosophy +and a little passion. + + + + +BOOK II + +IRELAND AFTER THE FALL OF PARNELL + + + + + +_IRELAND AFTER THE FALL OF PARNELL_ + + +I + +A couple of years before the death of Parnell, I had wound up my +introduction to those selections from the Irish novelists with the +prophecy of an intellectual movement at the first lull in politics, and +now I wished to fulfil my prophecy. I did not put it in that way, for I +preferred to think that the sudden emotion that now came to me, the sudden +certainty that Ireland was to be like soft wax for years to come, was a +moment of supernatural insight. How could I tell, how can I tell even now? + +There was a little Irish Society of young people, clerks, shop boys, and +shop girls, called "The Southwark Irish Literary Society," and it had +ceased to meet because the girls got the giggles when any member of the +Committee got up to speak. Every member of it had said all he had to say +many times over. I had given them a lecture about the falling asunder of +the human mind, as an opening flower falls asunder, and all had professed +admiration because I had made such a long speech without quotation or +narrative; and now I invited the Committee to my father's house at Bedford +Park, and there proposed a new organization, "The Irish Literary Society." +T. W. Rolleston came to that first meeting, and it was because he had much +tact, and a knowledge of the technical business of committees, that a +society was founded which was joined by every London-Irish author and +journalist. In a few months somebody had written its history, and +published that history, illustrated by our portraits, at a shilling. When +it was published I was in Dublin, founding a society there called "The +National Literary Society," and affiliating it with certain Young Ireland +Societies in country towns which seemed anxious to accept its leadership. +I had definite plans; I wanted to create an Irish Theatre; I was finishing +my _Countess Cathleen_ in its first meagre version, and thought of a +travelling company to visit our country branches; but before that there +must be a popular imaginative literature. I arranged with Mr. Fisher Unwin +and his reader, Mr Edward Garnett--a personal friend of mine--that when +our organization was complete Mr Fisher Unwin was to publish for it a +series of books at a shilling each. I told only one man of this +arrangement, for after I had made my plans I heard an alarming rumour. Old +Sir Charles Gavan Duffy was coming from Australia to start an Irish +publishing house, and publish a series of books, and I did not expect to +agree with him, but knew that I must not seek a quarrel. The two societies +were necessary because their lectures must take the place of an educated +popular press, which we had not, and have not now, and create a standard +of criticism. Irish literature had fallen into contempt; no educated man +ever bought an Irish book; in Dublin Professor Dowden, the one man of +letters with an international influence, was accustomed to say that he +knew an Irish book by its smell, because he had once seen some books whose +binding had been fastened together by rotten glue; and Standish O'Grady's +last book upon ancient Irish history--a book rather wild, rather too +speculative, but forestalling later research--had not been reviewed by any +periodical or newspaper in England or in Ireland. + +At first I had great success, for I brought with me a list of names +written down by some member of the Southwark Irish Literary Society, and +for six weeks went hither and thither appealing and persuading. My first +conversation was over a butter-tub in some Dublin back street, and the man +agreed with me at once; everybody agreed with me; all felt that something +must be done, but nobody knew what. Perhaps they did not understand me, +perhaps I kept back my full thoughts, perhaps they only seemed to listen; +it was enough that I had a plan, and was determined about it. When I went +to lecture in a provincial town, a workman's wife, who wrote patriotic +stories in some weekly newspaper, invited me to her house, and I found all +her children in their Sunday best. She made a little speech, very formal +and very simple, in which she said that what she wrote had no merit, but +that it paid for her children's schooling; and she finished her speech by +telling her children never to forget that they had seen me. One man +compared me to Thomas Davis, another said I could organise like Davitt, +and I thought to succeed as they did, and as rapidly. I did not examine +this applause, nor the true thoughts of those I met, nor the general +condition of the country, but I examined myself a great deal, and was +puzzled at myself. I knew that I was shy and timid, that I would often +leave some business undone, or purchase unmade, because I shrank from +facing a strange office or a shop a little grander than usual, and yet, +here was I delightedly talking to strange people every day. It was many +years before I understood that I had surrendered myself to the chief +temptation of the artist, creation without toil. Metrical composition is +always very difficult to me, nothing is done upon the first day, not one +rhyme is in its place; and when at last the rhymes begin to come, the +first rough draft of a six-line stanza takes the whole day. At that time I +had not formed a style, and sometimes a six-line stanza would take several +days, and not seem finished even then; and I had not learnt, as I have +now, to put it all out of my head before night, and so the last night was +generally sleepless, and the last day a day of nervous strain. But now I +had found the happiness that Shelley found when he tied a pamphlet to a +fire balloon. + + +II + +At first I asked no help from prominent persons, and when some clerk or +shop-assistant would say "Dr So-and-so or Professor So-and-so will have +nothing to do with us" I would answer, "When we prove we can gather sheep +shepherds will come." Presently, come they did, old, middle-aged, or but +little older than myself, but all with some authority in their town: John +O'Leary, John F. Taylor, and Douglas Hyde, and Standish O'Grady, and of +these much presently; Dr. Sigerson who has picked a quarrel with me and of +whom I shall say nothing that he may not pick another; Count Plunkett, +Sinn Feiner of late and Minister of Dail Eireann; Dr. Coffey, now head of +the National University; George Coffey, later on Curator of the Irish +Antiquities at the Museum of the Royal Dublin Society; Patrick J. McCall, +poet and publican of Patrick Street, and later member of corporation; +Richard Ashe King, novelist and correspondent of _Truth_, a gentle, +intelligent person, typical of nothing; and others, known or unknown. We +were now important, had our Committee room in the Mansion House, and I +remember that the old Mansion House butler recognised our importance so +fully, that he took us into his confidence once in every week, while we +sat waiting for a quorum. He had seen many Lord Mayors, and remembered +those very superior Lord Mayors who lived before the extension of the +municipal franchise, and spoke of his present masters with contempt. Among +our persons of authority, and among the friends and followers they had +brought, there were many who at that time found it hard to refuse if +anybody offered for sale a pepper-pot shaped to suggest a round tower with +a wolf-dog at its foot, and who would have felt it inappropriate to +publish an Irish book, that had not harp and shamrock and green cover, so +completely did their minds move amid Young Ireland images and metaphors, +and I thought with alarm of the coming of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy; while +here and there I noticed that smooth, smiling face that we discover for +the first time in certain pictures by Velasquez; all that hungry, +mediaeval speculation vanished, that had worn the faces of El Greco and in +its place a self-complacent certainty that all had been arranged, provided +for, set out in clear type, in manual of devotion or of doctrine. These, +however, were no true disciples of Young Ireland, for Young Ireland had +sought a nation unified by political doctrine, a subservient art and +letters aiding and abetting. The movement of thought, which had in the +'fifties and 'fourties at Paris and London and Boston, filled literature, +and especially poetical literature with curiosities about science, about +history about politics, with moral purpose and educational +fervour--abstractions all--had created a new instrument for Irish +politics, a method of writing that took its poetical style from Campbell, +Scott, Macauley, and Beranger, with certain elements from Gaelic, and its +prose style--in John Mitchell, the only Young Ireland prose writer who had +a style at all--from Carlyle. To recommend this method of writing as +literature without much reservation and discrimination I contended was to +be deceived or to practice deception. If one examined some country +love-song, one discovered that it was not written by a man in love, but by +a patriot who wanted to prove that we did indeed possess, in the words of +Daniel O'Connell, "the finest peasantry upon earth." Yet one well-known +anthology was introduced by the assertion that such love-poetry was +superior to "affected and artificial" English love-songs like "Drink to me +only with thine eyes"--"affected and artificial," the very words used by +English Victorians who wrote for the newspapers to discourage capricious, +personal writing. However, the greater number even of those who thought +our famous anthology, _The Spirit of the Nation_, except for three or four +songs, but good election rhyme, looked upon it much as certain enlightened +believers look upon the story of Adam and Eve and the apple, or that of +Jonah and the whale, which they do not question publicly, because such +stories are an integral part of religion to simple men and women. I, upon +the other hand, being in the intemperance of my youth, denied, as publicly +as possible, merit to all but a few ballads translated from Gaelic +writers, or written out of a personal and generally tragic experience. + + +III + +The greater number of those who joined my society had come under the seal +of Young Ireland at that age when we are all mere wax; the more ambitious +had gone daily to some public library to read the bound volumes of Thomas +Davis's old newspaper, and tried to see the world as Davis saw it. No +philosophic speculation, no economic question of the day, disturbed an +orthodoxy which, unlike that of religion had no philosophic history, and +the religious bigot was glad that it should be so. Some few of the younger +men were impatient, and it was these younger men, more numerous in the +London than in the Dublin Society, who gave me support; and we had been +joined by a few older men--some personal friends of my own or my +father--who had only historical interest in Thomas Davis and his school. +Young Ireland's prose had been as much occupied with Irish virtue, and +more with the invader's vices, than its poetry, and we were soon mired and +sunk into such problems as to whether Cromwell was altogether black, the +heads of the old Irish clans altogether white, the Danes mere robbers and +church burners (they tell me at Rosses Point that the Danes keep to this +day the maps of the Rosses fields they were driven out of in the 9th +century, and plot their return) and as to whether we were or were not once +the greatest orators in the world. All the past had been turned into a +melodrama with Ireland for blameless hero and poet, novelist and historian +had but one object, that we should hiss the villain, and only a minority +doubted that the greater the talent the greater the hiss. It was all the +harder to substitute for that melodrama a nobler form of art, because +there really had been, however different in their form, villain and +victim; yet fight that rancour I must, and if I had not made some head +against it in 1892 and 1893 it might have silenced in 1907 John Synge, the +greatest dramatic genius of Ireland. I am writing of disputes that +happened many years ago, that led in later years to much bitterness, and I +may exaggerate their immediate importance and violence, but I think I am +right in saying that disputes about the merits of Young Ireland so often +interrupted our discussion of rules, or of the merit of this or that +lecturer, and were so aggravated and crossed by the current wrangle +between Parnellite and anti-Parnellite that they delayed our public +appearance for a year. Other excited persons, doubtless, seeing that we +are of a race intemperate of speech, had looked up from their rancours to +the dead Lord Mayors upon the wall, superior men whose like we shall not +see again, but never, I think, from rancours so seemingly academic. I was +preparing the way without knowing it for a great satirist and master of +irony, for master works stir vaguely in many before they grow definite in +one man's mind, and to help me I had already flitting through my head, +jostling other ideas and so not yet established there, a conviction that +we should satirize rather than praise, that original virtue arises from +the discovery of evil. If we were, as I had dreaded, declamatory, loose, +and bragging, we were but the better fitted, that once declared and +measured, to create unyielding personality, manner at once cold and +passionate, daring long premeditated act; and if bitter beyond all the +people of the world, we might yet lie, that too declared and measured, +nearest the honeyed comb:-- + + "Like the clangour of a bell + Sweet and harsh, harsh and sweet, + That is how he learnt so well + To take the roses for his meat." + + +IV + +There were others with followers of their own, and too old or indifferent +to join our society. Old men who had never accepted Young Ireland, or +middle-aged men kept by some family tradition to the school of thought +before it arose, to the Ireland of Daniel O'Connell and of Lever and of +Thomas Moore, convivial Ireland with the traditional tear and smile. They +sang Moore's _Melodies_, admitted no poetry but his, and resented Young +Ireland's political objections to it as much as my generation's objection +to its artificial and easy rhythm; one, an old commercial traveller, a +Gaelic scholar who kept an erect head and the animal vigour of youth, +frequented the houses of our leading men, and would say in a loud voice, +"Thomas Moore, sir, is the greatest heroic poet of ancient or modern +times." I think it was the Fire Worshippers in _Lalla Rookh_ that he +preferred to Homer; or, jealous for the music of the _Melodies_, denounce +Wagner, then at the top of his vogue; "I would run ten miles through a bog +to escape him," he would cry. Then there was a maker of tombstones of whom +we had heard much but had seen little, an elderly fighting man, lately +imprisoned for beating a wine-merchant. A young member of the London +society, afterwards librarian to the National University, D. J. O'Donohue, +who had published a dictionary of the Irish poets, containing, I think, +two thousand names, had come to Dublin and settled there in a fit of +patriotism. He had been born in London, and spoke the most Cockney dialect +imaginable, and had picked up--probably from London critics--a dislike for +the poetry of Thomas Moore. The tombstone maker invited him to tea, and he +arrived with a bundle of books, which he laid beside him upon the table. +During tea he began expounding that dislike of his; his host was silent, +but he went on, for he was an obstinate little man. Presently the +tombstone-maker rose, and having said solemnly, "I have never permitted +that great poet to be slandered in my presence," seized his guest by the +back of the collar, and flung him out into the street, and after that +flung out the books one after another. Meanwhile the guest--as he himself +told the tale--stood in the middle of the street repeating, "Nice way to +treat a man in your own 'ouse." + + +V + +I shared a lodging full of old books and magazines, covered with dirt and +dust, with the head of the Fenian Brotherhood, John O'Leary. "In this +country," he had said to me, "a man must have upon his side the Church or +the Fenians, and you will never have the Church." He had been converted to +nationality by the poems of Davis, and he wished for some analogous +movement to that of Davis, but he had known men of letters, had been the +friend of Whistler, and knew the faults of the old literature. We had made +him the President of our Society, and without him I could do nothing, for +his long imprisonment and longer exile, his magnificent appearance, and, +above all, the fact that he alone had personality, a point of view not +made for the crowd's sake, but for self-expression, made him magnetic to +my generation. He and I had long been friends, he had stayed with us at +Bedford Park, and my father had painted his portrait, but if I had not +shared his lodging he would have opposed me. He was an old man, and my +point of view was not that of his youth, and it often took me half the day +to make him understand--so suspicious he was of all innovation--some +simple thing that he would presently support with ardour. He had grown up +in a European movement when the revolutionist thought that he, above all +men, must appeal to the highest motive, be guided by some ideal principle, +be a little like Cato or like Brutus, and he had lived to see the change +Dostoievsky examined in _The Possessed_. Men who had been of his +party--and oftener their sons--preached assassination and the bomb; and, +worst of all, the majority of his countrymen followed after constitutional +politicians who practised opportunism, and had, as he believed, such low +morals that they would lie, or publish private correspondence, if it might +advance their cause. He would split every practical project into its +constituent elements, like a clerical casuist, to find if it might not +lead into some moral error; but, were the project revolutionary, he would +sometimes temper condemnation with pity. Though he would cast off his +oldest acquaintance did he suspect him of rubbing shoulders with some +carrier of bombs, I have heard him say of a man who blew himself up in an +attempt to blow up Westminster Bridge, "He was not a bad man, but he had +too great a moral nature for his intellect, not that he lacked intellect." +He did not explain, but he meant, I suppose, that the spectacle of +injustice might madden a good man more quickly than some common man. Such +men were of his own sort, though gone astray, but the constitutional +politicians he had been fighting all his life, and all they did displeased +him. It was not that he thought their aim wrong, or that they could not +achieve it; he had accepted Gladstone's Home Rule Bill; but that in his +eyes they degraded manhood. "If England has been brought to do us justice +by such men," he would say, "that is not because of our strength, but +because of her weakness." He had a particular hatred for the rush of +emotion that followed the announcement of Gladstone's conversion, for what +was called "The Union of Hearts," and derided its sentimentality; "Nations +may respect one another," he would say, "they cannot love." His ancestors +had probably kept little shops, or managed little farms in County +Tipperary, yet he hated democracy, though he never used the word either +for praise or blame, with more than feudal hatred. "No gentleman can be a +socialist," he said, and then, with a thoughtful look, "He might be an +anarchist." He had no philosophy, but things distressed his palate, and +two of those things were International propaganda and the Organised State, +and Socialism aimed at both, nor could he speak such words as +"philanthropy," "humanitarianism," without showing by his tone of voice +that they offended him. The Church pleased him little better; there was an +old Fenian quarrel there, and he would say, "My religion is the old +Persian, to pull the bow and tell the truth." He had no +self-consciousness, no visible pride, and would have hated anything that +could have been called a gesture, was indeed scarce artist enough to +invent a gesture; yet he would never speak of the hardship of his prison +life--though abundantly enough of its humours--and once, when I pressed +him, replied, "I was in the hands of my enemy, why should I complain?" A +few years ago I heard that the Governor of the prison had asked why he did +not report some unnecessary discomfort, and O'Leary had said, "I did not +come here to complain." Now that he is dead, I wish that I could question +him, and perhaps discover whether in early youth he had come across some +teacher who had expounded Roman virtue, but I doubt if I would have learnt +anything, for I think the wax had long forgotten the seal--if seal there +were. The seal was doubtless made before the eloquent humanitarian +'forties and 'fifties, and was one kind with that that had moulded the +youthful mind of Savage Landor. Stephens, the founder of Fenianism, had +discovered him searching the second-hand bookstalls for rare editions, and +enrolled him in his organization. "You have no chance of success," O'Leary +had said "but it will be good for the _morale_ of the country" (_morale_ +was his great word), "and I will join on the condition that I am never +asked to enrol anybody." He still searched the second-hand bookstalls, and +had great numbers of books, especially of Irish history and literature, +and when I, exhausted over our morning's casuistry, would sit down to my +day's work (I was writing _The Secret Rose_) he would make his tranquil +way to the Dublin Quays. In the evening, over his coffee, he would write +passages for his memoirs upon postcards and odd scraps of paper, taking +immense trouble with every word and comma, for the great work must be a +masterpiece of style. When it was finished, it was unreadable, being dry, +abstract, and confused; no picture had ever passed before his mind's eye. +He was a victim, I think, of a movement where opinions stick men together, +or keep them apart, like a kind of bird lime, and without any relation to +their natural likes and tastes, and where men of rich nature must give +themselves up to an irritation which they no longer recognise because it +is always present. I often wonder why he gave me his friendship, why it +was he who found almost all the subscribers for my _Wanderings of Usheen_, +and why he now supported me in all I did, for how could he like verses +that were all picture, all emotion, all association, all mythology? He +could not have approved my criticism either, for I exalted Mask and Image +above the 18th century logic which he loved, and set experience before +observation, emotion before fact. Yet he would say, "I have only three +followers, Taylor, Yeats, and Rolleston," and presently he cast out +Rolleston--"Davitt wants to convert thousands, but I want two or three." I +think that perhaps it was because he no more wished to strengthen Irish +Nationalism by second-rate literature than by second-rate morality, and +was content that we agreed in that. "There are things a man must not do to +save a Nation," he had once told me, and when I asked what things, had +said, "To cry in public," and I think it probable that he would have +added, if pressed, "To write oratorical or insincere verse." + +O'Leary's movements and intonations were full of impulse, but John F. +Taylor's voice in private discussion had no emotional quality except in +the expression of scorn; if he moved an arm it moved from the shoulder or +elbow alone, and when he walked he moved from the waist only, and seemed +an automaton, a wooden soldier, as if he had no life that was not dry and +abstract. Except at moments of public oratory, he lacked all personality, +though when one saw him respectful and gentle with O'Leary, as with some +charming woman, one saw that he felt its fascination. In letters, or in +painting, it repelled him unless it were harsh and obvious, and, +therefore, though his vast erudition included much art and letters, he +lacked artistic feeling, and judged everything by the moral sense. He had +great ambition, and had he joined some established party, or found some +practicable policy, he might have been followed, might have produced even +some great effect, but he must have known that in defeat no man would +follow him, as they followed O'Leary, as they followed Parnell. His +oratory was noble, strange, even beautiful, at moments the greatest I have +ever listened to; but, the speech over, where there had been, as it +seemed, so little of himself, all coming from beyond himself, we saw +precisely as before an ungainly body in unsuitable, badly-fitting clothes, +and heard an excited voice speaking ill of this man or that other. We knew +that he could never give us that one price we would accept, that he would +never find a practicable policy; that no party would admit, no government +negotiate with, a man notorious for a temper, that, if it gave him genius, +could at times carry him to the edge of insanity. + +Born in some country town, the son of some little watchmaker, he had been +a shop assistant, put himself to college and the bar, learned to speak at +temperance meetings and Young Ireland societies, and was now a Queen's +Counsel famous for his defence of country criminals, whose cases had +seemed hopeless--Taylor's boys, their neighbours called them or they +called themselves. He had shaped his style and his imagination from +Carlyle, the chief inspirer of self-educated men in the 'eighties and +early 'nineties. "I prefer Emerson's _Oversoul_," the Condalkin cobbler +said to me, "but I always read Carlyle when I am wild with the +neighbours"; but he used his master's style, as Mitchell had done before, +to abase what his master loved, to exalt what his master scorned. His +historical erudition seemed as vast as that of York Powell, but his +interests were not Powell's, for he had no picture before the mind's eye, +and had but one object--a plea of not guilty--entered in his country's +name before a jury which he believed to be packed. O'Leary cared nothing +for his country's glory, its individuality alone seemed important in his +eyes; he was like some man, who serves a woman all his life without asking +whether she be good or bad, wise or foolish; but Taylor cared for nothing +else; he was so much O'Leary's disciple that he would say in conversation, +"We are demoralised, what case for change if we are not?" for O'Leary +admitted no ground for reform outside the moral life, but when he spoke to +the great plea he would make no admission. He spoke to it in the most +obscure places, in little halls in back streets where the white-washed +walls are foul with grease from many heads, before some audience of +medical students or of shop assistants, for he was like a man under a +curse, compelled to hide his genius, and compelled to show in conspicuous +places his ill judgment and his temper. + +His distaste for myself, broken by occasional tolerance, in so far as it +was not distaste for an imagination that seemed to him aesthetic rather +than ethical, was because I had published Irish folk-lore in English +reviews to the discredit, as he thought, of the Irish peasantry, and +because, England within earshot, I found fault with the Young Ireland +prose and poetry. He would have hated _The Playboy of the Western World_, +and his death a little before its performance was fortunate for Synge and +myself. His articles are nothing, and his one historical work, a life of +Hugh O'Neill, is almost nothing, lacking the living voice; and now, though +a most formidable man, he is forgotten, but for the fading memory of a few +friends, and for what an enemy has written here and elsewhere. Did not +Leonardo da Vinci warn the imaginative man against pre-occupation with +arts that cannot survive his death? + + +VI + +When Carleton was dying in 1870, he said there would be nothing more about +Irish Literature for twenty years, and his words were fulfilled, for the +land war had filled Ireland with its bitterness; but imagination had begun +to stir again. I had the same confidence in the future that Lady Gregory +and I had eight or nine years later, when we founded an Irish Theatre, +though there were neither, as it seemed, plays or players. There were +already a few known men to start my popular series, and to keep it popular +until the men, whose names I did not know, had learnt to express +themselves. I had met Dr. Douglas Hyde when I lived in Dublin, and he was +still an undergraduate. I have a memory of meeting in college rooms for +the first time a very dark young man, who filled me with surprise, partly +because he had pushed a snuffbox towards me, and partly because there was +something about his vague serious eyes, as in his high cheek bones, that +suggested a different civilization, a different race. I had set him down +as a peasant, and wondered what brought him to college, and to a +Protestant college, but somebody explained that he belonged to some branch +of the Hydes of Castle Hyde, and that he had a Protestant Rector for +father. He had much frequented the company of old countrymen, and had so +acquired the Irish language, and his taste for snuff, and for moderate +quantities of a detestable species of illegal whiskey distilled from the +potato by certain of his neighbours. He had already--though intellectual +Dublin knew nothing of it--considerable popularity as a Gaelic poet, +mowers and reapers singing his songs from Donegal to Kerry. Years +afterwards I was to stand at his side and listen to Galway mowers singing +his Gaelic words without knowing whose words they sang. It is so in India, +where peasants sing the words of the great poet of Bengal without knowing +whose words they sing, and it must often be so where the old imaginative +folk life is undisturbed, and it is so amongst schoolboys who hand their +story books to one another without looking at the title page to read the +author's name. Here and there, however, the peasants had not lost the +habit of Gaelic criticism, picked up, perhaps, from the poets who took +refuge among them after the ruin of the great Catholic families, from men +like that O'Rahilly, who cries in a translation from the Gaelic that is +itself a masterpiece of concentrated passion-- + + "The periwinkle and the tough dog-fish + Towards evening time have got into my dish." + +An old rascal was kept in food and whiskey for a fortnight by some +Connaught village under the belief that he was Craoibhin Aoibhin, "the +pleasant little branch," as Doctor Hyde signed himself in the newspapers +where the villagers had found his songs. The impostor's thirst only +strengthened belief in his genius, for the Gaelic song-writers have had +the infirmities of Robert Burns, "It is not the drink but the company," +one of the last has sung. Since that first meeting Doctor Hyde and I had +corresponded, and he had sent me in manuscript the best tale in my _Faery +and Folk Tales_, and I think I had something to do with the London +publication of his _Beside the Fire_, a book written in the beautiful +English of Connaught, which is Gaelic in idiom and Tudor in vocabulary, +and indeed, the first book to use it in the expression of emotion and +romance, for Carleton and his school had turned it into farce. Henley had +praised him, and York Powell had said, "If he goes on as he has begun, he +will be the greatest folk-loreist who has ever lived"; and I know no first +book of verse of our time that is at once so romantic and so concrete as +his Gaelic _Abhla de'n Craoibh_; but in a few years Dublin was to laugh +him, or rail him, out of his genius. He had no critical capacity, having +indeed for certain years the uncritical folk-genius, as no educated Irish +or Englishman has ever had it, writing out of an imitative sympathy like +that of a child catching a tune and leaving it to chance to call the tune; +and the failure of our first attempt to create a modern Irish literature +permitted the ruin of that genius. He was to create a great popular +movement, far more important in its practical results than any movement I +could have made, no matter what my luck, but, being neither quarrelsome +nor vain, he will not be angry if I say--for the sake of those who come +after us--that I mourn for the "greatest folk-loreist who ever lived," +and for the great poet who died in his youth. The Harps and Pepperpots got +him and the Harps and Pepperpots kept him till he wrote in our common +English--"It must be either English or Irish," said some patriotic editor, +Young Ireland practice in his head--that needs such sifting that he who +would write it vigorously must write it like a learned language, and took +for his model the newspaper upon his breakfast table, and became for no +base reason beloved by multitudes who should never have heard his name +till their schoolmasters showed it upon his tomb. That very incapacity for +criticism made him the cajoler of crowds, and of individual men and women; +"He should not be in the world at all," said one admiring elderly woman, +"or doing the world's work"; and for certain years young Irish women were +to display his pseudonym, "Craoibhin Aoibhin," in gilt letters upon their +hat bands. + + "Dear Craoibhin Aoibhin,......impart to us, + We'll keep the secret, a new trick to please; + Is there a bridle for this Proteus + That turns and changes like his draughty seas, + Or is there none, most popular of men, + But, when they mock us, that we mock again?" + + +VII + +Standish O'Grady, upon the other hand, was at once all passion and all +judgment. And yet those who knew him better than I assured me he could +find quarrel in a straw; and I did know that he had quarrelled a few years +back with Jack Nettleship. Nettleship's account had been, "My mother +cannot endure the God of the Old Testament, but likes Jesus Christ; +whereas I like the God of the Old Testament, and cannot endure Jesus +Christ; and we have got into the way of quarrelling about it at lunch; and +once, when O'Grady lunched with us, he said it was the most disgraceful +spectacle he had ever seen, and walked out." Indeed, I wanted him among my +writers, because of his quarrels, for, having much passion and little +rancour, the more he quarrelled, the nobler, the more patched with +metaphor, the more musical his style became, and if he were in his turn +attacked, he knew a trick of speech that made us murmur, "We do it wrong, +being so majestical, to offer it the show of violence." Sometimes he +quarrelled most where he loved most. A Unionist in politics, a +leader-writer on _The Daily Express_, the most Conservative paper in +Ireland, hater of every form of democracy, he had given all his heart to +the smaller Irish landowners, to whom he belonged, and with whom his +childhood had been spent, and for them he wrote his books, and would soon +rage over their failings in certain famous passages that many men would +repeat to themselves like poets' rhymes. All round us people talked or +wrote for victory's sake, and were hated for their victories--but here was +a man whose rage was a swan-song over all that he had held most dear, and +to whom for that very reason every Irish imaginative writer owed a portion +of his soul. In his unfinished _History of Ireland_ he had made the old +Irish heroes, Fion, and Oisin, and Cuchullan, alive again, taking them, +for I think he knew no Gaelic, from the dry pages of O'Curry and his +school, and condensing and arranging, as he thought Homer would have +arranged and condensed. Lady Gregory has told the same tales, but keeping +closer to the Gaelic text, and with greater powers of arrangement and a +more original style, but O'Grady was the first, and we had read him in our +'teens. I think that, had I succeeded, a popular audience could have +changed him little, and that his genius would have stayed, as it had been +shaped by his youth in some provincial society, and that to the end he +would have shown his best in occasional thrusts and parries. But I do +think that if, instead of that one admirable little book _The Bog of +Stars_, we had got all his histories and imaginative works into the hands +of our young men, he might have brought the imagination of Ireland nearer +the Image and the honeycomb. + +Lionel Johnson was to be our critic, and above all our theologian, for he +had been converted to Catholicism, and his orthdoxy, too learned to +question, had accepted all that we did, and most of our plans. Historic +Catholicism, with all its counsels and its dogmas, stirred his passion +like the beauty of a mistress, and the unlearned parish priests who +thought good literature or good criticism dangerous were in his eyes "all +heretics." He belonged to a family that had called itself Irish some +generations back, and its recent English generations but enabled him to +see as one single sacred tradition Irish nationality and Catholic +religion. How should he fail to know the Holy Land? Had he not been in +Egypt? He had joined our London Irish Literary Society, attended its +committee meetings, and given lectures in London, in Dublin, and in +Belfast, on Irish novelists and Irish poetry, reading his lectures always, +and yet affecting his audience as I, with my spoken lectures, could not, +perhaps because Ireland had still the shape it had received from the +eighteenth century, and so felt the dignity, not the artifice, of his +elaborate periods. He was very little, and at a first glance he seemed +but a schoolboy of fifteen. I remember saying one night at the Rhymers', +when he spoke of passing safely, almost nightly, through Seven Dials, then +a dangerous neighbourhood, "Who would expect to find anything in your +pockets but a pegtop and a piece of string?" But one never thought of his +small stature when he spoke or read. He had the delicate strong features +of a certain filleted head of a Greek athlete in the British Museum, an +archaistic Graeco-Roman copy of a masterpiece of the fourth century, and +that resemblance seemed symbolic of the austere nobility of his verse. He +was now in his best years, writing with great ease and power; neither I, +nor, I think, any other, foresaw his tragedy. + +He suffered from insomnia, and some doctor, while he was still at the +University, had recommended alcohol, and he had, in a vain hope of sleep, +increased the amount, as Rossetti had increased his doses of chloral, and +now he drank for drinking's sake. He drank a great deal too much, and, +though nothing could, it seemed, disturb his calm or unsteady his hand or +foot, his doctrine, after a certain number of glasses, would become more +ascetic, more contemptuous of all that we call human life. I have heard +him, after four or five glasses of wine, praise some church father who +freed himself from sexual passion by a surgical operation, and deny with +scorn, and much historical evidence, that a gelded man lost anything of +intellectual power. Even without stimulant his theology conceded nothing +to human weakness, and I can remember his saying with energy, "I wish +those people who deny the eternity of punishment could realise their +unspeakable vulgarity." + +Now that I know his end, I see him creating, to use a favourite adjective +of his, "marmorean" verse, and believing the most terrible doctrines to +keep down his own turbulence. One image of that stay in Dublin is so clear +before me that it has blotted out most other images of that time. He is +sitting at a lodging-house table, which I have just left at three in the +morning, and round him lie or sit in huddled attitudes half-a-dozen men in +various states of intoxication: and he is looking straight before him with +head erect, and one hand resting upon the table. As I reach the stairs I +hear him say, in a clear, unshaken voice, "I believe in nothing but the +Holy Roman Catholic Church." He sometimes spoke of drink as something +which he could put aside at any moment, and his friends believed, and I +think he liked us to believe, that he would shortly enter a monastery. Did +he deceive us deliberately? Did he himself already foresee the moment when +he would write _The Dark Angel_? I am almost certain that he did, for he +had already written _Mystic and Cavalier_, where the historical setting +is, I believe, but masquerade. + + "Go from me: I am one of those, who fall. + What! hath no cold wind swept your heart at all, + In my sad company? Before the end, + Go from me, dear my friend! + + Yours are the victories of light: your feet + Rest from good toil, where rest is brave and sweet. + But after warfare in a mourning gloom + I rest in clouds of doom. + + * * * * * + + Seek with thine eyes to pierce this crystal sphere: + Canst read a fate there, prosperous and clear? + Only the mists, only the weeping clouds: + Dimness, and airy shrouds. + + * * * * * + + O rich and sounding voices of the air! + Interpreters and prophets of despair: + Priests of a fearful sacrament! I come + To make with you my home." + + +VIII + +Sir Charles Gavan Duffy arrived. He brought with him much manuscript, the +private letters of a Young Ireland poetess, a dry but informing +unpublished historical essay by Davis, and an unpublished novel by William +Carleton, into the middle of which he had dropped a hot coal, so that +nothing remained but the borders of every page. He hired a young man to +read him, after dinner, Carlyle's _Heroes and Hero-Worship_, and before +dinner was gracious to all our men of authority and especially to our +Harps and Pepperpots. Taylor compared him to Odysseus returning to Ithaca, +and every newspaper published his biography. He was a white-haired old +man, who had written the standard history of Young Ireland, had emigrated +to Australia, had been the first Australian Federalist, and later Prime +Minister, but, in all his writings, in which there is so much honesty, so +little rancour, there is not one sentence that has any meaning when +separated from its place in argument or narrative, not one distinguished +because of its thought or music. One imagined his youth in some little +gaunt Irish town, where no building or custom is revered for its +antiquity; and there speaking a language where no word, even in solitude, +is ever spoken slowly and carefully because of emotional implication; and +of his manhood of practical politics, of the dirty piece of orange-peel in +the corner of the stairs as one climbs up to some newspaper office; of +public meetings where it would be treacherous amid so much geniality to +speak, or even to think of anything that might cause a moment's +misunderstanding in one's own party. No argument of mine was intelligible +to him, and I would have been powerless, but that fifty years ago he had +made an enemy, and though that enemy was long dead, his school remained. +He had attacked, why or with what result I do not remember, the only Young +Ireland politician who had music and personality, though rancorous and +devil-possessed. At some public meeting of ours, where he spoke amid great +applause, in smooth, Gladstonian periods, of his proposed Irish publishing +firm, one heard faint hostile murmurs, and at last a voice cried, +"Remember Newry," and a voice answered, "There is a grave there!" and a +part of the audience sang, "Here's to John Mitchell that is gone, boys, +gone; Here's to the friends that are gone." The meeting over, a group of +us, indignant that the meeting we had called for his welcome should have +contained those malcontents, gathered about him to apologize. He had +written a pamphlet, he explained: he would give us copies. We would see +that he was in the right, how badly Mitchell had behaved. But in Ireland +personality, if it be but harsh and hard, has lovers, and some of us, I +think, may have gone home muttering, "How dare he be in the right if +Mitchell is in the wrong?" + + +IX + +He wanted "to complete the Young Ireland movement"--to do all that had +been left undone because of the Famine, or the death of Davis, or his own +emigration; and all the younger men were upon my side in resisting that. +They might not want the books I wanted, but they did want books written by +their own generation, and we began to struggle with him over the control +of the company. Taylor became very angry, and I can understand what I +looked like in his eyes, when I remember Edwin Ellis's seriously-intended +warning, "It is bad manners for a man under thirty to permit himself to be +in the right." But John O'Leary supported me throughout. + +When Gavin Duffy had gone to London to draw up articles of association for +his company, for which he had found many shareholders in Dublin, the +dispute became very fierce. One night members of the general public +climbed the six flights of stairs to our committee room, now no longer in +the Mansion House, and found seats for themselves just behind our chairs. +We were all too angry to send them away, or even to notice their presence, +for I was accused of saying at a public meeting in Cork, "Our books," when +I should have said, "Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's books." I was not Taylor's +match with the spoken word, and barely matched him with the written word. +At twenty-seven or twenty-eight I was immature and clumsy, and O'Leary's +support was capricious, for, being but a spectator of life, he would +desert me if I used a bad argument, and would not return till I found a +good one; and our chairman, Dr. Hyde, "most popular of men," sat dreaming +of his old white cockatoo in far-away Roscommon. Our very success had been +a misfortune, for an opposition which had been literary and political, now +that it had spread to the general public, brought religious prejudice to +its aid. Suddenly, when the company seemed all but established, and a +scheme had been thought out which gave some representation on its +governing board to contemporary Irish writers, Gavan Duffy produced a +letter from Archbishop Walsh, and threw the project up. The letter had +warned him that after his death the company would fall under a dangerous +influence. At this moment the always benevolent friend, to whom I had +explained in confidence, when asking his support, my arrangements with my +publisher, went to Gavan Duffy and suggested that they should together +offer Mr Fisher Unwin a series of Irish books, and Mr Fisher Unwin and his +reader accepted the series under the belief that it was my project that +they accepted. I went to London to find the contract signed, and that all +I could do was to get two sub-editors appointed, responsible to the two +societies. Two or three good books were published, especially Dr. Hyde's +_Short History of Gaelic Literature_, and Standish O'Grady's _Bog of +Stars_; but the series was killed by its first volume, Thomas Davis's dry +but informing historical essay. So important had our movement seemed that +ten thousand copies had been sold before anybody had time to read it, and +then came a dead stop. + +Gavan Duffy knew nothing of my plans, and so was guiltless, and my friend +had heard me discuss many things that evening. I had perhaps dispraised +the humanitarian Stephen Phillips, already in his first vogue, and praised +Francis Thompson, but half-rescued from his gutter; or flouted his belief +in the perpetual marriage of genius and virtue by numbering the vices of +famous men; this man's venery, that man's drink. He could not be expected +to remember that where I had said so much of no account, I said one +thing, and he had made no reply, that I thought of great account. He died +a few months ago, and it would have surprised and shocked him if any man +had told him that he was unforgiven; had he not forgotten all about it +long ago? A German doctor has said that if we leave an umbrella at a +friend's house it is because we have a sub-conscious desire to re-visit +that house; and he had perhaps a sub-conscious desire that my too +tumultuous generation should not have its say. + + +X + +I was at Sligo when I received a letter from John O'Leary, saying that I +could do no more in Dublin, for even the younger men had turned against +me, were "jealous," his letter said, though what they had to be jealous of +God knows. He said further that it was all my own fault, that he had +warned me what would happen if I lived on terms of intimacy with those I +tried to influence. I should have kept myself apart and alone. It was all +true; through some influence from an earlier generation, from Walt +Whitman, perhaps, I had sat talking in public bars, had talked late into +the night at many men's houses, showing all my convictions to men that +were but ready for one, and used conversation to explore and discover +among men who looked for authority. I did not yet know that intellectual +freedom and social equality are incompatible; and yet, if I had, could +hardly have lived otherwise, being too young for silence. The trouble came +from half a dozen obscure young men, who having nothing to do attended +every meeting and were able to overturn a project, that seemed my only +bridge to other projects, including a travelling theatre. We had planned +small libraries of Irish literature in connection with our country +branches; we collected books and money, sending a lecturer to every branch +and taking half the proceeds of that lecture to buy books. Maud Gonne, +whose beauty could draw a great audience in any country town, had been the +lecturer. The scheme was very nearly self-supporting, and six or seven +bundles of books, chosen after much disputation by John O'Leary, J. F. +Taylor, and myself, had been despatched to some six or seven branches. +"The country will support this work" Taylor had said somewhere on some +public platform, "because we are the most inflammable people on God's +earth," his harsh voice giving almost a quality of style to Carlylian +commonplace; but we are also a very jealous people. The half-a-dozen young +men, if a little jealous of me, were still more jealous of those country +branches which were getting so much notice, and where there was so much of +that peasant mind their schoolmasters had taught them to despise. One must +be English or Irish, they would have said. I returned to find a great box +of books appropriated for some Dublin purpose and the whole scheme +abandoned. I know that it was a bitter moment because I remember with +gratitude words spoken not to my ear, but for my ear, by a young man who +had lately joined our Society, Mr. Stephen McKenna, now well-known amongst +scholars for his distinguished translations of Plotinus, and I seem to +remember that I lost through anger what gift of persuasion I may possess, +and that I was all the more helpless because I felt that even the best of +us disagreed about everything at heart. I began to feel that I needed a +hostess more than a society, but that I was not to find for years to +come. I tried to persuade Maud Gonne to be that hostess, but her social +life was in Paris, and she had already formed a new ambition, the turning +of French public opinion against England. Without intellectual freedom +there can be no agreement, and in Nationalist Dublin there was not--indeed +there still is not--any society where a man is heard by the right ears, +but never overheard by the wrong, and where he speaks his whole mind +gaily, and is not the cautious husband of a part; where phantasy can play +before matured into conviction; where life can shine and ring, and lack +utility. Mere life lacking the protection of wealth or rank, or some +beauty's privilege of caprice cannot choose its company, taking up and +dropping men merely because it likes, or dislikes, their manners and their +looks, and in its stead opinion crushes and rends, and all is hatred and +bitterness: wheel biting upon wheel, a roar of steel or iron tackle, a +mill of argument grinding all things down to mediocrity. If, as I think, +minds and metals correspond the goldsmiths of Paris foretold the French +Revolution when they substituted steel for that unserviceable gold in the +manufacture of the more expensive jewel work, and made those large, flat +steel buttons for men of fashion whereby the card players were able to +cheat by studying the reflections of the cards. + + +XI + +No country could have more natural distaste for equality, for in every +circle there was some man ridiculous for posing as the type of some +romantic or distinguished quality. One of our friends, a man of talent +and of learning, whose ancestors had come, he believed, from Denmark in +the ninth century, looked and talked the distinguished foreigner so +perfectly that a patriotic newspaper gave particulars of his supposed +relations in contemporary Denmark! A half-mad old man who had served for a +few months in the Pope's army, many years before, still rode an old white +warhorse in all national processions, and, if their enemies were not +lying, one Town Councillor had challenged another to a duel by flinging +his glove upon the floor; while a popular Lord Mayor had boasted in a +public speech that he never went to bed at night without reading at least +twelve pages of _Sappho_. Then, too, in those conversations of the small +hours, to which O'Leary had so much objected, whenever we did not speak of +art and letters, we spoke of Parnell. We told each other that he had +admitted no man to his counsel; that when some member of his party found +himself in the same hotel by chance, that member would think to stay there +a presumption, and move to some other lodging; and, above all, we spoke of +his pride, that made him hide all emotion while before his enemy. Once he +had seemed callous and indifferent to the House of Commons, Foster had +accused him of abetting assassination, but when he came among his +followers his hands were full of blood, because he had torn them with his +nails. What excitement there would have been, what sense of mystery would +have stirred all our hearts, and stirred hearts all through the country, +where there was still, and for many years to come, but one overmastering +topic, had we known the story Mrs. Parnell tells of that scene on Brighton +Pier. He and the woman that he loved stood there upon a night of storm, +when his power was at its greatest height, and still unthreatened. He +caught her from the ground and held her at arm's length out over the water +and she lay there motionless, knowing that, had she moved, he would have +drowned himself and her. Perhaps unmotived self-immolation, were that +possible, or else at mere suggestion of storm and night, were as great +evidence as such a man could give of power over self, and so of the +expression of the self. + + +XII + +When I look back upon my Irish propaganda of those years I can see little +but its bitterness. I never met with, or but met to quarrel with, my +father's old family acquaintance; or with acquaintance I myself might have +found, and kept, among the prosperous educated class, who had all the +great appointments at University or Castle; and this I did by deliberate +calculation. If I must attack so much that seemed sacred to Irish +nationalist opinion, I must, I knew, see to it that no man suspect me of +doing it to flatter Unionist opinion. Whenever I got the support of some +man who belonged by birth and education to University or Castle, I would +say, "Now you must be baptized of the gutter." I chose Royal visits +especially for demonstrations of disloyalty, rolling up with my own hands +the red carpet spread by some elderly Nationalist, softened or weakened by +time, to welcome Viceroyalty; and threatening, if the London Society drank +to the King's health, that my friends and I would demonstrate against it +by turning our glasses upside down; and was presently to discover that one +can grow impassioned and fanatical about opinions, which one has chosen +as one might choose a side upon the football field; and I thought many a +time of the pleasant Dublin houses that would never ask me to dine; and +the still pleasanter houses with trout-streams near at hand, that would +never ask me upon a visit. I became absurdly sensitive, glancing about me +in certain public places, the private view of our Academy, or the like, to +discover imagined enemies; and even now, after twenty or thirty years, I +feel at times that I have not recovered my natural manner. Yet it was in +those pleasant houses, among the young men and the young girls, that we +were to make our converts. When we loathe ourselves or our world, if that +loathing but turn to intellect, we see self or world and its anti-self as +in one vision; when loathing remains but loathing, world or self consumes +itself away, and we turn to its mechanical opposite. Popular Nationalism +and Unionism so changed into one another, being each but the other's +headache. The Nationalist abstractions were like the fixed ideas of some +hysterical woman, a part of the mind turned into stone, and all the rest a +seething and burning; and Unionist Ireland had re-acted from that seething +and burning to a cynical indifference, and from those fixed ideas to +whatever might bring the most easy and obvious success. + +I remember Taylor at some public debate, stiff of body and tense of voice; +and the contrasting figure of Fitzgibbon, the Lord Justice of Appeal of +the moment and his calm, flowing sentences, satisfactory to hear and +impossible to remember. Taylor speaks of a little nation of antiquity, +which he does not name, "set between the great Empire of Persia and the +great Empire of Rome." Into the mouths of those great Empires he puts the +arguments of Fitzgibbon, and such as he, "Join with our greatness! What +in comparison to that is your little, beggarly nationality?" And then I +recall the excitement, the shiver of the nerves, as his voice rose to an +ecstatic cry, "Out of that nation came the salvation of the world." I +remember, too, and grow angry, as it were yesterday, a letter from that +Lord Justice of Appeal, who had changed his politics for advancement's +sake, recommending a correspondent to avoid us, because we dissuaded +people from the study of "Shakespeare and Kingsley." + +Edward Dowden, my father's old friend, with his dark romantic face, the +one man of letters Dublin Unionism possessed, was withering in that barren +soil. Towards the end of his life he confessed to a near friend that he +would have wished before all things to have been the lover of many women; +and some careless lecture, upon the youthful Goethe, had in early life +drawn down upon him the displeasure of the Protestant Archbishop. And yet +he turned Shakespeare into a British Benthamite, flattered Shelley but to +hide his own growing lack of sympathy, abandoned for like reason that +study of Goethe that should have been his life-work, and at last cared but +for Wordsworth, the one great poet who, after brief blossom, was cut and +sawn into planks of obvious utility. I called upon him from time to time +out of gratitude for old encouragements, and because, among the Dublin +houses open to me, his alone was pleasant to the eye, with its many books +and its air of scholarship. But when O'Grady had declared, rancorous for +once but under substantial provocation, that he had "a bad head and a +worse heart," I found my welcome troubled and called no more. + + +XIII + +The one house where nobody thought or talked politics was a house in Ely +Place, where a number of young men lived together, and, for want of a +better name, were called Theosophists. Beside the resident members, other +members dropped in and out during the day, and the reading-room was a +place of much discussion about philosophy and about the arts. The house +had been taken in the name of the engineer to the Board of Works, a +black-bearded young man, with a passion for Manichean philosophy, and all +accepted him as host; and sometimes the conversation, especially when I +was there, became too ghostly for the nerves of his young and delicate +wife, and he would be made angry. I remember young men struggling, with +inexact terminology and insufficient learning, for some new religious +conception, on which they could base their lives; and some few strange or +able men. + +At the top of the house lived a medical student who read Plato and took +haschisch, and a young Scotchman who owned a vegetarian restaurant, and +had just returned from America, where he had gone as the disciple of the +Prophet Harris, and where he would soon return in the train of some new +prophet. When one asked what set him on his wanderings, he told of a young +Highlander, his friend in boyhood, whose cap was always plucked off at a +certain twist in the road, till the fathers of the village fastened it +upon his head by recommending drink and women. When he had gone, his room +was inherited by an American hypnotist, who had lived among the Zuni +Indians with the explorer Cushant, and told of a Zuni Indian who, +irritated by some white man's praise of telephone and telegraph, cried +out, "Can they do that?" and cast above his head two handfuls of sand that +burst into flame, and flamed till his head seemed wrapped in fire. He +professed to talk the philosophy of the Zuni Indians, but it seemed to me +the vague Platonism that all there talked, except that he spoke much of +men passing in sleep into the heart of mountains; a doctrine that was +presently incorporated in the mythology of the house, to send young men +and women hither and thither inquiring for sacred places. On a lower floor +lived a strange red-haired girl, all whose thoughts were set upon painting +and poetry, conceived as abstract images like Love and Penury in the +_Symposium_; and to these images she sacrificed herself with Asiatic +fanaticism. The engineer had discovered her starving somewhere in an +unfurnished or half-furnished room, and that she had lived for many weeks +upon bread and shell-cocoa, so that her food never cost her more than a +penny a day. Born into a county family, who were so haughty that their +neighbours called them the Royal Family, she had quarrelled with a mad +father, who had never, his tenants declared, "unscrewed the top of his +flask with any man," because she wished to study art, had ran away from +home, had lived for a time by selling her watch, and then by occasional +stories in an Irish paper. For some weeks she had paid half-a-crown a week +to some poor woman to see her to the art schools and back, for she +considered it wrong for a woman to show herself in public places +unattended; but of late she had been unable to afford the school fees. The +engineer engaged her as a companion for his wife, and gave her money +enough to begin her studies once more. She had talent and imagination, a +gift for style; but, though ready to face death for painting and poetry, +conceived as allegorical figures, she hated her own genius, and had not +met praise and sympathy early enough to overcome the hatred. Face to face +with paint and canvas, pen and paper, she saw nothing of her genius but +its cruelty, and would have scarce arrived before she would find some +excuse to leave the schools for the day, if indeed she had not invented +over her breakfast some occupation so laborious that she could call it a +duty, and so not go at all. Most watched her in mockery, but I watched in +sympathy; composition strained my nerves and spoiled my sleep; and yet, as +far back as I could trace--and in Ireland we have long memories--my +paternal ancestors had worked at some intellectual pursuit, while hers had +shot and hunted. She could at any time, had she given up her profession, +which her father had raged against, not because it was art, but because it +was a profession, have returned to the common comfortable life of women. +When, a little later, she had quarrelled with the engineer or his wife, +and gone back to bread and shell-cocoa I brought her an offer from some +Dublin merchant of fairly well paid advertisement work, which would have +been less laborious than artistic creation; but she said that to draw +advertisements was to degrade art, thanked me elaborately, and did not +disguise her indignation. She had, I believe, returned to starvation with +joy, for constant anaemia would shortly give her an argument strong enough +to silence her conscience when the allegorical images glared upon her, +and, apart from that, starvation and misery had a large share in her +ritual of worship. + + +XIV + +At the top of the house and at the time I remember best, in the same room +with the young Scotchman, lived Mr. George Russell (A.E.), and the house +and the society were divided into his adherents and those of the engineer; +and I heard of some quarrelling between the factions. The rivalry was +sub-conscious. Neither had willingly opposed the other in any matter of +importance. The engineer had all the financial responsibility, and George +Russell was, in the eyes of the community, saint and genius. Had either +seen that the question at issue was the leadership of mystical thought in +Dublin, he would, I think, have given way, but the dispute seemed trivial. +At the weekly meetings, anything might be discussed; no chairman called a +speaker to order; an atheistic workman could denounce religion, or a pious +Catholic confound theosophy with atheism; and the engineer, precise and +practical, disapproved. He had an object. He wished to make converts for a +definite form of belief, and here an enemy, if a better speaker, might +make all the converts. He wished to confine discussion to members of the +society, and had proposed in committee, I was told, a resolution on the +subject; while Russell, who had refused to join my National Literary +Society, because the party of Harp and Pepperpot had set limits to +discussion, resisted, and at last defeated him. In a couple of years some +new dispute arose; he resigned, and founded a society which drew doctrine +and method from America or London; and Russell became, as he is to-day, +the one masterful influence among young Dublin men and women who love +religious speculation, but have no historical faith. + +When Russell and I had been at the Art School six or seven years before, +he had been almost unintelligible. He had seemed incapable of coherent +thought, and perhaps was so at certain moments. The idea came upon him, he +has told me, that, if he spoke he would reveal that he had lost coherence; +and for the three days that the idea lasted spent the hours of daylight +wandering upon the Dublin mountains, that he might escape the necessity +for speech. I used to listen to him at that time, mostly walking through +the streets at night, for the sake of some stray sentence, beautiful and +profound, amid many words that seemed without meaning; and there were +others, too, who walked and listened, for he had become, I think, to all +his fellow students, sacred, as the fool is sacred in the East. We copied +the model laboriously, but he would draw without research into the natural +form, and call his study "St. John in the Wilderness"; but I can remember +the almost scared look and the half-whisper of a student, now a successful +sculptor, who said, pointing to the modelling of a shoulder, "That is too +easy, a great deal too easy!" For with brush and pencil he was too +coherent. + +We derided each other, told absurd tales to one another's discredit, but +we never derided him, or told tales to his discredit. He stood outside the +sense of comedy his friend John Eglinton has called "the social cement" of +our civilization; and we would "gush" when we spoke of him, as men do when +they praise something incomprehensible. But when he painted there was no +difficulty in comprehending. How could that ease and rapidity of +composition, so far beyond anything that we could attain to, belong to a +man whose words seemed often without meaning? + +A few months before I had come to Ireland he had sent me some verses, +which I had liked till Edwin Ellis had laughed me from my liking by +proving that no line had a rhythm that agreed with any other, and that, +the moment one thought he had settled upon some scheme of rhyme, he would +break from it without reason. But now his verse was clear in thought and +delicate in form. He wrote without premeditation or labour. It had, as it +were, organized itself, and grown as nervous and living as if it had, as +Dante said of his own work, paled his cheek. The Society he belonged to +published a little magazine, and he had asked the readers to decide +whether they preferred his prose or his verse, and it was because they so +willed it that he wrote the little transcendental verses afterwards +published in _Homeward Songs by the Way_. + +Life was not expensive in that house, where, I think, no meat was eaten; I +know that out of the sixty or seventy pounds a year which he earned as +accountant in a Dublin shop, he saved a considerable portion for his +private charity; and it was, I think, his benevolence that gave him his +lucidity of speech, and, perhaps, of writing. If he convinced himself that +any particular activity was desirable in the public interest or in that of +his friends, he had at once the ardour that came to another from personal +ambition. He was always surrounded with a little group of infirm or +unlucky persons, whom he explained to themselves and to others, turning +cat to griffin, goose to swan. In later years he was to accept the +position of organizer of a co-operative banking system, before he had even +read a book upon economics or finance, and within a few months to give +evidence before a Royal Commission upon the system, as an acknowledged +expert, though he had brought to it nothing but his impassioned +versatility. + +At the time I write of him, he was the religious teacher, and that +alone--his painting, his poetry, and his conversation all subservient to +that one end. Men watched him with awe or with bewilderment; it was known +that he saw visions continually, perhaps more continually than any modern +man since Swedenborg; and when he painted and drew in pastel what he had +seen, some accepted the record without hesitation, others, like myself, +noticing the academic Graeco-Roman forms, and remembering his early +admiration for the works of Gustave Moreau, divined a subjective element, +but no one doubted his word. One might not think him a good observer, but +no one could doubt that he reported with the most scrupulous care what he +believed himself to have seen; nor did he lack occasional objective +corroboration. Walking with some man in his park--his demesne, as we say +in Ireland--he had seen a visionary church at a particular spot, and the +man had dug and uncovered its foundations; then some woman had met him +with, "Oh, Mr Russell, I am so unhappy," and he had replied, "You will be +perfectly happy this evening at seven o'clock," and left her to her +blushes. She had an appointment with a young man for seven o'clock. I had +heard of this a day or so after the event, and I asked him about it, and +was told it had suddenly come into his head to use those words; but why he +did not know. He and I often quarrelled, because I wanted him to examine +and question his visions, and write them out as they occurred; and still +more because I thought symbolic what he thought real like the men and +women that had passed him on the road. Were they so much a part of his +sub-conscious life that they would have vanished had he submitted them to +question; were they like those voices that only speak, those strange +sights that only show themselves for an instant, when the attention has +been withdrawn; that phantasmagoria of which I had learnt something in +London: and had his verse and his painting a like origin? And was that why +the same hand that painted a certain dreamy, lovely sandy shore, now in +the Dublin Municipal Gallery, could with great rapidity fill many canvases +with poetical commonplace; and why, after writing _Homeward Songs by the +Way_, where all is skilful and much exquisite, he would never again write +a perfect book? Was it precisely because in Swedenborg alone the conscious +and the sub-conscious became one, as in that marriage of the angels, which +he has described as a contact of the whole being, that Coleridge thought +Swedenborg both man and woman? + +Russell's influence, which was already great, had more to support it than +his versatility, or the mystery that surrounded him, for his sense of +justice, and the daring that came from his own confidence in it, had made +him the general counsellor. He would give endless time to a case of +conscience, and no situation was too difficult for his clarity; and +certainly some of the situations were difficult. I remember his being +summoned to decide between two ladies who had quarrelled about a +vacillating admirer, and called each other, to each other's faces, the +worst names in our somewhat anaemic modern vocabulary; and I have heard of +his success on an occasion when I think no other but Dostoievsky's idiot +could have avoided offence. The Society was very young, and, as its +members faced the world's moral complexities as though they were the first +that ever faced them, they drew up very vigorous rules. One rule was that +if any member saw a fault growing upon any other member, it was his duty +to point it out to that member. A certain young man become convinced that +a certain young woman had fallen in love with him; and, as an unwritten +rule pronounced love and the spiritual life incompatible, that was a heavy +fault. As the young man felt the delicacy of the situation, he asked for +Russell's help, and side by side they braved the offender, who, I was +told, received their admonishment with surprised humility, and promised +amendment. His voice would often become high, and lose its self-possession +during intimate conversation, and I especially could put him in a rage; +but the moment the audience became too large for intimacy, or some +exciting event had given formality to speech, he would be at the same +moment impassioned and impersonal. He had, and has, the capacity, beyond +that of any man I have known, to put with entire justice not only the +thoughts, but the emotions, of the most opposite parties and +personalities, as it were dissolving some public or private uproar into +drama by Corneille or by Racine; and men who have hated each other must +sometimes have been reconciled, because each heard his enemy's argument +put into better words than he himself had found for his own; and this gift +was in later years to give him political influence, and win him respect +from Irish Nationalist and Unionist alike. It was, perhaps, because of it, +joined to a too literal acceptance of those noble images of moral +tradition which are so like late Graeco-Roman statues, that he had seen +all human life as a mythological system, where, though all cats are +griffins, the more dangerous griffins are only found among politicians he +has not spoken to, or among authors he has but glanced at; while those men +and women who bring him their confessions and listen to his advice, carry +but the snowiest of swan's plumage. Nor has it failed to make him, as I +think, a bad literary critic; demanding plays and poems where the +characters must attain a stature of seven feet, and resenting as something +perverse and morbid all abatement from that measure. I sometimes wonder +what he would have been had he not met in early life the poetry of Emerson +and Walt Whitman, writers who have begun to seem superficial precisely +because they lack the Vision of evil; and those translations of the +Upanishads, which it is so much harder to study by the sinking flame of +Indian tradition than by the serviceable lamp of Emerson and Walt Whitman. + +We are never satisfied with the maturity of those whom we have admired in +boyhood; and, because we have seen their whole circle--even the most +successful life is but a segment--we remain to the end their harshest +critics. One old schoolfellow of mine will never believe that I have +fulfilled the promise of some rough unscannable verses that I wrote before +I was eighteen. Does any imaginative man find in maturity the admiration +that his first half-articulate years aroused in some little circle; and is +not the first success the greatest? Certainly, I demanded of Russell some +impossible things, and if I had any influence upon him--and I have little +doubt that I had, for we were very intimate--it may not have been a good +influence for I thought there could be no aim for poet or artist except +expression of a "Unity of Being" like that of a "perfectly proportioned +human body"--though I would not at the time have used that phrase. I +remember that I was ironic and indignant when he left the Art Schools +because his "will was weak, and must grow weaker if he followed any +emotional pursuit;" as, later, when he let the readers of a magazine +decide between his prose and his verse. I now know that there are men who +cannot possess "Unity of Being," who must not seek it or express it--and +who, so far from seeking an anti-self, a Mask that delineates a being in +all things the opposite to their natural state, can but seek the +suppression of the anti-self, till the natural state alone remains. These +are those who must seek no image of desire, but await that which lies +beyond their mind, unities not of the mind, but unities of nature, unities +of God: the man of science, the moralist, the humanitarian, the +politician, St. Simon Stylites upon his pillar, St. Antony in his cavern; +all whose pre-occupation is to know themselves for fragments, and at last +for nothing; to hollow their hearts out till they are void and without +form, to summon a creator by revealing chaos, to become the lamp for +another's wick and oil; and indeed it may be that it has been for their +guidance in a very special sense that the "perfectly proportioned human +body" suffered crucifixion. For them Mask and Image are of necessity +morbid, turning their eyes upon themselves, as though they were of those +who can be law unto themselves, of whom Chapman has written, "Neither is +it lawful that they should stoop to any other law," whereas they are +indeed of those who can but ask, "Have I behaved as well as So-and-so?" +"Am I a good man according to the commandments?" or, "Do I realise my own +nothingness before God?" "Have my experiments and observations excluded +the personal factor with sufficient rigour?" Such men do not assume wisdom +or beauty as Shelley did, when he masked himself as Ahasuerus, or as +Prince Athanais, nor do they pursue an Image through a world that had else +seemed an uninhabitable wilderness till, amid the privations of that +pursuit, the Image is no more named Pandemos, but Urania; for such men +must cast all Masks away and fly the Image, till that Image, transfigured +because of their cruelties of self-abasement, becomes itself some Image or +epitome of the whole natural or supernatural world, and itself pursues. +The wholeness of the supernatural world can only express itself in +personal form, because it has no epitome but man, nor can _The Hound of +Heaven_ fling itself into any but an empty heart. We may know the +fugitives from others poets because, like George Herbert, like Francis +Thompson, like George Russell, their imaginations grow more vivid in the +expression of something which they have not themselves created, some +historical religion or cause. But if the fugitive should live, as I think +Russell does at times, as it is natural for a Morris or a Henley or a +Shelley to live, hunters and pursuers all, his art surrenders itself to +moral or poetical commonplace, to a repetition of thoughts and images that +have no relation to experience. + +I think that Russell would not have disappointed even my hopes had he, +instead of meeting as an impressionable youth with our modern subjective +romanticism, met with some form of traditional belief, which condemned all +that romanticism admires and praises, indeed, all images of desire; for +such condemnation would have turned his intellect towards the images of +his vision. It might, doubtless, have embittered his life, for his strong +intellect would have been driven out into the impersonal deeps where the +man shudders; but it would have kept him a religious teacher, and set him, +it may be, among the greatest of that species; politics, for a +vision-seeking man, can be but half achievement, a choice of an almost +easy kind of skill instead of that kind which is, of all those not +impossible, the most difficult. Is it not certain that the Creator yawns +in earthquake and thunder and other popular displays, but toils in +rounding the delicate spiral of a shell? + + +XV + +I heard the other day of a Dublin man recognizing in London an elderly man +who had lived in that house in Ely Place in his youth, and of that elderly +man, at the sudden memory, bursting into tears. Though I have no such +poignant memories, for I was never of it, never anything but a +dissatisfied critic, yet certain vivid moments come back to me as I write. + +...Russell has just come in from a long walk on the Two Rock mountain, +very full of his conversation with an old religious beggar, who kept +repeating, "God possesses the heavens, but He covets the earth--He covets +the earth." + + * * * * * + +I get in talk with a young man who has taken the orthodox side in some +debate. He is a stranger, but explains that he has inherited magical art +from his father, and asks me to his rooms to see it in operation. He and a +friend of his kill a black cock, and burn herbs in a big bowl, but nothing +happens except that the friend repeats again and again, "Oh, my God," and +when I ask him why he has said that, does not know that he has spoken; and +I feel that there is something very evil in the room. + + * * * * * + +We are sitting round the fire one night, and a member, a woman, tells a +dream that she has just had. She dreamed that she saw monks digging in a +garden. They dug down till they found a coffin, and when they took off the +lid she saw that in the coffin lay a beautiful young man in a dress of +gold brocade. The young man railed against the glory of the world, and +when he had finished, the monks closed the coffin reverently, and buried +it once more. They smoothed the ground, and then went on with their +gardening. + + * * * * * + +I have a young man with me, an official of the National Literary Society, +and I leave him in the reading-room with Russell, while I go upstairs to +see the young Scotchman. I return after some minutes to find that the +young man has become a Theosophist, but a month later, after an interview +with a friar, to whom he gives an incredible account of his new beliefs, +he goes to Mass again. + + + + +BOOK III + +HODOS CAMELIONIS + + + + +_HODOS CAMELIONIS_ + + +I + +When staying with Hyde in Roscommon, I had driven over to Lough Kay, +hoping to find some local memory of the old story of Tumaus Costello, +which I was turning into a story now called _Proud Costello, Macdermot's +Daughter, and the Bitter Tongue_. I was rowed up the lake that I might +find the island where he died; I had to find it from Hyde's account in +_The Love-Songs of Connaught_, for when I asked the boatman, he told the +story of Hero and Leander, putting Hero's house on one island, and +Leander's on another. Presently we stopped to eat our sandwiches at the +"Castle Rock," an island all castle. It was not an old castle, being but +the invention of some romantic man, seventy or eighty years ago. The last +man who had lived there had been Dr. Hyde's father, and he had but stayed +a fortnight. The Gaelic-speaking men in the district were accustomed, +instead of calling some specially useless thing a "white elephant," to +call it "The Castle on the Rock." The roof was, however, still sound, and +the windows unbroken. The situation in the centre of the lake, that has +little wood-grown islands, and is surrounded by wood-grown hills, is +romantic, and at one end, and perhaps at the other too, there is a stone +platform where meditative persons might pace to and fro. I planned a +mystical Order which should buy or hire the castle, and keep it as a place +where its members could retire for a while for contemplation, and where +we might establish mysteries like those of Eleusis and Samothrace; and for +ten years to come my most impassioned thought was a vain attempt to find +philosophy and to create ritual for that Order. I had an unshakeable +conviction, arising how or whence I cannot tell, that invisible gates +would open as they opened for Blake, as they opened for Swedenborg, as +they opened for Boehme, and that this philosophy would find its manuals of +devotion in all imaginative literature, and set before Irishmen for +special manual an Irish literature which, though made by many minds, would +seem the work of a single mind, and turn our places of beauty or legendary +association into holy symbols. I did not think this philosophy would be +altogether pagan, for it was plain that its symbols must be selected from +all those things that had moved men most during many, mainly Christian, +centuries. + +I thought that for a time I could rhyme of love, calling it _The Rose_, +because of the Rose's double meaning; of a fisherman who had "never a +crack" in his heart; of an old woman complaining of the idleness of the +young, or of some cheerful fiddler, all those things that "popular poets" +write of, but that I must some day, on that day when the gates began to +open, become difficult or obscure. With a rhythm that still echoed Morris +I prayed to the Red Rose, to Intellectual Beauty: + + "Come near, come near, come near--ah, leave me still + A little space for the Rose-breath to fill, + Lest I no more hear common things.... + But seek alone to hear the strange things said + By God to the bright hearts of those long dead, + And learn to chant a tongue men do not know." + +I do not remember what I meant by "the bright hearts," but a little later +I wrote of Spirits "with mirrors in their hearts." + +My rituals were not to be made deliberately, like a poem, but all got by +that method Mathers had explained to me, and with this hope I plunged +without a clue into a labyrinth of images, into that labyrinth that we are +warned against in those _Oracles_ which antiquity has attributed to +Zoroaster, but modern scholarship to some Alexandrian poet. "Stoop not +down to the darkly splendid world wherein lieth continually a faithless +depth and Hades wrapped in cloud, delighting in unintelligible images." + + +II + +I found a supporter at Sligo in my elderly uncle, a man of fifty-three or +fifty-four, with the habits of a much older man. He had never left the +West of Ireland, except for a few days to London every year, and a single +fortnight's voyage to Spain on board a trading schooner, in his boyhood. +He was in politics a Unionist and Tory of the most obstinate kind, and +knew nothing of Irish literature or history. He was, however, strangely +beset by the romance of Ireland, as he discovered it among the people who +served him, sailing upon his ships or attending to his horses, and, though +narrow and obstinate of opinion, and puritanical in his judgment of life, +was perhaps the most tolerant man I have ever known. He never expected +anybody to agree with him, and if you did not upset his habits by cheating +him over a horse, or by offending his taste, he would think as well of you +as he did of other men, and that was not very well; and help you out of +any scrape whatever. I was accustomed to people much better read than he, +much more liberal-minded, but they had no life but the intellectual life, +and if they and I differed, they could not take it lightly, and were often +angry, and so for years now I had gone to Sligo, sometimes because I could +not afford my Dublin lodging, but most often for freedom and peace. He +would receive me with "I have learned that your friend So and So has been +seen at the Gresham Hotel talking to Mr William Redmond. What will not +people do for notoriety?" He considered all Irish Nationalist Members of +Parliament as outside the social pale, but after dinner, when conversation +grew intimate, would talk sympathetically of the Fenians in Ballina, where +he spent his early manhood, or of the Fenian privateer that landed the +wounded man at Sligo in the 'sixties. When Parnell was contesting an +election at Sligo a little before his death, other Unionist magistrates +refused or made difficulties when asked for some assistance, what I do not +remember, made necessary under election law; and so my uncle gave that +assistance. He walked up and down some Town Hall assembly-room or some +courtroom with Parnell, but would tell me nothing of that conversation, +except that Parnell spoke of Gladstone with extravagant hatred. He would +not repeat words spoken by a great man in his bitterness, yet Parnell at +the moment was too angry to care who listened. I knew one other man who +kept as firm a silence; he had attended Parnell's last public meeting, and +after it sat alone beside him, and heard him speak of the followers that +had fallen away, or were showing their faint hearts; but Parnell was the +chief devotion of his life. + +When I first began my visits, he had lived in the town itself, and close +to a disreputable neighbourhood called the Burrough, till one evening, +while he sat over his dinner, he heard a man and woman quarrelling under +his window. "I mind the time," shouted the man, "when I slept with you and +your daughter in the one bed." My uncle was horrified, and moved to a +little house about a quarter of a mile into the country, where he lived +with an old second-sighted servant, and a man-servant to look after the +racehorse that was browsing in the neighbouring field, with a donkey to +keep it company. His furniture had not been changed since he set up house +for himself as a very young man, and in a room opposite his dining-room +were the saddles of his youth, and though he would soon give up riding, +they would be oiled and the stirrups kept clean and bright till the day of +his death. Some love-affair had gone wrong when he was a very young man; +he had now no interest in women; certainly never sought favour of a woman, +and yet he took great care of his appearance. He did not let his beard +grow, though he had, or believed that he had, for he was hypochondriacal, +a sensitiveness of the skin that forced him to spend an hour in shaving, +and he would take to club and dumb-bell if his waist thickened by a hair's +breadth, and twenty years after, when a very old man, he had the erect +shapely figure of his youth. I often wondered why he went through so much +labour, for it was not pride, which had seemed histrionic in his eyes--and +certainly he had no vanity; and now, looking back, I am convinced that it +was from habit, mere habit, a habit formed when he was a young man, and +the best rider of his district. + +Probably through long association with Mary Battle, the second-sighted +servant, he had come to believe much in the supernatural world, and would +tell how several times, arriving home with an unexpected guest, he had +found the table set for three, and that he himself had dreamed of his +brother's illness in Liverpool before he had other news of it. He saw me +using images learned from Mathers to start reverie, and, though I held out +for a long time, thinking him too old and habit-bound, he persuaded me to +tell him their use, and from that on we experimented continually, and +after a time I began to keep careful record. In summer he always had the +same little house at Rosses Point, and it was there that he first became +sensitive to the cabalistic symbols. There are some high sandhills and low +cliffs, and I adopted the practice of walking by the seashore while he +walked on cliff or sandhill; I, without speaking, would imagine the +symbol, and he would notice what passed before his mind's eye, and in a +short time he would practically never fail of the appropriate vision. In +the symbols which are used certain colours are classified as "actives," +while certain other colours are "passives," and I had soon discovered that +if I used "actives" George Pollexfen would see nothing. I therefore gave +him exercises to make him sensitive to those colours, and gradually we +found ourselves well fitted for this work, and he began to take as lively +an interest, as was possible to a nature given over to habit, in my plans +for the Castle on the Rock. + +I worked with others, sworn to the scheme for the most part, and I made +many curious observations. It was the symbol itself, or, at any rate, not +my conscious intention that produced the effect, for if I made an error +and told someone, let us say, to gaze at the wrong symbol--they were +painted upon cards--the vision would be suggested by the symbol, not by +my thought, or two visions would appear side by side, one from the symbol +and one from my thought. When two people, between whose minds there was +even a casual sympathy, worked together under the same symbolic influence, +the dream or reverie would divide itself between them, each half being the +complement of the other; and now and again these complementary dreams, or +reveries, would arise spontaneously. I find, for instance, in an old +notebook, "I saw quite suddenly a tent with a wooden badly-carved idol, +painted dull red; a man looking like a Red Indian was prostrate before it. +The idol was seated to the left. I asked G. what he saw. He saw a most +august immense being, glowing with a ruddy opalescent colour, sitting on a +throne to the left", or, to summarise from a later notebook,... I am +meditating in one room and my fellow-student in another, when I see a boat +full of tumult and movement on a still sea, and my friend sees a boat with +motionless sails upon a tumultuous sea. There was nothing in the +originating symbol to suggest a boat. + +We never began our work until George's old servant was in her bed; and +yet, when we went upstairs to our beds, we constantly heard her crying out +with nightmare, and in the morning we would find that her dream echoed our +vision. One night, started by what symbol I forget, we had seen an +allegorical marriage of Heaven and Earth. When Mary Battle brought in the +breakfast next morning, I said, "Well, Mary, did you dream anything last +night?" and she replied (I am quoting from an old notebook) "indeed she +had," and that it was "a dream she would not have liked to have had twice +in one night." She had dreamed that her bishop, the Catholic bishop of +Sligo, had gone away "without telling anybody," and had married "a very +high-up lady," "and she not too young, either." She had thought in her +dream, "Now all the clergy will get married, and it will be no use going +to confession." There were "layers upon layers of flowers, many roses, all +round the church." + +Another time, when George Pollexfen had seen in answer to some evocation +of mine a man with his head cut in two, she woke to find that she "must +have cut her face with a pin, as it was all over blood." When three or +four saw together, the dream or vision would divide itself into three or +four parts, each seeming complete in itself, and all fitting together, so +that each part was an adaptation of a single meaning to a particular +personality. A visionary being would give, let us say, a lighted torch to +one, an unlighted candle to another, an unripe fruit to a third, and to +the fourth a ripe fruit. At times coherent stories were built up, as if a +company of actors were to improvise, and play, not only without previous +consultation, but without foreseeing at any moment what would be said or +done the moment after. Who made the story? Was it the mind of one of the +visionaries? Perhaps, for I have endless proof that, where two worked +together, the symbolic influence commonly took upon itself, though no word +was spoken, the quality of the mind that had first fixed a symbol in the +mind's eye. But, if so, what part of the mind? One friend, in whom the +symbolic impulse produced actual trance, described an elaborate and very +strange story while the trance was upon him, but upon waking told a story +that after a certain point was quite different. "They gave me a cup of +wine, and after that I remembered nothing." While speaking out of trance +he had said nothing of the cup of wine, which must have been offered to a +portion of his mind quite early in the dream. Then, too, from whence come +the images of the dream? Not always, I was soon persuaded, from the +memory, perhaps never in trance or sleep. One man, who certainly thought +that Eve's apple was the sort that you got from the greengrocer, and as +certainly never doubted its story's literal truth, said, when I used some +symbol to send him to Eden, that he saw a walled garden on the top of a +high mountain, and in the middle of it a tree with great birds in the +branches, and fruit out of which, if you held a fruit to your ear, came +the sound of fighting. I had not at the time read Dante's _Purgatorio_, +and it caused me some trouble to verify the mountain garden, and, from +some passage in the Zohar, the great birds among the boughs; while a young +girl, on being sent to the same garden, heard "the music of heaven" from a +tree, and on listening with her ear against the trunk, found that it was +made by the "continual clashing of swords." Whence came that fine thought +of music-making swords, that image of the garden, and many like images and +thoughts? I had as yet no clear answer, but knew myself face to face with +the Anima Mundi described by Platonic philosophers, and more especially in +modern times by Henry More, which has a memory independent of individual +memories, though they constantly enrich it with their images and their +thoughts. + + +III + +At Sligo we walked twice every day, once after lunch and once after +dinner, to the same gate on the road to Knocknarea; and at Rosses Point, +to the same rock upon the shore; and as we walked we exchanged those +thoughts that never rise before me now without bringing some sight of +mountain or of shore. Considering that Mary Battle received our thoughts +in sleep, though coarsened or turned to caricature, do not the thoughts of +the scholar or the hermit, though they speak no word, or something of +their shape and impulse, pass into the general mind? Does not the emotion +of some woman of fashion, caught in the subtle torture of self-analysing +passion, pass down, although she speak no word, to Joan with her Pot, Jill +with her Pail and, it may be, with one knows not what nightmare melancholy +to Tom the Fool? + +Seeing that a vision could divide itself in divers complementary portions, +might not the thought of philosopher or poet or mathematician depend at +every moment of its progress upon some complementary thought in minds +perhaps at a great distance? Is there nation-wide multiform reverie, every +mind passing through a stream of suggestion, and all streams acting and +reacting upon one another, no matter how distant the minds, how dumb the +lips? A man walked, as it were, casting a shadow, and yet one could never +say which was man and which was shadow, or how many the shadows that he +cast. Was not a nation, as distinguished from a crowd of chance comers, +bound together by these parallel streams or shadows; that Unity of Image, +which I sought in national literature, being but an originating symbol? + +From the moment when these speculations grew vivid, I had created for +myself an intellectual solitude, most arguments that could influence +action had lost something of their meaning. How could I judge any scheme +of education, or of social reform, when I could not measure what the +different classes and occupations contributed to that invisible commerce +of reverie and of sleep; and what is luxury and what necessity when a +fragment of gold braid, or a flower in the wallpaper may be an originating +impulse to revolution or to philosophy? I began to feel myself not only +solitary but helpless. + + +IV + +I had not taken up these subjects wilfully, nor through love of +strangeness, nor love of excitement, nor because I found myself in some +experimental circle, but because unaccountable things had happened even in +my childhood, and because of an ungovernable craving. When supernatural +events begin, a man first doubts his own testimony, but when they repeat +themselves again and again, he doubts all human testimony. At least he +knows his own bias, and may perhaps allow for it, but how trust historian +and psychologist that have for two hundred years ignored in writing of the +history of the world, or of the human mind, so momentous a part of human +experience? What else had they ignored and distorted? When Mesmerists +first travelled about as public entertainers, a favourite trick was to +tell a mesmerised man that some letter of the alphabet had ceased to +exist, and after that to make him write his name upon the blackboard. +Brown, or Jones, or Robinson would become upon the instant, and without +any surprise or hesitation, Rown, or Ones, or Obinson. + +Was modern civilisation a conspiracy of the sub-conscious? Did we turn +away from certain thoughts and things because the Middle Ages lived in +terror of the dark, or had some seminal illusion been imposed upon us by +beings greater than ourselves for an unknown purpose? Even when no facts +of experience were denied, might not what had seemed logical proof be but +a mechanism of change, an automatic impulse? Once in London, at a dinner +party, where all the guests were intimate friends, I had written upon a +piece of paper, "In five minutes York Powell will talk of a burning +house," thrust the paper under my neighbour's plate, and imagined my fire +symbol, and waited in silence. Powell shifted conversation from topic to +topic and within the five minutes was describing a fire he had seen as a +young man. When Locke's French translator Coste asked him how, if there +were no "innate ideas," he could explain the skill shown by a bird in +making its nest, Locke replied, "I did not write to explain the actions of +dumb creatures," and his translator thought the answer "very good, seeing +that he had named his book _A Philosophical Essay upon Human +Understanding_." Henry More, upon the other hand, considered that the +bird's instinct proved the existence of the Anima Mundi, with its ideas +and memories. Did modern enlightenment think with Coste that Locke had the +better logic, because it was not free to think otherwise? + + +V + +I ceased to read modern books that were not books of belief older than any +European Church, and founded that interested me, I tried to trace it back +to its earliest use, believing that there must be a tradition of belief +older than any European Church, and founded upon the experience of the +world before the modern bias. It was this search for a tradition that +urged George Pollexfen and myself to study the visions and thoughts of the +country people, and some country conversation repeated by one or the other +often gave us a day's discussion. These visions, we soon discovered, were +very like those we called up by symbol. Mary Battle, looking out of the +window at Rosses Point, saw coming from Knocknarea, where Queen Maeve, +according to local folklore, is buried under a great heap of stones, "the +finest woman you ever saw travelling right across from the mountains and +straight to here."--I quote a record written at the time. "She looked very +strong, but not wicked" (that is to say, not cruel). "I have seen the +Irish Giant" (some big man shown at a fair). "And though he was a fine man +he was nothing to her, for he was round and could not have stepped out so +soldierly ... she had no stomach on her but was slight and broad in the +shoulders, and was handsomer than any one you ever saw; she looked about +thirty." And when I asked if she had seen others like her, she said, "Some +of them have their hair down, but they look quite different, more like the +sleepy-looking ladies one sees in the papers. Those with their hair up are +like this one. The others have long white dresses, but those with their +hair up have short dresses, so that you can see their legs right up to +the calf." And when I questioned her, I found that they wore what might +well be some kind of buskin. "They are fine and dashing-looking, like the +men one sees riding their horses in twos and threes on the slopes of the +mountains with their swords swinging. There is no such race living now, +none so finely proportioned ... When I think of her and the ladies now +they are like little children running about not knowing how to put their +clothes on right ... why, I would not call them women at all." + +Not at this time, but some three or four years later, when the visions +came without any conscious use of symbol for a short time, and with much +greater vividness, I saw two or three forms of this incredible beauty, one +especially that must always haunt my memory. Then, too, the Master Pilot +told us of meeting at night close to the Pilot House a procession of women +in what seemed the costume of another age. Were they really people of the +past, revisiting, perhaps, the places where they lived, or must I explain +them, as I explained that vision of Eden as a mountain garden, by some +memory of the race, as distinct from individual memory? Certainly these +Spirits, as the country people called them, seemed full of personality; +were they not capricious, generous, spiteful, anxious, angry, and yet did +that prove them more than images and symbols? When I used a combined earth +and fire and lunar symbol, my seer, a girl of twenty-five, saw an obvious +Diana and her dogs, about a fire in a cavern. Presently, judging from her +closed eyes, and from the tone of her voice, that she was in trance, not +in reverie, I wished to lighten the trance a little, and made through +carelessness or hasty thinking a symbol of dismissal; and at once she +started and cried out, "She says you are driving her away too quickly. You +have made her angry." Then, too, if my visions had a subjective element, +so had Mary Battle's, for her fairies had but one tune, _The Distant +Waterfall_, and she never heard anything described in a sermon at the +Cathedral that she did not "see it after," and spoke of seeing in this way +the gates of Purgatory. + +Furthermore, if my images could affect her dreams, the folk-images could +affect mine in turn, for one night I saw between sleeping and waking a +strange long bodied pair of dogs, one black and one white, that I found +presently in some country tale. How, too, could one separate the dogs of +the country tale from those my uncle heard bay in his pillow? In order to +keep myself from nightmare, I had formed the habit of imagining four +watch-dogs, one at each corner of my room, and, though I had not told him +or anybody, he said, "Here is a very curious thing; most nights now, when +I lay my head upon the pillow, I hear a sound of dogs baying--the sound +seems to come up out of the pillow." A friend of Strindberg's, in +_delirium tremens_, was haunted by mice, and a friend in the next room +heard the squealing of the mice. + + +VI + +To that multiplicity of interest and opinion, of arts and sciences, which +had driven me to conceive a Unity of Culture defined and evoked by Unity +of Image, I had but added a multiplicity of images, and I was the more +troubled because, the first excitement over, I had done nothing to rouse +George Pollexfen from the gloom and hypochondria always thickening about +him. I asked no help of books, for I believed that the truth I sought +would come to me like the subject of a poem, from some moment of +passionate experience, and that if I filled my exposition with other men's +thought, other men's investigation, I would sink into all that +multiplicity of interest and opinion. That passionate experience could +never come--of that I was certain--until I had found the right image or +right images. From what but the image of Apollo, fixed always in memory +and passion, did his priesthood get that occasional power, a classical +historian has described, of lifting great stones and snapping great +branches; and did not Gemma Galgani, like many others that had gone +before, in 1889 cause deep wounds to appear in her body by contemplating +her crucifix? In the essay that Wilde read to me one Christmas Day, +occurred these words--"What does not the world owe to the imitation of +Christ, what to the imitation of Caesar?" and I had seen Macgregor Mathers +paint little pictures combining the forms of men, animals, and birds, +according to a rule which provided a form for every possible mental +condition, and I had heard him describing, upon what authority I do not +remember, how citizens of ancient Egypt assumed, when in contemplation, +the images of their gods. + +But now image called up image in an endless procession, and I could not +always choose among them with any confidence; and when I did choose, the +image lost its intensity, or changed into some other image. I had but +exchanged the Temptation of Flaubert's _Bouvard et Pecuchet_ for that of +his _St. Anthony_, and I was lost in that region a cabalistic manuscript, +shown me by Macgregor Mathers, had warned me of; astray upon the Path of +the Cameleon, upon _Hodos Camelionis_. + + +VII + +Now that I am a settled man and have many birds--the canaries have just +hatched out four nestlings--I have before me the problem that Locke waved +aside. As I gave them an artificial nest, a hollow vessel like a saucer, +they had no need of that skill the wild bird shows, each species having +its own preference among the lichen, or moss; but they could sort out wool +and hair and a certain soft white down that I found under a big tree. They +would twist a stem of grass till it was limber, and would wind it all +about the centre of the nest, and when the four grey eggs were laid, the +mother bird knew how to turn them over from time to time, that they might +be warmed evenly; and how long she must leave them uncovered, that the +white might not be dried up, and when to return that the growing bird +might not take cold. Then the young birds, even when they had all their +feathers, were very still as compared with the older birds, as though any +habit of movement would disturb the nest or make them tumble out. One of +them would now and again pass on the food that he had received from his +mother's beak to some other nestling. The father had often pecked the +mother bird before the eggs were laid, but now, until the last nestling +was decently feathered, he took his share in the feeding, and was very +peaceable, and it was only when the young could be left to feed themselves +that he grew jealous and had to be put into another cage. + +When I watch my child, who is not yet three years old, I can see so many +signs of knowledge from beyond her own mind; why else should she be so +excited when a little boy passes outside the window, and take so little +interest in a girl; why should she put a cloak about her, and look over +her shoulder to see it trailing upon the stairs, as she will some day +trail a dress; and why, above all, as she lay against her mother's side, +and felt the unborn child moving within, did she murmur, "Baby, baby?" + +When a man writes any work of genius, or invents some creative action, is +it not because some knowledge or power has come into his mind from beyond +his mind? It is called up by an image, as I think; all my birds' +adventures started when I hung a little saucer at one side of the cage, +and at the other a bundle of hair and grass; but our images must be given +to us, we cannot choose them deliberately. + + +VIII + +I know now that revelation is from the self, but from that age-long +memoried self, that shapes the elaborate shell of the mollusc and the +child in the womb, that teaches the birds to make their nest; and that +genius is a crisis that joins that buried self for certain moments to our +trivial daily mind. There are, indeed, personifying spirits that we had +best call but Gates and Gate-keepers, because through their dramatic power +they bring our souls to crisis, to Mask and Image, caring not a straw +whether we be Juliet going to her wedding, or Cleopatra to her death; for +in their eyes nothing has weight but passion. We have dreamed a foolish +dream these many centuries in thinking that they value a life of +contemplation, for they scorn that more than any possible life, unless it +be but a name for the worst crisis of all. They have but one purpose, to +bring their chosen man to the greatest obstacle he may confront without +despair. They contrived Dante's banishment, and snatched away his +Beatrice, and thrust Villon into the arms of harlots, and sent him to +gather cronies at the foot of the gallows, that Dante and Villon might +through passion become conjoint to their buried selves, turn all to Mask +and Image, and so be phantoms in their own eyes. In great lesser writers +like Landor and like Keats we are shown that Image and that Mask as +something set apart; Andromeda and her Perseus--though not the +sea-dragon--but in a few in whom we recognise supreme masters of tragedy, +the whole contest is brought into the circle of their beauty. Such +masters, Villon and Dante, let us say, would not, when they speak through +their art, change their luck; yet they are mirrored in all the suffering +of desire. The two halves of their nature are so completely joined that +they seem to labour for their objects, and yet to desire whatever happens, +being at the same instant predestinate and free, creation's very self. We +gaze at such men in awe, because we gaze not at a work of art, but at the +re-creation of the man through that art, the birth of a new species of +man, and, it may even seem that the hairs of our heads stand up, because +that birth, that re-creation, is from terror. Had not Dante and Villon +understood that their fate wrecked what life could not rebuild, had they +lacked their Vision of Evil, had they cherished any species of optimism, +they could but have found a false beauty, or some momentary instinctive +beauty, and suffered no change at all, or but changed as do the wild +creatures, or from devil well to devil sick, and so round the clock. + +They and their sort alone earn contemplation, for it is only when the +intellect has wrought the whole of life to drama, to crisis, that we may +live for contemplation, and yet keep our intensity. + +And these things are true also of nations, but the Gate-keepers who drive +the nation to war or anarchy that it may find its Image are different from +those who drive individual men, though I think at times they work +together. And as I look backward upon my own writing, I take pleasure +alone in those verses where it seems to me I have found something hard, +cold, some articulation of the Image, which is the opposite of all that I +am in my daily life, and all that my country is; yet man or nation can no +more make Mask or Image than the seed can be made by the soil into which +it is cast. + + Ille. + + "What portion in the world can the artist have, + Who has awakened from the common dream, + But dissipation and despair? + + Hic. + + And yet + No one denies to Keats, love of the world. + Remember his deliberate happiness. + + Ille. + + His art is happy, but who knows his mind? + I see a schoolboy, when I think of him, + With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window. + For certainly he sank into his grave + His senses and his heart unsatisfied, + And made, being poor, ailing, and ignorant.... + Shut out from all the luxury of the world, + Luxuriant song." + + + + +BOOK IV + +THE TRAGIC GENERATION + + + + +_THE TRAGIC GENERATION_ + + +I + +Two or three years after our return to Bedford Park _The Doll's House_ had +been played at the Royalty Theatre in Dean Street, the first Ibsen play to +be played in England, and somebody had given me a seat for the gallery. In +the middle of the first act, while the heroine was asking for macaroons, a +middle-aged washerwoman who sat in front of me, stood up and said to the +little boy at her side, "Tommy, if you promise to go home straight, we +will go now;" and at the end of the play, as I wandered through the +entrance hall, I heard an elderly critic murmur, "A series of +conversations terminated by an accident." I was divided in mind, I hated +the play; what was it but Carolus Durand, Bastien-Lepage, Huxley and +Tyndall, all over again; I resented being invited to admire dialogue so +close to modern educated speech that music and style were impossible. + +"Art is art because it is not nature," I kept repeating to myself, but how +could I take the same side with critic and washerwoman? As time passed +Ibsen became in my eyes the chosen author of very clever young +journalists, who, condemned to their treadmill of abstraction, hated music +and style; and yet neither I nor my generation could escape him because, +though we and he had not the same friends, we had the same enemies. I +bought his collected works in Mr. Archer's translation out of my thirty +shillings a week and carried them to and fro upon my journeys to Ireland +and Sligo, and Florence Farr, who had but one great gift, the most perfect +poetical elocution, became prominent as an Ibsen actress and had almost a +success in _Rosmersholm_, where there is symbolism and a stale odour of +spoilt poetry. She and I and half our friends found ourselves involved in +a quarrel with the supporters of old fashioned melodrama, and conventional +romance, and in the support of the new dramatists who wrote in what the +Daily Press chose to consider the manner of Ibsen. In 1894 she became +manageress of the Avenue Theatre with a play of Dr. Todhunter's, called +_The Comedy of Sighs_, and Mr Bernard Shaw's _Arms and the Man_. She asked +me to write a one act play for her niece, Miss Dorothy Paget, a girl of +eight or nine, to make her first stage appearance in; and I, with my Irish +Theatre in mind, wrote _The Land of Heart's Desire_, in some discomfort +when the child was theme, as I knew nothing of children, but with an +abundant mind when Mary Bruin was for I knew an Irish woman whose unrest +troubled me and lay beyond my comprehension. When she opened her theatre +she had to meet a hostile audience, almost as violent as that Synge met in +January, 1907, and certainly more brutal, for the Abbey audience had no +hatred for the players, and I think but little for Synge himself. Nor had +she the certainty of final victory to give her courage, for _The Comedy of +Sighs_ was a rambling story told with a little paradoxical wit. She had +brought the trouble upon herself perhaps, for always in revolt against her +own poetical gift, which now seemed obsolete, and against her own +Demeter-like face in the mirror, she had tried when interviewed by the +Press to shock and startle--to seem to desire enemies; and yet, unsure of +her own judgment being out of her own trade, had feared to begin with +Shaw's athletic wit, and now outraged convention saw its chance. For two +hours and a half, pit and gallery drowned the voices of the players with +boos and jeers that were meant to be bitter to the author who sat visible +to all in his box surrounded by his family, and to the actress struggling +bravely through her weary part; and then pit and gallery went home to +spread their lying story that the actress had a fit of hysterics in her +dressing-room. + +Todhunter had sat on to the end, and there were, I think, four acts of it, +listening to the howling of his enemies, while his friends slipped out one +by one, till one saw everywhere their empty seats, but nothing could +arouse the fighting instincts of that melancholy man. Next day I tried to +get him to publish his book of words with satirical designs and +illustrations, by Beardsley, who was just rising into fame, and an +introduction attacking the public, but though petulant and irascible he +was incapable of any emotion that could give life to a cause. He shared +the superstition still current in the theatre, that the public wants +sincere drama, but is kept from it by some conspiracy of managers or +newspapers, and could not get out of his head that the actors were to +blame. Shaw, whose turn came next, had foreseen all months before, and had +planned an opening that would confound his enemies. For the first few +minutes _Arms and the Man_ is crude melodrama and then just when the +audience are thinking how crude it is, it turns into excellent farce. At +the dress rehearsal, a dramatist who had his own quarrel with the public, +was taken in the noose; for at the first laugh he stood up, turned his +back on the stage, scowled at the audience, and even when everybody else +knew what turn the play had taken, continued to scowl, and order those +nearest to be silent. + +On the first night the whole pit and gallery, except certain members of +the Fabian Society, started to laugh at the author and then, discovering +that they themselves were being laughed at, sat there not converted--their +hatred was too bitter for that--but dumbfounded, while the rest of the +house cheered and laughed. In the silence that greeted the author after +the cry for a speech one man did indeed get his courage and boo loudly. "I +assure the gentleman in the gallery," was Shaw's answer, "that he and I +are of exactly the same opinion, but what can we do against a whole house +who are of the contrary opinion?" And from that moment Bernard Shaw became +the most formidable man in modern letters, and even the most drunken of +medical students knew it. My own play, which had been played with _The +Comedy of Sighs_, had roused no passions, but had pleased a sufficient +minority for Florence Farr to keep it upon the stage with _Arms and the +Man_, and I was in the theatre almost every night for some weeks. "Oh, +yes, the people seem to like _Arms and the Man_," said one of Mr Shaw's +players to me, "but we have just found out that we are all wrong. Mr Shaw +did really mean it quite seriously, for he has written a letter to say so, +and we must not play for laughs any more." Another night I found the +manager, triumphant and excited, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of +Edinburgh had been there, and the Duke of Edinburgh had spoken his dislike +out loud so that the whole stalls could hear, but the Prince of Wales had +been "very pleasant" and "got the Duke of Edinburgh away as soon as +possible." "They asked for me," he went on, "and the Duke of Edinburgh +kept on repeating, 'The man is mad,' meaning Mr Shaw, and the Prince of +Wales asked who Mr Shaw was, and what he meant by it." I myself was almost +as bewildered for though I came mainly to see how my own play went, and +for the first fortnight to vex my most patient actors with new lines, I +listened with excitement to see how the audience would like certain +passages of _Arms and the Man_. I hated it; it seemed to me inorganic, +logical straightness and not the crooked road of life and I stood aghast +before its energy as to-day before that of the Stone Drill by Mr. Epstein +or of some design by Mr Wyndham Lewis. He was right to claim Samuel Butler +for his master, for Butler was the first Englishman to make the discovery, +that it is possible to write with great effect without music, without +style, either good or bad, to eliminate from the mind all emotional +implication and to prefer plain water to every vintage, so much +metropolitan lead and solder to any tendril of the vine. Presently I had a +nightmare that I was haunted by a sewing machine, that clicked and shone, +but the incredible thing was that the machine smiled, smiled perpetually. +Yet I delighted in Shaw the formidable man. He could hit my enemies and +the enemies of all I loved, as I could never hit, as no living author that +was dear to me could ever hit. + +Florence Farr's way home was mine also for a part of the way, and it was +often of this that we talked, and sometimes, though not always, she would +share my hesitations, and for years to come I was to wonder whenever Shaw +became my topic, whether the cock crowed for my blame or for my praise. + + +II + +Shaw and Wilde, had no catastrophe come, would have long divided the stage +between them, though they were most unlike--for Wilde believed himself to +value nothing but words in their emotional associations, and he had turned +his style to a parade as though it were his show, and he Lord Mayor. + +I was at Sligo again and I saw the announcement of his action against Lord +Queensberry, when starting from my uncle's house to walk to Knocknarea to +dine with Cochrane of the Glen, as he was called, to distinguish him from +others of that name, an able old man. He had a relation, a poor mad girl, +who shared our meals, and at whom I shuddered. She would take a flower +from the vase in front of her and push it along the tablecloth towards any +male guest who sat near. The old man himself had strange opinions, born +not from any mental eccentricity, but from the solitude of his life; and a +freedom from all prejudice that was not of his own discovery. "The world +is getting more manly," he would say, "it has begun to drink port again," +or "Ireland is going to become prosperous. Divorced couples now choose +Ireland for a retreat, just as before Scotland became prosperous they +began to go there. There are a divorced wife and her lover living at the +other side of the mountain." I remember that I spoke that night of Wilde's +kindness to myself, said I did not believe him guilty, quoted the +psychologist Bain, who has attributed to every sensualist "a voluminous +tenderness," and described Wilde's hard brilliance, his dominating +self-possession. I considered him essentially a man of action, that he was +a writer by perversity and accident, and would have been more important as +soldier or politician; and I was certain that, guilty or not guilty, he +would prove himself a man. I was probably excited, and did most of the +talking, for if Cochrane had talked, I would have remembered an amusing +sentence or two; but he was certainly sympathetic. A couple of days later +I received a letter from Lionel Johnson, denouncing Wilde with great +bitterness. He had "a cold scientific intellect;" he got a "sense of +triumph and power; at every dinner-table he dominated, from the knowledge +that he was guilty of that sin which, more than any other possible to man, +would turn all those people against him if they but knew." He wrote in the +mood of his poem, _To the Destroyer of a Soul_, addressed to Wilde, as I +have always believed, though I know nothing of the circumstance that made +him write it. + +I might have known that Wilde's phantasy had taken some tragic turn, and +that he was meditating upon possible disaster, but one took all his words +for play--had he not called insincerity "a mere multiplication of the +personality" or some such words? I had met a man who had found him in a +barber's shop in Venice, and heard him explain, "I am having my hair +curled that I may resemble Nero;" and when, as editor of an Irish +anthology, I had asked leave to quote "Tread gently, she is near under the +snow," he had written that I might do so if I pleased, but his most +characteristic poem was that sonnet with the lines + + "Lo! with a little rod + I did but touch the honey's romance-- + And must I lose a soul's inheritance." + +When in London for my play I had asked news from an actor who had seen him +constantly. "He is in deep melancholy," was the answer. "He says that he +tries to sleep away as much of life as possible, only leaving his bed at +two or three in the afternoon, and spending the rest of the day at the +Café Royal. He has written what he calls the best short story in the +world, and will have it that he repeats to himself on getting out of bed +and before every meal. 'Christ came from a white plain to a purple city, +and as he passed through the first street, he heard voices overhead, and +saw a young man lying drunk upon a window sill, "Why do you waste your +soul in drunkenness?" He said. "Lord, I was a leper and You healed me, +what else can I do?" A little further through the town he saw a young man +following a harlot, and said, "Why do you dissolve your soul in +debauchery?" and the young man answered, "Lord, I was blind, and You +healed me, what else can I do?" At last in the middle of the city He saw +an old man crouching, weeping upon the ground, and when He asked why he +wept, the old man answered, "Lord, I was dead and You raised me into life, +what else can I do but weep?"'" + +Wilde published that story a little later, but spoiled it with the verbal +decoration of his epoch, and I have to repeat it to myself as I first +heard it, before I can see its terrible beauty. I no more doubt its +sincerity than I doubt that his parade of gloom, all that late rising, and +sleeping away his life, that elaborate playing with tragedy, was an +attempt to escape from an emotion by its exaggeration. He had three +successful plays running at once; he had been almost poor, and now, his +head full of Flaubert, found himself with ten thousand a year:--"Lord, I +was dead, and You raised me into life, what else can I do but weep." A +comedian, he was in the hands of those dramatists who understand nothing +but tragedy. + +A few days after the first production of my _Land of Heart's Desire_, I +had my last conversation with him. He had come into the theatre as the +curtain fell upon my play, and I knew that it was to ask my pardon that he +overwhelmed me with compliments; and yet I wonder if he would have chosen +those precise compliments, or spoken so extravagantly, but for the turn +his thoughts had taken: "Your story in _The National Observer_, _The +Crucifixion of the Outcast_, is sublime, wonderful, wonderful." + +Some business or other brought me to London once more and I asked various +Irish writers for letters of sympathy, and I was refused by none but +Edward Dowden, who gave me what I considered an irrelevant excuse--his +dislike for everything that Wilde had written. I heard that Wilde was at +his mother's house in Oakley Street, and I called there, but the Irish +servant told me, her face drawn and tragic as in the presence of death, +that he was not there, but that I could see his brother. Willie Wilde +received me with, "Who are you; what do you want?" but became all +friendship when I told him that I had brought letters of sympathy. He took +the bundle of letters in his hand, but said, "Do these letters urge him to +run away? Every friend he has is urging him to, but we have made up our +minds that he must stay and take his chance." "No," I said, "I certainly +do not think that he should run away, nor do those letters advise it." +"Letters from Ireland," he said. "Thank you, thank you. He will be glad to +get those letters, but I would keep them from him if they advised him to +run away." Then he threw himself back in his chair and began to talk with +incoherent emotion, and in phrases that echoed now and again his brother's +style at its worst; there were tear in his eyes, and he was, I think, +slightly intoxicated. "He could escape, oh, yes, he could escape--there is +a yacht in the Thames, and five thousand pounds to pay his bail--well, not +exactly in the Thames, but there is a yacht--oh, yes, he could escape, +even if I had to inflate a balloon in the back yard with my own hand, but +he has resolved to stay, to face it out, to stand the music like Christ. +You must have heard--it is not necessary to go into detail--but he and I, +we have not been friends; but he came to me like a wounded stag, and I +took him in." "After his release"--after the failure of his action against +Lord Queensberry, I think--"Stewart Headlam engaged a room at an hotel and +brought him there under another name, but the manager came up and said, +'Are you Mr. Wilde?' You know what my brother is, you know how he would +answer that. He said, 'Yes, I am Oscar Wilde,' and the manager said he +must not stay. The same thing happened in hotel after hotel, and at last +he made up his mind to come here. It is his vanity that has brought all +this disgrace upon him; they swung incense before him." He dwelt upon the +rhythm of the words as his brother would have done--"They swung it before +his heart." His first emotion at the thought of the letters over, he +became more simple, and explained that his brother considered that his +crime was not the vice itself, but that he should have brought such misery +upon his wife and children, and that he was bound to accept any chance, +however slight, that might reestablish his position. "If he is acquitted," +he said, "he will stay out of England for a few years, and can then gather +his friends about him once more--even if he is condemned he will purge his +offence--but if he runs away he will lose every friend that he has." I +heard later, from whom I forget now, that Lady Wilde had said, "If you +stay, even if you go to prison, you will always be my son, it will make no +difference to my affection, but if you go, I will never speak to you +again." While I was there, some woman who had just seen him--Willie +Wilde's wife, I think--came in, and threw herself in a chair, and said in +an exhausted voice, "It is all right now, he has made up his mind to go to +prison if necessary." Before his release, two years later, his brother and +mother were dead, and a little later his wife, struck by paralysis during +his imprisonment, I think, was dead, too; and he himself, his constitution +ruined by prison life, followed quickly; but I have never doubted, even +for an instant, that he made the right decision, and that he owes to that +decision half of his renown. + +Cultivated London, that before the action against Lord Queensberry had +mocked his pose and affected style, and refused to acknowledge his wit, +was now full of his advocates, though I did not meet a single man who +considered him innocent. One old enemy of his overtook me in the street +and began to praise his audacity, his self-possession. "He has made," he +said, "of infamy a new Thermopylae." I had written in reply to Lionel +Johnson's letter that I regretted Wilde's downfall but not that of his +imitators, but Johnson had changed with the rest. "Why do you not regret +the fall of Wilde's imitators"--I had but tried to share what I thought +his opinion--"They were worthless, but should have been left to +criticism." Wilde himself was a martyr in his eyes, and when I said that +tragedy might give his art a greater depth, he would not even grant a +martyr's enemies that poor merit, and thought Wilde would produce, when +it was all over, some comedy exactly like the others, writing from an art +where events could leave no trace. Everywhere one met writers and artists +who praised his wit and eloquence in the witness box, or repeated some +private saying. Willie Redmond told of finding him, to his astonishment, +at the conversazione of some theatrical society, standing amid an +infuriated crowd, mocking with more than all his old satirical wit the +actors and their country. He had said to a well-known painter during one +or other of the trials, "My poor brother writes to me that he is defending +me all over London; my poor, dear brother, he could compromise a steam +engine." His brother, too, had suffered a change, for, if rumour did not +wrong him, "the wounded stag" had not been at all graciously received. +"Thank God my vices were decent," had been his comment, and refusing to +sit at the same table, he had dined at some neighbouring hotel at his +brother's expense. His successful brother who had scorned him for a +drunken ne'er-do-well was now at his mercy, and besides, he probably +shared, until tragedy awoke another self, the rage and contempt that +filled the crowds in the street, and all men and women who had an +over-abundant normal sexual instinct. "Wilde will never lift his head +again," said the art critic, Gleeson White, "for he has against him all +men of infamous life." When the verdict was announced the harlots in the +street outside danced upon the pavement. + + +III + +Somewhere about 1450, though later in some parts of Europe by a hundred +years or so, and in some earlier, men attained to personality in great +numbers, "Unity of Being," and became like a "perfectly proportioned human +body," and as men so fashioned held places of power, their nations had it +too, prince and ploughman sharing that thought and feeling. What +afterwards showed for rifts and cracks were there already, but imperious +impulse held all together. Then the scattering came, the seeding of the +poppy, bursting of pea-pod, and for a time personality seemed but the +stronger for it. Shakespeare's people make all things serve their passion, +and that passion is for the moment the whole energy of their being--birds, +beasts, men, women, landscape, society, are but symbols and metaphors, +nothing is studied in itself, the mind is a dark well, no surface, depth +only. The men that Titian painted, the men that Jongsen painted, even the +men of Van Dyck, seemed at moments like great hawks at rest. In the Dublin +National Gallery there hung, perhaps there still hangs, upon the same +wall, a portrait of some Venetian gentleman by Strozzi, and Mr. Sargent's +painting of President Wilson. Whatever thought broods in the dark eyes of +that Venetian gentleman, has drawn its life from his whole body; it feeds +upon it as the flame feeds upon the candle--and should that thought be +changed, his pose would change, his very cloak would rustle for his whole +body thinks. President Wilson lives only in the eyes, which are steady and +intent; the flesh about the mouth is dead, and the hands are dead, and the +clothes suggest no movement of his body, nor any movement but that of the +valet, who has brushed and folded in mechanical routine. There, all was an +energy flowing outward from the nature itself; here, all is the anxious +study and slight deflection of external force; there man's mind and body +were predominantly subjective; here all is objective, using those words +not as philosophy uses them, but as we use them in conversation. + +The bright part of the moon's disk, to adopt the symbolism of a certain +poem, is subjective mind, and the dark, objective mind, and we have eight +and twenty Phases for our classification of mankind, and of the movement +of his thought. At the first Phase--the night where there is no +moonlight--all is objective, while when, upon the fifteenth night, the +moon comes to the full, there is only subjective mind. The mid-renaissance +could but approximate to the full moon "For there is no human life at the +full or the dark," but we may attribute to the next three nights of the +moon the men of Shakespeare, of Titian, of Strozzi, and of Van Dyck, and +watch them grow more reasonable, more orderly, less turbulent, as the +nights pass; and it is well to find before the fourth--the nineteenth moon +counting from the start--a sudden change, as when a cloud becomes rain, or +water freezes, for the great transitions are sudden; popular, typical men +have grown more ugly and more argumentative; the face that Van Dyck called +a fatal face has faded before Cromwell's warty opinionated head. +Henceforth no mind made like "a perfectly proportioned human body" shall +sway the public, for great men must live in a portion of themselves, +become professional and abstract; but seeing that the moon's third quarter +is scarce passed, that abstraction has attained but not passed its climax, +that a half, as I affirm it, of the twenty-second night still lingers, +they may subdue and conquer; cherish, even, some Utopian dream; spread +abstraction ever further till thought is but a film, and there is no dark +depth any more, surface only. But men who belong by nature to the nights +near to the full are still born, a tragic minority, and how shall they do +their work when too ambitious for a private station, except as Wilde of +the nineteenth Phase, as my symbolism has it, did his work. He understood +his weakness, true personality was impossible, for that is born in +solitude, and at his moon one is not solitary; he must project himself +before the eyes of others, and, having great ambition, before some great +crowd of eyes; but there is no longer any great crowd that cares for his +true thought. He must humour and cajole and pose, take worn-out stage +situations, for he knows that he may be as romantic as he please, so long +as he does not believe in his romance, and all that he may get their ears +for a few strokes of contemptuous wit in which he does believe. + +We Rhymers did not humour and cajole; but it was not wholly from demerit, +it was in part because of different merit, that he refused our exile. +Shaw, as I understand him, has no true quarrel with his time, its moon and +his almost exactly coincide. He is quite content to exchange Narcissus and +his Pool for the signal box at a railway junction, where goods and +travellers pass perpetually upon their logical glittering road. Wilde was +a monarchist, though content that monarchy should turn demagogue for its +own safety, and he held a theatre by the means whereby he held a London +dinner table. "He who can dominate a London dinner table," he had boasted, +"can dominate the world." While Shaw has but carried his street-corner +socialist eloquence on to the stage, and in him one discovers, in his +writing and his public speech, as once--before their outline had been +softened by prosperity or the passage of the years--in his clothes and in +his stiff joints, the civilization that Sargent's picture has explored. +Neither his crowd nor he have yet made that discovery that brought +President Wilson so near his death, that the moon draws to its fourth +quarter. But what happens to the individual man whose moon has come to +that fourth quarter, and what to the civilization...? + +I can but remember pipe music to-night, though I can half hear beyond it +in the memory a weightier music, but this much at any rate is certain--the +dream of my early manhood, that a modern nation can return to Unity of +Culture, is false; though it may be we can achieve it for some small +circle of men and women, and there leave it till the moon bring round its +century. + + "The cat went here and there + And the moon spun round like a top, + And the nearest kin of the moon + The creeping cat looked up. + + * * * * + + Minnaloushe creeps through the grass + From moonlit place to place; + The sacred moon overhead + Has taken a new phase. + Does Minnaloushe know that her pupils + Will pass from change to change, + And that from round to crescent + From crescent to round they range? + Minnaloushe creeps through the grass + Alone, important and wise, + And lifts to the changing moon + Her changing eyes." + + +IV + +Henley's troubles and infirmities were growing upon him. He, too, an +ambitious, formidable man, who showed alike in his practice and in his +theory, in his lack of sympathy for Rossetti and Landor, for instance, +that he never understood how small a fragment of our own nature can be +brought to perfect expression, nor that even but with great toil, in a +much divided civilization; though, doubtless, if our own Phase be right, a +fragment may be an image of the whole, the moon's still scarce crumbled +image, as it were, in a glass of wine. He would be, and have all poets be, +a true epitome of the whole mass, a Herrick and Dr. Johnson in the same +body and because this--not so difficult before the Mermaid closed its +door--is no longer possible, his work lacks music, is abstract, as even an +actor's movement can be when the thought of doing is plainer to his mind +than the doing itself: the straight line from cup to lip, let us say, more +plain than the hand's own sensation weighed down by that heavy spillable +cup. I think he was content, when he had called before our eyes--before +the too understanding eyes of his chosen crowd--the violent burly man that +he had dreamed, content with the mere suggestion, and so did not work long +enough at his verses. He disliked Victor Hugo as much as he did Rossetti, +and yet Rossetti's translation from _Les Burgraves_, because of its mere +technical mastery, out-sings Henley in his own song-- + + "My mother is dead; God's patience wears; + It seems my Chaplain will not have done. + Love on: who cares? + Who cares? Love on." + +I can read his poetry with emotion, but I read it for some glimpse of what +he might have been as Border balladist, or Cavalier, or of what he +actually was, not as poet but as man. He had what Wilde lacked, even in +his ruin, passion, was maybe as passionate as some great man of action, as +Parnell, let us say. When he and Stevenson quarrelled, he cried over it +with some woman or other, and his notorious article was but for vengeance +upon Mrs. Stevenson, who had arranged for the public eye, what he +considered an imaginary figure, with no resemblance to the gay companion +who had founded his life, to that life's injury, upon "The august, the +immortal musketeers." She had caused the quarrel, as he believed, and now +she had robbed him over again, by blotting from the world's memory the +friend of his youth; and because he believed it I read those angry +paragraphs with but deeper sympathy for the writer; and I think that the +man who has left them out of Henley's collected writings has wronged his +memory, as Mrs. Stevenson wronged the memory of Stevenson. + +He was no contemplative man, no pleased possessor of wooden models and +paper patterns, but a great passionate man, and no friend of his would +have him pictured otherwise. I saw little of him in later years, but I +doubt if he was ever the same after the death of his six-year old +daughter. Few passages of his verse touch me as do those few mentions of +her though they lack precision of word and sound. When she is but a hope, +he prays that she may have his 'gift of life' and his wife's 'gift of +love,' and when she is but a few months old he murmurs over her sleep-- + + When you wake in your crib, + You an inch of experience-- + Vaulted about + With the wonder of darkness; + Wailing and striving + To reach from your feebleness + Something you feel + Will be good to and cherish you. + +And now he commends some friend "boyish and kind, and shy," who greeted +him, and greeted his wife, "that day we brought our beautiful one to lie +in the green peace" and who is now dead himself, and after that he speaks +of love "turned by death to longing" and so, to an enemy. + +When I spoke to him of his child's death he said, "she was a person of +genius; she had the genius of the mind, and the genius of the body." And +later I heard him talk of her as a man talks of something he cannot keep +silence over because it is in all his thoughts. I can remember, too, his +talking of some book of natural history he had read, that he might be able +to answer her questions. + +He had a house now at Mortlake on the Thames with a great ivy tod +shadowing door and window, and one night there he shocked and startled a +roomful of men by showing how far he could be swept beyond our reach in +reveries of affection. The dull man, who had tried to put Wilde out of +countenance, suddenly said to the whole room, roused by I cannot remember +what incautious remark of mine made to some man at my side: "Yeats +believes in magic; what nonsense." Henley said, "No, it may not be +nonsense; black magic is all the go in Paris now." And then turning +towards me with a changed sound in his voice, "It is just a game, isn't +it." I replied, not noticing till too late his serious tone, and wishing +to avoid discussion in the dull man's company, "One has had a vision; one +wants to have another, that is all." Then Henley said, speaking in a very +low voice, "I want to know how I am to get to my daughter. I was sitting +here the other night when she came into the room and played round the +table and went out again. Then I saw that the door was shut and I knew +that I had seen a vision." There was an embarrassed silence, and then +somebody spoke of something else and we began to discuss it hurriedly and +eagerly. + + +V + +I came now to be more in London, never missing the meetings of the +Rhymers' Club, nor those of the council of the Irish Literary Society, +where I constantly fought out our Irish quarrels and pressed upon the +unwilling Gavan Duffy the books of our new movement. The Irish members of +Parliament looked upon us with some hostility because we had made it a +matter of principle never to put a politician in the chair, and upon other +grounds. One day, some old Irish member of Parliament made perhaps his +only appearance at a gathering of members. He recited with great emotion a +ballad of his own composition in the manner of Young Ireland, repeating +over his sacred names, Wolfe Tone, Emmet, and Owen Roe, and mourning that +new poets and new movements should have taken something of their +sacredness away. The ballad had no literary merit, but I went home with a +troubled conscience; and for a dozen years perhaps, till I began to see +the result of our work in a deepened perception of all those things that +strengthen race, that trouble remained. I had in mind that old politician +as I wrote but the other day-- + + "Our part + To murmur name upon name + As a mother names her child." + +The Rhymers had begun to break up in tragedy, though we did not know that +till the play had finished. I have never found a full explanation of that +tragedy; sometimes I have remembered that, unlike the Victorian poets, +almost all were poor men, and had made it a matter of conscience to turn +from every kind of money-making that prevented good writing, and that +poverty meant strain, and for the most part, a refusal of domestic life. +Then I have remembered that Johnson had private means, and that others who +came to tragic ends, had wives and families. Another day I think that +perhaps our form of lyric, our insistence upon emotion which has no +relation to any public interest, gathered together, overwrought, unstable +men; and remember the moment after that the first to go out of his mind +had no lyrical gift, and that we valued him mainly because he seemed a +witty man of the world; and that a little later another who seemed, alike +as man and writer, dull and formless, went out of his mind, first burning +poems which I cannot believe would have proved him as the one man who saw +them claims, a man of genius. The meetings were always decorous and often +dull; some one would read out a poem and we would comment, too politely +for the criticism to have great value; and yet that we read out our poems, +and thought that they could be so tested, was a definition of our aims. +_Love's Nocturne_ is one of the most beautiful poems in the world, but no +one can find out its beauty, so intricate its thought and metaphor, till +he has read it over several times, or often stopped his reading to think +out the meaning of some passage, and the _Faustine_ of Swinburne, where +many separate verses are powerful and musical, could not, were it read +out, be understood with pleasure, however clearly it were read, because it +has no more logical structure than a bag of shot. I shall, however, +remember all my life that evening when Lionel Johnson read or spoke aloud +in his musical monotone, where meaning and cadence found the most precise +elocution, his poem suggested "by the Statue of King Charles at Charing +Cross." It was as though I listened to a great speech. Nor will that poem +be to me again what it was that first night. For long I only knew Dowson's +_O Mors_, to quote but the first words of its long title, and his +_Villanelle of Sunset_ from his reading, and it was because of the desire +to hold them in my hand that I suggested the first _Book of The Rhymers' +Club_. They were not speech but perfect song, though song for the speaking +voice. It was perhaps our delight in poetry that was, before all else, +speech or song, and could hold the attention of a fitting audience like a +good play or good conversation, that made Francis Thompson, whom we +admired so much--before the publication of his first poem I had brought to +the Cheshire Cheese the proof sheets of his _Ode to the Setting Sun_, his +first published poem--come but once and refuse to contribute to our book. +Preoccupied with his elaborate verse, he may have seen only that which we +renounced, and thought what seemed to us simplicity, mere emptiness. To +some members this simplicity was perhaps created by their tumultuous +lives, they praised a desired woman and hoped that she would find amid +their praise her very self, or at worst, their very passion; and knew that +she, ignoramus that she was, would have slept in the middle of _Love's +Nocturne_, lofty and tender though it be. Woman herself was still in our +eyes, for all that, romantic and mysterious, still the priestess of her +shrine, our emotions remembering the _Lilith_ and the _Sybilla Palmifera_ +of Rossetti; for as yet that sense of comedy, which was soon to mould the +very fashion plates, and, in the eyes of men of my generation, to destroy +at last the sense of beauty itself, had scarce begun to show here and +there, in slight subordinate touches among the designs of great painters +and craftsmen. It could not be otherwise, for Johnson's favourite phrase, +that life is ritual, expressed something that was in some degree in all +our thoughts, and how could life be ritual if woman had not her symbolical +place? + +If Rossetti was a sub-conscious influence, and perhaps the most powerful +of all, we looked consciously to Pater for our philosophy. Three or four +years ago I re-read _Marius the Epicurean_, expecting to find I cared for +it no longer, but it still seemed to me, as I think it seemed to us all, +the only great prose in modern English, and yet I began to wonder if it, +or the attitude of mind of which it was the noblest expression, had not +caused the disaster of my friends. It taught us to walk upon a rope, +tightly stretched through serene air, and we were left to keep our feet +upon a swaying rope in a storm. Pater had made us learned; and, whatever +we might be elsewhere, ceremonious and polite, and distant in our +relations to one another, and I think none knew as yet that Dowson, who +seemed to drink so little and had so much dignity and reserve, was +breaking his heart for the daughter of the keeper of an Italian eating +house, in dissipation and drink; and that he might that very night sleep +upon a sixpenny bed in a doss house. It seems to me that even yet, and I +am speaking of 1894 and 1895, we knew nothing of one another, but the +poems that we read and criticised; perhaps I have forgotten or was too +much in Ireland for knowledge, but of this I am certain, we shared nothing +but the artistic life. Sometimes Johnson and Symons would visit our sage +at Oxford, and I remember Johnson, whose reports however were not always +to be trusted, returning with a sentence that long ran in my head. He had +noticed books on political economy among Pater's books, and Pater had +said, "Everything that has occupied man, for any length of time, is worthy +of our study." Perhaps it was because of Pater's influence that we, with +an affectation of learning, claimed the whole past of literature for our +authority, instead of finding it like the young men in the age of comedy +that followed us, in some new, and so still unrefuted authority; that we +preferred what seemed still uncrumbled rock, to the still unspotted foam; +that we were traditional alike in our dress, in our manner, in our +opinions, and in our style. + +Why should men, who spoke their opinions in low voices, as though they +feared to disturb the readers in some ancient library, and timidly as +though they knew that all subjects had long since been explored, all +questions long since decided in books whereon the dust settled--live lives +of such disorder and seek to rediscover in verse the syntax of impulsive +common life? Was it that we lived in what is called "an age of transition" +and so lacked coherence, or did we but pursue antithesis? + + +VI + +All things, apart from love and melancholy, were a study to us; Horne +already learned in Botticelli had begun to boast that when he wrote of him +there would be no literature, all would be but learning; Symons, as I +wrote when I first met him, studied the music halls, as he might have +studied the age of Chaucer; while I gave much time to what is called the +Christian Cabala; nor was there any branch of knowledge Johnson did not +claim for his own. When I had first gone to see him in 1888 or 1889, at +the Charlotte Street house, I had called about five in the afternoon, but +the man servant that he shared with Horne and Image, told me that he was +not yet up, adding with effusion "he is always up for dinner at seven." +This habit of breakfasting when others dined had been started by insomnia, +but he came to defend it for its own sake. When I asked if it did not +separate him from men and women he replied, "In my library I have all the +knowledge of the world that I need." He had certainly a considerable +library, far larger than that of any young man of my acquaintance, so +large that he wondered if it might not be possible to find some way of +hanging new shelves from the ceiling like chandeliers. That room was +always a pleasure to me, with its curtains of grey corduroy over door and +window and book case, and its walls covered with brown paper, a fashion +invented, I think, by Horne, that was soon to spread. There was a portrait +of Cardinal Newman, looking a little like Johnson himself, some religious +picture by Simeon Solomon, and works upon theology in Greek and Latin and +a general air of neatness and severity; and talking there by candle light +it never seemed very difficult to murmur Villiers de L'isle Adam's proud +words, "As for living--our servants will do that for us." Yet I can now +see that Johnson himself in some hidden, half-conscious part of him +desired the world he had renounced, desired it as an object of study. I +was often puzzled as to when and where he could have met the famous men or +beautiful women, whose conversation, often wise, and always appropriate, +he quoted so often, and it was not till a little before his death that I +discovered that these conversations were imaginary. He never altered a +detail of speech, and would quote what he had invented for Gladstone or +Newman for years without amplification or amendment, with what seemed a +scholar's accuracy. His favourite quotations were from Newman, whom, I +believe, he had never met, though I can remember nothing now but Newman's +greeting to Johnson, "I have always considered the profession of a man of +letters a third order of the priesthood!" and these quotations became so +well known that at Newman's death, the editor of _The Nineteenth Century_ +asked them for publication. Because of his delight in all that was formal +and arranged he objected to the public quotation of private conversation +even after death, and this scruple helped his refusal. Perhaps this +dreaming was made a necessity by his artificial life, yet before that life +began he wrote from Oxford to his Tory but flattered family, that as he +stood mounted upon a library ladder in his rooms taking a book from a +shelf, Gladstone, about to pass the open door on his way upstairs to some +college authority, had stopped, hesitated, come into the room and there +spent an hour of talk. Presently it was discovered that Gladstone had not +been near Oxford on the date given; yet he quoted that conversation +without variation of a word until the end of his life, and I think +believed in it as firmly as did his friends. These conversations were +always admirable in their drama, but never too dramatic or even too +polished to lose their casual accidental character; they were the +phantasmagoria through which his philosophy of life found its expression. +If he made his knowledge of the world out of his phantasy, his knowledge +of tongues and books was certainly very great; and yet was that knowledge +as great as he would have us believe? Did he really know Welsh, for +instance, had he really as he told me, made his only love song, his +incomparable _Morfydd_ out of three lines in Welsh, heard sung by a woman +at her door on a walking tour in Wales, or did he but wish to hide that he +shared in their emotion? + + "O, what are the winds? + And what are the waters? + Mine are your eyes." + +He wanted us to believe that all things, his poetry with its Latin weight, +his religion with its constant reference to the Fathers of the Church, or +to the philosophers of the Church, almost his very courtesy were a study +and achievement of the intellect. Arthur Symons' poetry made him angry, +because it would substitute for that achievement, Parisian impressionism, +"a London fog, the blurred tawny lamplight, the red omnibus, the dreary +rain, the depressing mud, the glaring gin shop, the slatternly shivering +women, three dexterous stanzas telling you that and nothing more." I, on +the other hand, angered him by talking as if art existed for emotion only, +and for refutation he would quote the close of the Aeschylean Trilogy, +the trial of Orestes on the Acropolis. Yet at moments the thought came to +him that intellect, as he conceived it, was too much a thing of many +books, that it lacked lively experience. "Yeats," he has said to me, "You +need ten years in a library, but I have need of ten years in the +wilderness." When he said "Wilderness" I am certain, however, that he +thought of some historical, some bookish desert, the Thebaid, or the lands +about the Mareotic sea. His best poetry is natural and impassioned, but he +spoke little of it, but much about his prose, and would contend that I had +no right to consider words made to read, less natural than words made to +be spoken; and he delighted in a sentence in his book on Thomas Hardy, +that kept its vitality, as he contended, though two pages long. He +punctuated after the manner of the seventeenth century and was always +ready to spend an hour discussing the exact use of the colon. "One should +use a colon where other people use a semi-colon, a semi-colon where other +people use a comma," was, I think, but a condescension to my ignorance for +the matter was plainly beset with many subtleties. + + +VII + +Not till some time in 1895 did I think he could ever drink too much for +his sobriety--though what he drank would certainly be too much for that of +most of the men whom I knew--I no more doubted his self-control, though we +were very intimate friends, than I doubted his memories of Cardinal +Newman. The discovery that he did was a great shock to me, and, I think, +altered my general view of the world. I had, by my friendship with +O'Leary, by my fight against Gavan Duffy, drawn the attention of a group +of men, who at that time controlled what remained of the old Fenian +movement in England and Scotland; and at a moment when an attempt, that +came to nothing, was being made to combine once more our constitutional +and unconstitutional politics, I had been asked to represent them at some +convention in the United States. I went to consult Johnson, whom I found +sitting at a table with books about him. I was greatly tempted, because I +was promised complete freedom of speech; and I was at the time enraged by +some wild articles published by some Irish American newspaper, suggesting +the burning down of the houses of Irish landlords. Nine years later I was +lecturing in America, and a charming old Irishman came to see me with an +interview to write, and we spent, and as I think in entire neglect of his +interview, one of the happiest hours I have ever spent, comparing our +tales of the Irish fairies, in which he very firmly believed. When he had +gone I looked at his card, to discover that he was the writer of that +criminal incitement. I told Johnson that if I had a week to decide in I +would probably decide to go, but as they had only given me three days, I +had refused. He would not hear of my refusal with so much awaiting my +condemnation; and that condemnation would be effective with Catholics, for +he would find me passages in the Fathers, condemning every kind of +political crime, that of the dynamiter and the incendiary especially. I +asked how could the Fathers have condemned weapons they had never heard +of, but those weapons, he contended, were merely developments of old +methods and weapons; they had decided all in principle; but I need not +trouble myself about the matter, for he would put into my hands before I +sailed the typewritten statement of their doctrine, dealing with the +present situation in the utmost detail. He seemed perfectly logical, but a +little more confident and impassioned than usual, and I had, I think, +promised to accept--when he rose from his chair, took a step towards me in +his eagerness, and fell on to the floor; and I saw that he was drunk. From +that on, he began to lose control of his life; he shifted from Charlotte +Street, where, I think, there was fear that he would overset lamp or +candle and burn the house, to Gray's Inn, and from Gray's Inn to old +rambling rooms in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and at last one called to find his +outer door shut, the milk on the doorstep sour. Sometimes I would urge him +to put himself, as Jack Nettleship had done, into an Institute. One day +when I had been very urgent, he spoke of "a craving that made every atom +of his body cry out" and said the moment after, "I do not want to be +cured," and a moment after that, "In ten years I shall be penniless and +shabby, and borrow half-crowns from friends." He seemed to contemplate a +vision that gave him pleasure, and now that I look back, I remember that +he once said to me that Wilde got, perhaps, an increase of pleasure and +excitement from the degradation of that group of beggars and blackmailers +where he sought his pathics, and I remember, too, his smile at my +surprise, as though he spoke of psychological depths I could never enter. +Did the austerity, the melancholy of his thoughts, that spiritual ecstasy +which he touched at times, heighten, as complementary colours heighten one +another, not only the Vision of Evil, but its fascination? Was it only +Villon, or did Dante also feel the fascination of evil, when shown in its +horror, and, as it were, judged and lost; and what proud man does not +feel temptation strengthened from the certainty that his intellect is not +deceived? + + +VIII + +I began now to hear stories of Dowson, whom I knew only at the Rhymers, or +through some chance meeting at Johnson's. I was indolent and +procrastinating, and when I thought of asking him to dine, or taking some +other step towards better knowledge, he seemed to be in Paris, or at +Dieppe. He was drinking, but, unlike Johnson, who, at the autopsy after +his death, was discovered never to have grown, except in the brain, after +his fifteenth year, he was full of sexual desire. Johnson and he were +close friends, and Johnson lectured him out of the Fathers upon chastity, +and boasted of the great good done him thereby. But the rest of us counted +the glasses emptied in their talk. I began to hear now in some detail of +the restaurant-keeper's daughter, and of her marriage to the waiter, and +of that weekly game of cards with her that filled so great a share of +Dowson's emotional life. Sober, he would look at no other woman, it was +said, but, drunk, would desire whatever woman chance brought, clean or +dirty. + +Johnson was stern by nature, strong by intellect, and always, I think, +deliberately picked his company, but Dowson seemed gentle, affectionate, +drifting. His poetry shows how sincerely he felt the fascination of +religion, but his religion had certainly no dogmatic outline, being but a +desire for a condition of virginal ecstasy. If it is true, as Arthur +Symons, his very close friend, has written, that he loved the +restaurant-keeper's daughter for her youth, one may be almost certain +that he sought from religion some similar quality, something of that which +the angels find who move perpetually, as Swedenborg has said, towards "the +dayspring of their youth." Johnson's poetry, like Johnson himself before +his last decay, conveys an emotion of joy, of intellectual clearness, of +hard energy; he gave us of his triumph; while Dowson's poetry is sad, as +he himself seemed, and pictures his life of temptation and defeat, + + "Unto us they belong + Us the bitter and gay, + Wine and women and song." + +Their way of looking at their intoxication showed their characters. +Johnson, who could not have written _Dark Angel_ if he did not suffer from +remorse, showed to his friends an impenitent face, and defeated me when I +tried to prevent the foundation of an Irish convivial club--it was brought +to an end after one meeting by the indignation of the members' +wives--whereas the last time I saw Dowson he was pouring out a glass of +whiskey for himself in an empty corner of my room and murmuring over and +over in what seemed automatic apology "The first to-day." + + +IX + +Two men are always at my side, Lionel Johnson and John Synge whom I was to +meet a little later; but Johnson is to me the more vivid in memory, +possibly because of the external finish, the clearly-marked lineaments of +his body, which seemed but to express the clarity of his mind. I think +Dowson's best verse immortal, bound, that is, to outlive famous novels +and plays and learned histories and other discursive things, but he was +too vague and gentle for my affections. I understood him too well, for I +had been like him but for the appetite that made me search out strong +condiments. Though I cannot explain what brought others of my generation +to such misfortune, I think that (falling backward upon my parable of the +moon) I can explain some part of Dowson's and Johnson's dissipation-- + + "What portion in the world can the artist have, + Who has awaked from the common dream, + But dissipation and despair?" + +When Edmund Spencer described the islands of Phaedria and of Acrasia he +aroused the indignation of Lord Burleigh, "that rugged forehead" and Lord +Burleigh was in the right if morality were our only object. + +In those islands certain qualities of beauty, certain forms of sensuous +loveliness were separated from all the general purposes of life, as they +had not been hitherto in European literature--and would not be again, for +even the historical process has its ebb and flow, till Keats wrote his +_Endymion_. I think that the movement of our thought has more and more so +separated certain images and regions of the mind, and that these images +grow in beauty as they grow in sterility. Shakespeare leaned, as it were, +even as craftsman, upon the general fate of men and nations, had about him +the excitement of the playhouse; and all poets, including Spencer in all +but a few pages, until our age came, and when it came almost all, have had +some propaganda or traditional doctrine to give companionship with their +fellows. Had not Matthew Arnold his faith in what he described as the +best thought of his generation? Browning his psychological curiosity, +Tennyson, as before him Shelley and Wordsworth, moral values that were not +aesthetic values? But Coleridge of the _Ancient Mariner_, and _Kubla +Khan_, and Rossetti in all his writings made what Arnold has called that +"morbid effort," that search for "perfection of thought and feeling, and +to unite this to perfection of form," sought this new, pure beauty, and +suffered in their lives because of it. The typical men of the classical +age (I think of Commodus, with his half-animal beauty, his cruelty, and +his caprice), lived public lives, pursuing curiosities of appetite, and so +found in Christianity, with its Thebaid and its Mariotic Sea the needed +curb. But what can the Christian confessor say to those who more and more +must make all out of the privacy of their thought, calling up perpetual +images of desire, for he cannot say "Cease to be artist, cease to be +poet," where the whole life is art and poetry, nor can he bid men leave +the world, who suffer from the terrors that pass before shut-eyes. +Coleridge, and Rossetti though his dull brother did once persuade him that +he was an agnostic, were devout Christians, and Steinbock and Beardsley +were so towards their lives' end, and Dowson and Johnson always, and yet I +think it but deepened despair and multiplied temptation. + + "Dark Angel, with thine aching lust, + To rid the world of penitence: + Malicious angel, who still dost + My soul such subtil violence! + + When music sounds, then changest thou + A silvery to a sultry fire: + Nor will thine envious heart allow + Delight untortured by desire. + + Through thee, the gracious Muses turn + To Furies, O mine Enemy! + And all the things of beauty burn + With flames of evil ecstasy. + + Because of thee, the land of dreams + Becomes a gathering place of fears: + Until tormented slumber seems + One vehemence of useless tears." + +Why are these strange souls born everywhere to-day? with hearts that +Christianity, as shaped by history, cannot satisfy. Our love letters wear +out our love; no school of painting outlasts its founders, every stroke of +the brush exhausts the impulse, Pre-Raphaelitism had some twenty years; +impressionism thirty perhaps. Why should we believe that religion can +never bring round its antithesis? Is it true that our air is disturbed, as +Malarmé said, by "the trembling of the veil of the temple," or "that our +whole age is seeking to bring forth a sacred book?" Some of us thought +that book near towards the end of last century, but the tide sank again. + + +X + +I do not know whether John Davidson, whose life also was tragic, made that +"morbid effort," that search for "perfection of thought and feeling," for +he is hidden behind failure, to unite it "to perfection of form." At +eleven one morning I met him in the British Museum reading room, probably +in 1894, when I was in London for the production of _The Land of Heart's +Desire_, but certainly after some long absence from London. "Are you +working here?" I said; "No," he said, "I am loafing, for I have finished +my day's work." "What, already?" "I work an hour a day--I cannot work +longer without exhaustion, and even as it is, if I meet anybody and get +into talk, I cannot write the next day; that is why I loaf when my work is +finished." No one had ever doubted his industry; he had supported his wife +and family for years by "devilling" many hours a day for some popular +novelist. "What work is it?" I said. "I am writing verse," he answered. "I +had been writing prose for a long time, and then one day I thought I might +just as well write what I liked, as I must starve in any case. It was the +luckiest thought I ever had, for my agent now gets me forty pounds for a +ballad, and I made three hundred out of my last book of verse." + +He was older by ten years than his fellow Rhymers; a national schoolmaster +from Scotland, he had been dismissed, he told us, for asking for a rise in +his salary, and had come to London with his wife and children. He looked +older than his years. "Ellis," he had said, "how old are you?" "Fifty," +Edwin Ellis replied, or whatever his age was. "Then I will take off my +wig. I never take off my wig when there is a man under thirty in the +room." He had endured and was to endure again, a life of tragic penury, +which was made much harder by the conviction that the world was against +him, that he was refused for some reason his rightful position. Ellis +thought that he pined even for social success, and I that his Scots +jealousy kept him provincial and but half articulate. + +During the quarrel over Parnell's grave a quotation from Goethe ran +through the papers, describing our Irish jealousy: "The Irish seem to me +like a pack of hounds, always dragging down some noble stag." But I do not +think we object to distinction for its own sake; if we kill the stag, it +is that we may carry off his head and antlers. "The Irish people," O'Leary +used to say, "do not know good from bad in any art, but they do not hate +the good once it is pointed out to them because it is good." An infallible +Church, with its Mass in Latin, and its mediaeval philosophy, and our +Protestant social prejudice, have kept our ablest men from levelling +passions; but Davidson with a jealousy, which may be Scottish, seeing that +Carlyle had it, was quick to discover sour grapes. He saw in delicate, +laborious, discriminating taste, an effeminate pedantry, and would, when +that mood was on him, delight in all that seemed healthy, popular, and +bustling. Once when I had praised Herbert Horne for his knowledge and his +taste, he burst out, "If a man must be a connoisseur, let him be a +connoisseur in women." He, indeed, was accustomed, in the most +characteristic phrase of his type, to describe the Rhymers as lacking in +"blood and guts," and very nearly brought us to an end by attempting to +supply the deficiency by the addition of four Scotsmen. He brought all +four upon the same evening, and one read out a poem upon the Life Boat, +evidently intended for a recitation; another described how, when +gold-digging in Australia, he had fought and knocked down another miner +for doubting the rotundity of the earth; while of the remainder I can +remember nothing except that they excelled in argument. He insisted upon +their immediate election, and the Rhymers, through that complacency of +good manners whereby educated Englishmen so often surprise me, obeyed, +though secretly resolved never to meet again; and it cost me seven hours' +work to get another meeting, and vote the Scotsmen out. A few days later I +chanced upon Davidson at some restaurant; he was full of amiability, and +when we parted shook my hand, and proclaimed enthusiastically that I had +"blood and guts." I think he might have grown to be a successful man had +he been enthusiastic instead about Dowson or Johnson, or Horne or Symons, +for they had what I still lacked, conscious deliberate craft, and what I +must lack always, scholarship. They had taught me that violent energy, +which is like a fire of straw, consumes in a few minutes the nervous +vitality, and is useless in the arts. Our fire must burn slowly, and we +must constantly turn away to think, constantly analyse what we have done, +be content even to have little life outside our work, to show, perhaps, to +other men, as little as the watch-mender shows, his magnifying glass +caught in his screwed-up eye. Only then do we learn to conserve our +vitality, to keep our mind enough under control and to make our technique +sufficiently flexible for expression of the emotions of life as they +arise. A few months after our meeting in the Museum, Davidson had spent +his inspiration. "The fires are out," he said, "and I must hammer the cold +iron." When I heard a few years ago that he had drowned himself, I knew +that I had always expected some such end. With enough passion to make a +great poet, through meeting no man of culture in early life, he lacked +intellectual receptivity, and, anarchic and indefinite, lacked pose and +gesture, and now no verse of his clings to my memory. + + +XI + +Gradually Arthur Symons came to replace in my intimate friendship, Lionel +Johnson from whom I was slowly separated by a scruple of conscience. If +he came to see me he sat tongue-tied unless I gave him the drink that +seemed necessary to bring his vitality to but its normal pitch, and if I +called upon him he drank so much that I became his confederate. Once, when +a friend and I had sat long after our proper bed-time at his constantly +repeated and most earnest entreaty, knowing what black melancholy would +descend upon him at our departure, and with the unexpressed hope of +getting him to his bed, he fixed upon us a laughing and whimsical look, +and said:--"I want you two men to understand that you are merely two men +that I am drinking with." That was the only time that I was to hear from +him an imaginary conversation that had not an air of the most scrupulous +accuracy. He gave two accounts of a conversation with Wilde in prison; in +one Wilde wore his hair long, and in the other it had been cropped by the +prison barber. He was gradually losing, too, the faculty of experience, +and in his prose and verse repeated the old ideas and emotions, but +faintly, as though with fading interest. I am certain that he prayed much, +and on those rare days that I came upon him dressed and active before +midday or but little after, I concluded that he had been to morning Mass +at Farm Street. + +When with Johnson I had tuned myself to his mood, but Arthur Symons, more +than any man I have ever known, could slip as it were into the mind of +another, and my thoughts gained in richness and in clearness from his +sympathy, nor shall I ever know how much my practice and my theory owe to +the passages that he read me from Catullus and from Verlaine and Mallarmé. +I had read _Axel_ to myself or was still reading it, so slowly, and with +so much difficulty, that certain passages had an exaggerated importance, +while all remained so obscure that I could without much effort imagine +that here at last was the Sacred Book I longed for. An Irish friend of +mine lives in a house where beside a little old tower rises a great new +Gothic hall and stair, and I have sometimes got him to extinguish all +light but a little Roman lamp, and in that faint light and among great +vague shadows, blotting away the unmeaning ornament, have imagined myself +partaking in some incredible romance. Half-a-dozen times, beginning in +boyhood with Shelley's _Prometheus Unbound_, I have in that mood possessed +for certain hours or months the book that I long for; and Symons, without +ever being false to his own impressionist view of art and of life, +deepened as I think my longing. + +It seems to me, looking backward, that we always discussed life at its +most intense moment, that moment which gives a common sacredness to the +Song of Songs, and to the Sermon on the Mount, and in which one discovers +something supernatural, a stirring as it were of the roots of the hair. He +was making those translations from Mallarmé and from Verlaine, from +Calderon, from St. John of the Cross, which are the most accomplished +metrical translations of our time, and I think that those from Mallarmé +may have given elaborate form to my verses of those years, to the latter +poems of _The Wind Among the Reeds_, to _The Shadowy Waters_, while +Villiers de L'Isle Adam had shaped whatever in my _Rosa Alchemica_ Pater +had not shaped. I can remember the day in Fountain Court when he first +read me Herodiade's address to some Sibyl who is her nurse and it may be +the moon also: + + "The horror of my virginity + Delights me, and I would envelope me + In the terror of my tresses, that, by night, + Inviolate reptile, I might feel the white + And glimmering radiance of thy frozen fire, + Thou that art chaste and diest of desire, + White night of ice and of the cruel snow! + Eternal sister, my lone sister, lo + My dreams uplifted before thee! now, apart, + So rare a crystal is my dreaming heart, + And all about me lives but in mine own + Image, the idolatrous mirror of my pride, + Mirroring this Herodiade diamond-eyed." + +Yet I am certain that there was something in myself compelling me to +attempt creation of an art as separate from everything heterogenous and +casual, from all character and circumstance, as some Herodiade of our +theatre, dancing seemingly alone in her narrow moving luminous circle. +Certainly I had gone a great distance from my first poems, from all that I +had copied from the folk-art of Ireland, as from the statue of Mausolus +and his Queen, where the luminous circle is motionless and contains the +entire popular life; and yet why am I so certain? I can imagine an Aran +Islander who had strayed into the Luxembourg Gallery, turning bewildered +from Impressionist or Post-Impressionist, but lingering at Moreau's +"Jason," to study in minute astonishment the elaborate background, where +there are so many jewels, so much wrought stone and moulded bronze. Had +not lover promised mistress in his own island song, "A ship with a gold +and silver mast, gloves of the skin of a fish, and shoes of the skin of a +bird, and a suit of the dearest silk in Ireland?" + + +XII + +Hitherto when in London I had stayed with my family in Bedford Park, but +now I was to live for some twelve months in chambers in the Temple that +opened through a little passage into those of Arthur Symons. If anybody +rang at either door, one or other would look through a window in the +connecting passage, and report. We would then decide whether one or both +should receive the visitor, whether his door or mine should be opened, or +whether both doors were to remain closed. I have never liked London, but +London seemed less disagreeable when one could walk in quiet, empty places +after dark, and upon a Sunday morning sit upon the margin of a fountain +almost as alone as if in the country. I was already settled there, I +imagine, when a publisher called and proposed that Symons should edit a +Review or Magazine, and Symons consented on the condition that Beardsley +were Art Editor--and I was delighted at his condition, as I think were all +his other proposed contributors. Aubrey Beardsley had been dismissed from +the Art editorship of _The Yellow Book_ under circumstances that had made +us indignant. He had illustrated Wilde's _Salome_, his strange satiric art +had raised the popular press to fury, and at the height of the excitement +aroused by Wilde's condemnation, a popular novelist, a woman who had great +influence among the most conventional part of the British public, had +written demanding his dismissal. "She owed it to her position before the +British people," she had said. Beardsley was not even a friend of +Wilde's--they even disliked each other--he had no sexual abnormality, but +he was certainly unpopular, and the moment had come to get rid of +unpopular persons. The public at once concluded--they could hardly +conclude otherwise, he was dismissed by telegram--that there was evidence +against him, and Beardsley, who was some twenty-three years old, being +embittered and miserable, plunged into dissipation. We knew that we must +face an infuriated press and public, but being all young we delighted in +enemies and in everything that had an heroic air. + + +XIII + +We might have survived but for our association with Beardsley, perhaps, +but for his _Under the Hill_, a Rabelaisian fragment promising a literary +genius as great maybe as his artistic genius, and for the refusal of the +bookseller who controlled the railway bookstalls to display our wares. The +bookseller's manager, no doubt looking for a design of Beardsley's, +pitched upon Blake's _Anteus setting Virgil and Dante upon the verge of +Cocytus_ as the ground of refusal, and when Arthur Symons pointed out that +Blake was considered "a very spiritual artist" replied, "O, Mr Symons, you +must remember that we have an audience of young ladies as well as an +audience of agnostics." However, he called Arthur Symons back from the +door to say, "If contrary to our expectations _The Savoy_ should have a +large sale, we should be very glad to see you again." As Blake's design +illustrated an article of mine, I wrote a letter upon that remarkable +saying to a principal daily newspaper. But I had mentioned Beardsley, and +I was told that the editor had made it a rule that his paper was never to +mention Beardsley's name. I said upon meeting him later, "Would you have +made the same rule in the case of Hogarth?" against whom much the same +objection could be taken, and he replied with what seemed to me a dreamy +look, as though suddenly reminded of a lost opportunity--"Ah, there was no +popular press in Hogarth's day." We were not allowed to forget that in our +own day there was a popular press, and its opinions began to affect our +casual acquaintance, and even our comfort in public places. At some +well-known house, an elderly man to whom I had just been introduced, got +up from my side and walked to the other end of the room; but it was as +much my reputation as an Irish rebel as the evil company that I was +supposed to keep, that excited some young men in a railway carriage to +comment upon my general career in voices raised that they might catch my +attention. I discovered, however, one evening that we were perhaps envied +as well as despised. I was in the pit at some theatre, and had just +noticed Arthur Symons a little in front of me, when I heard a young man, +who looked like a shop-assistant or clerk, say, "There is Arthur Symons. +If he can't get an order, why can't he pay for a stall." Clearly we were +supposed to prosper upon iniquity, and to go to the pit added a sordid +parsimony. At another theatre I caught sight of a woman that I once liked, +the widow of some friend of my father's youth, and tried to attract her +attention, but she had no eyes for anything but the stage curtain; and at +some house where I met no hostility to myself, a popular novelist snatched +out of my hand a copy of _The Savoy_, and opening it at Beardsley's +drawing, called _The Barber_, began to expound its bad drawing and wound +up with, "Now if you want to admire really great black and white art, +admire the Punch Cartoons of Mr Lindley Sambourne," and our hostess, after +making peace between us, said, "O, Mr Yeats, why do you not send your +poems to _The Spectator_ instead of to _The Savoy_." The answer, "My +friends read the _Savoy_ and they do not read _The Spectator_," brought a +look of deeper disapproval. + +Yet, even apart from Beardsley, we were a sufficiently distinguished body: +Max Beerbohm, Bernard Shaw, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Symons, +Charles Conder, Charles Shannon, Havelock Ellis, Selwyn Image, Joseph +Conrad; but nothing counted but the one hated name. I think that had we +been challenged we might have argued something after this +fashion:--"Science through much ridicule and some persecution has won its +right to explore whatever passes before its corporeal eye, and merely +because it passes: to set as it were upon an equality the beetle and the +whale though Ben Jonson could find no justification for the entomologist +in _The New Inn_, but that he had been crossed in love. Literature now +demands the same right of exploration of all that passes before the mind's +eyes, and merely because it passes." Not a complete defence, for it +substitutes a spiritual for a physical objective, but sufficient it may be +for the moment, and to settle our place in the historical process. + +The critic might well reply that certain of my generation delighted in +writing with an unscientific partiality for subjects long forbidden. Yet +is it not most important to explore especially what has been long +forbidden, and to do this not only "with the highest moral purpose," like +the followers of Ibsen, but gaily, out of sheer mischief, or sheer delight +in that play of the mind. Donne could be as metaphysical as he pleased, +and yet never seemed unhuman and hysterical as Shelley often does, because +he could be as physical as he pleased; and besides who will thirst for the +metaphysical, who have a parched tongue, if we cannot recover the Vision +of Evil? + +I have felt in certain early works of my own which I have long abandoned, +and here and there in the work of others of my generation, a slight, +sentimental sensuality which is disagreeable, and doesn't exist in the +work of Donne, let us say, because he, being permitted to say what he +pleased, was never tempted to linger, or rather to pretend that we can +linger, between spirit and sense. How often had I heard men of my time +talk of the meeting of spirit and sense, yet there is no meeting but only +change upon the instant, and it is by the perception of a change like the +sudden "blacking out" of the lights of the stage, that passion creates its +most violent sensation. + + +XIV + +Dowson was now at Dieppe, now at a Normandy village. Wilde, too, was at +Dieppe; and Symons, Beardsley, and others would cross and recross, +returning with many tales, and there were letters and telegrams. Dowson +wrote a protest against some friend's too vivid essay upon the disorder of +his life, and explained that in reality he was living a life of industry +in a little country village; but before the letter arrived that friend +received a wire, "arrested, sell watch and send proceeds." Dowson's watch +had been left in London--and then another wire, "Am free." Dowson, ran the +tale as I heard it ten years after, had got drunk and fought the baker, +and a deputation of villagers had gone to the magistrate and pointed out +that Monsieur Dowson was one of the most illustrious of English poets. +"Quite right to remind me," said the magistrate, "I will imprison the +baker." + +A Rhymer had seen Dowson at some cafe in Dieppe with a particularly common +harlot, and as he passed, Dowson, who was half drunk, caught him by the +sleeve and whispered, "She writes poetry--it is like Browning and Mrs +Browning." Then there came a wonderful tale, repeated by Dowson himself, +whether by word of mouth or by letter I do not remember. Wilde has arrived +in Dieppe, and Dowson presses upon him the necessity of acquiring "a more +wholesome taste." They empty their pockets on to the café table, and +though there is not much, there is enough if both heaps are put into one. +Meanwhile the news has spread, and they set out accompanied by a cheering +crowd. Arrived at their destination, Dowson and the crowd remain outside, +and presently Wilde returns. He says in a low voice to Dowson, "The first +these ten years, and it will be the last. It was like cold +mutton"--always, as Henley had said, "a scholar and a gentleman," he no +doubt remembered the sense in which the Elizabethan dramatists used the +words "Cold mutton"--and then aloud so that the crowd may hear him, "But +tell it in England, for it will entirely restore my character." + + +XV + +When the first few numbers of _The Savoy_ had been published, the +contributors and the publisher gave themselves a supper, and Symons +explained that certain among us were invited afterwards to the +publisher's house, and if I went there that once I need never go again. I +considered the publisher a scandalous person, and had refused to meet him; +we were all agreed as to his character, and only differed as to the +distance that should lie between him and us. I had just received two +letters, one from T. W. Rolleston protesting with all the conventional +moral earnestness of an article in _The Spectator_ newspaper, against my +writing for such a magazine; and one from A. E. denouncing that magazine, +which he called the "Organ of the Incubi and the Succubi," with the +intensity of a personal conviction. I had forgotten that Arthur Symons had +borrowed the letters until as we stood about the supper table waiting for +the signal to be seated, I heard the infuriated voice of the publisher +shouting, "Give me the letter, give me the letter, I will prosecute that +man," and I saw Symons waving Rolleston's letter just out of reach. Then +Symons folded it up and put it in his pocket, and began to read out A. E. +and the publisher was silent, and I saw Beardsley listening. Presently +Beardsley came to me and said, "Yeats, I am going to surprise you very +much. I think your friend is right. All my life I have been fascinated by +the spiritual life--when a child I saw a vision of a Bleeding Christ over +the mantelpiece--but after all to do one's work when there are other +things one wants to do so much more, is a kind of religion." + +Something, I forget what, delayed me a few minutes after the supper was +over, and when I arrived at our publisher's I found Beardsley propped up +on a chair in the middle of the room, grey and exhausted, and as I came in +he left the chair and went into another room to spit blood, but returned +immediately. Our publisher, perspiration pouring from his face, was +turning the handle of a hurdy gurdy piano--it worked by electricity, I was +told, when the company did not cut off the supply--and very plainly had +had enough of it, but Beardsley pressed him to labour on, "The tone is so +beautiful," "It gives me such deep pleasure," etc., etc. It was his method +of keeping our publisher at a distance. + +Another image competes with that image in my memory. Beardsley has arrived +at Fountain Court a little after breakfast with a young woman who belongs +to our publisher's circle and certainly not to ours, and is called +"twopence coloured," or is it "penny plain." He is a little drunk and his +mind has been running upon his dismissal from _The Yellow Book_, for he +puts his hand upon the wall and stares into a mirror. He mutters, "Yes, +yes. I look like a Sodomite," which he certainly did not. "But no, I am +not that," and then begins railing, against his ancestors, accusing them +of that and this, back to and including the great Pitt, from whom he +declares himself descended. + + +XVI + +I can no more justify my convictions in these brief chapters, where I +touch on fundamental things, than Shakespeare could justify within the +limits of a sonnet, his conviction that the soul of the wide world dreams +of things to come; and yet as I have set out to describe nature as I see +it, I must not only describe events but those patterns into which they +fall, when I am the looker-on. A French miracle-working priest once said +to Maud Gonne and myself and to an English Catholic who had come with us, +that a certain holy woman had been the "victim" for his village, and that +another holy woman who had been "victim" for all France, had given him her +Crucifix, because he, too, was doomed to become a "victim." + +French psychical research has offered evidence to support the historical +proofs that such saints as Lydwine of Schiedam, whose life suggested to +Paul Claudel his _L'Annonce faite à Marie_, did really cure disease by +taking it upon themselves. As disease was considered the consequence of +sin, to take it upon themselves was to copy Christ. All my proof that mind +flows into mind, and that we cannot separate mind and body, drives me to +accept the thought of victimage in many complex forms, and I ask myself if +I cannot so explain the strange, precocious genius of Beardsley. He was in +my Lunar metaphor a man of the thirteenth Phase, his nature on the edge of +Unity of Being, the understanding of that Unity by the intellect his one +overmastering purpose; whereas Lydwine de Schiedam and her like, being of +the saints, are at the seven and twentieth Phase, and seek a unity with a +life beyond individual being; and so being all subjective he would take +upon himself not the consequences, but the knowledge of sin. I surrender +myself to the wild thought that by so doing he enabled persons who had +never heard his name, to recover innocence. I have so often, too, +practised meditations, or experienced dreams, where the meditations or +dreams of two or three persons contrast and complement one another, in so +far as those persons are in themselves complementary or contrasting, that +I am convinced that it is precisely from the saint or potential saint that +he would gather this knowledge. I see in his fat women and shadowy, +pathetic girls, his horrible children, half child, half embryo, in all +the lascivious monstrous imagery of the privately published designs, the +phantasms that from the beginning have defied the scourge and the hair +shirt. I once said to him half seriously, "Beardsley, I was defending you +last night in the only way in which it is possible to defend you, by +saying that all you draw is inspired by rage against iniquity," and he +answered, "If it were so inspired the work would be in no way different," +meaning, as I think, that he drew with such sincerity that no change of +motive could change the image. + +I know that some turn of disease had begun to parade erotic images before +his eyes, and I do not doubt that he drew these images. "I make a blot +upon the paper," he said to me; "And I begin to shove the ink about and +something comes." But I was wrong to say that he drew these things in rage +against iniquity, for to know that rage he must needs be objective, +concerned with other people, with the Church or the Divinity, with +something outside his own head, and responsible not for the knowledge but +for the consequence of sin. His preparation had been the exhaustion of sin +in act, while the preparation of the Saint is the exhaustion of his pride, +and instead of the Saint's humility, he had come to see the images of the +mind in a kind of frozen passion, the virginity of the intellect. + +Does not all art come when a nature, that never ceases to judge itself, +exhausts personal emotion in action or desire so completely that something +impersonal, something that has nothing to do with action or desire, +suddenly starts into its place, something which is as unforeseen, as +completely organized, even as unique, as the images that pass before the +mind between sleeping and waking. + +But all art is not victimage; and much of the hatred of the art of +Beardsley came from the fact that victimage, though familiar under another +name to French criticism since the time of Baudelaire, was not known in +England. He pictures almost always disillusion, and apart from those +privately published drawings which he tried upon his deathbed to have +destroyed, there is no representation of desire. Even the beautiful women +are exaggerated into doll-like prettiness by a spirit of irony, or are +poignant with a thwarted or corrupted innocence. I see his art with more +understanding now, than when he lived, for in 1895 or 1896, I was in +despair at the new breath of comedy that had begun to wither the beauty +that I loved, just when that beauty seemed about to unite itself to +mystery. I said to him once, "You have never done anything to equal your +Salome with the head of John the Baptist." I think, that for the moment he +was sincere when he replied, "Yes, yes; but beauty is so difficult." It +was for the moment only, for as the popular rage increased and his own +disease increased, he became more and more violent in his satire, or +created out of a spirit of mockery a form of beauty where his powerful +logical intellect eliminated every outline that suggested meditation or +even satisfied passion. + +The distinction between the Image, between the apparition as it were, and +the personal action and desire, took a new form at the approach of death. +He made two or three charming and blasphemous designs; I think especially +of a Madonna and Child, where the Child has a foolish, doll-like face, and +an elaborate modern baby's dress; and of a St. Rose of Lima in an +expensive gown decorated with roses, ascending to Heaven upon the bosom of +the Madonna, her face enraptured with love, but with that form of it +which is least associated with sanctity. I think that his conversion to +Catholicism was sincere, but that so much of impulse as could exhaust +itself in prayer and ceremony, in formal action and desire, found itself +mocked by the antithetical image; and yet I am perhaps mistaken, perhaps +it was merely his recognition that historical Christianity had dwindled to +a box of toys, and that it might be amusing to empty the whole box on to +the counterpane. + + +XVII + +I had been a good deal in Paris, though never very long at any time, my +later visits with a member of the Rhymer's Club whose curiosity or emotion +was roused by every pretty girl. He treated me with a now admiring, now +mocking wonder, because being in love, and in no way lucky in that love, I +had grown exceedingly puritanical so far as my immediate neighbourhood was +concerned. One night, close to the Luxembourg, a strange young woman in +bicycling costume, came out of a side street, threw one arm about his +neck, walked beside us in perfect silence for a hundred yards or so, and +then darted up another side street. He had a red and white complexion and +fair hair, but how she discovered that in the dark I could not understand. +I became angry and reproachful, but he defended himself by saying, "You +never meet a stray cat without caressing it: I have similar instincts." +Presently we found ourselves at some Café--the Café D'Harcourt, I +think--and when I looked up from my English newspaper, I found myself +surrounded with painted ladies and saw that he was taking vengeance. I +could not have carried on a conversation in French, but I was able to say, +"That gentleman over there has never refused wine or coffee to any lady," +and in a little they had all settled about him like greedy pigeons. + +I had put my ideal of those years, an ideal that passed away with youth, +into my description of _Proud Costello_. "He was of those ascetics of +passion, who keep their hearts pure for love or for hatred, as other men +for God, for Mary and for the Saints." My friend was not interested in +passion. A woman drew him to her by some romantic singularity in her +beauty or her circumstance, and drew him the more if the curiosity she +aroused were half intellectual. A little after the time I write of, +throwing himself into my chair after some visit to a music-hall or +hippodrome, he began, "O, Yeats, I was never in love with a +serpent-charmer before." He was objective. For him "the visible world +existed" as he was fond of quoting, and I suspect him of a Moon that had +entered its fourth quarter. + + +XVIII + +At first I used to stay with Macgregor Mathers and his gracious young wife +near the Champ de Mars, or in the Rue Mozart, but later by myself in a +student's hotel in the Latin quarter, and I cannot remember always where I +stayed when this or that event took place. Macgregor Mathers, or +Macgregor, for he had now shed the "Mathers," would come down to breakfast +one day with his Horace, the next day with his Macpherson's Ossian, and +read out fragments during breakfast, considering both books of equal +authenticity. Once when I questioned that of Ossian, he got into a +rage--what right had I to take sides with the English enemy--and I found +that for him the eighteenth century controversy still raged. At night he +would dress himself in Highland dress, and dance the sword dance, and his +mind brooded upon the ramifications of clans and tartans. Yet I have at +moments doubted whether he had seen the Highlands, or even, until invited +there by some White Rose Society, Scotland itself. Every Sunday he gave to +the evocation of Spirits, and I noted that upon that day he would spit +blood. That did not matter, he said, because it came from his head, not +his lungs; what ailed him I do not know, but I think that he lived under +some great strain, and presently I noted that he was drinking neat brandy, +not to drunkenness, but to detriment of mind and body. + +He began to foresee changes in the world, announcing in 1893 or 1894, the +imminence of immense wars, and was it in 1895 or 1896 that he learned +ambulance work, and made others learn it? He had a sabre wound on his +wrist--or perhaps his forehead, for my memory is not clear--got in some +student riot that he had mistaken for the beginning of war. It may have +been some talk of his that made me write the poem that begins: + + "The dews drop slowly and dreams gather; + unknown spears + Suddenly hurtle before my dream awakened eyes, + And then the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries + Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears." + +War was to bring, or be brought by, anarchy, but that would be a passing +stage, he declared, for his dreams were all Napoleonic. He certainly +foresaw some great role that he could play, had made himself an +acknowledged master of the war-game, and for a time taught it to French +officers for his living. He was to die of melancholia, and was perhaps +already mad at certain moments or upon certain topics, though he did not +make upon me that impression in those early days, being generous, gay, and +affable. I have seen none that lacked philosophy and trod _Hodos +Camelionis_ come to good there; and he lacked it but for a vague +affirmation, that he would have his friends affirm also, each for himself, +"There is no part of me that is not of the Gods." Once, when he had told +me that he met his Teachers in some great crowd, and only knew that they +were phantoms by a shock that was like an electric shock to his heart, I +asked him how he knew that he was not deceived or hallucinated. He said, +"I had been visited by one of them the other night, and I followed him +out, and followed him down that little lane to the right. Presently I fell +over the milk boy, and the milk boy got in a rage because he said that not +only I but the man in front had fallen over him." He like all that I have +known, who have given themselves up to images, and to the murmuring of +images, thought that when he had proved that an image could act +independently of his mind, he had proved also that neither it, nor what it +had murmured, had originated there. Yet had I need of proof to the +contrary, I had it while under his roof. I was eager for news of the +Spanish-American war, and went to the Rue Mozart before breakfast to buy a +_New York Herald_. As I went out past the young Normandy servant who was +laying breakfast, I was telling myself some schoolboy romance, and had +just reached a place where I carried my arm in a sling after some +remarkable escape. I bought my paper and returned, to find Macgregor on +the doorstep. "Why, you are all right," he said, "What did the Bonne mean +by telling me that you had hurt your arm and carried it in a sling." + +Once when I met him in the street in his Highland clothes, with several +knives in his stocking, he said, "When I am dressed like this I feel like +a walking flame," and I think that everything he did was but an attempt to +feel like a walking flame. Yet at heart he was, I think, gentle, and +perhaps even a little timid. He had some impediment in his nose that gave +him a great deal of trouble, and it could have been removed had he not +shrunk from the slight operation; and once when he was left in a +mouse-infested flat with some live traps, he collected his captives into a +large birdcage, and to avoid the necessity of their drowning, fed them +there for weeks. Being a self-educated, un-scholarly, though learned man, +he was bound to express the fundamental antithesis in the most crude form, +and being arrogant, to prevent as far as possible that alternation between +the two natures which is, it may be, necessary to sanity. When the nature +turns to its spiritual opposite alone there can be no alternation, but +what nature is pure enough for that. + +I see Paris in the Eighteen-nineties as a number of events separated from +one another, and without cause or consequence, without lot or part in the +logical structure of my life; I can often as little find their dates as I +can those of events in my early childhood. William Sharp, who came to see +me there, may have come in 1895, or on some visit four or five years +later, but certainly I was in an hotel in the Boulevard Raspail. When he +stood up to go he said, "What is that?" pointing to a geometrical form +painted upon a little piece of cardboard that lay upon my window sill. And +then before I could answer, looked out of the window saying, "There is a +funeral passing." I said, "That is curious, as the Death symbol is painted +upon the card." I did not look, but I am sure there was no funeral. A few +days later he came back and said, "I have been very ill; you must never +allow me to see that symbol again." He did not seem anxious to be +questioned, but years later he said, "I will now tell you what happened in +Paris. I had two rooms at my hotel, a front sitting-room and a bedroom +leading out of it. As I passed the threshold of the sitting-room, I saw a +woman standing at the bureau writing, and presently she went into my +bedroom. I thought somebody had got into the wrong room by mistake, but +when I went to the bureau I saw the sheet of paper she had seemed to write +upon, and there was no writing upon it. I went into my bed-room and I +found nobody, but as there was a door from the bedroom on to the stairs I +went down the stairs to see if she had gone that way. When I got out into +the street I saw her just turning a corner, but when I turned the corner +there was nobody there, and then I saw her at another corner. Constantly +seeing her and losing her like that I followed till I came to the Seine, +and there I saw her standing at an opening in the wall, looking down into +the river. Then she vanished, and I cannot tell why, but I went to the +opening in the wall and stood there, just as she had stood, taking just +the same attitude. Then I thought I was in Scotland, and that I heard a +sheep bell. After that I must have lost consciousness, for I knew nothing +till I found myself lying on my back, dripping wet, and people standing +all round. I had thrown myself into the Seine." + +I did not believe him, and not because I thought the story impossible, for +I knew he had a susceptibility beyond that of any one I had ever known, to +symbolic or telepathic influence, but because he never told one anything +that was true; the facts of life disturbed him and were forgotten. The +story had been created by the influence but it had remained a reverie, +though he may in the course of years have come to believe that it happened +as an event. The affectionate husband of his admiring and devoted wife, he +had created an imaginary beloved, had attributed to her the authorship of +all his books that had any talent, and though habitually a sober man, I +have known him to get drunk, and at the height of his intoxication when +most men speak the truth, to attribute his state to remorse for having +been unfaithful to Fiona Macleod. + +Paul Verlaine alternated between the two halves of his nature with so +little apparent resistance that he seemed like a bad child, though to read +his sacred poems is to remember perhaps that the Holy Infant shared His +first home with the beasts. In what month was it that I received a note +inviting me to "coffee and cigarettes plentifully," and signed "Yours +quite cheerfully, Paul Verlaine?" I found him at the top of a tenement +house in the Rue St. Jacques, sitting in an easy chair, his bad leg +swaddled in many bandages. He asked me, speaking in English, if I knew +Paris well, and added, pointing to his leg, that it had scorched his leg +for he know it "well, too well" and "lived in it like a fly in a pot of +marmalade." He took up an English dictionary, one of the few books in the +room, and began searching for the name of his disease, selecting after a +long search and with, as I understood, only comparative accuracy +"Erysipelas." Meanwhile his homely, middle-aged mistress made the coffee +and found the cigarettes; it was obviously she who had given the room its +character; her canaries in several cages hanging in the window, and her +sentimental lithographs nailed here and there among the nude drawings and +newspaper caricatures of her lover as various kinds of monkey, which he +had pinned upon the wall. A slovenly, ragged man came in, his trousers +belted with a piece of rope and an opera hat upon his head. She drew a box +over to the fire, and he sat down, now holding the opera hat upon his +knees, and I think he must have acquired it very lately for he kept +constantly closing and opening it. Verlaine introduced him by saying, "He +is a poor man, but a good fellow, and is so like Louis XI to look at that +we call him Louis the XIth." I remember that Verlaine talked of Victor +Hugo who was "a supreme poet, but a volcano of mud as well as of flame," +and of Villiers de L'Isle Adam who was "exalté" and wrote excellent +French; and of _In Memoriam_, which he had tried to translate and could +not. "Tennyson is too noble, too Anglais; when he should have been +brokenhearted, he had many reminiscences." + +At Verlaine's burial, but a few months after, his mistress quarrelled with +a publisher at the graveside as to who owned the sheet by which the body +had been covered, and Louis XI stole fourteen umbrellas that he found +leaning against a tree in the Cemetery. + + +XIX + +I am certain of one date, for I have gone to much trouble to get it right. +I met John Synge for the first time in the Autumn of 1896, when I was one +and thirty, and he four and twenty. I was at the Hotel Corneille instead +of my usual lodging, and why I cannot remember for I thought it expensive. +Synge's biographer says that you boarded there for a pound a week, but I +was accustomed to cook my own breakfast, and dine at an anarchist +restaurant in the Boulevard S. Jacques for little over a shilling. Some +one, whose name I forget, told me there was a poor Irishman at the top of +the house, and presently introduced us. Synge had come lately from Italy, +and had played his fiddle to peasants in the Black Forest; six months of +travel upon fifty pounds; and was now reading French literature and +writing morbid and melancholy verse. He told me that he had learned Irish +at Trinity College, so I urged him to go to the Aran Islands and find a +life that had never been expressed in literature, instead of a life where +all had been expressed. I did not divine his genius, but I felt he needed +something to take him out of his morbidity and melancholy. Perhaps I would +have given the same advice to any young Irish writer who knew Irish, for I +had been that summer upon Inishmaan and Inishmore, and was full of the +subject. My friends and I had landed from a fishing boat to find ourselves +among a group of islanders, one of whom said he would bring us to the +oldest man upon Inishmaan. This old man, speaking very slowly, but with +laughing eyes, had said, "If any gentleman has done a crime, we'll hide +him. There was a gentleman that killed his father, and I had him in my +own house six months till he got away to America." + +From that on I saw much of Synge, and brought him to Maude Gonne's, under +whose persuasion perhaps, he joined the "Young Ireland Society of Paris," +the name we gave to half a dozen Parisian Irish, signed, but resigned +after a few months because "it wanted to stir up Continental nations +against England, and England will never give us freedom until she feels +she is safe," the one political sentence I ever heard him speak. Over a +year was to pass before he took my advice and settled for a while in an +Aran cottage, and became happy, having escaped at last, as he wrote, "from +the squalor of the poor and the nullity of the rich." I almost forget the +prose and verse he showed me in Paris, though I read it all through again +when after his death I decided, at his written request, what was to be +published and what not. Indeed, I have but a vague impression, as of a man +trying to look out of a window and blurring all that he sees by breathing +upon the window. According to my Lunar parable, he was a man of the +twenty-third Phase, a man whose subjective lives--for a constant return to +our life is a part of my dream--were over, who must not pursue an image, +but fly from it, all that subjective dreaming, that had once been power +and joy, now corrupting within him. He had to take the first plunge into +the world beyond himself, the first plunge away from himself that is +always pure technique, the delight in doing, not because one would or +should, but merely because one can do. + +He once said to me, "a man has to bring up his family and be as virtuous +as is compatible with so doing, and if he does more than that he is a +puritan; a dramatist has to express his subject and to find as much +beauty as is compatible with that, and if he does more he is an aesthete," +that is to say, he was consciously objective. Whenever he tried to write +drama without dialect he wrote badly, and he made several attempts, +because only through dialect could he escape self-expression, see all that +he did from without, allow his intellect to judge the images of his mind +as if they had been created by some other mind. His objectivity was, +however, technical only, for in those images paraded all the desires of +his heart. He was timid, too shy for general conversation, an invalid and +full of moral scruple, and he was to create now some ranting braggadocio, +now some tipsy hag full of poetical speech, and now some young man or girl +full of the most abounding health. He never spoke an unkind word, had +admirable manners, and yet his art was to fill the streets with rioters, +and to bring upon his dearest friends enemies that may last their +lifetime. + +No mind can engender till divided into two, but that of a Keats or a +Shelley falls into an intellectual part that follows, and a hidden +emotional flying image, whereas in a mind like that of Synge the emotional +part is dreaded and stagnant, while the intellectual part is a clear +mirror-like technical achievement. + +But in writing of Synge I have run far ahead, for in 1896 he was but one +picture among many. I am often astonished when I think that we can meet +unmoved some person, or pass some house, that in later years is to bear a +chief part in our life. Should there not be some flutter of the nerve or +stopping of the heart like that Macgregor experienced at the first meeting +with a phantom? + + +XX + +Many pictures come before me without date or order. I am walking somewhere +near the Luxembourg Gardens when Synge, who seldom generalises and only +after much thought, says, "There are three things any two of which have +often come together but never all three; ecstasy, asceticism, austerity; I +wish to bring all three together." + + * * * * * + +I notice that Macgregor considers William Sharp vague and sentimental, +while Sharp is repelled by Macgregor's hardness and arrogance. William +Sharp met Macgregor in the Louvre, and said, "No doubt considering your +studies you live upon milk and fruit." And Macgregor replied, "No, not +exactly milk and fruit, but very nearly so;" and now Sharp has lunched +with Macgregor and been given nothing but brandy and radishes. + + * * * * * + +Macgregor is much troubled by ladies who seek spiritual advice, and one +has called to ask his help against phantoms who have the appearance of +decayed corpses, and try to get into bed with her at night. He has driven +her away with one furious sentence, "Very bad taste on both sides." + + * * * * * + +I am sitting in a Café with two French Americans, one in the morning, +while we are talking wildly, and some are dancing, there is a tap at the +shuttered window; we open it and three ladies enter, the wife of a man of +letters, who thought to find no one but a confederate, and her husband's +two young sisters whom she has brought secretly to some disreputable +dance. She is very confused at seeing us, but as she looks from one to +another understands that we have taken some drug and laughs; caught in our +dream we know vaguely that she is scandalous according to our code and to +all codes, but smile at her benevolently and laugh. + + * * * * * + +I am at Stuart Merrill's, and I meet there a young Jewish Persian scholar. +He has a large gold ring, seemingly very rough, made by some amateur, and +he shows me that it has shaped itself to his finger, and says, "That is +because it contains no alloy--it is alchemical gold." I ask who made the +gold, and he says a certain Rabbi, and begins to talk of the Rabbi's +miracles. We do not question him--perhaps it is true--perhaps he has +imagined at all--we are inclined to accept every historical belief once +more. + + * * * * * + +I am sitting in a Cafe with two French Americans, a German poet +Douchenday, and a silent man whom I discover to be Strindberg, and who is +looking for the Philosopher's Stone. The French American reads out a +manifesto he is about to issue to the Latin Quarter; it proposes to +establish a communistic colony of artists in Virginia, and there is a +footnote to explain why he selects Virginia, "Art has never flourished +twice in the same place. Art has never flourished in Virginia." + +Douchenday, who has some reputation as a poet, explains that his poems are +without verbs, as the verb is the root of all evil in the world. He wishes +for an art where all things are immoveable, as though the clouds should be +made of marble. I turn over the page of one of his books which he shows +me, and find there a poem in dramatic form, but when I ask if he hopes to +have it played he says:--"It could only be played by actors before a black +marble wall, with masks in their hands. They must not wear the masks for +that would not express my scorn for reality." + + * * * * * + +I go to the first performance of Alfred Jarry's _Ubu Roi_, at the Théatre +de L'Oeuvre, with the Rhymer who had been so attractive to the girl in the +bicycling costume. The audience shake their fists at one another, and the +Rhymer whispers to me, "There are often duels after these performances," +and he explains to me what is happening on the stage. The players are +supposed to be dolls, toys, marionettes, and now they are all hopping like +wooden frogs, and I can see for myself that the chief personage, who is +some kind of King, carries for Sceptre a brush of the kind that we use to +clean a closet. Feeling bound to support the most spirited party, we have +shouted for the play, but that night at the Hotel Corneille I am very sad, +for comedy, objectivity, has displayed its growing power once more. I say, +"After Stephane Mallarmé, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after +Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our subtle colour and +nervous rhythm, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is +possible? After us the Savage God." + + + + +BOOK V + +THE STIRRING OF THE BONES + + + + +_THE STIRRING OF THE BONES_ + + +I + +It may have been the Spring of 1897 that Maud Gonne, who was passing +through London, told me that for some reason unknown to her, she had +failed to get a Dublin authorization for an American lecturing tour. The +young Dublin Nationalists planned a monument to Wolfe Tone which, it was +hoped, might exceed in bulk and in height that of the too compromised and +compromising Daniel O'Connell, and she proposed to raise money for it by +these lectures. I had left the Temple and taken two rooms in Bloomsbury, +and in Bloomsbury lived important London Nationalists, elderly doctors, +who had been medical students during the Fenian movement. So I was able to +gather a sufficient committee to pass the necessary resolution. She had no +sooner sailed than I found out why the Dublin committee had refused it, or +rather put it off by delay and vague promises. A prominent Irish American +had been murdered for political reasons, and another Irish American had +been tried and acquitted, but was still accused by his political +opponents, and the dispute had spread to London and to Ireland, and had +there intermixed itself with current politics and gathered new bitterness. +My committee, and the majority of the Nationalist Irish Societies +throughout England were upon one side, and the Dublin committee and the +majority of the Nationalist Societies in Ireland upon the other, and +feeling ran high. Maud Gonne had the same friends that I had, and the +Dublin committee could not be made to understand that whatever money she +collected would go to the movement, and not to her friends and their +opponents. It seemed to me that if I accepted the Presidency of the '98 +Commemoration Association of Great Britain, I might be able to prevent a +public quarrel, and so make a great central council possible; and a public +quarrel I did prevent, though with little gain perhaps to anybody, for at +least one active man assured me that I had taken the heart out of his +work, and no gain at all perhaps to the movement, for our central council +had commonly to send two organizers or to print two pamphlets, that both +parties might be represented when one pamphlet or one organizer had +served. + + +II + +It was no business of mine, and that was precisely why I could not keep +out of it. Every enterprise that offered, allured just in so far as it was +not my business. I still think that in a species of man, wherein I count +myself, nothing so much matters as Unity of Being, but if I seek it as +Goethe sought, who was not of that species, I but combine in myself, and +perhaps as it now seems, looking backward, in others also, incompatibles. +Goethe, in whom objectivity and subjectivity were intermixed I hold, as +the dark is mixed with the light at the eighteenth Lunar Phase, could but +seek it as Wilhelm Meister seeks it intellectually, critically, and +through a multitude of deliberately chosen experiences; events and forms +of skill gathered as if for a collector's cabinet; whereas true Unity of +Being, where all the nature murmurs in response if but a single note be +touched, is found emotionally, instinctively, by the rejection of all +experience not of the right quality, and by the limitation of its +quantity. Of all this I knew nothing, for I saw the world by the light of +what my father had said, speaking about some Frenchman who frequented the +dissecting rooms to overcome his dread in the interest of that Unity. My +father had mocked, but had not explained why he had mocked, and I, for my +unhappiness had felt a shuddering fascination. Nor did I understand as yet +how little that Unity, however wisely sought, is possible without a Unity +of Culture in class or people that is no longer possible at all. + + "The fascination of what's difficult + Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent + Spontaneous joy and natural content + Out of my heart." + + +III + +I went hither and thither speaking at meetings in England and Scotland and +occasionally at tumultuous Dublin conventions, and endured some of the +worst months of my life. I had felt years before that I had made a great +achievement when the man who trained my uncle's horses invited me to share +his Xmas dinner, which we roasted in front of his harness room fire; and +now I took an almost equal pride in an evening spent with some small +organizer into whose spitoon I secretly poured my third glass of whiskey. +I constantly hoped for some gain in self-possession, in rapidity of +decision, in capacity for disguise, and am at this moment, I dare say, no +different for it all, having but burgeoned and withered like a tree. + +When Maud Gonne returned she became our directing mind both in England and +in Ireland, and it was mainly at her bidding that our movement become a +protest against the dissensions, the lack of dignity, of the Parnellite +and Anti-Parnellite parties, who had fought one another for seven or eight +years, till busy men passed them by, as they did those performing cats +that in my childhood I used to see, pretending to spit at one another on a +table, outside Charing Cross station. Both parliamentary parties seeing +that all young Ireland, and a good part of old, were in the movement, +tried to join us, the Anti-Parnellite without abandoning its separate +identity. They were admitted I think, but upon what terms I do not +remember. I and two or three others had to meet Michael Davitt, and a +member of parliament called F. X. O'Brien to talk out the question of +separate identity, and I remember nothing of what passed but the manner +and image of Michael Davitt. He seemed hardly more unfitted for such +negotiation, perhaps even for any possible present politics, than I +myself, and I watched him with sympathy. One knows by the way a man sits +in his chair if he have emotional intensity, and Davitt's suggested to me +a writer, a painter, an artist of some kind, rather than a man of action. +Then, too, F. X. O'Brien did not care whether he used a good or a bad +argument, whether he seemed a fool or a clever man, so that he carried his +point, but if he used a bad argument Davitt would bring our thought back +to it though he had to wait several minutes and re-state it. One felt +that he had lived always with small unimaginative, effective men whom he +despised; and that perhaps through some lack of early education, perhaps +because nine years' imprisonment at the most plastic period of his life +had jarred or broken his contact with reality, he had failed, except +during the first months of the Land League, to dominate those men. He told +me that if the split in the Irish Party had not come he would have carried +the Land League into the Highlands, and recovered for Ireland as much of +Scotland as was still Gaelic in blood or in language. Our negotiations, +which interested so much F. X. O'Brien and my two negotiators, a barrister +and a doctor, bored him I thought, even more than they did me, to whom +they were a novelty; but the Highland plan with its historical foundation +and its vague possibilities excited him, and it seemed to me that what we +said or did stirred him, at other moments also, to some similar remote +thought and emotion. I think he returned my sympathy, for a little before +his death he replied to some words of congratulation I sent him after the +speech in which he resigned his seat in the House of Commons, with an +account of some project of his for improving the quality of the Irish +representation there. + + +IV + +I think that he shared with poet and philosopher the necessity of speaking +the whole mind or remaining silent or ineffective, and he had been for +years in a movement, where, to adapt certain words of a friend of mine, it +was as essential to carry the heart upon the sleeve as the tongue in the +cheek. The founders of the Irish Agrarian movement had acted upon the +doctrine, contradicted by religious history, that ignorant men will not +work for an idea, or feel a political passion for its own sake, and that +you must find "a lever" as it was called, some practical grievance; and I +do not think that I am fantastic in believing that this faith in "levers," +universal among revolutionaries, is but a result of that mechanical +philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, which has, as Coleridge said, turned +the human mind into the quicksilver at the back of a mirror, though it +still permits a work of art to seem "a mirror dawdling along a road." + +O'Leary had told me the story, not I think hitherto published. A prominent +Irish American, not long released from the prison where Fenianism had sent +him, cabled to Parnell:--"Take up Land Reform side by side with the +National Question and we will support you. See Kickham." What had Parnell, +a landowner and a haughty man, to do with the peasant or the peasant's +grievance? And he was indeed so ignorant of both that he asked Kickham, +novelist and Fenian leader, if he thought the people would take up a land +agitation, and Kickham answered:--"I am only afraid they would go to the +Gates of Hell for it;" and O'Leary's comment was, "and so they have." + +And so was founded an agitation where some men pretended to national +passion for the land's sake; some men to agrarian passion for the nation's +sake; some men to both for their own advancement, and this agitation at +the time I write of had but old men to serve it, who found themselves +after years of labour, some after years of imprisonment, derided for +unscrupulous rascals. Unscrupulous they certainly were, for they had +grown up amid make-believe, and now because their practical grievance was +too near settlement to blind and to excite, their make-believe was visible +to all. They were as eloquent as ever, they had never indeed shared +anything in common but the sentimental imagery, the poetical allusions +inherited from a still earlier generation, but were faced by a generation +that had turned against all oratory. I recall to my memory a member of +Parliament who had fought for Parnell's policy after Parnell's death, and +much against his own interest, who refused to attend a meeting my friends +had summoned at the declaration of the Boer War, because he thought +"England was in the right," and yet a week later when the Dublin mob had +taken the matter up, advised Irish soldiers to shoot their officers and +join President Kruger. I recall another and more distinguished politician +who supported the Anti-Parnellite Party in his declining years, and in his +vigorous years had raked up some scandal about some Colonial Governor. A +friend of mine, after advising that Governor's son to write his father's +life, had remembered the scandal and called in her alarm upon the +politician; "I do beseech you," he had said and with the greatest +earnestness, "to pay no attention whatever to anything I may have said +during an election." + +Certain of these men, all public prepossessions laid aside, were excellent +talkers, genial and friendly men, with memories enriched by country +humour, and much half sentimental, half practical philosophy, and at +moments by poetical feeling that was not all an affectation, found very +moving by English sympathisers, of the tear and the smile in Erin's eye. +They may even have had more sincerity than their sort elsewhere, but they +had inherited a cause that men had died for, and they themselves had gone +to jail for it, and had so worn their hereditary martyrdom that they had +seemed for a time no common men, and now must pay the penalty. "I have +just told Mahaffy," Wilde had said to me, "that it is a party of men of +genius," and now John O'Leary, Taylor, and many obscure sincere men had +pulled them down; and yet, should what followed, judged by an eye that +thinks most of the individual soul, be counted as more clearly out of the +common? A movement first of poetry, then of sentimentality, and land +hunger, had struggled with, and as the nation passed into the second +period of all revolutions, had given way before a movement of abstraction +and hatred; and after some twenty years of the second period, though +abstraction and hatred have won their victory, there is no clear sign, of +a third, a _tertium quid_, and a reasonable frame of mind. + +Seeing that only the individual soul can attain to its spiritual opposite, +a nation in tumult must needs pass to and fro between mechanical +opposites, but one hopes always that those opposites may acquire sex and +engender. At moments when I have thought of the results of political +subjection upon Ireland I have remembered a story told me by Oscar Wilde +who professed to have found it in a book of magic, "if you carve a +Cerberus upon an emerald," he said, "and put it in the oil of a lamp and +carry it into a room where your enemy is, two heads will come upon his +shoulders and devour one another." + +Instead of sharing our traditional sentimental rhetoric with every man who +had found a practical grievance, whether one care a button for the +grievance or not, most of us were prosecuting heretics. Nationality was +like religion, few could be saved, and meditation had but one theme--the +perfect nation and its perfect service. "Public opinion," said an +anonymous postcard sent to a friend of mine, "will compel you to learn +Irish," and it certainly did compel many persons of settled habits to +change tailor and cloth. I believed myself dressed according to public +opinion, until a letter of apology from my tailor informed me that "It +takes such a long time getting Connemara cloth as it has to come all the +way from Scotland." + +The Ireland of men's affections must be, as it were, self-moving, +self-creating, though as yet (avoiding a conclusion that seemed hopeless) +but few added altogether separate from England politically. Men for the +moment were less concerned with the final achievement than with +independence from English parties and influence during the struggle for +it. We had no longer any leaders, abstractions were in their place; and +our Conventions, where O'Leary presided interrupting discussion without +the least consideration for rules of procedure when the moment came for +his cup of coffee, were dominated by little groups, the Gaelic +propagandists, though still very few, being the most impassioned, which +had the intensity and narrowness of theological sects. + +I had in my head a project to reconcile old and new that gave Maud Gonne +and myself many stirring conversations upon journeys by rail to meetings +in Scotland, in Dublin, or in the Midlands. Should we not persuade the +organizations in Dublin and in London, when the time drew near for the +unveiling of our statue, or even perhaps for the laying of its foundation +stone, to invite the leaders of Parnellite or Anti-Parnellite, of the new +group of Unionists who had almost changed sides in their indignation at +the over-taxation of Ireland, to lay their policy before our +Convention--could we not then propose and carry that the Convention sit +permanently, or appoint some Executive Committee to direct Irish policy +and report from time to time. The total withdrawal from Westminster had +been proposed in the 'Seventies, before the two devouring heads were of +equal strength, and now that the abstract head seemed the strongest, would +be proposed again, but the Convention could send them thither, not as an +independent power, but as its delegation, and only when, and for what +purpose the Convention might decide. I dreaded some wild Fenian movement, +and with literature perhaps more in my mind than politics, dreamed of that +Unity of Culture which might begin with some few men controlling some form +of administration. I began to talk my project over with various +organizers, who often interrupted their attention which was perhaps only +politeness, with some new jibe at Mr. Dillon or Mr. Redmond. I thought I +had Maud Gonne's support, but when I overheard her conversation, she +commonly urged the entire withdrawal of the Irish Members, or if she did +refer to my scheme, it was to suggest the sending to England of eighty +ragged and drunken Dublin beggars or eighty pugilists "to be paid by +results." + +She was the first who spoke publicly or semi-publicly of the withdrawal of +the Irish Members as a practical policy for our time, so far as I know, +but others may have been considering it. A nation in crisis becomes almost +like a single mind, or rather like those minds I have described that +become channels for parallel streams of thought, each stream taking the +colour of the mind it flows through. These streams are not set moving, as +I think, through conversation or publication, but through "telepathic +contact" at some depth below that of normal consciousness, and it is only +years afterwards, when future events have shown the themes' importance, +that we discover that they are different expressions of a common theme. +That self-moving, self-creating nation necessitated an Irish centre of +policy, and I planned a premature impossible peace between those two +devouring heads because I was sedentary and thoughtful; but Maud Gonne was +not sedentary, and I noticed that before some great event she did not +think but became exceedingly superstitous. Are not such as she aware, at +moments of great crisis, of some power beyond their own minds; or are they +like some good portrait painter of my father's generation and only think +when the model is under their eye? Once upon the eve of some +demonstration, I found her with many caged larks and finches which she was +about to set free for the luck's sake. + +I abandoned my plans on discovering that our young men, not yet educated +by Mr. Birrell's university, would certainly shout down everyone they +disagreed with, and that their finance was so extravagant that we must +content ourselves with a foundation stone and an iron rail to protect it, +for there could never be a statue; while she carried out every plan she +made. + +Her power over crowds was at its height, and some portion of the power +came because she could still, even when pushing an abstract principle to +what seemed to me an absurdity, keep her own mind free, and so when men +and women did her bidding they did it not only because she was beautiful, +but because that beauty suggested joy and freedom. Besides there was an +element in her beauty that moved minds full of old Gaelic stories and +poems, for she looked as though she lived in an ancient civilization where +all superiorities whether of the mind or the body were a part of public +ceremonial, were in some way the crowd's creation, as the Pope entering +the Vatican is the crowd's creation. Her beauty, backed by her great +stature, could instantly affect an assembly, and not as often with our +stage beauties because obvious and florid, for it was incredibly +distinguished, and if--as must be that it might seem that assembly's very +self, fused, unified, and solitary--her face, like the face of some Greek +statue, showed little thought, her whole body seemed a master work of long +labouring thought, as though a Scopas had measured and calculated, +consorted with Egyptian sages, and mathematicians out of Babylon, that he +might outface even Artemisia's sepulchral image with a living norm. + +But in that ancient civilization abstract thought scarce existed, while +she but rose partially and for a moment out of raging abstraction; and for +that reason, as I have known another woman do, she hated her own beauty, +not its effect upon others, but its image in the mirror. Beauty is from +the antithetical self, and a woman can scarce but hate it, for not only +does it demand a painful daily service, but it calls for the denial or the +dissolution of the self. + + "How many centuries spent + The sedentary soul, + In toil of measurement + Beyond eagle or mole + Beyond hearing and seeing + Or Archimedes' guess, + To raise into being + That loveliness?" + + +V + +On the morning of the great procession, the greatest in living memory, the +Parnellite and Anti-Parnellite members of Parliament, huddled together +like cows in a storm, gather behind our carriage, and I hear John Redmond +say to certain of his late enemies, "I went up nearer the head of the +Procession, but one of the Marshals said, 'This is not your place, Mr +Redmond; your place is further back.' 'No,' I said, 'I will stay here.' +'In that case,' he said, 'I will lead you back.'" Later on I can see by +the pushing and shouldering of a delegate from South Africa how important +place and procedure is; and noticing that Maud Gonne is cheered +everywhere, and that the Irish Members march through street after street +without welcome, I wonder if their enemies have not intended their +humiliation. + + * * * * * + +We are at the Mansion House Banquet, and John Dillon is making the first +speech he has made before a popular Dublin audience since the death of +Parnell; and I have several times to keep my London delegates from +interrupting. Dillon is very nervous, and as I watch him the abstract +passion begins to rise within me, and I am almost overpowered by an +instinct of cruelty; I long to cry out, "Had Zimri peace who slew his +master?" + + * * * * * + +Is our Foundation Stone still unlaid when the more important streets are +decorated for Queen Victoria's Jubilee? + +I find Maud Gonne at her hotel talking to a young working-man who looks +very melancholy. She had offered to speak at one of the regular meetings +of his socialist society about Queen Victoria, and he has summoned what +will be a great meeting in the open air. She has refused to speak, and he +says that her refusal means his ruin, as nobody will ever believe that he +had any promise at all. When he has left without complaint or anger, she +gives me very cogent reasons against the open air meeting, but I can think +of nothing but the young man and his look of melancholy. He has left his +address, and presently at my persuasion, she drives to his tenement, where +she finds him and his wife and children crowded into a very small +space--perhaps there was only one room--and, moved by the sight, promises +to speak. The young man is James Connolly who, with Padraic Pearce, is to +make the Insurrection of 1916 and to be executed. + + * * * * * + +The meeting is held in College Green and is very crowded, and Maud Gonne +speaks, I think, standing upon a chair. In front of her is an old woman +with a miniature of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, which she waves in her +excitement, crying out, "I was in it before she was born." Maud Gonne +tells how that morning she had gone to lay a wreath upon a martyr's tomb +at St. Michael's Church, for it is the one day in the year when such +wreaths are laid, but has been refused admission because it is the +Jubilee. Then she pauses, and after that her voice rises to a cry, "Must +the graves of our dead go undecorated because Victoria has her Jubilee?" + + * * * * * + +It is eight or nine at night, and she and I have come from the City Hall, +where the Convention has been sitting, that we may walk to the National +Club in Rutland Square, and we find a great crowd in the street, who +surround us and accompany us. Presently I hear a sound of breaking glass, +the crowd has begun to stone the windows of decorated houses, and when I +try to speak that I may restore order, I discover that I have lost my +voice through much speaking at the Convention. I can only whisper and +gesticulate, and as I am thus freed from responsibility, I share the +emotion of the crowd, and perhaps even feel as they feel when the glass +crashes. Maud Gonne has a look of exultation as she walks with her +laughing head thrown back. + +Later that night Connolly carries in procession a coffin with the words +"British Empire" upon it, and police and mob fight for its ownership, and +at last that the police may not capture, it is thrown into the Liffey. And +there are fights between police and window-breakers, and I read in the +morning papers that many have been wounded; some two hundred heads have +been dressed at the hospitals; an old woman killed by baton blows, or +perhaps trampled under the feet of the crowd; and that two thousand pounds +worth of decorated plate glass windows have been broken. I count the links +in the chain of responsibility, run them across my fingers, and wonder if +any link there is from my workshop. + + * * * * * + +Queen Victoria visits the city, and Dublin Unionists have gathered +together from all Ireland some twelve thousand children and built for them +a grandstand, and bought them sweets and buns that they may cheer. A week +later Maud Gonne marches forty thousand children through the streets of +Dublin, and in a field beyond Drumcondra, and in the presence of a Priest +of their Church, they swear to cherish towards England until the freedom +of Ireland has been won, an undying enmity. + +How many of these children will carry bomb or rifle when a little under or +a little over thirty? + + * * * * * + +Feeling is still running high between the Dublin and London organizations, +for a London doctor, my fellow-delegate, has called a little after +breakfast to say he was condemned to death by a certain secret society the +night before. He is very angry, though it does not seem that his life is +in danger, for the insult is beyond endurance. + + * * * * * + +We arrive at Chancery Lane for our Committee meeting, but it is Derby Day, +and certain men who have arranged a boxing match are in possession of our +rooms. We adjourn to a neighbouring public-house where there are little +pannelled cubicles as in an old-fashioned eating house, that we may direct +the secretary how to answer that week's letters. We are much interrupted +by a committee man who has been to the Derby, and now, half lying on the +table, keeps repeating, "I know what you all think. Let us hand on the +torch, you think, let us hand it on to our children, but I say no! I say, +let us order an immediate rising." + +Presently one of the boxers arrives, sent up to apologise it seems, and to +explain that we had not been recognized. He begins his apology but stops, +and for a moment fixes upon us a meditative critical eye. "No, I will +not," he cries. "What do I care for anyone now but Venus and Adonis and +the other Planets of Heaven." + + * * * * * + +French sympathisers have been brought to see the old buildings in Galway, +and with the towns of Southern France in their mind's eye, are not in the +least moved. The greater number are in a small crowded hotel. Presently an +acquaintance of mine, peeping, while it is still broad day, from his +bedroom window, sees the proprietress of the hotel near the hall door, and +in the road a serious-minded, quixotic Dublin barrister, with a little boy +who carries from a stick over his shoulder twelve chamber pots. He hears +one angry, and one soft pleading explanatory voice, "But, Madam, I feel +certain that at the unexpected arrival of so many guests, so many guests +of the Nation, I may say, you must have found yourself unprepared." "Never +have I been so insulted." "Madam, I am thinking of the honour of my +country." + + * * * * * + +I am at Maud Gonne's hotel, and an Italian sympathiser Cipriani, the +friend of Garibaldi, is there, and though an old man now, he is the +handsomest man I have ever seen. I am telling a ghost story in English at +one end of the room, and he is talking politics in French at the other. +Somebody says, "Yeats believes in ghosts," and Cipriani interrupts for a +moment his impassioned declamation to say in English, and with a +magnificent movement and intonation, "As for me, I believe in nothing but +cannon." + + * * * * * + +I call at the office of the Dublin organization in Westmoreland Street, +and find the front door open, and the office door open, and though the +office is empty the cupboard door open and eighteen pounds in gold upon +the shelf. + + * * * * * + +At a London Committee meeting I notice a middle-aged man who slips into +the room for a moment, whispers something to the secretary, lays three or +four shillings on a table, and slips out. I am told that he is an Irish +board-school teacher who, in early life, took an oath neither to drink nor +smoke, but to contribute the amount so saved weekly to the Irish Cause. + + * * * * * + + +VI + +A few months before I was drawn into politics, I made a friendship that +was to make possible that old project of an Irish Theatre. Arthur Symons +and I were staying at Tillyra Castle in County Galway with Mr. Edward +Martyn, when Lady Gregory, whom I had met once in London for a few minutes +drove over, and after Symon's return to London I stayed at her house, +which is some four miles from Tillyra. I was in poor health, the strain +of youth had been greater than it commonly is, even with imaginative men, +who must always, I think, find youth bitter, and I had lost myself besides +as I had done periodically for years, upon _Hodos Camelionis_. The first +time was in my eighteenth or nineteenth years, when I tried to create a +more multitudinous dramatic form, and now I had got there through a novel +that I could neither write nor cease to write which had _Hodos Camelionis_ +for its theme. My chief person was to see all the modern visionary sects +pass before his bewildered eyes, as Flaubert's St. Anthony saw the +Christian sects, and I was as helpless to create artistic, as my chief +person to create philosophic order. It was not that I do not love order, +or that I lack capacity for it, but that--and not in the arts and in +thought only--I outrun my strength. It is not so much that I choose too +many elements, as that the possible unities themselves seem without +number, like those angels, that in Henry More's paraphrase of the +Schoolman's problem, dance spurred and booted upon the point of a needle. +Perhaps fifty years ago I had been in less trouble, but what can one do +when the age itself has come to _Hodos Camelionis_? + +Lady Gregory seeing that I was ill brought me from cottage to cottage to +gather folk-belief, tales of the fairies, and the like, and wrote down +herself what we had gathered, considering that this work, in which one let +others talk, and walked about the fields so much, would lie, to use a +country phrase, "Very light upon the mind." She asked me to return there +the next year, and for years to come I was to spend my summers at her +house. When I was in good health again, I found myself indolent, partly +perhaps because I was affrighted by that impossible novel, and asked her +to send me to my work every day at eleven, and at some other hour to my +letters, rating me with idleness if need be, and I doubt if I should have +done much with my life but for her firmness and her care. After a time, +though not very quickly, I recovered tolerable industry, though it has +only been of late years that I have found it possible to face an hour's +verse without a preliminary struggle and much putting off. + +Certain woods at Sligo, the woods above Dooney Rock and those above the +waterfall at Ben Bulben, though I shall never perhaps walk there again, +are so deep in my affections that I dream about them at night; and yet the +woods at Coole, though they do not come into my dream are so much more +knitted to my thought, that when I am dead they will have, I am persuaded, +my longest visit. When we are dead, according to my belief, we live our +lives backward for a certain number of years, treading the paths that we +have trodden, growing young again, even childish again, till some attain +an innocence that is no longer a mere accident of nature, but the human +intellect's crowning achievement. It was at Coole that the first few +simple thoughts that now, grown complex, through their contact with other +thoughts, explain the world, came to me from beyond my own mind. I +practised meditations, and these, as I think, so affected my sleep that I +began to have dreams that differed from ordinary dreams in seeming to take +place amid brilliant light, and by their invariable coherence, and certain +half-dreams, if I can call them so, between sleep and waking. I have +noticed that such experiences come to me most often amid distraction, at +some time that seems of all times the least fitting, as though it were +necessary for the exterior mind to be engaged elsewhere, and it was +during 1897 and 1898, when I was always just arriving from or just setting +out to some political meeting, that the first dreams came. I was crossing +a little stream near Inchy Wood and actually in the middle of a stride +from bank to bank, when an emotion never experienced before swept down +upon me. I said, "That is what the devout Christian feels, that is how he +surrenders his will to the will of God." I felt an extreme surprise for my +whole imagination was preoccupied with the pagan mythology of ancient +Ireland, I was marking in red ink upon a large map, every sacred mountain. +The next morning I awoke near dawn, to hear a voice saying, "The love of +God is infinite for every human soul because every human soul is unique, +no other can satisfy the same need in God." + +Lady Gregory and I had heard many tales of changelings, grown men and +women as well as children, who as the people believe are taken by the +fairies, some spirit or inanimate object bewitched into their likeness +remaining in their stead, and I constantly asked myself what reality there +could be in these tales, often supported by so much testimony. I woke one +night to find myself lying upon my back with all my limbs rigid, and to +hear a ceremonial measured voice which did not seem to be mine speaking +through my lips, "We make an image of him who sleeps," it said, "and it is +not him who sleeps, and we call it Emmanuel." After many years that +thought, others often found as strangely being added to it, became the +thought of the Mask, which I have used in these memoirs to explain men's +characters. A few months ago at Oxford I was asking myself why it should +be "An image of him who sleeps," and took down from the shelf not knowing +why I was doing so, a book which I had never read, Burkitt's _Early +Eastern Christianity_, and opened it at random. My eyes lit upon a passage +from a Gnostic Hymn telling how a certain King's son being exiled, slept +in Egypt, a symbol of the natural state, and while he slept an Angel +brought him a royal mantle; and at the bottom of the page I found a +footnote saying that the word mantle did not represent the meaning +properly for that which the Angel gave had the exile's own form and +likeness. I did not, however, find in the Gnostic Hymn my other thought +that Egypt and that which the Mask represents are antithetical. That, I +think, became clear, though I had had some premonitions when a countryman +told Lady Gregory and myself that he had heard the crying of new-dropped +lambs in November--Spring in the world of Fairy, being November with us. + + * * * * * + +On the sea coast at Duras, a few miles from Coole, an old French Count, +Florimond de Bastero, lived for certain months in every year. Lady Gregory +and I talked over my project of an Irish Theatre looking out upon the lawn +of his house, watching a large flock of ducks that was always gathered for +his arrival from Paris, and that would be a very small flock, if indeed it +were a flock at all, when he set out for Rome in the autumn. I told her +that I had given up my project because it was impossible to get the few +pounds necessary for a start in little halls, and she promised to collect +or give the money necessary. That was her first great service to the Irish +intellectual movement. She reminded me the other day that when she first +asked me what she could do to help our movement I suggested nothing; and, +certainly, no more foresaw her genius that I foresaw that of John Synge, +nor had she herself foreseen it. Our theatre had been established before +she wrote or had any ambition to write, and yet her little comedies have +merriment and beauty, an unusual combination, and those two volumes where +the Irish heroic tales are arranged and translated in an English so simple +and so noble, may do more than other books to deepen Irish imagination. +They contain our ancient literature, are something better than our +_Mabinogion_, are almost our _Morte D'Arthur_. It is more fitting, +however, that in a book of memoirs I should speak of her personal +influence, and especially as no witness is likely to arise better +qualified to speak. If that influence were lacking, Ireland would be +greatly impoverished, so much has been planned out in the library, or +among the woods at Coole; for it was there that John Shawe Taylor found +the independence from class and family that made him summon the conference +between landlord and tenant, that brought land purchase, and it was there +that Hugh Lane formed those Irish ambitions that led to his scattering +many thousands, and gathering much ingratitude; and where, but for that +conversation at Florimond de Bastero's, had been the genius of Synge? + +I have written these words instead of leaving all to posterity, and though +my friend's ear seems indifferent to praise or blame, that young men to +whom recent events are often more obscure than those long past, may learn +what debts they owe and to what creditor. + + +END. + + +PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE DUNEDIN PRESS LIMITED, EDINBURGH + + + + +Transcriber's Notes: + +Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_. + +Periods after "Mr" and "Mrs" are used inconsistently in the original. + +The following misprints have been corrected: + "philospohy" corrected to "philosophy" (page 51) + "unkown" corrected to "unknown" (page 87) + "have have" corrected to "have" (page 92) + "comparson" corrected to "comparison" (page 117) + "politicion" corrected to "politician" (page 128) + "spendid" corrected to "splendid" (page 137) + "mother'" corrected to "mother's" (page 151) + "discoverey" corrected to "discovery" (page 161) + "Shakesspeare's" corrected to "Shakespeare's" (page 169) + "knowlege" corrected to "knowledge" (page 183) + "mechnical" corrected to "mechanical" (page 230) + "delgation" corrected to "delegation" (page 234) + "precedure" corrected to "procedure" (page 237) + +Other than the corrections listed above, inconsistencies in spelling and +hyphenation have been retained from the original. + + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's The Trembling of the Veil, by William Butler Yeats + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL *** + +***** This file should be named 33505-8.txt or 33505-8.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/3/3/5/0/33505/ + +Produced by Brian Foley and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was +produced from images generously made available by The +Internet Archive/American Libraries.) + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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Yeats. + </title> + <style type="text/css"> + + p {margin-top: .75em; text-align: justify; margin-bottom: .75em;} + + body {margin-left: 12%; margin-right: 12%;} + + .pagenum {position: absolute; left: 92%; font-size: smaller; text-align: right; font-style: normal;} + + h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {text-align: center; clear: both;} + + hr {width: 33%; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 2em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; clear: both;} + + table {margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;} + + .poem {margin-left:15%; margin-right:15%;} + .note {margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%;} + + .right {text-align: right;} + .center {text-align: center;} + + .smcap {font-variant: small-caps;} + + .figcenter {margin: auto; text-align: center;} + + a:link {color:#0000ff; text-decoration:none} + a:visited {color:#6633cc; text-decoration:none} + + .spacer {padding-left: 1em; padding-right: 1em;} + .spacer2 {padding-left: 2em; padding-right: 2em;} + + ins.correction {text-decoration:none; border-bottom: thin solid gray;} + + </style> + </head> +<body> + + +<pre> + +Project Gutenberg's The Trembling of the Veil, by William Butler Yeats + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere 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 + + +Title: The Trembling of the Veil + +Author: William Butler Yeats + +Release Date: August 23, 2010 [EBook #33505] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL *** + + + + +Produced by Brian Foley and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was +produced from images generously made available by The +Internet Archive/American Libraries.) + + + + + + +</pre> + + + + + +<h1><i>THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL</i></h1> +<p> </p><p> </p> + +<p class="center">PRIVATELY PRINTED BOOKS</p> +<p class="center">(<i>Uniform with this Volume</i>)</p> + +<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table"> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Story-Teller’s Holiday</span> (<i>George Moore</i>)</td><td><span class="spacer"> </span></td><td><i>July 1918</i></td></tr> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">Avowals</span> (<i>George Moore</i>)</td><td> </td><td><i>September 1919</i></td></tr> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">Esther Waters</span> (<i>George Moore</i>)</td><td> </td><td><i>October 1920</i></td></tr> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Coming of Gabrielle</span> (<i>George Moore</i>)</td><td> </td><td><i>December 1920</i></td></tr> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">Héloise and Abélard</span> (<i>George Moore</i>)</td><td> </td><td><i>February 1921</i></td></tr> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">Nine Tales from “Les Contes Drolatiques” of Balzac</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;">(<i>Translated by Robert Crawford</i>)</span></td><td> </td><td valign="bottom"><i>November 1921</i></td></tr> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">A Portrait of George Moore in a Study of his Work</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;">(<i>John Freeman</i>)</span></td><td> </td><td valign="bottom"><i>May 1922</i></td></tr> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Cauldron of Annwn</span> (<i>Thomas Evelyn Ellis</i>)</td><td> </td><td><i>June 1922</i></td></tr></table> + + + +<p> </p><p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/frontis.jpg" alt="" /></div> +<p class="center"><span style="margin-left: 18em;"><small><i>Emery Walker Ph.oc.</i></small></span></p> +<p class="center"><i>From a picture by Charles Shannon</i></p> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<h1><i>The</i> TREMBLING<br /> +<i>of the</i> VEIL</h1> +<p> </p> +<h4><i>By</i></h4> +<h3>W. B. YEATS</h3> +<p> </p> +<p class="center">LONDON<br /><span class="smcap">Privately Printed for Subscribers only by</span><br /> +T. WERNER LAURIE, LTD.<br />1922</p> + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<p class="center"><i>To</i><br /> +JOHN QUINN<br /> +<i>my friend and helper,<br /> +and friend and helper of certain people<br /> +mentioned in this book</i>.</p> +<p> </p><p> </p> +<p class="center">GIFT</p> +<p> </p> +<p class="center">PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN</p> + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<p class="center">THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL<br /><br /> +<i>This edition consists of one thousand<br />copies numbered and signed.</i><br /> +<br /><i>This is No.</i> 24</p> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/border.png" alt="" /></div> +<h2>PREFACE</h2> +<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/border2.png" alt="" /></div> + +<p> </p> +<div class="note"> +<p><i>I have found in an old diary a quotation from Stephane Mallarmé, saying +that his epoch was troubled by the trembling of the veil of the Temple. As +those words were still true, during the years of my life described in this +book, I have chosen The Trembling of the Veil for its title.</i></p> + +<p><i>Except in one or two trivial details, where I have the warrant of old +friendship, I have not, without permission, quoted conversation or +described occurrence from the private life of named or recognisable +persons. I have not felt my freedom abated, for most of the friends of my +youth are dead and over the dead I have an historian’s rights. They were +artists and writers and certain among them men of genius, and the life of +a man of genius, because of his greater sincerity, is often an experiment +that needs analysis and record. At least my generation so valued +personality that it thought so. I have said all the good I know and all +the evil: I have kept nothing back necessary to understanding.</i></p> + +<p class="right"><i>W. B. YEATS.</i></p> + +<p><i>May, 1922.</i><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Thoor Ballylee.</i></span></p></div> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<h2>CONTENTS</h2> + +<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table"> +<tr><td> </td><td align="right"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr> +<tr><td align="center"><a href="#BOOK_I"><span class="smcap">Book I</span></a></td></tr> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">Four Years 1887-1891</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_3">3</a></td></tr> +<tr><td> </td></tr> +<tr><td align="center"><a href="#BOOK_II"><span class="smcap">Book II</span></a></td></tr> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">Ireland after the Fall of Parnell</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_83">83</a></td></tr> +<tr><td> </td></tr> +<tr><td align="center"><a href="#BOOK_III"><span class="smcap">Book III</span></a></td></tr> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">Hodos Camelionis</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_135">135</a></td></tr> +<tr><td> </td></tr> +<tr><td align="center"><a href="#BOOK_IV"><span class="smcap">Book IV</span></a></td></tr> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Tragic Generation</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_157">157</a></td></tr> +<tr><td> </td></tr> +<tr><td align="center"><a href="#BOOK_V"><span class="smcap">Book V</span></a></td></tr> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Stirring of the Bones</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_225">225</a></td></tr></table> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p> +<h2><a name="BOOK_I" id="BOOK_I"></a>BOOK I<br />FOUR YEARS—1887-1891</h2> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span></p> + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p> + +<h2>THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL</h2> +<p> </p> +<h2><i>FOUR YEARS</i> 1887-1891</h2> + +<p> </p> +<h3>I</h3> + +<p>At the end of the ’eighties my father and mother, my brother and sisters +and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were settled in Bedford Park in +a red-brick house with several mantelpieces of wood, copied from marble +mantelpieces designed by the brothers Adam, a balcony and a little garden +shadowed by a great horse-chestnut tree. Years before we had lived there, +when the crooked ostentatiously picturesque streets with great trees +casting great shadows had been a new enthusiasm: the Pre-Raphaelite +movement at last affecting life. But now exaggerated criticism had taken +the place of enthusiasm, the tiled roofs, the first in modern London, were +said to leak, which they did not, and the drains to be bad, though that +was no longer true; and I imagine that houses were cheap. I remember +feeling disappointed because the co-operative stores, with their little +seventeenth century panes, had lost the romance they had when I had passed +them still unfinished on my way to school; and because the public house, +called The Tabard after Chaucer’s Inn,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> was so plainly a common public +house; and because the great sign of a trumpeter designed by Rooke, the +Pre-Raphaelite artist, had been freshened by some inferior hand. The big +red-brick church had never pleased me, and I was accustomed, when I saw +the wooden balustrade that ran along the slanting edge of the roof where +nobody ever walked or could walk, to remember the opinion of some +architect friend of my father’s, that it had been put there to keep the +birds from falling off. Still, however, it had some village characters and +helped us to feel not wholly lost in the metropolis. I no longer went to +church as a regular habit, but go I sometimes did, for one Sunday morning +I saw these words painted on a board in the porch: “The congregation are +requested to kneel during prayers; the kneelers are afterwards to be hung +upon pegs provided for the purpose.” In front of every seat hung a little +cushion and these cushions were called “kneelers.” Presently the joke ran +through the community, where there were many artists who considered +religion at best an unimportant accessory to good architecture and who +disliked that particular church.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>II</h3> + +<p>I could not understand where the charm had gone that I had felt, when as a +school-boy of twelve or thirteen I had played among the unfinished houses, +once leaving the marks of my two hands, blacked by a fall among some +paint, upon a white balustrade. Sometimes I thought it was because these +were real houses, while my play had been among toy-houses some day to be +inhabited by imaginary people full of the happiness that one can see in +picture books.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>I was in all things Pre-Raphaelite. When I was fifteen or sixteen my +father had told me about Rossetti and Blake and given me their poetry to +read; and once at Liverpool on my way to Sligo I had seen Dante’s Dream in +the gallery there, a picture painted when Rossetti had lost his dramatic +power and to-day not very pleasing to me, and its colour, its people, its +romantic architecture had blotted all other pictures away. It was a +perpetual bewilderment that my father, who had begun life as a +Pre-Raphaelite painter, now painted portraits of the first comer, children +selling newspapers, or a consumptive girl with a basket of fish upon her +head, and that when, moved perhaps by some memory of his youth, he chose +some theme from poetic tradition, he would soon weary and leave it +unfinished. I had seen the change coming bit by bit and its defence +elaborated by young men fresh from the Paris art-schools. “We must paint +what is in front of us,” or “A man must be of his own time,” they would +say, and if I spoke of Blake or Rossetti they would point out his bad +drawing and tell me to admire Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage. Then, too, +they were very ignorant men; they read nothing, for nothing mattered but +“knowing how to paint,” being in reaction against a generation that seemed +to have wasted its time upon so many things. I thought myself alone in +hating these young men, now indeed getting towards middle life, their +contempt for the past, their monopoly of the future, but in a few months I +was to discover others of my own age, who thought as I did, for it is not +true that youth looks before it with the mechanical gaze of a well-drilled +soldier. Its quarrel is not with the past, but with the present, where its +elders are so obviously powerful and no cause seems lost if it seem to +threaten that power.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> Does cultivated youth ever really love the future, +where the eye can discover no persecuted Royalty hidden among oak leaves, +though from it certainly does come so much proletarian rhetoric?</p> + +<p>I was unlike others of my generation in one thing only. I am very +religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the +simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion, almost +an infallible church out of poetic tradition: a fardel of stories, and of +personages, and of emotions, inseparable from their first expression, +passed on from generation to generation by poets and painters with some +help from philosophers and theologians. I wished for a world, where I +could discover this tradition perpetually, and not in pictures and in +poems only, but in tiles round the chimney-piece and in the hangings that +kept out the draught. I had even created a dogma: “Because those imaginary +people are created out of the deepest instinct of man, to be his measure +and his norm, whatever I can imagine those mouths speaking may be the +nearest I can go to truth.” When I listened they seemed always to speak of +one thing only: they, their loves, every incident of their lives, were +steeped in the supernatural. Could even Titian’s “Ariosto” that I loved +beyond other portraits have its grave look, as if waiting for some perfect +final event, if the painters before Titian had not learned portraiture, +while painting into the corner of compositions full of saints and +Madonnas, their kneeling patrons? At seventeen years old I was already an +old-fashioned brass cannon full of shot, and nothing had kept me from +going off but a doubt as to my capacity to shoot straight.</p> + +<p> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span></p> +<h3>III</h3> + +<p>I was not an industrious student and knew only what I had found by +accident and I found nothing I cared for after Titian, and Titian I knew +from an imitation of his <i>Supper of Emmaus</i> in Dublin, till Blake and the +Pre-Raphaelites; and among my father’s friends were no Pre-Raphaelites. +Some indeed had come to Bedford Park in the enthusiasm of the first +building and others to be near those that had. There was Todhunter, a +well-off man who had bought my father’s pictures while my father was still +Pre-Raphaelite; once a Dublin doctor he was now a poet and a writer of +poetical plays; a tall, sallow, lank, melancholy man, a good scholar and a +good intellect; and with him my father carried on a warm exasperated +friendship, fed I think by old memories and wasted by quarrels over +matters of opinion. Of all the survivors he was the most dejected and the +least estranged, and I remember encouraging him, with a sense of worship +shared, to buy a very expensive carpet designed by Morris. He displayed it +without strong liking and would have agreed had there been any to find +fault. If he had liked anything strongly he might have been a famous man, +for a few years later he was to write, under some casual patriotic +impulse, certain excellent verses now in all Irish anthologies; but with +him every book was a new planting, and not a new bud on an old bough. He +had I think no peace in himself. But my father’s chief friend was York +Powell, a famous Oxford Professor of history, a broad-built, broad-headed, +brown-bearded man clothed in heavy blue cloth and looking, but for his +glasses and the dim sight of a student, like some captain in the merchant +service. One often<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> passed with pleasure from Todhunter’s company to that +of one who was almost ostentatiously at peace. He cared nothing for +philosophy, nothing for economics, nothing for the policy of nations; for +history, as he saw it, was a memory of men who were amusing or exciting to +think about. He impressed all who met him, and seemed to some a man of +genius, but he had not enough ambition to shape his thought, or conviction +to give rhythm to his style and remained always a poor writer. I was too +full of unfinished speculations and premature convictions to value rightly +his conversation, informed by a vast erudition, which would give itself to +every casual association of speech and company, precisely because he had +neither cause nor design. My father, however, found Powell’s concrete +narrative manner in talk a necessary completion of his own, and when I +asked him in a letter many years later where he got his philosophy replied +“from York Powell” and thereon added, no doubt remembering that Powell was +without ideas, “by looking at him.” Then there was a good listener, a +painter in whose hall hung a big picture painted in his student days of +Ulysses sailing home from the Phaeacian court, an orange and a skin of +wine at his side, blue mountains towering behind; but who lived by drawing +domestic scenes and lovers’ meetings for a weekly magazine that had an +immense circulation among the imperfectly educated. To escape the boredom +of work, which he never turned to but under pressure of necessity and +usually late at night, with the publisher’s messenger in the hall, he had +half-filled his studio with mechanical toys, of his own invention, and +perpetually increased their number. A model railway train at intervals +puffed its way along the walls, passing several railway stations and +signal boxes; and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> on the floor lay a camp with attacking and defending +soldiers and a fortification that blew up when the attackers fired a pea +through a certain window; while a large model of a Thames barge hung from +the ceiling. Opposite our house lived an old artist who worked also for +the illustrated papers for a living, but painted landscapes for his +pleasure, and of him I remember nothing except that he had outlived +ambition, was a good listener, and that my father explained his gaunt +appearance by his descent from Pocahontas. If all these men were a little +like becalmed ships, there was certainly one man whose sails were full. +Three or four doors off on our side of the road lived a decorative artist +in all the naïve confidence of popular ideals and the public approval. He +was our daily comedy. “I myself and Sir Frederick Leighton are the +greatest decorative artists of the age,” was among his sayings, and a +great Lych-gate, bought from some country church-yard, reared its thatched +roof, meant to shelter bearers and coffin, above the entrance to his front +garden to show that he at any rate knew nothing of discouragement. In this +fairly numerous company—there were others though no other face rises +before me—my father and York Powell found listeners for a conversation +that had no special loyalties, or antagonisms; while I could only talk +upon set topics, being in the heat of my youth, and the topics that filled +me with excitement were never spoken of.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>IV</h3> + +<p>Bedford Park had a red brick clubhouse with a little theatre that began to +stir my imagination. I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> persuaded Todhunter to write a pastoral play and +have it performed there.</p> + +<p>A couple of years before, while we were still in Dublin, he had given at +Hengler’s Circus, remodelled as a Greek Theatre, a most expensive +performance of his <i>Helena of Troas</i>, an oratorical Swinburnian play which +I had thought as unactable as it was unreadable. Since I was seventeen I +had constantly tested my own ambition with Keats’s praise of him who “left +great verses to a little clan,” so it was but natural that I should spend +an evening persuading him that we had nothing to do with the great public, +that it should be a point of honour to be content with our own little +public, that he should write of shepherds and shepherdesses because people +would expect them to talk poetry and move without melodrama. He wrote his +<i>Sicilian Idyll</i>, which I have not looked at for thirty years, and never +rated very high as poetry, and had the one unmistakable success of his +life. The little theatre was full for twice the number of performances +intended, for artists, men of letters and students had come from all over +London.</p> + +<p>I made through these performances a close friend and a discovery that was +to influence my life. Todhunter had engaged several professional actors +with a little reputation, but had given the chief woman’s part to Florence +Farr, who had qualities no contemporary professional practice could have +increased, the chief man’s part to an amateur, Heron Allen, solicitor, +fiddler and popular writer on palmistry. Heron Allen and Florence Farr +read poetry for their pleasure. While they were upon the stage no one else +could hold an eye or an ear. Their speech was music, the poetry acquired a +nobility, a passionate austerity that made it seem akin for certain +moments to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> great poetry of the world. Heron Allen, who had never +spoken in public before except to lecture upon the violin, had the wisdom +to reduce his acting to a series of poses, to be the stately shepherd with +not more gesture than was needed to “twitch his mantle blue” and to let +his grace be foil to Florence Farr’s more impassioned delivery. When they +closed their mouths, and some other player opened his, breaking up the +verse to make it conversational, jerking his body or his arms that he +might seem no austere poetical image but very man, I listened in raging +hatred. I kept my seat with difficulty, I searched my memory for insulting +phrases, I even muttered them to myself that the people about might hear. +I had discovered for the first time that in the performance of all drama +that depends for its effect upon beauty of language, poetical culture may +be more important than professional experience.</p> + +<p>Florence Farr lived in lodgings some twenty minutes’ walk away at Brook +Green, and I was soon a constant caller, talking over plays that I would +some day write her. She had three great gifts, a tranquil beauty like that +of Demeter’s image near the British Museum reading room door, and an +incomparable sense of rhythm and a beautiful voice, the seeming natural +expression of the image. And yet there was scarce another gift that she +did not value above those three. We all have our simplifying image, our +genius, and such hard burden does it lay upon us that, but for the praise +of others, we would deride it and hunt it away. She could only express +hers through an unfashionable art, an art that has scarce existed since +the seventeenth century, and so could only earn unimportant occasional +praise. She would dress without care or calculation as if to hide her +beauty and seem contemptuous<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> of its power. If a man fell in love with her +she would notice that she had seen just that movement upon the stage or +had heard just that intonation and all seemed unreal. If she read out some +poem in English or in French all was passion, all a traditional splendour, +but she spoke of actual things with a cold wit or under the strain of +paradox. Wit and paradox alike sought to pull down whatever had tradition +or passion and she was soon to spend her days in the British Museum +reading room and become erudite in many heterogeneous studies moved by an +insatiable, destroying curiosity. I formed with her an enduring friendship +that was an enduring exasperation—“why do you play the part with a bent +back and a squeak in the voice? How can you be a character actor, you who +hate all our life, you who belong to a life that is a vision?” But +argument was no use, and some Nurse in Euripedes must be played with all +an old woman’s infirmities and not as I would have it, with all a Sybil’s +majesty, because “it is no use doing what nobody wants,” or because she +would show that she “could do what the others did.”</p> + +<p>I used in my rage to compare her thoughts, when her worst mood was upon +her, to a game called Spillikens which I had seen played in my childhood +with little pieces of bone that you had to draw out with a hook from a +bundle of like pieces. A bundle of bones instead of Demeter’s golden +sheaf! Her sitting room at the Brook Green lodging house was soon a +reflection of her mind, the walls covered with musical instruments, pieces +of oriental drapery, and Egyptian gods and goddesses painted by herself in +the British Museum.</p> + +<p> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span></p> +<h3>V</h3> + +<p>Presently a hansom drove up to our door at Bedford Park with Miss Maud +Gonne, who brought an introduction to my father from old John O’Leary, the +Fenian leader. She vexed my father by praise of war, war for its own sake, +not as the creator of certain virtues but as if there were some virtue in +excitement itself. I supported her against my father, which vexed him the +more, though he might have understood that, apart from the fact that +Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage were somehow involved, a man so young as +I could not have differed from a woman so beautiful and so young. To-day, +with her great height and the unchangeable lineaments of her form, she +looks the Sybil I would have had played by Florence Farr, but in that day +she seemed a classical impersonation of the Spring, the Virgilian +commendation “She walks like a goddess” made for her alone. Her complexion +was luminous, like that of apple blossom through which the light falls, +and I remember her standing that first day by a great heap of such +blossoms in the window. In the next few years I saw her always when she +passed to and fro between Dublin and Paris, surrounded, no matter how +rapid her journey and how brief her stay at either end of it, by cages +full of birds, canaries, finches of all kinds, dogs, a parrot, and once a +full-grown hawk from Donegal. Once when I saw her to her railway carriage +I noticed how the cages obstructed wraps and cushions and wondered what +her fellow travellers would say, but the carriage remained empty. It was +years before I could see into the mind that lay hidden under so much +beauty and so much energy.</p> + +<p> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span></p> +<h3>VI</h3> + +<p>Some quarter of an hour’s walk from Bedford Park, out on the high road to +Richmond, lived W. E. Henley, and I, like many others, began under him my +education. His portrait, a lithograph by Rothenstein, hangs over my +mantelpiece among portraits of other friends. He is drawn standing, but +because doubtless of his crippled legs he leans forward, resting his +elbows upon some slightly suggested object—a table or a window-sill. His +heavy figure and powerful head, the disordered hair standing upright, his +short irregular beard and moustache, his lined and wrinkled face, his eyes +steadily fixed upon some object, in complete confidence and +self-possession, and yet as in half-broken reverie, all are there exactly +as I remember him. I have seen other portraits and they too show him +exactly as I remember him, as though he had but one appearance and that +seen fully at the first glance and by all alike. He was most human—human +I used to say like one of Shakespeare’s characters—and yet pressed and +pummelled, as it were, into a single attitude, almost into a gesture and a +speech as by some overwhelming situation. I disagreed with him about +everything, but I admired him beyond words. With the exception of some +early poems founded upon old French models I disliked his poetry, mainly +because he wrote in <i>vers libre</i>, which I associated with Tyndall and +Huxley, and Bastien-Lepage’s clownish peasant staring with vacant eyes at +her great boots; and filled it with unimpassioned description of an +hospital ward where his leg had been amputated. I wanted the strongest +passions, passions that had nothing to do with observation,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> sung in +metrical forms that seemed old enough to be sung by men half-asleep or +riding upon a journey. Furthermore, Pre-Raphaelism affected him as some +people are affected by a cat in the room, and though he professed himself +at our first meeting without political interests or convictions, he soon +grew into a violent unionist and imperialist. I used to say when I spoke +of his poems: “He is like a great actor with a bad part; yet who would +look at Hamlet in the grave scene if Salvini played the grave-digger?” and +I might so have explained much that he said and did. I meant that he was +like a great actor of passion—character-acting meant nothing to me for +many years—and an actor of passion will display some one quality of soul, +personified again and again, just as a great poetical painter, Titian, +Botticelli, Rossetti, may depend for his greatness upon a type of beauty +which presently we call by his name. Irving, the last of the sort on the +English stage, and in modern England and France it is the rarest sort, +never moved me but in the expression of intellectual pride and though I +saw Salvini but once I am convinced that his genius was a kind of animal +nobility. Henley, half inarticulate—“I am very costive,” he would +say—beset with personal quarrels, built up an image of power and +magnanimity till it became, at moments, when seen as it were by lightning, +his true self. Half his opinions were the contrivance of a +sub-consciousness that sought always to bring life to the dramatic crisis +and expression to that point of artifice where the true self could find +its tongue. Without opponents there had been no drama, and in his youth +Ruskinism and Pre-Raphaelitism, for he was of my father’s generation, were +the only possible opponents. How could one resent his prejudice when, that +he himself might play<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> a worthy part, he must find beyond the common rout, +whom he derided and flouted daily, opponents he could imagine moulded like +himself? Once he said to me in the height of his imperial propaganda, +“Tell those young men in Ireland that this great thing must go on. They +say Ireland is not fit for self-government, but that is nonsense. It is as +fit as any other European country, but we cannot grant it.” And then he +spoke of his desire to found and edit a Dublin newspaper. It would have +expounded the Gaelic propaganda then beginning, though Dr Hyde had, as +yet, no league, our old stories, our modern literature—everything that +did not demand any shred or patch of government. He dreamed of a tyranny, +but it was that of Cosimo de’ Medici.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>VII</h3> + +<p>We gathered on Sunday evenings in two rooms, with folding doors between, +and hung, I think, with photographs from Dutch masters, and in one room +there was always, I think, a table with cold meat. I can recall but one +elderly man—Dunn his name was—rather silent and full of good sense, an +old friend of Henley’s. We were young men, none as yet established in his +own, or in the world’s opinion, and Henley was our leader and our +confidant. One evening, I found him alone amused and exasperated: “Young +A——,” he cried “has just been round to ask my advice. Would I think it a +wise thing if he bolted with Mrs B——? ‘Have you quite determined to do +it?’ I asked him. ‘Quite.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘in that case I refuse to give +you any advice.’” Mrs B——<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> was a beautiful talented woman, who, as the +Welsh Triad said of Guinievere, “was much given to being carried off.” I +think we listened to him, and often obeyed him, partly because he was +quite plainly not upon the side of our parents. We might have a different +ground of quarrel, but the result seemed more important than the ground, +and his confident manner and speech made us believe, perhaps for the first +time, in victory. And besides, if he did denounce, and in my case he +certainly did, what we held in secret reverence, he never failed to +associate it with things or persons that did not move us to reverence. +Once I found him just returned from some art congress in Liverpool or in +Manchester. “The salvation armyism of art,” he called it, and gave a +grotesque description of some city councillor he had found admiring +Turner. Henley, who hated all that Ruskin praised, thereupon derided +Turner, and finding the city councillor the next day on the other side of +the gallery, admiring some Pre-Raphaelite there, derided that +Pre-Raphaelite. The third day Henley discovered the poor man on a chair in +the middle of the room staring disconsolately upon the floor. He terrified +us also and certainly I did not dare, and I think none of us dared, to +speak our admiration for book or picture he condemned, but he made us feel +always our importance, and no man among us could do good work, or show the +promise of it, and lack his praise. I can remember meeting of a Sunday +night Charles Whibley, Kenneth Grahame, author of <i>The Golden Age</i>, Barry +Pain, now a well-known novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a +famous talker, George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chief +secretary, and now or later Oscar Wilde, who was some ten years older than +the rest of us. But faces and names are vague to me and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> while faces that +I met but once may rise clearly before me, a face met on many a Sunday has +perhaps vanished. Kipling came sometimes, I think, but I never met him; +and Stepniak, the Nihilist, whom I knew well elsewhere but not there, +said—“I cannot go more than once a year, it is too exhausting.” Henley +got the best out of us all, because he had made us accept him as our judge +and we knew that his judgment could neither sleep, nor be softened, nor +changed, nor turned aside. When I think of him, the antithesis that is the +foundation of human nature being ever in my sight, I see his crippled legs +as though he were some Vulcan perpetually forging swords for other men to +use; and certainly I always thought of C——, a fine classical scholar, a +pale and seemingly gentle man, as our chief swordsman and bravo. When +Henley founded his weekly newspaper, first <i>The Scots</i>, afterwards <i>The +National Observer</i>, this young man wrote articles and reviews notorious +for savage wit; and years afterwards when <i>The National Observer</i> was +dead, Henley dying, and our cavern of outlaws empty, I met him in Paris +very sad and I think very poor. “Nobody will employ me now,” he said. +“Your master is gone,” I answered, “and you are like the spear in an old +Irish story that had to be kept dipped in poppy-juice that it might not go +about killing people on its own account.” I wrote my first good lyrics and +tolerable essays for <i>The National Observer</i>, and as I always signed my +work could go my own road in some measure. Henley often revised my lyrics, +crossing out a line or a stanza and writing in one of his own, and I was +comforted by my belief that he also rewrote Kipling then in the first +flood of popularity. At first, indeed, I was ashamed of being rewritten +and thought that others were not, and only began investigation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> when the +editorial characteristics—epigrams, archaisms, and all—appeared in the +article upon Paris fashions and in that upon opium by an Egyptian Pasha. I +was not compelled to full conformity for verse is plainly stubborn; and in +prose, that I might avoid unacceptable opinions, I wrote nothing but ghost +or fairy stories, picked up from my mother or some pilot at Rosses Point +and Henley saw that I must needs mix a palette fitted to my subject +matter. But if he had changed every “has” into “hath” I would have let +him, for had not we sunned ourselves in his generosity? “My young men +outdo me and they write better than I,” he wrote in some letter praising +Charles Whibley’s work, and to another friend with a copy of my <i>Man Who +Dreamed of Fairyland</i>: “See what a fine thing has been written by one of +my lads.”</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>VIII</h3> + +<p>My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never before +heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all +over night with labour and yet all spontaneous. There was present that +night at Henley’s, by right of propinquity or of accident, a man full of +the secret spite of dulness, who interrupted from time to time, and always +to check or disorder thought; and I noticed with what mastery he was +foiled and thrown. I noticed, too, that the impression of artificiality +that I think all Wilde’s listeners have recorded came from the perfect +rounding of the sentences and from the deliberation that made it possible. +That very impression helped him, as the effect of metre, or of the +antithetical prose of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> the seventeenth century, which is itself a true +metre, helped its writers, for he could pass without incongruity from some +unforeseen, swift stroke of wit to elaborate reverie. I heard him say a +few nights later: “Give me <i>The Winter’s Tale</i>, ‘Daffodils that come +before the swallow dare’ but not <i>King Lear</i>. What is <i>King Lear</i> but poor +life staggering in the fog?” and the slow, carefully modulated cadence +sounded natural to my ears. That first night he praised Walter Pater’s +<i>Studies in the History of the Renaissance</i>: “It is my golden book; I +never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of decadence: +the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written.” “But,” +said the dull man, “would you not have given us time to read it?” “Oh no,” +was the retort, “there would have been plenty of time afterwards—in +either world.” I think he seemed to us, baffled as we were by youth, or by +infirmity, a triumphant figure, and to some of us a figure from another +age, an audacious Italian fifteenth century figure. A few weeks before I +had heard one of my father’s friends, an official in a publishing firm +that had employed both Wilde and Henley as editors, blaming Henley who was +“no use except under control” and praising Wilde, “so indolent but such a +genius”; and now the firm became the topic of our talk. “How often do you +go to the office?” said Henley. “I used to go three times a week,” said +Wilde, “for an hour a day but I have since struck off one of the days.” +“My God,” said Henley, “I went five times a week for five hours a day and +when I wanted to strike off a day they had a special committee meeting.” +“Furthermore,” was Wilde’s answer, “I never answered their letters. I have +known men come to London full of bright prospects and seen them <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>complete +wrecks in a few months through a habit of answering letters.” He too knew +how to keep our elders in their place, and his method was plainly the more +successful, for Henley had been dismissed. “No he is not an aesthete,” +Henley commented later, being somewhat embarrassed by Wilde’s +Pre-Raphaelite entanglement; “one soon finds that he is a scholar and a +gentleman.” And when I dined with Wilde a few days afterwards he began at +once, “I had to strain every nerve to equal that man at all”; and I was +too loyal to speak my thought: “You and not he said all the brilliant +things.” He like the rest of us had felt the strain of an intensity that +seemed to hold life at the point of drama. He had said on that first +meeting “The basis of literary friendship is mixing the poisoned bowl”; +and for a few weeks Henley and he became close friends till, the +astonishment of their meeting over, diversity of character and ambition +pushed them apart, and, with half the cavern helping, Henley began mixing +the poisoned bowl for Wilde. Yet Henley never wholly lost that first +admiration, for after Wilde’s downfall he said to me: “Why did he do it? I +told my lads to attack him and yet we might have fought under his banner.”</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>IX</h3> + +<p>It became the custom, both at Henley’s and at Bedford Park, to say that R. +A. M. Stevenson, who frequented both circles, was the better talker. Wilde +had been trussed up like a turkey by undergraduates, dragged up and down a +hill, his champagne emptied into the ice tub, hooted in the streets of +various towns,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> and I think stoned, and no newspaper named him but in +scorn; his manner had hardened to meet opposition and at times he allowed +one to see an unpardonable insolence. His charm was acquired and +systematized, a mask which he wore only when it pleased him, while the +charm of Stevenson belonged to him like the colour of his hair. If +Stevenson’s talk became monologue we did not know it, because our one +object was to show by our attention that he need never leave off. If +thought failed him we would not combat what he had said, or start some new +theme, but would encourage him with a question; and one felt that it had +been always so from childhood up. His mind was full of phantasy for +phantasy’s sake and he gave as good entertainment in monologue as his +cousin Robert Louis in poem or story. He was always “supposing”; “Suppose +you had two millions what would you do with it?” and “Suppose you were in +Spain and in love how would you propose?” I recall him one afternoon at +our house at Bedford Park, surrounded by my brother and sisters and a +little group of my father’s friends, describing proposals in half a dozen +countries. There your father did it, dressed in such and such a way with +such and such words, and there a friend must wait for the lady outside the +chapel door, sprinkle her with holy water and say, “My friend Jones is +dying for love of you.” But when it was over those quaint descriptions, so +full of laughter and sympathy, faded or remained in the memory as +something alien from one’s own life, like a dance I once saw in a great +house, where beautifully dressed children wound a long ribbon in and out +as they danced. I was not of Stevenson’s party and mainly I think because +he had written a book in praise of Velasquez, praise at that time +universal wherever <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>Pre-Raphaelism was accurst, and to my mind, that had +to pick its symbols where its ignorance permitted, Velasquez seemed the +first bored celebrant of boredom. I was convinced from some obscure +meditation that Stevenson’s conversational method had joined him to my +elders and to the indifferent world, as though it were right for old men, +and unambitious men and all women, to be content with charm and humour. It +was the prerogative of youth to take sides and when Wilde said: “Mr +Bernard Shaw has no enemies but is intensely disliked by all his friends,” +I knew it to be a phrase I should never forget, and felt revenged upon a +notorious hater of romance, whose generosity and courage I could not +fathom.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>X</h3> + +<p>I saw a good deal of Wilde at that time—was it 1887 or 1888?—I have no +way of fixing the date except that I had published my first book <i>The +Wanderings of Usheen</i> and that Wilde had not yet published his <i>Decay of +Lying</i>. He had, before our first meeting, reviewed my book and despite its +vagueness of intention, and the inexactness of its speech, praised without +qualification; and what was worth more than any review he had talked about +it and now he asked me to eat my Christmas dinner with him believing, I +imagine, that I was alone in London. He had just renounced his velveteen, +and even those cuffs turned backward over the sleeves, and had begun to +dress very carefully in the fashion of the moment. He lived in a little +house at Chelsea that the architect Godwin had decorated with an elegance +that owed something to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> Whistler. There was nothing mediaeval, nor +Pre-Raphaelite, no cupboard door with figures upon flat gold, no peacock +blue, no dark background. I remember vaguely a white drawing room with +Whistler etchings, “let in” to white panels, and a dining room all white, +chairs, walls, mantelpiece, carpet, except for a diamond-shaped piece of +red cloth in the middle of the table under a terra-cotta statuette, and I +think a red shaded lamp hanging from the ceiling to a little above the +statuette. It was perhaps too perfect in its unity, his past of a few +years before had gone too completely, and I remember thinking that the +perfect harmony of his life there, with his beautiful wife and his two +young children, suggested some deliberate artistic composition.</p> + +<p>He commended and dispraised himself during dinner by attributing +characteristics like his own to his country: “We Irish are too poetical to +be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest +talkers since the Greeks.” When dinner was over he read me from the proofs +of <i>The Decay of Lying</i> and when he came to the sentence: “Schopenhauer +has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet +invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once +melancholy,” I said, “Why do you change ‘sad’ to ‘melancholy’?” He replied +that he wanted a full sound at the close of his sentence, and I thought it +no excuse and an example of the vague impressiveness that spoilt his +writing for me. Only when he spoke, or when his writing was the mirror of +his speech, or in some simple fairy tale, had he words exact enough to +hold a subtle ear. He alarmed me, though not as Henley did, for I never +left his house thinking myself fool or dunce. He flattered the intellect +of every man he liked; he made me tell<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> him long Irish stories and +compared my art of storytelling to Homer’s; and once when he had described +himself as writing in the census paper “age 19, profession genius, +infirmity talent” the other guest, a young journalist fresh from Oxford or +Cambridge, said, “What should I have written?” and was told that it should +have been “profession talent, infirmity genius.” When, however, I called, +wearing shoes a little too yellow—unblackened leather had just become +fashionable—I realized their extravagance when I saw his eyes fixed upon +them; and another day Wilde asked me to tell his little boy a fairy story, +and I had but got as far as “Once upon a time there was a giant” when the +little boy screamed and ran out of the room. Wilde looked grave and I was +plunged into the shame of clumsiness that afflicts the young. When I asked +for some literary gossip for some provincial newspaper, that paid me a few +shillings a month, he explained very explicitly that writing literary +gossip was no job for a gentleman.</p> + +<p>Though to be compared to Homer passed the time pleasantly, I had not been +greatly perturbed had he stopped me with: “Is it a long story?” as Henley +would certainly have done. I was abashed before him as wit and man of the +world alone. I remember that he deprecated the very general belief in his +success or his efficiency, and I think with sincerity. One form of success +had gone: he was no more the lion of the season and he had not discovered +his gift for writing comedy, yet I think I knew him at the happiest moment +of his life. No scandal had touched his name, his fame as a talker was +growing among his equals, and he seemed to live in the enjoyment of his +own spontaneity. One day he began: “I have been inventing a Christian +heresy,” and he told a detailed story, in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> the style of some early father, +of how Christ recovered after the Crucifixion, and escaping from the tomb, +lived on for many years, the one man upon earth who knew the falsehood of +Christianity. Once St Paul visited his town and he alone in the +carpenters’ quarter did not go to hear him preach. The other carpenters +noticed that henceforth, for some unknown reason, he kept his hands +covered. A few days afterwards I found Wilde with smock frocks in various +colours spread out upon the floor in front of him, while a missionary +explained that he did not object to the heathen going naked upon week +days, but insisted upon clothes in church. He had brought the smock frocks +in a cab that the only art-critic whose fame had reached Central Africa +might select a colour; so Wilde sat there weighing all with a conscious +ecclesiastic solemnity.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XI</h3> + +<p>Of late years I have often explained Wilde to myself by his family +history. His father was a friend or acquaintance of my father’s father and +among my family traditions there is an old Dublin riddle: “Why are Sir +William Wilde’s nails so black?” Answer, “Because he has scratched +himself.” And there is an old story still current in Dublin of Lady Wilde +saying to a servant, “Why do you put the plates on the coal-scuttle? What +are the chairs meant for?” They were famous people and there are many like +stories; and even a horrible folk story, the invention of some Connaught +peasant, that tells how Sir William Wilde took out the eyes of some men, +who had come to consult him as an oculist, and laid them upon a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> plate, +intending to replace them in a moment, and how the eyes were eaten by a +cat. As a certain friend of mine, who has made a prolonged study of the +nature of cats, said when he first heard the tale, “Cats love eyes.” The +Wilde family was clearly of the sort that fed the imagination of Charles +Lever, dirty, untidy, daring, and what Charles Lever, who loved more +normal activities, might not have valued so highly, very imaginative and +learned. Lady Wilde, who when I knew her received her friends with blinds +drawn and shutters closed that none might see her withered face, longed +always perhaps, though certainly amid much self-mockery, for some +impossible splendour of character and circumstance. She lived near her son +in level Chelsea, but I have heard her say, “I want to live on some high +place, Primrose Hill or Highgate, because I was an eagle in my youth.” I +think her son lived with no self-mockery at all an imaginary life; +perpetually performed a play which was in all things the opposite of all +that he had known in childhood and early youth; never put off completely +his wonder at opening his eyes every morning on his own beautiful house, +and in remembering that he had dined yesterday with a duchess, and that he +delighted in Flaubert and Pater, read Homer in the original and not as a +schoolmaster reads him for the grammar. I think, too, that because of all +that half-civilized blood in his veins he could not endure the sedentary +toil of creative art and so remained a man of action, exaggerating, for +the sake of immediate effect, every trick learned from his masters, +turning their easel painting into painted scenes. He was a parvenu, but a +parvenu whose whole bearing proved that if he did dedicate every story in +<i>The House of Pomegranates</i> to a lady of title, it was but to show that he +was Jack and the social ladder<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> his pantomime beanstalk. “Did you ever +hear him say ‘Marquess of Dimmesdale’?” a friend of his once asked me. “He +does not say ‘the Duke of York’ with any pleasure.”</p> + +<p>He told me once that he had been offered a safe seat in Parliament and, +had he accepted, he might have had a career like that of Beaconsfield, +whose early style resembles his, being meant for crowds, for excitement, +for hurried decisions, for immediate triumphs. Such men get their +sincerity, if at all, from the contact of events; the dinner table was +Wilde’s event and made him the greatest talker of his time, and his plays +and dialogues have what merit they possess from being now an imitation, +now a record, of his talk. Even in those days I would often defend him by +saying that his very admiration for his predecessors in poetry, for +Browning, for Swinburne and Rossetti, in their first vogue while he was a +very young man, made any success seem impossible that could satisfy his +immense ambition: never but once before had the artist seemed so great, +never had the work of art seemed so difficult. I would then compare him +with Benvenuto Cellini who, coming after Michael Angelo, found nothing +left to do so satisfactory as to turn bravo and quarrel with the man who +broke Michael Angelo’s nose.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XII</h3> + +<p>I cannot remember who first brought me to the old stable beside Kelmscott +House, William Morris’s house at Hammersmith, and to the debates held +there upon Sunday evenings by the Socialist League. I was soon of the +little group who had supper with Morris <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>afterwards. I met at these +suppers very constantly Walter Crane, Emery Walker, in association with +Cobden Sanderson, the printer of many fine books, and less constantly +Bernard Shaw and Cockerell, now of the Museum of Cambridge, and perhaps +but once or twice Hyndman the Socialist and the Anarchist Prince +Kropotkin. There, too, one always met certain more or less educated +workmen, rough of speech and manner, with a conviction to meet every turn. +I was told by one of them, on a night when I had done perhaps more than my +share of the talking, that I had talked more nonsense in one evening than +he had heard in the whole course of his past life. I had merely preferred +Parnell, then at the height of his career, to Michael Davitt, who had +wrecked his Irish influence by international politics. We sat round a long +unpolished and unpainted trestle table of new wood in a room where hung +Rossetti’s <i>Pomegranate</i>, a portrait of Mrs. Morris, and where one wall +and part of the ceiling were covered by a great Persian carpet. Morris had +said somewhere or other that carpets were meant for people who took their +shoes off when they entered a house and were most in place upon a tent +floor. I was a little disappointed in the house, for Morris was an old man +content at last to gather beautiful things rather than to arrange a +beautiful house. I saw the drawing-room once or twice, and there alone all +my sense of decoration, founded upon the background of Rossetti’s +pictures, was satisfied by a big cupboard painted with a scene from +Chaucer by Burne-Jones; but even there were objects, perhaps a chair or a +little table, that seemed accidental, bought hurriedly perhaps and with +little thought, to make wife or daughter comfortable. I had read as a boy, +in books belonging to my father, the third volume of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> <i>The Earthly +Paradise</i>, and <i>The Defence of Guenevere</i>, which pleased me less, but had +not opened either for a long time. <i>The Man Who Never Laughed Again</i> had +seemed the most wonderful of tales till my father had accused me of +preferring Morris to Keats, got angry about it, and put me altogether out +of countenance. He had spoiled my pleasure, for now I questioned while I +read and at last ceased to read; nor had Morris written as yet those prose +romances that became after his death so great a joy that they were the +only books I was ever to read slowly that I might not come too quickly to +the end. It was now Morris himself that stirred my interest, and I took to +him first because of some little tricks of speech and body that reminded +me of my old grandfather in Sligo, but soon discovered his spontaneity and +joy and made him my chief of men. To-day I do not set his poetry very +high, but for an odd altogether wonderful line, or thought; and yet, if +some angel offered me the choice, I would choose to live his life, poetry +and all, rather than my own or any other man’s. A reproduction of his +portrait by Watts hangs over my mantelpiece with Henley’s, and those of +other friends. Its grave wide-open eyes, like the eyes of some dreaming +beast, remind me of the open eyes of Titian’s “Ariosto,” while the broad +vigorous body suggests a mind that has no need of the intellect to remain +sane, though it give itself to every phantasy: the dreamer of the middle +ages. It is “the fool of fairy ... wide and wild as a hill,” the resolute +European image that yet half remembers Buddha’s motionless meditation, and +has no trait in common with the wavering, lean image of hungry +speculation, that cannot but fill the mind’s eye because of certain famous +Hamlets of our stage. Shakespeare himself<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> foreshadowed a symbolic change, +that shows a change in the whole temperament of the world, for though he +called his Hamlet “fat” and even “scant of breath,” he thrust between his +fingers agile rapier and dagger.</p> + +<p>The dream world of Morris was as much the antithesis of daily life as with +other men of genius, but he was never conscious of the antithesis and so +knew nothing of intellectual suffering. His intellect, unexhausted by +speculation or casuistry, was wholly at the service of hand and eye, and +whatever he pleased he did with an unheard of ease and simplicity, and if +style and vocabulary were at times monotonous, he could not have made them +otherwise without ceasing to be himself. Instead of the language of +Chaucer and Shakespeare, its warp fresh from field and market, if the woof +were learned, his age offered him a speech, exhausted from abstraction, +that only returned to its full vitality when written learnedly and slowly.</p> + +<p>The roots of his antithetical dream were visible enough: a never idle man +of great physical strength and extremely irascible—did he not fling a +badly baked plum pudding through the window upon Christmas Day?—a man +more joyous than any intellectual man of our world, called himself “the +idle singer of an empty day,” created new forms of melancholy, and faint +persons, like the knights and ladies of Burne-Jones, who are never, no not +once in forty volumes, put out of temper. A blunderer who had said to the +only unconverted man at a Socialist picnic in Dublin, to prove that +equality came easy, “I was brought up a gentleman and now as you can see +associate with all sorts” and left wounds thereby that rankled after +twenty years, a man of whom I have heard it said “He is always afraid that +he is doing something wrong and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> generally is,” wrote long stories with +apparently no other object than that his persons might show to one +another, through situations of poignant difficulty the most exquisite +tact.</p> + +<p>He did not project like Henley or like Wilde, an image of himself, because +having all his imagination set upon making and doing he had little self +knowledge. He imagined instead new conditions of making and doing; and in +the teeth of those scientific generalizations that cowed my boyhood, I can +see some like imagining in every great change, believing that the first +flying fish first leaped, not because it sought “adaptation” to the air, +but out of horror of the sea.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XIII</h3> + +<p>Soon after I began to attend the lectures a French class was started in +the old coach-house for certain young Socialists who planned a tour in +France, and I joined it, and was for a time a model student constantly +encouraged by the compliments of the old French mistress. I told my father +of the class, and he asked me to get my sisters admitted. I made +difficulties and put off speaking of the matter, for I knew that the new +and admirable self I was making would turn, under family eyes, into plain +rag-doll. How could I pretend to be industrious, and even carry +dramatisation to the point of learning my lessons, when my sisters were +there and knew that I was nothing of the kind? But I had no argument I +could use, and my sisters were admitted. They said nothing unkind, so far +as I can remember, but in a week or two I was my old procrastinating idle +self and had soon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> left the class altogether. My elder sister stayed on +and became an embroideress under Miss May Morris, and the hangings round +Morris’s big bed at Kelmscott House, Oxfordshire, with their verses about +lying happily in bed when “all birds sing in the town of the tree,” were +from her needle, though not from her design. She worked for the first few +months at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, and in my imagination I cannot +always separate what I saw and heard from her report, or indeed from the +report of that tribe or guild who looked up to Morris as to some +worshipped mediaeval king. He had no need for other people. I doubt if +their marriage or death made him sad or glad, and yet no man I have known +was so well loved; you saw him producing everywhere organisation and +beauty, seeming, almost in the same instant, helpless and triumphant; and +people loved him as children are loved. People much in his neighbourhood +became gradually occupied with him or about his affairs, and, without any +wish on his part, as simple people become occupied with children. I +remember a man who was proud and pleased because he had distracted +Morris’s thoughts from an attack of gout by leading the conversation +delicately to the hated name of Milton. He began at Swinburne: “O, +Swinburne,” said Morris, “is a rhetorician; my masters have been Keats and +Chaucer, for they make pictures.” “Does not Milton make pictures?” asked +my informant. “No,” was the answer, “Dante makes pictures, but Milton, +though he had a great earnest mind, expressed himself as a rhetorician.” +“Great earnest mind” sounded strange to me, and I doubt not that were his +questioner not a simple man Morris had been more violent. Another day the +same man started by praising Chaucer, but the gout was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> worse, and Morris +cursed Chaucer for destroying the English language with foreign words.</p> + +<p>He had few detachable phrases, and I can remember little of his speech, +which many thought the best of all good talk, except that it matched his +burly body and seemed within definite boundaries inexhaustible in fact and +expression. He alone of all the men I have known seemed guided by some +beast-like instinct and never ate strange meat. “Balzac! Balzac!” he said +to me once, “oh, that was the man the French Bourgeoisie read so much a +few years ago.” I can remember him at supper praising wine: “Why do people +say it is prosaic to be inspired by wine? Has it not been made by the +sunlight and the sap?” and his dispraising houses decorated by himself: +“Do you suppose I like that kind of house? I would like a house like a big +barn, where one ate in one corner, cooked in another corner, slept in the +third corner, and in the fourth received one’s friends”; and his +complaining of Ruskin’s objection to the underground railway: “If you must +have a railway the best thing you can do with it is to put it in a tube +with a cork at each end.” I remember, too, that when I asked what led up +to his movement, he replied: “Oh, Ruskin and Carlyle, but somebody should +have been beside Carlyle and punched his head every five minutes.” Though +I remember little, I do not doubt that, had I continued going there on +Sunday evenings, I should have caught fire from his words and turned my +hand to some mediaeval work or other.</p> + +<p>Just before I had ceased to go there I had sent my <i>Wanderings of Usheen</i> +to his daughter, hoping of course that it might meet his eyes, and soon +after sending it I came upon him by chance in Holborn—“You write my sort +of poetry,” he said and began to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> praise me and to promise to send his +praise to <i>The Commonwealth</i>, the League organ, and he would have said +more had he not caught sight of a new ornamental cast-iron lamp post and +got very heated upon that subject.</p> + +<p>I did not read economics, having turned socialist because of Morris’s +lectures and pamphlets, and I think it unlikely that Morris himself could +read economics. That old dogma of mine seemed germane to the matter. If +the men and women imagined by the poets were the norm, and if Morris had, +in let us say “News from Nowhere,” then running through <i>The +Commonwealth</i>, described such men and women, living under their natural +conditions, or as they would desire to live, then those conditions +themselves must be the norm and could we but get rid of certain +institutions the world would turn from eccentricity. Perhaps Morris +himself justified himself in his own heart by as simple an argument, and +was, as the socialist D—— said to me one night, walking home after some +lecture, “an anarchist without knowing it.” Certainly I and all about me, +including D—— himself, were for chopping up the old king for Medea’s +pot. Morris had told us to have nothing to do with the parliamentary +socialists, represented for men in general by the Fabian Society and +Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation and for us in particular by D——. +During the period of transition mistakes must be made, and the discredit +of these mistakes must be left to “the Bourgeoisie”; and besides, when you +begin to talk of this measure, or that other, you lose sight of the goal, +and see, to reverse Swinburne’s description of Tiresias, “Light on the way +but darkness on the goal.” By mistakes Morris meant vexatious restrictions +and compromises—“If<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> any man puts me into a labour squad, I will lie on +my back and kick.” That phrase very much expresses our idea of +revolutionary tactics: we all intended to lie upon our back and kick. +D——, pale and sedentary, did not dislike labour squads and we all hated +him with the left side of our heads, while admiring him immensely with the +right side. He alone was invited to entertain Mrs Morris, having many +tales of his Irish uncles, more especially of one particular uncle who had +tried to commit suicide by shutting his head into a carpet-bag. At that +time he was an obscure man, known only for a witty speaker at street +corners and in Park demonstrations. He had, with an assumed truculence and +fury, cold logic, an invariable gentleness, an unruffled courtesy, and yet +could never close a speech without being denounced by a journeyman hatter, +with an Italian name. Converted to socialism by D——, and to anarchism by +himself, with swinging arm and uplifted voice, this man put, and perhaps, +exaggerated our scruple about Parliament. “I lack,” said D——, “the bump +of reverence”; whereon the wild man shouted: “You ’ave a ’ole.” There are +moments when looking back I somewhat confuse my own figure with that of +the hatter, image of our hysteria, for I too became violent with the +violent solemnity of a religious devotee. I can even remember sitting +behind D—— and saying some rude thing or other over his shoulder.</p> + +<p>I don’t remember why I gave it up but I did quite suddenly and the push +may have come from a young workman who was educating himself between +Morris and Karl Marx. He had planned a history of the Navy, and when I had +spoken of the battleships of Nelson’s day had said, “O, that was the +decadence of the battleship,” but if his naval interests were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> mediæval, +his ideas about religion were pure Karl Marx, and we were soon in +perpetual argument. Then gradually the attitude towards religion of almost +everybody but Morris, who avoided the subject altogether, got upon my +nerves, for I broke out after some lecture or other with all the arrogance +of raging youth. They attacked religion, I said, or some such words, and +yet there must be a change of heart and only religion could make it. What +was the use of talking about some new revolution putting all things right, +when the change must come, if come it did, with astronomical slowness, +like the cooling of the sun, or it may have been like the drying of the +moon? Morris rang his chairman’s bell, but I was too angry to listen, and +he had to ring it a second time before I sat down. He said that night at +supper, “Of course I know there must be a change of heart, but it will not +come as slowly as all that. I rang my bell because you were not being +understood.” He did not show any vexation, but I never returned after that +night; and yet I did not always believe what I had said, and only +gradually gave up thinking of and planning for some near sudden change for +the better.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XIV</h3> + +<p>I spent my days at the British Museum and must, I think, have been +delicate, for I remember often putting off hour after hour consulting some +necessary book because I shrank from lifting the heavy volumes of the +catalogue; and yet to save money for my afternoon coffee and roll I often +walked the whole way home to Bedford Park. I was compiling, for a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> series +of shilling books, an anthology of Irish fairy-stories and, for an +American publisher, a two-volume selection from the Irish novelists that +would be somewhat dearer. I was not well paid, for each book cost me more +than three months’ reading; and I was paid for the first some twelve +pounds (“O, Mr. E.,” said publisher to editor, “you must never again pay +so much!”) and for the second twenty, but I did not think myself badly +paid, for I had chosen the work for my own purposes.</p> + +<p>Though I went to Sligo every summer, I was compelled to live out of +Ireland the greater part of every year, and was but keeping my mind upon +what I knew must be the subject-matter of my poetry. I believed that if +Morris had set his stories amid the scenery of his own Wales, for I knew +him to be of Welsh extraction and supposed wrongly that he had spent his +childhood there, that if Shelley had nailed his <i>Prometheus</i>, or some +equal symbol, upon some Welsh or Scottish rock, their art had entered more +intimately, more microscopically, as it were, into our thought and had +given perhaps to modern poetry a breadth and stability like that of +ancient poetry. The statues of Mausolus and Artemisia at the British +Museum, private, half-animal, half-divine figures, all unlike the Grecian +athletes and Egyptian kings in their near neighbourhood, that stand in the +middle of the crowd’s applause, or sit above measuring it out +unpersuadable justice, became to me, now or later, images of an +unpremeditated joyous energy, that neither I nor any other man, racked by +doubt and inquiry, can achieve; and that yet, if once achieved, might seem +to men and women of Connemara or of Galway their very soul. In our study +of that ruined tomb raised by a queen to her dead lover,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> and finished by +the unpaid labour of great sculptors, after her death from grief, or so +runs the tale, we cannot distinguish the handiworks of Scopas and +Praxiteles; and I wanted to create once more an art where the artist’s +handiwork would hide as under those half anonymous chisels, or as we find +it in some old Scots ballads, or in some twelfth or thirteenth century +Arthurian Romance. That handiwork assured, I had martyred no man for +modelling his own image upon Pallas Athena’s buckler; for I took great +pleasure in certain allusions to the singer’s life, one finds in old +romances and ballads, and thought his presence there all the more poignant +because we discover it half lost, like portly Chaucer, behind his own +maunciple and pardoner upon the Canterbury roads. Wolfram von Eschenbach, +singing his German Parsifal, broke off some description of a famished city +to remember that in his own house at home the very mice lacked food, and +what old ballad singer was it who claimed to have fought by day in the +very battle he sang by night? So masterful indeed was that instinct that +when the minstrel knew not who his poet was, he must needs make up a man: +“When any stranger asks who is the sweetest of singers, answer with one +voice: ‘a blind man; he dwells upon rocky Chios; his songs shall be the +most beautiful for ever.’” Elaborate modern psychology sounds egotistical, +I thought, when it speaks in the first person, but not those simple +emotions which resemble the more, the more powerful they are, everybody’s +emotion, and I was soon to write many poems where an always personal +emotion was woven into a general pattern of myth and symbol. When the +Fenian poet says that his heart has grown cold and callous—“For thy +hapless fate, dear Ireland, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> sorrows of my own”—he but follows +tradition and if he does not move us deeply, it is because he has no +sensuous musical vocabulary that comes at need, without compelling him to +sedentary toil and so driving him out from his fellows. I thought to +create that sensuous, musical vocabulary, and not for myself only, but +that I might leave it to later Irish poets, much as a mediæval Japanese +painter left his style as an inheritance to his family, and was careful to +use a traditional manner and matter, yet did something altogether +different, changed by that toil, impelled by my share in Cain’s curse, by +all that sterile modern complication, by my “originality,” as the +newspapers call it. Morris set out to make a revolution that the persons +of his <i>Well at the World’s End</i> or his <i>Waters of the Wondrous Isles</i>, +always, to my mind, in the likeness of Artemisia and her man, might walk +his native scenery; and I, that my native scenery might find imaginary +inhabitants, half-planned a new method and a new culture. My mind began +drifting vaguely towards that doctrine of “the mask” which has convinced +me that every passionate man (I have nothing to do with mechanist, or +philanthropist, or man whose eyes have no preference) is, as it were, +linked with another age, historical or imaginary, where alone he finds +images that rouse his energy. Napoleon was never of his own time, as the +naturalistic writers and painters bid all men be, but had some Roman +emperor’s image in his head and some condottiere blood in his heart; and +when he crowned that head at Rome with his own hands he had covered, as +may be seen from David’s painting, his hesitation with that emperor’s old +suit.</p> + +<p> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span></p> +<h3>XV</h3> + +<p>I had various women friends on whom I would call towards five o’clock +mainly to discuss my thoughts that I could not bring to a man without +meeting some competing thought, but partly because their tea and toast +saved my pennies for the ’bus ride home; but with women, apart from their +intimate exchanges of thought, I was timid and abashed. I was sitting on a +seat in front of the British Museum feeding pigeons when a couple of girls +sat near and began enticing my pigeons away, laughing and whispering to +one another, and I looked straight in front of me, very indignant, and +presently went into the Museum without turning my head towards them. Since +then I have often wondered if they were pretty or merely very young. +Sometimes I told myself very adventurous love-stories with myself for +hero, and at other times I planned out a life of lonely austerity, and at +other times mixed the ideals and planned a life of lonely austerity +mitigated by periodical lapses. I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo +in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little +island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick +I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which +balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. +From the sudden remembrance came my poem <i>Innisfree</i>, my first lyric with +anything in its rhythm of my own music. I had begun to loosen rhythm as an +escape from rhetoric and from that emotion of the crowd that rhetoric +brings, but I only understood vaguely and occasionally that I must for my +special purpose use nothing but the common syntax. A couple of years<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> +later I would not have written that first line with its conventional +archaism—“Arise and go”—nor the inversion in the last stanza. Passing +another day by the new Law Courts, a building that I admired because it +was Gothic—“It is not very good,” Morris had said, “but it is better than +anything else they have got and so they hate it”—I grew suddenly +oppressed by the great weight of stone, and thought, “There are miles and +miles of stone and brick all round me,” and presently added, “If John the +Baptist or his like were to come again and had his mind set upon it, he +could make all these people go out into some wilderness leaving their +buildings empty,” and that thought, which does not seem very valuable now, +so enlightened the day that it is still vivid in the memory. I spent a few +days at Oxford copying out a seventeenth century translation of Poggio’s +<i>Liber Facetiarum</i> or the <i>Hypneroto-machia</i> of Poliphili for a publisher; +I forget which, for I copied both; and returned very pale to my troubled +family. I had lived upon bread and tea because I thought that if antiquity +found locust and wild honey nutritive, my soul was strong enough to need +no better. I was always planning some great gesture, putting the whole +world into one scale of the balance and my soul into the other and +imagining that the whole world somehow kicked the beam. More than thirty +years have passed and I have seen no forcible young man of letters brave +the metropolis, without some like stimulant; and all after two or three, +or twelve or fifteen years, according to obstinacy, have understood that +we achieve, if we do achieve, in little sedentary stitches as though we +were making lace. I had one unmeasured advantage from my stimulant: I +could ink my socks, that they might not show through my shoes, with a most +haughty mind, imagining <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>myself, and my torn tackle, somewhere else, in +some far place “under the canopy ... i’ the city of kites and crows.”</p> + +<p>In London I saw nothing good and constantly remembered that Ruskin had +said to some friend of my father’s—“As I go to my work at the British +Museum I see the faces of the people become daily more corrupt.” I +convinced myself for a time, that on the same journey I saw but what he +saw. Certain old women’s faces filled me with horror, faces that are no +longer there, or if they are pass before me unnoticed: the fat blotched +faces, rising above double chins, of women who have drunk too much beer +and eaten much meat. In Dublin I had often seen old women walking with +erect heads and gaunt bodies, talking to themselves with loud voices, mad +with drink and poverty, but they were different, they belonged to romance. +Da Vinci had drawn women who looked so and so carried their bodies.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XVI</h3> + +<p>I attempted to restore one old friend of my father’s to the practice of +his youth, but failed, though he, unlike my father, had not changed his +belief. My father brought me to dine with Jack Nettleship at Wigmore +Street, once inventor of imaginative designs and now a painter of +melodramatic lions. At dinner I had talked a great deal—too much, I +imagine, for so young a man, or maybe for any man—and on the way home my +father, who had been plainly anxious that I should make a good impression, +was very angry. He said I had talked for effect and that talking for +effect was precisely what one must never do; he had always<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> hated rhetoric +and emphasis and had made me hate it; and his anger plunged me into great +dejection. I called at Nettleship’s studio the next day to apologise, and +Nettleship opened the door himself and received me with enthusiasm. He had +explained to some woman guest that I would probably talk well, being an +Irishman, but the reality had surpassed, etc., etc. I was not flattered, +though relieved at not having to apologise, for I soon discovered that +what he really admired was my volubility, for he himself was very silent. +He seemed about sixty, had a bald head, a grey beard, and a nose, as one +of my father’s friends used to say, like an opera-glass, and sipped cocoa +all the afternoon and evening from an enormous tea-cup that must have been +designed for him alone, not caring how cold the cocoa grew. Years before +he had been thrown from his horse, while hunting, and broke his arm, and +because it had been badly set suffered great pain for a long time. A +little whisky would always stop the pain, and soon a little became a great +deal and he found himself a drunkard, but having signed his liberty away +for certain months he was completely cured. He had acquired, however, the +need of some liquid which he could sip constantly. I brought him an +admiration settled in early boyhood, for my father had always said, +“George Wilson was our born painter, but Nettleship our genius,” and even +had he shown me nothing I could care for, I had admired him still because +my admiration was in my bones. He showed me his early designs, and they, +though often badly drawn, fulfilled my hopes. Something of Blake they +certainly did show, but had in place of Blake’s joyous, intellectual +energy a Saturnian passion and melancholy. “God Creating Evil,” the +death-like head with a woman and a tiger<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> coming from the forehead, which +Rossetti—or was it Browning?—had described “as the most sublime design +of ancient or modern art,” had been lost, but there was another version of +the same thought, and other designs never published or exhibited. They +rise before me even now in meditation, especially a blind Titan-like ghost +floating with groping hands above the tree-tops. I wrote a criticism, and +arranged for reproductions with the editor of an art magazine, but after +it was written and accepted the proprietor, lifting what I considered an +obsequious caw in the Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage +rookery, insisted upon its rejection. Nettleship did not mind its +rejection, saying, “Who cares for such things now? Not ten people,” but he +did mind my refusal to show him what I had written. Though what I had +written was all eulogy, I dreaded his judgment for it was my first art +criticism. I hated his big lion pictures, where he attempted an art too +much concerned with the sense of touch, with the softness or roughness, +the minutely observed irregularity of surfaces, for his genius; and I +think he knew it. “Rossetti used to call my pictures pot-boilers,” he +said, “but they are all—all”—and he waved his arm to the +canvasses—“symbols.” When I wanted him to design gods, and angels, and +lost spirits once more, he always came back to the point “Nobody would be +pleased.” “Everybody should have a <i>raison d’être</i>” was one of his +phrases. “Mrs ——’s articles are not good but they are her <i>raison +d’être</i>.” I had but little knowledge of art for there was little +scholarship in the Dublin art school, so I overrated the quality of +anything that could be connected with my general beliefs about the world. +If I had been able to give angelical or diabolical names to his lions<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> I +might have liked them also and I think that Nettleship himself would have +liked them better and liking them better have become a better painter. We +had the same kind of religious feeling, but I could give a crude +philosophical expression to mine while he could only express his in action +or with brush and pencil. He often told me of certain ascetic ambitions, +very much like my own, for he had kept all the moral ambition of youth, as +for instance—“Yeats, the other night I was arrested by a policeman—was +walking round Regent’s Park barefooted to keep the flesh under—good sort +of thing to do. I was carrying my boots in my hand and he thought I was a +burglar and even when I explained and gave him half a crown, he would not +let me go till I had promised to put on my boots before I met the next +policeman.”</p> + +<p>He was very proud and shy and I could not imagine anybody asking him +questions and so I was content to take these stories as they came: +confirmations of what I had heard of him in boyhood. One story in +particular had stirred my imagination for, ashamed all my boyhood of my +lack of physical courage, I admired what was beyond my imitation. He +thought that any weakness, even a weakness of body, had the character of +sin and while at breakfast with his brother, with whom he shared a room on +the third floor of a corner house, he said that his nerves were out of +order. Presently he left the table, and got out through the window and on +to a stone ledge that ran along the wall under the windowsills. He sidled +along the ledge, and turning the corner with it, got in at a different +window and returned to the table. “My nerves,” he said, “are better than I +thought.”</p> + +<p>Nettleship said to me: “Has Edwin Ellis ever said<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> anything about the +effect of drink upon my genius?” “No,” I answered. “I ask,” he said, +“because I have always thought that Ellis has some strange medical +insight.” Though I had answered no, Ellis had only a few days before used +these words: “Nettleship drank his genius away.” Ellis, but lately +returned from Perugia where he had lived many years, was another old +friend of my father’s but some years younger than Nettleship or my father. +Nettleship had found his simplifying image, but in his painting had turned +away from it, while Ellis, the son of Alexander Ellis, a once famous man +of science, who was perhaps the last man in England to run the circle of +the sciences without superficiality, had never found that image at all. He +was a painter and poet, but his painting, which did not interest me, +showed no influence but that of Leighton. He had started perhaps a couple +of years too late for Pre-Raphaelite influence, for no great +Pre-Raphaelite picture was painted after 1870, and left England too soon +for that of the French painters. He was, however, sometimes moving as a +poet and still more often an astonishment. I have known him cast something +just said into a dozen lines of musical verse, without apparently ceasing +to talk; but the work once done he could not or would not amend it, and my +father thought he lacked all ambition. Yet he had at times nobility of +rhythm—an instinct for grandeur, and after thirty years I still repeat to +myself his address to Mother Earth—</p> + +<p class="poem">“O mother of the hills, forgive our towers,<br /> +O mother of the clouds forgive our dreams.”</p> + +<p>And there are certain whole poems that I read from time to time or try to +make others read. There is that poem where the manner is unworthy of the +matter,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> being loose and facile, describing Adam and Eve fleeing from +Paradise. Adam asks Eve what she carries so carefully, and Eve replies +that it is a little of the apple-core kept for their children. There is +that vision concerning <i>Christ the Less</i>, a too hurriedly written ballad, +where the half of Christ sacrificed to the divine half “that fled to seek +felicity” wanders wailing through Golgotha, and there is <i>The Saint and +the Youth</i>, in which I can discover no fault at all. He loved +complexities—“Seven silences like candles round her face” is a line of +his—and whether he wrote well or ill had always a manner which I would +have known from that of any other poet. He would say to me, “I am a +mathematician with the mathematics left out”—his father was a great +mathematician—or “A woman once said to me, ‘Mr Ellis, why are your poems +like sums?’” And certainly he loved symbols and abstractions. He said +once, when I had asked him not to mention something or other, “Surely you +have discovered by this time that I know of no means whereby I can mention +a fact in conversation.”</p> + +<p>He had a passion for Blake, picked up in Pre-Raphaelite studios, and early +in our acquaintance put into my hands a scrap of notepaper on which he had +written some years before an interpretation of the poem that begins</p> + +<p class="poem">“The fields from Islington to Marylebone,<br /> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;">To Primrose Hill and St. John’s Wood,</span><br /> +Were builded over with pillars of gold,<br /> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood.”</span></p> + +<p>The four quarters of London represented Blake’s four great mythological +personages, the Zoas, and also the four elements. These few sentences were +the foundation of all study of the philosophy of William Blake that +requires an exact knowledge for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> its pursuit and that traces the +connection between his system and that of Swedenborg or of Boehme. I +recognised certain attributions, from what is sometimes called the +Christian Cabbala, of which Ellis had never heard, and with this proof +that his interpretation was more than fantasy he and I began our four +years’ work upon the Prophetic Books of William Blake. We took it as +almost a sign of Blake’s personal help when we discovered that the spring +of 1889, when we first joined our knowledge, was one hundred years from +the publication of <i>The Book of Thel</i>, the first published of the +Prophetic Books, as though it were firmly established that the dead +delight in anniversaries. After months of discussion and reading we made a +concordance of all Blake’s mystical terms, and there was much copying to +be done in the Museum and at Red Hill, where the descendants of Blake’s +friend and patron, the landscape painter John Linnell, had many +manuscripts. The Linnells were narrow in their religious ideas and +doubtful of Blake’s orthodoxy, whom they held, however, in great honour, +and I remember a timid old lady who had known Blake when a child saying, +“He had very wrong ideas, he did not believe in the historical Jesus.” One +old man sat always beside us, ostensibly to sharpen our pencils but +perhaps really to see that we did not steal the manuscripts, and they gave +us very old port at lunch, and I have upon my dining-room walls their +present of Blake’s Dante engravings. Going thither and returning Ellis +would entertain me by philosophical discussion varied with improvised +stories, at first folk-tales which he professed to have picked up in +Scotland, and, though I had read and collected many folk tales, I did not +see through the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> deceit. I have a partial memory of two more elaborate +tales, one of an Italian conspirator flying barefoot, from I forget what +adventure through I forget what Italian city, in the early morning. +Fearing to be recognised by his bare feet, he slipped past the sleepy +porter at an hotel, calling out “number so and so” as if he were some +belated guest. Then passing from bedroom door to door he tried on the +boots, and just as he got a pair to fit, a voice cried from the room: “Who +is that?” “Merely me, sir,” he called back, “taking your boots.” The other +was of a martyr’s Bible, round which the cardinal virtues had taken +personal form—this a fragment of Blake’s philosophy. It was in the +possession of an old clergyman when a certain jockey called upon him, and +the cardinal virtues, confused between jockey and clergyman, devoted +themselves to the jockey. As whenever he sinned a cardinal virtue +interfered and turned him back to virtue, he lived in great credit, and +made, but for one sentence, a very holy death. As his wife and family +knelt round in admiration and grief he suddenly said “damn.” “O my dear,” +said his wife, “what a dreadful expression.” He answered, “I am going to +heaven,” and straightway died. It was a long tale, for there were all the +jockey’s vain attempts to sin, as well as all the adventures of the +clergyman, who became very sinful indeed, but it ended happily for when +the jockey died the cardinal virtues returned to the clergyman. I think he +would talk to any audience that offered, one audience being the same as +another in his eyes, and it may have been for this reason that my father +called him unambitious. When he was a young man he had befriended a +reformed thief and had asked the grateful<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> thief to take him round the +thieves’ quarters of London. The thief, however, hurried him away from the +worst saying, “Another minute and they would have found you out. If they +were not the stupidest of men in London, they had done so already.” Ellis +had gone through a detailed, romantic and witty account of all the houses +he had robbed and all the throats he had cut in one short life.</p> + +<p>His conversation would often pass out of my comprehension, or indeed I +think of any man’s, into a labyrinth of abstraction and subtlety and then +suddenly return with some verbal conceit or turn of wit. The mind is known +to attain in certain conditions of trance a quickness so extraordinary +that we are compelled at times to imagine a condition of unendurable +intellectual intensity from which we are saved by the merciful stupidity +of the body, and I think that the mind of Edwin Ellis was constantly upon +the edge of trance. Once we were discussing the symbolism of sex in the +<ins class="correction" title="original: philospohy">philosophy</ins> of Blake and had been in disagreement all the afternoon. I +began talking with a new sense of conviction and after a moment Ellis, who +was at his easel, threw down his brush and said that he had just seen the +same explanation in a series of symbolic visions. “In another moment,” he +said, “I should have been off.” We went into the open air and walked up +and down to get rid of that feeling, but presently we came in again and I +began again my explanation, Ellis lying upon the sofa. I had been talking +some time when Mrs Ellis came into the room and said, “Why are you sitting +in the dark?” Ellis answered, “But we are not,” and then added in a voice +of wonder, “I thought the lamp was lit, and that I was sitting up,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> and +now I find that I am lying down and that we are in darkness.” I had seen a +flicker of light over the ceiling but thought it a reflection from some +light outside the house, which may have been the case.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XVII</h3> + +<p>I had already met most of the poets of my generation. I had said, soon +after the publication of <i>The Wanderings of Usheen</i>, to the editor of a +series of shilling reprints, who had set me to compile tales of the Irish +fairies, “I am growing jealous of other poets and we will all grow jealous +of each other unless we know each other and so feel a share in each +other’s triumph.” He was a Welshman, lately a mining engineer, Ernest +Rhys, a writer of Welsh translations and original poems, that have often +moved me greatly though I can think of no one else who has read them. He +was perhaps a dozen years older than myself and through his work as editor +knew everybody who would compile a book for seven or eight pounds. Between +us we founded The Rhymers’ Club, which for some years was to meet every +night in an upper room with a sanded floor in an ancient eating house in +the Strand called The Cheshire Cheese. Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, +Victor Plarr, Ernest Radford, John Davidson, Richard le Gallienne, T. W. +Rolleston, Selwyn Image, Edwin Ellis, and John Todhunter came constantly +for a time, Arthur Symons and Herbert Home, less constantly, while William +Watson joined but never came and Francis Thompson came once but never +joined; and sometimes if we met in a private house,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> which we did +occasionally, Oscar Wilde came. It had been useless to invite him to The +Cheshire Cheese for he hated Bohemia. “Olive Schreiner,” he said once to +me, “is staying in the East End because that is the only place where +people do not wear masks upon their faces, but I have told her that I live +in the West End because nothing in life interests me but the mask.”</p> + +<p>We read our poems to one another and talked criticism and drank a little +wine. I sometimes say when I speak of the club, “We had such and such +ideas, such and such a quarrel with the great Victorians, we set before us +such and such aims,” as though we had many philosophical ideas. I say this +because I am ashamed to admit that I had these ideas and that whenever I +began to talk of them a gloomy silence fell upon the room. A young Irish +poet, who wrote excellently but had the worst manners, was to say a few +years later, “You do not talk like a poet, you talk like a man of +letters,” and if all the Rhymers had not been polite, if most of them had +not been to Oxford or Cambridge, the greater number would have said the +same thing. I was full of thought, often very abstract thought, longing +all the while to be full of images, because I had gone to the art school +instead of a university. Yet even if I had gone to a university, and +learned all the classical foundations of English literature and English +culture, all that great erudition which once accepted frees the mind from +restlessness, I should have had to give up my Irish subject matter, or +attempt to found a new tradition. Lacking sufficient recognized precedent +I must needs find out some reason for all I did. I knew almost from the +start that to overflow with reasons was to be not quite <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>well-born, and +when I could I hid them, as men hide a disagreeable ancestry; and that +there was no help for it seeing that my country was not born at all. I was +of those doomed to imperfect achievement, and under a curse, as it were, +like some race of birds compelled to spend the time, needed for the making +of the nest, in argument as to the convenience of moss and twig and +lichen. Le Gallienne and Davidson, and even Symons, were provincial at +their setting out, but their provincialism was curable, mine incurable; +while the one conviction shared by all the younger men, but principally by +Johnson and Home, who imposed their personalities upon us, was an +opposition to all ideas, all generalizations that can be explained and +debated. E—— fresh from Paris would sometimes say—“We are concerned +with nothing but impressions,” but that itself was a generalization and +met but stony silence. Conversation constantly dwindled into “Do you like +so and so’s last book?” “No, I prefer the book before it,” and I think +that but for its Irish members, who said whatever came into their heads, +the club would not have survived its first difficult months. I saw—now +ashamed that I saw “like a man of letters,” now exasperated at their +indifference to the fashion of their own river-bed—that Swinburne in one +way, Browning in another, and Tennyson in a third, had filled their work +with what I called “impurities,” curiosities about politics, about +science, about history, about religion; and that we must create once more +the pure work.</p> + +<p>Our clothes were, for the most part unadventurous like our conversation, +though I indeed wore a brown velveteen coat, a loose tie, and a very old +inverness cape, discarded by my father twenty years before and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> preserved +by my Sligo-born mother whose actions were unreasoning and habitual like +the seasons. But no other member of the club, except Le Gallienne, who +wore a loose tie, and Symons, who had an inverness cape that was quite new +and almost fashionable, would have shown himself for the world in any +costume but “that of an English gentleman.” “One should be quite +unnoticeable,” Johnson explained to me. Those who conformed most carefully +to the fashion in their clothes, generally departed furthest from it in +their handwriting, which was small, neat, and studied, one poet—which, I +forget—having founded his upon the handwriting of George Herbert. Dowson +and Symons I was to know better in later years when Symons became a very +dear friend, and I never got behind John Davidson’s Scottish roughness and +exasperation, though I saw much of him, but from the first I devoted +myself to Lionel Johnson. He and Horne and Image and one or two others, +shared a man-servant and an old house in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, +typical figures of transition, doing as an achievement of learning and of +exquisite taste what their predecessors did in careless abundance. All +were Pre-Raphaelite, and sometimes one might meet in the rooms of one or +other a ragged figure, as of some fallen dynasty, Simeon Solomon the +Pre-Raphaelite painter, once the friend of Rossetti and of Swinburne, but +fresh now from some low public house. Condemned to a long term of +imprisonment for a criminal offence, he had sunk into drunkenness and +misery. Introduced one night, however, to some man who mistook him, in the +dim candle light, for another Solomon, a successful academic painter and +R.A., he started to his feet in a rage with, “Sir, do you dare to mistake +me for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> that mountebank?” Though not one had hearkened to the feeblest +caw, or been spattered by the smallest dropping from any Huxley, Tyndall, +Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage bundle of old twigs I began by suspecting +them of lukewarmness, and even backsliding, and I owe it to that suspicion +that I never became intimate with Horne, who lived to become the greatest +English authority upon Italian life in the fourteenth century and to write +the one standard work on Botticelli. Connoisseur in several arts, he had +designed a little church in the manner of Inigo Jones for a burial ground +near the Marble Arch. Though I now think his little church a masterpiece, +its style was more than a century too late to hit my fancy, at two or +three and twenty; and I accused him of leaning towards that eighteenth +century</p> + +<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 3em;">“That taught a school</span><br /> +Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit<br /> +Till, like the certain wands of Jacob’s wit,<br /> +Their verses tallied.”</p> + +<p>Another fanaticism delayed my friendship with two men, who are now my +friends and in certain matters my chief instructors. Somebody, probably +Lionel Johnson, brought me to the studio of Charles Ricketts and Charles +Shannon, certainly heirs of the great generation, and the first thing I +saw was a Shannon picture of a lady and child, arrayed in lace silk and +satin, suggesting that hated century. My eyes were full of some more +mythological mother and child and I would have none of it and I told +Shannon that he had not painted a mother and child, but elegant people +expecting visitors and I thought that a great reproach. Somebody writing +in <i>The Germ</i> had said that a picture of a pheasant and an apple was +merely a picture of something to eat and I was so angry with the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> +indifference to subject, which was the commonplace of all art criticism +since Bastien-Lepage, that I could at times see nothing else but subject. +I thought that, though it might not matter to the man himself whether he +loved a white woman or a black, a female pickpocket or a regular +communicant of the Church of England, if only he loved strongly, it +certainly did matter to his relations and even under some circumstances to +his whole neighbourhood. Sometimes indeed, like some father in Molière, I +ignored the lover’s feelings altogether and even refused to admit that a +trace of the devil, perhaps a trace of colour, may lend piquancy, +especially if the connection be not permanent.</p> + +<p>Among these men, of whom so many of the greatest talents were to live such +passionate lives and die such tragic deaths, one serene man, T. W. +Rolleston, seemed always out of place; it was I brought him there, +intending to set him to some work in Ireland later on. I have known young +Dublin working men slip out of their workshop to see the second Thomas +Davis passing by, and even remember a conspiracy, by some three or four, +to make him “the leader of the Irish race at home and abroad,” and all +because he had regular features; and when all is said Alexander the Great +and Alcibiades were personable men, and the Founder of the Christian +religion was the only man who was neither a little too tall nor a little +too short, but exactly six feet high. We in Ireland thought as do the +plays and ballads, not understanding that, from the first moment wherein +nature foresaw the birth of Bastien-Lepage, she has only granted great +creative power to men whose faces are contorted with extravagance or +curiosity, or dulled with some protecting stupidity.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>I had now met all those who were to make the ’nineties of the last century +tragic in the history of literature, but as yet we were all seemingly +equal, whether in talent or in luck, and scarce even personalties to one +another. I remember saying one night at the Cheshire Cheese, when more +poets than usual had come, “None of us can say who will succeed, or even +who has or has not talent. The only thing certain about us is that we are +too many.”</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XVIII</h3> + +<p>I have described what image—always opposite to the natural self or the +natural world—Wilde, Henley, Morris, copied or tried to copy, but I have +not said if I found an image for myself. I know very little about myself +and much less of that anti-self: probably the woman who cooks my dinner or +the woman who sweeps out my study knows more than I. It is perhaps because +nature made me a gregarious man, going hither and thither looking for +conversation, and ready to deny from fear or favour his dearest +conviction, that I love proud and lonely things. When I was a child and +went daily to the sexton’s daughter for writing lessons, I found one poem +in her School Reader that delighted me beyond all others: a fragment of +some metrical translation from Aristophanes wherein the birds sing scorn +upon mankind. In later years my mind gave itself to gregarious Shelley’s +dream of a young man, his hair blanched with sorrow, studying philosophy +in some lonely tower, or of his old man, master of all human knowledge, +hidden from human sight in some shell-strewn cavern on the Mediterranean<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> +shore. One passage above all ran perpetually in my ears—</p> + +<p class="poem">“Some feign that he is Enoch: others dream<br /> +He was pre-Adamite, and has survived<br /> +Cycles of generation and of ruin.<br /> +The sage, in truth, by dreadful abstinence,<br /> +And conquering penance of the mutinous flesh,<br /> +Deep contemplation and unwearied study,<br /> +In years outstretched beyond the date of man,<br /> +May have attained to sovereignty and science<br /> +Over those strong and secret things and thoughts<br /> +Which others fear and know not.<br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>Mahmud.</i><span class="spacer2"> </span><span class="spacer2"> </span>I would talk</span><br /> +With this old Jew.<br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>Hassan.</i><span class="spacer2"> </span>Thy will is even now</span><br /> +Made known to him where he dwells in a sea-cavern<br /> +’Mid the Demonesi, less accessible<br /> +Than thou or God! He who would question him<br /> +Must sail alone at sunset where the stream<br /> +Of ocean sleeps around those foamless isles,<br /> +When the young moon is westering as now,<br /> +And evening airs wander upon the wave;<br /> +And, when the pines of that bee-pasturing isle,<br /> +Green Erebinthus, quench the fiery shadow<br /> +Of his gilt prow within the sapphire water,<br /> +Then must the lonely helmsman cry aloud<br /> +‘Ahasuerus!’ and the caverns round<br /> +Will answer ‘Ahasuerus!’ If his prayer<br /> +Be granted, a faint meteor will arise,<br /> +Lighting him over Marmora; and a wind<br /> +Will rush out of the sighing pine-forest,<br /> +And with the wind a storm of harmony<br /> +Unutterably sweet, and pilot him<br /> +Through the soft twilight to the Bosphorus:<br /> +Thence, at the hour and place and circumstance<br /> +Fit for the matter of their conference,<br /> +The Jew appears. Few dare, and few who dare<br /> +Win the desired communion.”</p> + +<p>Already in Dublin, I had been attracted to the Theosophists because they +had affirmed the real existence of the Jew, or of his like, and, apart +from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> whatever might have been imagined by Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, +and Bastien-Lepage, I saw nothing against his reality. Presently having +heard that Madame Blavatsky had arrived from France, or from India, I +thought it time to look the matter up. Certainly if wisdom existed +anywhere in the world it must be in some such lonely mind admitting no +duty to us, communing with God only, conceding nothing from fear or +favour. Have not all peoples, while bound together in a single mind and +taste, believed that such men existed and paid them that honour, or paid +it to their mere shadow, which they have refused to philanthropists and to +men of learning.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XIX</h3> + +<p>I found Madame Blavatsky in a little house at Norwood, with but, as she +said, three followers left—the Society of Psychical Research had just +reported on her Indian phenomena—and as one of the three followers sat in +an outer room to keep out undesirable visitors, I was kept a long time +kicking my heels. Presently I was admitted and found an old woman in a +plain loose dark dress: a sort of old Irish peasant woman with an air of +humour and audacious power. I was still kept waiting, for she was deep in +conversation with a woman visitor. I strayed through folding doors into +the next room and stood, in sheer idleness of mind, looking at a cuckoo +clock. It was certainly stopped, for the weights were off and lying upon +the ground, and yet, as I stood there the cuckoo came out and cuckooed at +me. I interrupted Madame Blavatsky to say, “Your clock has hooted me.”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> +“It oftens hoots at a stranger,” she replied. “Is there a spirit in it?” I +said. “I do not know,” she said, “I should have to be alone to know what +is in it.” I went back to the clock and began examining it and heard her +say: “Do not break my clock.” I wondered if there was some hidden +mechanism and I should have been put out, I suppose, had I found any, +though Henley had said to me, “Of course she gets up fraudulent miracles, +but a person of genius has to do something; Sarah Bernhardt sleeps in her +coffin.” Presently the visitor went away and Madame Blavatsky explained +that she was a propagandist for women’s rights who had called to find out +“why men were so bad.” “What explanation did you give her?” I said. “That +men were born bad, but women made themselves so,” and then she explained +that I had been kept waiting because she had mistaken me for some man, +whose name resembled mine and who wanted to persuade her of the flatness +of the earth.</p> + +<p>When I next saw her she had moved into a house at Holland Park, and some +time must have passed—probably I had been in Sligo where I returned +constantly for long visits—for she was surrounded by followers. She sat +nightly before a little table covered with green baize and on this green +baize she scribbled constantly with a piece of white chalk. She would +scribble symbols, sometimes humorously explained, and sometimes +unintelligible figures, but the chalk was intended to mark down her score +when she played patience. One saw in the next room a large table where +every night her followers and guests, often a great number, sat down to +their vegetable meal, while she encouraged or mocked through the folding +doors. A great passionate nature, a sort of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> female Dr Johnson, impressive +I think to every man or woman who had themselves any richness, she seemed +impatient of the formalism of the shrill abstract idealism of those about +her, and this impatience broke out in railing and many nicknames: “O you +are a flap-doodle, but then you are a theosophist and a brother.” The most +devout and learned of all her followers said to me, “H. P. B. has just +told me that there is another globe stuck on to this at the north pole, so +that the earth has really a shape something like a dumb-bell.” I said, for +I knew that her imagination contained all the folklore of the world, “That +must be some piece of Eastern mythology.” “O no it is not,” he said, “of +that I am certain, and there must be something in it or she would not have +said it.” Her mockery was not kept for her followers alone, and her voice +would become harsh, and her mockery lose fantasy and humour, when she +spoke of what seemed to her scientific materialism. Once I saw this +antagonism, guided by some kind of telepathic divination, take a form of +brutal fantasy. I brought a very able Dublin woman to see her and this +woman had a brother, a physiologist whose reputation, though known to +specialists alone, was European, and because of this brother a family +pride in everything scientific and modern. The Dublin woman scarcely +opened her mouth the whole evening and her name was certainly unknown to +Madame Blavatsky, yet I saw at once in that wrinkled old face bent over +the cards, and the only time I ever saw it there, a personal hostility, +the dislike of one woman for another. Madame Blavatsky seemed to bundle +herself up, becoming all primeval peasant, and began complaining of her +ailments, more especially of her bad leg. But of late<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> her master—her +“old Jew,” her “Ahasuerus”—cured it, or set it on the way to be cured. “I +was sitting here in my chair,” said she, “when the master came in and +brought something with him which he put over my knee, something warm which +enclosed my knee—it was a live dog which he had cut open.” I recognized a +cure used sometimes in mediaeval medicine. She had two masters and their +portraits, ideal Indian heads, painted by some most incompetent artist, +stood upon either side of the folding doors. One night when talk was +impersonal and general, I sat gazing through the folding doors into the +dimly lighted dining room beyond. I noticed a curious red light shining +upon a picture and got up to see where the red light came from. It was the +picture of an Indian and as I came near it slowly vanished. When I +returned to my seat, Madame Blavatsky said, “What did you see?” “A +picture,” I said. “Tell it to go away.” “It is already gone.” “So much the +better,” she said, “I was afraid it was mediumship. But it is only +clairvoyance.” “What is the difference?” “If it had been mediumship, it +would have stayed in spite of you. Beware of mediumship; it is a kind of +madness; I know for I have been through it.”</p> + +<p>I found her almost always full of gaiety that, unlike the occasional +joking of those about her, was illogical and incalculable and yet always +kindly and tolerant. I had called one evening to find her absent but +expected every moment. She had been somewhere at the seaside for her +health and arrived with a little suite of followers. She sat down at once +in her big chair, and began unfolding a brown paper parcel while all +looked on full of curiosity. It contained a large family Bible. “This is a +present for my maid,”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> she said. “What a Bible and not even annotated!” +said some shocked voice. “Well, my children,” was the answer, “what is the +good of giving lemons to those who want oranges?” When I first began to +frequent her house, as I soon did very constantly, I noticed a handsome +clever woman of the world there, who seemed certainly very much out of +place, penitent though she thought herself. Presently there was much +scandal and gossip for the penitent was plainly entangled with two young +men, who were expected to grow into ascetic sages. The scandal was so +great that Madame Blavatsky had to call the penitent before her and to +speak after this fashion, “We think that it is necessary to crush the +animal nature; you should live in chastity in act and thought. Initiation +is granted only to those who are entirely chaste,” and so it ran on for +some time. However, after some minutes in that vehement style, the +penitent standing crushed and shamed before her, she had wound up, “I +cannot permit you more than one.” She was quite sincere but thought that +nothing mattered but what happened in the mind, and that if we could not +master the mind our actions were of little importance. One young man +filled her with exasperation for she thought that his settled gloom came +from his chastity. I had known him in Dublin where he had been accustomed +to interrupt long periods of asceticism, in which he would eat vegetables +and drink water, with brief outbreaks of what he considered the devil. +After an outbreak he would for a few hours dazzle the imagination of the +members of the local theosophical society with poetical rhapsodies about +harlots and street lamps, and then sink into weeks of melancholy. A +fellow-theosophist once found him hanging from the windowpole, but cut him +down in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> the nick of time. I said to the man who cut him down, “What did +you say to each other?” He said, “We spent the night telling comic stories +and laughing a great deal.” This man, torn between sensuality and +visionary ambition, was now the most devout of all, and told me that in +the middle of the night he could often hear the ringing of the little +“astral bell” whereby Madame Blavatsky’s master called her attention, and +that, although it was a silvery low tone, it made the whole house shake. +Another night I found him waiting in the hall to show in those who had +right of entrance, on some night when the discussion was private, and as I +passed he whispered into my ear, “Madame Blavatsky is perhaps not a real +woman at all. They say that her dead body was found many years ago upon +some Russian battlefield.” She had two dominant moods, both of extreme +activity, one calm and philosophic, and this was the mood always on that +night in the week when she answered questions upon her system, and as I +look back after thirty years I often ask myself, “Was her speech +automatic? Was she a trance medium, or in some similar state, one night in +every week?” In the other mood she was full of fantasy and inconsequent +raillery. “That is the Greek Church, a triangle like all true religion,” I +recall her saying, as she chalked out a triangle on the green baize, and +then as she made it disappear in meaningless scribbles, “it spread out and +became a bramble bush like the Church of Rome.” Then rubbing it all out +except one straight line, “Now they have lopped off the branches and +turned it into a broomstick and that is protestantism.” And so it was +night after night always varied and unforeseen. I have observed a like +sudden extreme change in others,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> half whose thought was supernatural and +Lawrence Oliphant records somewhere or other like observations. I can +remember only once finding her in a mood of reverie, something had +happened to damp her spirits, some attack upon her movement, or upon +herself. She spoke of Balzac, whom she had seen but once, of Alfred de +Musset, whom she had known well enough to dislike for his morbidity, and +George Sand, whom she had known so well that they had dabbled in magic +together of which “neither knew anything at all” in those days; and she +ran on, as if there was nobody there to overhear her, “I used to wonder at +and pity the people who sell their souls to the devil, but now I only pity +them. They do it to have somebody on their side,” and added to that, after +some words I have forgotten, “I write, write, write as the Wandering Jew +walks, walks, walks.”</p> + +<p>Besides the devotees, who came to listen and to turn every doctrine into a +new sanction for the puritanical convictions of their Victorian childhood, +cranks came from half Europe and from all America, and they came that they +might talk. One American said to me, “She has become the most famous woman +in the world by sitting in a big chair and permitting us to talk.” They +talked and she played patience, and totted up her score on the green +baize, and generally seemed to listen, but sometimes she would listen no +more. There was a woman who talked perpetually of “the divine spark” +within her, until Madame Blavatsky stopped her with—“Yes, my dear, you +have a divine spark within you and if you are not very careful you will +hear it snore.” A certain Salvation Army captain probably pleased her, for +if vociferous and loud of voice, he had much animation. He had known +hardship and spoke of his visions while starving<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> in the streets and he +was still perhaps a little light in the head. I wondered what he could +preach to ignorant men, his head ablaze with wild mysticism, till I met a +man who had heard him talking near Covent Garden to some crowd in the +street. “My friends,” he was saying, “you have the kingdom of heaven +within you and it would take a pretty big pill to get that out.”</p> + +<p>Meanwhile I had got no nearer to proving that the sage Ahasuerus “dwells +in a sea cavern ’mid the Demonesi,” nor did I learn any more of those +“Masters” whose representative Madame Blavatsky claimed to be. All there +seemed to feel their presence, and all spoke of them as if they were more +important than any visible inhabitant of the house. When Madame Blavatsky +was more silent, less vivid than usual, it was “because her Masters were +angry;” they had rebuked her because of some error, and she professed +constant error. Once I seemed in their presence, or that of some messenger +of theirs. It was about nine at night, and half a dozen of us sat round +her big table cloth, when the room seemed to fill with the odour of +incense. Somebody came from upstairs, but could smell nothing—had been +outside the influence it seems—but to myself and the others, it was very +strong. Madame Blavatsky said it was a common Indian incense, and that +some pupil of her master’s was present; she seemed anxious to make light +of the matter and turned the conversation to something else. Certainly it +was a romantic house, and I did not separate myself from it by my own +will. I had learned from Blake to hate all abstraction, and, affected by +the abstraction of what were called “esoteric teachings,” I began a series +of experiments. Some book or magazine published by the society had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> quoted +from that essay of magic, which Sibley, the eighteenth century astrologer, +had bound up with his big book upon astrology. If you burnt a flower to +ashes and put the ashes under, I think, the receiver of an air pump, and +stood the receiver in the moonlight for so many nights, the ghost of the +flower would appear hovering over its ashes. I got together a committee +which performed this experiment without results. The “esoteric teachings” +had declared that a certain very pure kind of indigo was the symbol of one +of the seven principles into which they divided human nature. I got with +some difficulty a little of this pure indigo, and gave portions of it to +members of the committee, and asked them to put it under their pillows at +night and record their dreams. I argued that all natural scenery must be +divided into seven types according to these principles, and by their study +we could rid the mind of abstraction. Presently a secretary, a friendly, +intelligent man, asked me to come and see him, and, when I did, complained +that I was causing discussion and disturbance. A certain fanatical hungry +face had been noticed red and tearful, and it was quite plain that I was +not in agreement with their methods or their philosophy. “We have certain +definite ideas,” he said, “and we have but one duty, to spread them +through the world. I know that all these people become dogmatic, that they +believe what they can never prove, that their withdrawal from family life +is for them a great misfortune, but what are we to do? We have been told +that all spiritual influx into the society will come to an end in 1897 for +exactly one hundred years; before that date our fundamental ideas must be +spread in all countries.” I knew the doctrine, and it made me wonder why<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> +that old woman, or the “masters” from whom, whatever they were or were +not, her genius had come, insisted upon it; for influx of some kind there +must always be. Did they dread heresy, or had they no purpose but the +greatest possible immediate effect?</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XX</h3> + +<p>At the British Museum reading room I often saw a man of thirty-six, or +thirty-seven, in a brown velveteen coat, with a gaunt resolute face, and +an athletic body, who seemed before I heard his name, or knew the nature +of his studies, a figure of romance. Presently I was introduced, where or +by what man or woman I do not remember. He was called Liddle Mathers, but +would soon, under the touch of “The Celtic Movement,” become Macgregor +Mathers, and then plain Macgregor. He was the author of <i>The Kabbala +Unveiled</i>, and his studies were two only—magic and the theory of war, for +he believed himself a born commander and all but equal in wisdom and in +power to that old Jew. He had copied many manuscripts on magic ceremonial +and doctrine in the British Museum, and was to copy many more in +Continental libraries, and it was through him mainly that I began certain +studies and experiences, that were to convince me that images well up +before the mind’s eye from a deeper source than conscious or subconscious +memory. I believe that his mind in those early days did not belie his face +and body, though in later years it became unhinged, for he kept a proud +head amid great poverty. One that boxed with him nightly has told me that +for many weeks he could knock him down, though Mathers was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> the stronger +man, and only knew long after that during those weeks Mathers starved. +With him I met an old white-haired Oxfordshire clergyman, the most +panic-stricken person I have ever known, though Mathers’ introduction had +been “he unites us to the great adepts of antiquity.” This old man took me +aside that he might say—“I hope you never invoke spirits—that is a very +dangerous thing to do. I am told that even the planetary spirits turn upon +us in the end.” I said, “Have you ever seen an apparition?” “O yes, once,” +he said. “I have my alchemical laboratory in a cellar under my house where +the Bishop cannot see it. One day I was walking up and down there when I +heard another footstep walking up and down beside me. I turned and saw a +girl I had been in love with when I was a young man, but she died long +ago. She wanted me to kiss her. O no, I would not do that.” “Why not?” I +said. “O she might have got power over me.” “Has your alchemical research +had any success?” I said. “Yes, I once made the elixir of life. A French +alchemist said it had the right smell and the right colour” (the alchemist +may have been Eliphas Levi, who visited England in the ’sixties, and would +have said anything) “but the first effect of the elixir is that your nails +fall out and your hair falls off. I was afraid that I might have made a +mistake and that nothing else might happen, so I put it away on a shelf. I +meant to drink it when I was an old man, but when I got it down the other +day it had all dried up.”</p> + +<p>Soon after my first meeting with Mathers he emerged into brief prosperity, +becoming for two or three years Curator of a private museum at Forest +Hill, and marrying a young and beautiful wife, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> sister of the +philosopher, Henri Bergson. His house at Forest Hill was soon a romantic +place to a little group, Florence Farr, myself, and some dozen fellow +students. I think that it was she, her curiosity being insatiable, who +first brought news of that house and that she brought it in mockery and in +wonder. Mathers had taken her for a walk through a field of sheep and had +said, “Look at the sheep. I am going to imagine myself a ram,” and at once +all the sheep ran after him; another day he had tried to quell a thunder +storm by making symbols in the air with a masonic sword, but the storm had +not been quelled; and then came the crowning wonder. He had given her a +piece of cardboard on which was a coloured geometrical symbol and had told +her to hold it to her forehead and she had found herself walking upon a +cliff above the sea, seagulls shrieking overhead. I did not think the ram +story impossible, and even tried half a dozen times to excite a cat by +imagining a mouse in front of its nose, but still some chance movement of +the flock might have deceived her. But what could have deceived her in +that final marvel? Then another brought a like report, and presently my +own turn came. He gave me a cardboard symbol and I closed my eyes. Sight +came slowly, there was not that sudden miracle as if the darkness had been +cut with a knife, for that miracle is mostly a woman’s privilege, but +there rose before me mental images that I could not control: a desert and +black Titan raising himself up by his two hands from the middle of a heap +of ancient ruins. Mathers explained that I had seen a being of the order +of Salamanders because he had shown me their symbol, but it was not +necessary even to show the symbol, it would have been sufficient that he +imagined it. I had already written in my diary, under some<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> date in 1887, +that Madame Blavatsky’s Masters were “trance personalities,” and I must +have meant such beings as my black Titan, only more lasting and more +powerful. I had found when a boy in Dublin on a table in the Royal Irish +Academy a pamphlet on Japanese art and read there of an animal painter so +remarkable that horses he had painted upon a Temple wall, had slipped down +after dark and trampled the neighbours’ fields of rice. Somebody had come +into the temple in the early morning, had been startled by a shower of +water drops, had looked up and seen painted horses still wet from the +dew-covered fields, but now “trembling into stillness.”</p> + +<p>I had soon mastered Mathers’ symbolic system, and discovered that for a +considerable minority—whom I could select by certain unanalysable +characteristics—the visible world would completely vanish, and that +world, summoned by the symbol, take its place. One day when alone in a +third-class carriage, in the very middle of the railway bridge that +crosses the Thames near Victoria, I smelt incense. I was on my way to +Forest Hill; might it not come from some spirit Mathers had called up? I +had wondered when I smelt it at Madame Blavatsky’s—if there might be some +contrivance, some secret censer, but that explanation was no longer +possible. I believed that Salamander of his but an image, and presently I +found analogies between smell and image. It must be from thought but what +certainty had I, that what had taken me by surprise, could be from my own +thought, and if a thought could affect the sense of smell, why not the +sense of touch? Then I discovered among that group of students that +surrounded Macgregor, a man who had fought a cat in his dreams and awaked +to find his breast covered with scratches. Was there an impassable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> +barrier between those scratches and the trampled fields of rice? It would +seem so, and yet all was uncertainty. What fixed law would our experiments +leave to our imagination?</p> + +<p>Mathers had learning but no scholarship, much imagination and imperfect +taste, but if he made some absurd statement, some incredible claim, some +hackneyed joke, we would half consciously change claim, statement or joke, +as though he were a figure in a play of our composition. He was a +necessary extravagance, and he had carried further than anyone else, a +claim implicit in the romantic movement from the time of Shelley and of +Goethe; and in body and in voice at least he was perfect; so might Faust +have looked at the end of his hundred years. In the credulity of our youth +we secretly wondered if he had not met with, perhaps even been taught by +some old man who had found the elixir. Nor did he undeceive us. “If you +find the elixir,” he was accustomed to say, “you always look a few years +younger than the age at which you found it. If you find it at sixty you +will look fifty for a hundred years.” None of us would have admitted that +we believed in stone or elixir, the old Oxfordshire clergyman excited no +belief, yet one among us certainly laboured with crucible or athanor. Ten +years ago I called upon an elderly solicitor, on some business, but at his +private house, and I remembered whose pupil he had been when I found among +the ashes of the hearth a little earthen pot. He pretended that he studied +alchemy that he might some day write its history, and I found when I +questioned others, that for twenty years there had been just such a little +pot among the ashes.</p> + +<p> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span></p> +<h3>XXI</h3> + +<p>I generalized a great deal and was ashamed of it. I thought it was my +business in life to be an artist and a poet, and that there could be no +business comparable to that. I refused to read books and even to meet +people who excited me to generalization, all to no purpose. I said my +prayers much as in childhood, though without the old regularity of hour +and place, and I began to pray that my imagination might somehow be +rescued from abstraction and became as preoccupied with life as had been +the imagination of Chaucer. For ten or twelve years more I suffered +continual remorse, and only became content when my abstractions had +composed themselves into picture and dramatization. My very remorse helped +to spoil my early poetry, giving it an element of sentimentality through +my refusal to permit it any share of an intellect which I considered +impure. Even in practical life I only very gradually began to use +generalizations, that have since become the foundation of all I have done, +or shall do, in Ireland. For all I know all men may have been so timid, +for I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we +shall ever find, but as yet we do not know truths that belong to us from +opinions, caught up in casual irritation or momentary fantasy. As life +goes on we discover that certain thoughts sustain us in defeat, or give us +victory, whether over ourselves or others, and it is these thoughts, +tested by passion, that we call convictions. Among subjective men (in all +those, that is, who must spin a web out of their own bowels) the victory +is an intellectual daily recreation of all that exterior fate snatches +away, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> so that fate’s antithesis; while what I have called “the Mask” +is an emotional antithesis to all that comes out of their internal nature. +We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XXII</h3> + +<p>A conviction that the world was now but a bundle of fragments possessed me +without ceasing. I had tried this conviction on the Rhymers, thereby +plunging into greater silence an already too silent evening. “Johnson,” I +was accustomed to say, “you are the only man I know whose silence has beak +and claw.” I had lectured on it to some London Irish society, and I was to +lecture upon it later on in Dublin, but I never found but one interested +man, an official of the Primrose League, who was also an active member of +the Fenian Brotherhood. “I am an extreme conservative apart from Ireland,” +I have heard him explain; and I have no doubt that personal experience +made him share the sight of any eye that saw the world in fragments. I had +been put into a rage by the followers of Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, +and Bastien-Lepage, who not only asserted the unimportance of subject +whether in art or literature, but the independence of the arts from one +another. Upon the other hand, I delighted in every age where poet and +artist confined themselves gladly to some inherited subject matter known +to the whole people, for I thought that in man and race alike there is +something called “Unity of Being,” using that term as Dante used it when +he compared beauty in the <i>Convito</i> to a perfectly proportioned human +body. My father, from whom I had learned the term, preferred<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> a comparison +to a musical instrument so strung that if we touch a string all the +strings murmur faintly. There is not more desire, he had said, in lust +than in true love, but in true love desire awakens pity, hope, affection, +admiration, and, given appropriate circumstance, every emotion possible to +man. When I began, however, to apply this thought to the state and to +argue for a law-made balance among trades and occupations my father +displayed at once the violent free trader and propagandist of liberty. I +thought that the enemy of this unity was abstraction, meaning by +abstraction not the distinction but the isolation of occupation, or class +or faculty—</p> + +<p class="poem">“Call down the hawk from the air<br /> +Let him be hooded, or caged,<br /> +Till the yellow eye has grown mild,<br /> +For larder and spit are bare,<br /> +The old cook enraged,<br /> +The scullion gone wild.”</p> + +<p>I knew no mediaeval cathedral, and Westminster, being a part of abhorred +London, did not interest me, but I thought constantly of Homer and Dante, +and the tombs of Mausolus and Artemisia, the great figures of King and +Queen and the lesser figures of Greek and Amazon, Centaur and Greek. I +thought that all art should be a Centaur finding in the popular lore its +back and its strong legs. I got great pleasure too from remembering that +Homer was sung, and from that tale of Dante hearing a common man sing some +stanza from <i>The Divine Comedy</i>, and from Don Quixote’s meeting with some +common man that sang Ariosto. Morris had never seemed to care greatly for +any poet later than Chaucer and though I preferred Shakespeare to Chaucer +I begrudged my own preference. Had not Europe shared one mind and heart, +until both mind and heart began to break into<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> fragments a little before +Shakespeare’s birth? Music and verse began to fall apart when Chaucer +robbed verse of its speed that he might give it greater meditation, though +for another generation or so minstrels were to sing his lengthy elaborated +<i>Troilus and Criseyde</i>; painting parted from religion in the later +Renaissance that it might study effects of tangibility undisturbed; while, +that it might characterize, where it had once personified, it renounced, +in our own age, all that inherited subject matter which we have named +poetry. Presently I was indeed to number character itself among the +abstractions, encouraged by Congreve’s saying that “passions are too +powerful in the fair sex to let humour,” or as we say character, “have its +course.” Nor have we fared better under the common daylight, for pure +reason has notoriously made but light of practical reason, and has been +made light of in its turn from that morning when Descartes discovered that +he could think better in his bed than out of it; nor needed I original +thought to discover, being so late of the school of Morris, that machinery +had not separated from handicraft wholly for the world’s good, nor to +notice that the distinction of classes had become their isolation. If the +London merchants of our day competed together in writing lyrics they would +not, like the Tudor merchants, dance in the open street before the house +of the victor; nor do the great ladies of London finish their balls on the +pavement before their doors as did the great Venetian ladies, even in the +eighteenth century, conscious of an all enfolding sympathy. Doubtless +because fragments broke into ever smaller fragments we saw one another in +a light of bitter comedy, and in the arts, where now one technical element +reigned and now another, generation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> hated generation, and accomplished +beauty was snatched away when it had most engaged our affections. One +thing I did not foresee, not having the courage of my own thought: the +growing murderousness of the world.</p> + +<p class="poem">“Turning and turning in the widening gyre<br /> +The falcon cannot hear the falconer;<br /> +Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;<br /> +Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,<br /> +The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere<br /> +The ceremony of innocence is drowned;<br /> +The best lack all conviction while the worst<br /> +Are full of passionate intensity.”</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XXIII</h3> + +<p>If abstraction had reached, or all but reached its climax, escape might be +possible for many, and if it had not, individual men might still escape. +If Chaucer’s personages had disengaged themselves from Chaucer’s crowd, +forgot their common goal and shrine, and after sundry magnifications +became each in turn the centre of some Elizabethan play, and had after +split into their elements and so given birth to romantic poetry, must I +reverse the cinematograph? I thought that the general movement of +literature must be such a reversal, men being there displayed in casual, +temporary, contact as at the Tabard door. I had lately read Tolstoy’s +<i>Anna Karenina</i> and thought that where his theoretical capacity had not +awakened there was such a turning back: but a nation or an individual with +great emotional intensity might follow the pilgrims as it were to some +unknown shrine, and give to all those separated elements and to all that +abstract love and melancholy, a symbolical,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> a mythological coherence. Not +Chaucer’s rough tongued riders, but rather an ended pilgrimage, a +procession of the Gods! Arthur Symons brought back from Paris stories of +Verhaeren and Maeterlinck, and so brought me confirmation, as I thought, +and I began to announce a poetry like that of the Sufi’s. I could not +endure, however, an international art, picking stories and symbols where +it pleased. Might I not, with health and good luck to aid me, create some +new <i>Prometheus Unbound</i>; Patrick or Columbkil, Oisin or Fion, in +Prometheus’ stead; and, instead of Caucasus, Cro-Patric or Ben Bulben? +Have not all races had their first unity from a polytheism, that marries +them to rock and hill? We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which the +uneducated classes knew and even sang, and might we not make those stories +current among the educated classes, rediscovering for the work’s sake what +I have called “the applied arts of literature,” the association of +literature, that is, with music, speech, and dance; and at last, it might +be, so deepen the political passion of the nation that all, artist and +poet, craftsman and day-labourer would accept a common design? Perhaps +even these images, once created and associated with river and mountain, +might move of themselves and with some powerful, even turbulent life, like +those painted horses that trampled the rice fields of Japan.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XXIV</h3> + +<p>I used to tell the few friends to whom I could speak these secret thoughts +that I would make the attempt in Ireland but fail, for our civilization, +its elements multiplying by division like certain low<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> forms of life, was +all-powerful; but in reality I had the wildest hopes. To-day I add to that +first conviction, to that first desire for unity, this other conviction, +long a mere opinion vaguely or intermittently apprehended: Nations, races, +and individual men are unified by an image, or bundle of related images, +symbolical or evocative of the state of mind, which is of all states of +mind not impossible, the most difficult to that man, race, or nation; +because only the greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without +despair, rouses the will to full intensity.</p> + +<p>A powerful class by terror, rhetoric, and organized sentimentality, may +drive their people to war but the day draws near when they cannot keep +them there; and how shall they face the pure nations of the East when the +day comes to do it with but equal arms? I had seen Ireland in my own time +turn from the bragging rhetoric and gregarious humour of O’Connell’s +generation and school, and offer herself to the solitary and proud Parnell +as to her anti-self, buskin following hard on sock, and I had begun to +hope, or to half hope, that we might be the first in Europe to seek unity +as deliberately as it had been sought by theologian, poet, sculptor, +architect, from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. Doubtless we must +seek it differently, no longer considering it convenient to epitomize all +human knowledge, but find it we well might could we first find philosophy +and a little passion.</p> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p> +<h2><a name="BOOK_II" id="BOOK_II"></a>BOOK II<br />IRELAND AFTER THE FALL OF PARNELL</h2> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span></p> + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span></p> + +<h2><i>IRELAND AFTER THE FALL OF PARNELL</i></h2> + +<p> </p> +<h3>I</h3> + +<p>A couple of years before the death of Parnell, I had wound up my +introduction to those selections from the Irish novelists with the +prophecy of an intellectual movement at the first lull in politics, and +now I wished to fulfil my prophecy. I did not put it in that way, for I +preferred to think that the sudden emotion that now came to me, the sudden +certainty that Ireland was to be like soft wax for years to come, was a +moment of supernatural insight. How could I tell, how can I tell even now?</p> + +<p>There was a little Irish Society of young people, clerks, shop boys, and +shop girls, called “The Southwark Irish Literary Society,” and it had +ceased to meet because the girls got the giggles when any member of the +Committee got up to speak. Every member of it had said all he had to say +many times over. I had given them a lecture about the falling asunder of +the human mind, as an opening flower falls asunder, and all had professed +admiration because I had made such a long speech without quotation or +narrative; and now I invited the Committee to my father’s house at Bedford +Park, and there proposed a new organization, “The Irish Literary Society.” +T. W. Rolleston came to that first meeting, and it was because he had much +tact, and a knowledge of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> the technical business of committees, that a +society was founded which was joined by every London-Irish author and +journalist. In a few months somebody had written its history, and +published that history, illustrated by our portraits, at a shilling. When +it was published I was in Dublin, founding a society there called “The +National Literary Society,” and affiliating it with certain Young Ireland +Societies in country towns which seemed anxious to accept its leadership. +I had definite plans; I wanted to create an Irish Theatre; I was finishing +my <i>Countess Cathleen</i> in its first meagre version, and thought of a +travelling company to visit our country branches; but before that there +must be a popular imaginative literature. I arranged with Mr. Fisher Unwin +and his reader, Mr Edward Garnett—a personal friend of mine—that when +our organization was complete Mr Fisher Unwin was to publish for it a +series of books at a shilling each. I told only one man of this +arrangement, for after I had made my plans I heard an alarming rumour. Old +Sir Charles Gavan Duffy was coming from Australia to start an Irish +publishing house, and publish a series of books, and I did not expect to +agree with him, but knew that I must not seek a quarrel. The two societies +were necessary because their lectures must take the place of an educated +popular press, which we had not, and have not now, and create a standard +of criticism. Irish literature had fallen into contempt; no educated man +ever bought an Irish book; in Dublin Professor Dowden, the one man of +letters with an international influence, was accustomed to say that he +knew an Irish book by its smell, because he had once seen some books whose +binding had been fastened together by rotten glue; and Standish O’Grady’s +last book<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> upon ancient Irish history—a book rather wild, rather too +speculative, but forestalling later research—had not been reviewed by any +periodical or newspaper in England or in Ireland.</p> + +<p>At first I had great success, for I brought with me a list of names +written down by some member of the Southwark Irish Literary Society, and +for six weeks went hither and thither appealing and persuading. My first +conversation was over a butter-tub in some Dublin back street, and the man +agreed with me at once; everybody agreed with me; all felt that something +must be done, but nobody knew what. Perhaps they did not understand me, +perhaps I kept back my full thoughts, perhaps they only seemed to listen; +it was enough that I had a plan, and was determined about it. When I went +to lecture in a provincial town, a workman’s wife, who wrote patriotic +stories in some weekly newspaper, invited me to her house, and I found all +her children in their Sunday best. She made a little speech, very formal +and very simple, in which she said that what she wrote had no merit, but +that it paid for her children’s schooling; and she finished her speech by +telling her children never to forget that they had seen me. One man +compared me to Thomas Davis, another said I could organise like Davitt, +and I thought to succeed as they did, and as rapidly. I did not examine +this applause, nor the true thoughts of those I met, nor the general +condition of the country, but I examined myself a great deal, and was +puzzled at myself. I knew that I was shy and timid, that I would often +leave some business undone, or purchase unmade, because I shrank from +facing a strange office or a shop a little grander than usual, and yet, +here was I delightedly talking to strange people every day.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> It was many +years before I understood that I had surrendered myself to the chief +temptation of the artist, creation without toil. Metrical composition is +always very difficult to me, nothing is done upon the first day, not one +rhyme is in its place; and when at last the rhymes begin to come, the +first rough draft of a six-line stanza takes the whole day. At that time I +had not formed a style, and sometimes a six-line stanza would take several +days, and not seem finished even then; and I had not learnt, as I have +now, to put it all out of my head before night, and so the last night was +generally sleepless, and the last day a day of nervous strain. But now I +had found the happiness that Shelley found when he tied a pamphlet to a +fire balloon.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>II</h3> + +<p>At first I asked no help from prominent persons, and when some clerk or +shop-assistant would say “Dr So-and-so or Professor So-and-so will have +nothing to do with us” I would answer, “When we prove we can gather sheep +shepherds will come.” Presently, come they did, old, middle-aged, or but +little older than myself, but all with some authority in their town: John +O’Leary, John F. Taylor, and Douglas Hyde, and Standish O’Grady, and of +these much presently; Dr. Sigerson who has picked a quarrel with me and of +whom I shall say nothing that he may not pick another; Count Plunkett, +Sinn Feiner of late and Minister of Dail Eireann; Dr. Coffey, now head of +the National University; George Coffey, later on Curator of the Irish +Antiquities at the Museum of the Royal Dublin Society; Patrick J. McCall, +poet and publican of Patrick Street, and later member of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> corporation; +Richard Ashe King, novelist and correspondent of <i>Truth</i>, a gentle, +intelligent person, typical of nothing; and others, known or <ins class="correction" title="original: unkown">unknown</ins>. We +were now important, had our Committee room in the Mansion House, and I +remember that the old Mansion House butler recognised our importance so +fully, that he took us into his confidence once in every week, while we +sat waiting for a quorum. He had seen many Lord Mayors, and remembered +those very superior Lord Mayors who lived before the extension of the +municipal franchise, and spoke of his present masters with contempt. Among +our persons of authority, and among the friends and followers they had +brought, there were many who at that time found it hard to refuse if +anybody offered for sale a pepper-pot shaped to suggest a round tower with +a wolf-dog at its foot, and who would have felt it inappropriate to +publish an Irish book, that had not harp and shamrock and green cover, so +completely did their minds move amid Young Ireland images and metaphors, +and I thought with alarm of the coming of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy; while +here and there I noticed that smooth, smiling face that we discover for +the first time in certain pictures by Velasquez; all that hungry, +mediaeval speculation vanished, that had worn the faces of El Greco and in +its place a self-complacent certainty that all had been arranged, provided +for, set out in clear type, in manual of devotion or of doctrine. These, +however, were no true disciples of Young Ireland, for Young Ireland had +sought a nation unified by political doctrine, a subservient art and +letters aiding and abetting. The movement of thought, which had in the +’fifties and ’fourties at Paris and London and Boston, filled literature, +and especially poetical<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> literature with curiosities about science, about +history about politics, with moral purpose and educational +fervour—abstractions all—had created a new instrument for Irish +politics, a method of writing that took its poetical style from Campbell, +Scott, Macauley, and Beranger, with certain elements from Gaelic, and its +prose style—in John Mitchell, the only Young Ireland prose writer who had +a style at all—from Carlyle. To recommend this method of writing as +literature without much reservation and discrimination I contended was to +be deceived or to practice deception. If one examined some country +love-song, one discovered that it was not written by a man in love, but by +a patriot who wanted to prove that we did indeed possess, in the words of +Daniel O’Connell, “the finest peasantry upon earth.” Yet one well-known +anthology was introduced by the assertion that such love-poetry was +superior to “affected and artificial” English love-songs like “Drink to me +only with thine eyes”—“affected and artificial,” the very words used by +English Victorians who wrote for the newspapers to discourage capricious, +personal writing. However, the greater number even of those who thought +our famous anthology, <i>The Spirit of the Nation</i>, except for three or four +songs, but good election rhyme, looked upon it much as certain enlightened +believers look upon the story of Adam and Eve and the apple, or that of +Jonah and the whale, which they do not question publicly, because such +stories are an integral part of religion to simple men and women. I, upon +the other hand, being in the intemperance of my youth, denied, as publicly +as possible, merit to all but a few ballads translated from Gaelic +writers, or written out of a personal and generally tragic experience.</p> + +<p> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span></p> +<h3>III</h3> + +<p>The greater number of those who joined my society had come under the seal +of Young Ireland at that age when we are all mere wax; the more ambitious +had gone daily to some public library to read the bound volumes of Thomas +Davis’s old newspaper, and tried to see the world as Davis saw it. No +philosophic speculation, no economic question of the day, disturbed an +orthodoxy which, unlike that of religion had no philosophic history, and +the religious bigot was glad that it should be so. Some few of the younger +men were impatient, and it was these younger men, more numerous in the +London than in the Dublin Society, who gave me support; and we had been +joined by a few older men—some personal friends of my own or my +father—who had only historical interest in Thomas Davis and his school. +Young Ireland’s prose had been as much occupied with Irish virtue, and +more with the invader’s vices, than its poetry, and we were soon mired and +sunk into such problems as to whether Cromwell was altogether black, the +heads of the old Irish clans altogether white, the Danes mere robbers and +church burners (they tell me at Rosses Point that the Danes keep to this +day the maps of the Rosses fields they were driven out of in the 9th +century, and plot their return) and as to whether we were or were not once +the greatest orators in the world. All the past had been turned into a +melodrama with Ireland for blameless hero and poet, novelist and historian +had but one object, that we should hiss the villain, and only a minority +doubted that the greater the talent the greater the hiss. It was all the +harder to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>substitute for that melodrama a nobler form of art, because +there really had been, however different in their form, villain and +victim; yet fight that rancour I must, and if I had not made some head +against it in 1892 and 1893 it might have silenced in 1907 John Synge, the +greatest dramatic genius of Ireland. I am writing of disputes that +happened many years ago, that led in later years to much bitterness, and I +may exaggerate their immediate importance and violence, but I think I am +right in saying that disputes about the merits of Young Ireland so often +interrupted our discussion of rules, or of the merit of this or that +lecturer, and were so aggravated and crossed by the current wrangle +between Parnellite and anti-Parnellite that they delayed our public +appearance for a year. Other excited persons, doubtless, seeing that we +are of a race intemperate of speech, had looked up from their rancours to +the dead Lord Mayors upon the wall, superior men whose like we shall not +see again, but never, I think, from rancours so seemingly academic. I was +preparing the way without knowing it for a great satirist and master of +irony, for master works stir vaguely in many before they grow definite in +one man’s mind, and to help me I had already flitting through my head, +jostling other ideas and so not yet established there, a conviction that +we should satirize rather than praise, that original virtue arises from +the discovery of evil. If we were, as I had dreaded, declamatory, loose, +and bragging, we were but the better fitted, that once declared and +measured, to create unyielding personality, manner at once cold and +passionate, daring long premeditated act; and if bitter beyond all the +people of the world, we might yet lie, that too declared and measured, +nearest the honeyed comb:—</p> + +<p class="poem"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> +“Like the clangour of a bell<br /> +Sweet and harsh, harsh and sweet,<br /> +That is how he learnt so well<br /> +To take the roses for his meat.”</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>IV</h3> + +<p>There were others with followers of their own, and too old or indifferent +to join our society. Old men who had never accepted Young Ireland, or +middle-aged men kept by some family tradition to the school of thought +before it arose, to the Ireland of Daniel O’Connell and of Lever and of +Thomas Moore, convivial Ireland with the traditional tear and smile. They +sang Moore’s <i>Melodies</i>, admitted no poetry but his, and resented Young +Ireland’s political objections to it as much as my generation’s objection +to its artificial and easy rhythm; one, an old commercial traveller, a +Gaelic scholar who kept an erect head and the animal vigour of youth, +frequented the houses of our leading men, and would say in a loud voice, +“Thomas Moore, sir, is the greatest heroic poet of ancient or modern +times.” I think it was the Fire Worshippers in <i>Lalla Rookh</i> that he +preferred to Homer; or, jealous for the music of the <i>Melodies</i>, denounce +Wagner, then at the top of his vogue; “I would run ten miles through a bog +to escape him,” he would cry. Then there was a maker of tombstones of whom +we had heard much but had seen little, an elderly fighting man, lately +imprisoned for beating a wine-merchant. A young member of the London +society, afterwards librarian to the National University, D. J. O’Donohue, +who had published a dictionary of the Irish poets, containing, I think, +two<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> thousand names, had come to Dublin and settled there in a fit of +patriotism. He had been born in London, and spoke the most Cockney dialect +imaginable, and had picked up—probably from London critics—a dislike for +the poetry of Thomas Moore. The tombstone maker invited him to tea, and he +arrived with a bundle of books, which he laid beside him upon the table. +During tea he began expounding that dislike of his; his host was silent, +but he went on, for he was an obstinate little man. Presently the +tombstone-maker rose, and having said solemnly, “I <ins class="correction" title="original: have have">have</ins> never permitted +that great poet to be slandered in my presence,” seized his guest by the +back of the collar, and flung him out into the street, and after that +flung out the books one after another. Meanwhile the guest—as he himself +told the tale—stood in the middle of the street repeating, “Nice way to +treat a man in your own ’ouse.”</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>V</h3> + +<p>I shared a lodging full of old books and magazines, covered with dirt and +dust, with the head of the Fenian Brotherhood, John O’Leary. “In this +country,” he had said to me, “a man must have upon his side the Church or +the Fenians, and you will never have the Church.” He had been converted to +nationality by the poems of Davis, and he wished for some analogous +movement to that of Davis, but he had known men of letters, had been the +friend of Whistler, and knew the faults of the old literature. We had made +him the President of our Society, and without him I could do nothing, for +his long imprisonment<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> and longer exile, his magnificent appearance, and, +above all, the fact that he alone had personality, a point of view not +made for the crowd’s sake, but for self-expression, made him magnetic to +my generation. He and I had long been friends, he had stayed with us at +Bedford Park, and my father had painted his portrait, but if I had not +shared his lodging he would have opposed me. He was an old man, and my +point of view was not that of his youth, and it often took me half the day +to make him understand—so suspicious he was of all innovation—some +simple thing that he would presently support with ardour. He had grown up +in a European movement when the revolutionist thought that he, above all +men, must appeal to the highest motive, be guided by some ideal principle, +be a little like Cato or like Brutus, and he had lived to see the change +Dostoievsky examined in <i>The Possessed</i>. Men who had been of his +party—and oftener their sons—preached assassination and the bomb; and, +worst of all, the majority of his countrymen followed after constitutional +politicians who practised opportunism, and had, as he believed, such low +morals that they would lie, or publish private correspondence, if it might +advance their cause. He would split every practical project into its +constituent elements, like a clerical casuist, to find if it might not +lead into some moral error; but, were the project revolutionary, he would +sometimes temper condemnation with pity. Though he would cast off his +oldest acquaintance did he suspect him of rubbing shoulders with some +carrier of bombs, I have heard him say of a man who blew himself up in an +attempt to blow up Westminster Bridge, “He was not a bad man, but he had +too great a moral nature for his intellect, not that he lacked intellect.” +He did not explain, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> he meant, I suppose, that the spectacle of +injustice might madden a good man more quickly than some common man. Such +men were of his own sort, though gone astray, but the constitutional +politicians he had been fighting all his life, and all they did displeased +him. It was not that he thought their aim wrong, or that they could not +achieve it; he had accepted Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill; but that in his +eyes they degraded manhood. “If England has been brought to do us justice +by such men,” he would say, “that is not because of our strength, but +because of her weakness.” He had a particular hatred for the rush of +emotion that followed the announcement of Gladstone’s conversion, for what +was called “The Union of Hearts,” and derided its sentimentality; “Nations +may respect one another,” he would say, “they cannot love.” His ancestors +had probably kept little shops, or managed little farms in County +Tipperary, yet he hated democracy, though he never used the word either +for praise or blame, with more than feudal hatred. “No gentleman can be a +socialist,” he said, and then, with a thoughtful look, “He might be an +anarchist.” He had no philosophy, but things distressed his palate, and +two of those things were International propaganda and the Organised State, +and Socialism aimed at both, nor could he speak such words as +“philanthropy,” “humanitarianism,” without showing by his tone of voice +that they offended him. The Church pleased him little better; there was an +old Fenian quarrel there, and he would say, “My religion is the old +Persian, to pull the bow and tell the truth.” He had no +self-consciousness, no visible pride, and would have hated anything that +could have been called a gesture, was indeed scarce artist enough to +invent a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> gesture; yet he would never speak of the hardship of his prison +life—though abundantly enough of its humours—and once, when I pressed +him, replied, “I was in the hands of my enemy, why should I complain?” A +few years ago I heard that the Governor of the prison had asked why he did +not report some unnecessary discomfort, and O’Leary had said, “I did not +come here to complain.” Now that he is dead, I wish that I could question +him, and perhaps discover whether in early youth he had come across some +teacher who had expounded Roman virtue, but I doubt if I would have learnt +anything, for I think the wax had long forgotten the seal—if seal there +were. The seal was doubtless made before the eloquent humanitarian +’forties and ’fifties, and was one kind with that that had moulded the +youthful mind of Savage Landor. Stephens, the founder of Fenianism, had +discovered him searching the second-hand bookstalls for rare editions, and +enrolled him in his organization. “You have no chance of success,” O’Leary +had said “but it will be good for the <i>morale</i> of the country” (<i>morale</i> +was his great word), “and I will join on the condition that I am never +asked to enrol anybody.” He still searched the second-hand bookstalls, and +had great numbers of books, especially of Irish history and literature, +and when I, exhausted over our morning’s casuistry, would sit down to my +day’s work (I was writing <i>The Secret Rose</i>) he would make his tranquil +way to the Dublin Quays. In the evening, over his coffee, he would write +passages for his memoirs upon postcards and odd scraps of paper, taking +immense trouble with every word and comma, for the great work must be a +masterpiece of style. When it was finished, it was unreadable, being dry, +abstract, and confused; no picture had ever passed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> before his mind’s eye. +He was a victim, I think, of a movement where opinions stick men together, +or keep them apart, like a kind of bird lime, and without any relation to +their natural likes and tastes, and where men of rich nature must give +themselves up to an irritation which they no longer recognise because it +is always present. I often wonder why he gave me his friendship, why it +was he who found almost all the subscribers for my <i>Wanderings of Usheen</i>, +and why he now supported me in all I did, for how could he like verses +that were all picture, all emotion, all association, all mythology? He +could not have approved my criticism either, for I exalted Mask and Image +above the 18th century logic which he loved, and set experience before +observation, emotion before fact. Yet he would say, “I have only three +followers, Taylor, Yeats, and Rolleston,” and presently he cast out +Rolleston—“Davitt wants to convert thousands, but I want two or three.” I +think that perhaps it was because he no more wished to strengthen Irish +Nationalism by second-rate literature than by second-rate morality, and +was content that we agreed in that. “There are things a man must not do to +save a Nation,” he had once told me, and when I asked what things, had +said, “To cry in public,” and I think it probable that he would have +added, if pressed, “To write oratorical or insincere verse.”</p> + +<p>O’Leary’s movements and intonations were full of impulse, but John F. +Taylor’s voice in private discussion had no emotional quality except in +the expression of scorn; if he moved an arm it moved from the shoulder or +elbow alone, and when he walked he moved from the waist only, and seemed +an automaton, a wooden soldier, as if he had no life that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> was not dry and +abstract. Except at moments of public oratory, he lacked all personality, +though when one saw him respectful and gentle with O’Leary, as with some +charming woman, one saw that he felt its fascination. In letters, or in +painting, it repelled him unless it were harsh and obvious, and, +therefore, though his vast erudition included much art and letters, he +lacked artistic feeling, and judged everything by the moral sense. He had +great ambition, and had he joined some established party, or found some +practicable policy, he might have been followed, might have produced even +some great effect, but he must have known that in defeat no man would +follow him, as they followed O’Leary, as they followed Parnell. His +oratory was noble, strange, even beautiful, at moments the greatest I have +ever listened to; but, the speech over, where there had been, as it +seemed, so little of himself, all coming from beyond himself, we saw +precisely as before an ungainly body in unsuitable, badly-fitting clothes, +and heard an excited voice speaking ill of this man or that other. We knew +that he could never give us that one price we would accept, that he would +never find a practicable policy; that no party would admit, no government +negotiate with, a man notorious for a temper, that, if it gave him genius, +could at times carry him to the edge of insanity.</p> + +<p>Born in some country town, the son of some little watchmaker, he had been +a shop assistant, put himself to college and the bar, learned to speak at +temperance meetings and Young Ireland societies, and was now a Queen’s +Counsel famous for his defence of country criminals, whose cases had +seemed hopeless—Taylor’s boys, their neighbours called them or they +called themselves. He had shaped his style and his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> imagination from +Carlyle, the chief inspirer of self-educated men in the ’eighties and +early ’nineties. “I prefer Emerson’s <i>Oversoul</i>,” the Condalkin cobbler +said to me, “but I always read Carlyle when I am wild with the +neighbours”; but he used his master’s style, as Mitchell had done before, +to abase what his master loved, to exalt what his master scorned. His +historical erudition seemed as vast as that of York Powell, but his +interests were not Powell’s, for he had no picture before the mind’s eye, +and had but one object—a plea of not guilty—entered in his country’s +name before a jury which he believed to be packed. O’Leary cared nothing +for his country’s glory, its individuality alone seemed important in his +eyes; he was like some man, who serves a woman all his life without asking +whether she be good or bad, wise or foolish; but Taylor cared for nothing +else; he was so much O’Leary’s disciple that he would say in conversation, +“We are demoralised, what case for change if we are not?” for O’Leary +admitted no ground for reform outside the moral life, but when he spoke to +the great plea he would make no admission. He spoke to it in the most +obscure places, in little halls in back streets where the white-washed +walls are foul with grease from many heads, before some audience of +medical students or of shop assistants, for he was like a man under a +curse, compelled to hide his genius, and compelled to show in conspicuous +places his ill judgment and his temper.</p> + +<p>His distaste for myself, broken by occasional tolerance, in so far as it +was not distaste for an imagination that seemed to him aesthetic rather +than ethical, was because I had published Irish folk-lore in English +reviews to the discredit, as he thought, of the Irish peasantry, and +because, England within<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> earshot, I found fault with the Young Ireland +prose and poetry. He would have hated <i>The Playboy of the Western World</i>, +and his death a little before its performance was fortunate for Synge and +myself. His articles are nothing, and his one historical work, a life of +Hugh O’Neill, is almost nothing, lacking the living voice; and now, though +a most formidable man, he is forgotten, but for the fading memory of a few +friends, and for what an enemy has written here and elsewhere. Did not +Leonardo da Vinci warn the imaginative man against pre-occupation with +arts that cannot survive his death?</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>VI</h3> + +<p>When Carleton was dying in 1870, he said there would be nothing more about +Irish Literature for twenty years, and his words were fulfilled, for the +land war had filled Ireland with its bitterness; but imagination had begun +to stir again. I had the same confidence in the future that Lady Gregory +and I had eight or nine years later, when we founded an Irish Theatre, +though there were neither, as it seemed, plays or players. There were +already a few known men to start my popular series, and to keep it popular +until the men, whose names I did not know, had learnt to express +themselves. I had met Dr. Douglas Hyde when I lived in Dublin, and he was +still an undergraduate. I have a memory of meeting in college rooms for +the first time a very dark young man, who filled me with surprise, partly +because he had pushed a snuffbox towards me, and partly because there was +something about his vague serious<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> eyes, as in his high cheek bones, that +suggested a different civilization, a different race. I had set him down +as a peasant, and wondered what brought him to college, and to a +Protestant college, but somebody explained that he belonged to some branch +of the Hydes of Castle Hyde, and that he had a Protestant Rector for +father. He had much frequented the company of old countrymen, and had so +acquired the Irish language, and his taste for snuff, and for moderate +quantities of a detestable species of illegal whiskey distilled from the +potato by certain of his neighbours. He had already—though intellectual +Dublin knew nothing of it—considerable popularity as a Gaelic poet, +mowers and reapers singing his songs from Donegal to Kerry. Years +afterwards I was to stand at his side and listen to Galway mowers singing +his Gaelic words without knowing whose words they sang. It is so in India, +where peasants sing the words of the great poet of Bengal without knowing +whose words they sing, and it must often be so where the old imaginative +folk life is undisturbed, and it is so amongst schoolboys who hand their +story books to one another without looking at the title page to read the +author’s name. Here and there, however, the peasants had not lost the +habit of Gaelic criticism, picked up, perhaps, from the poets who took +refuge among them after the ruin of the great Catholic families, from men +like that O’Rahilly, who cries in a translation from the Gaelic that is +itself a masterpiece of concentrated passion—</p> + +<p class="poem">“The periwinkle and the tough dog-fish<br /> +Towards evening time have got into my dish.”</p> + +<p>An old rascal was kept in food and whiskey for a fortnight by some +Connaught village under the belief<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> that he was Craoibhin Aoibhin, “the +pleasant little branch,” as Doctor Hyde signed himself in the newspapers +where the villagers had found his songs. The impostor’s thirst only +strengthened belief in his genius, for the Gaelic song-writers have had +the infirmities of Robert Burns, “It is not the drink but the company,” +one of the last has sung. Since that first meeting Doctor Hyde and I had +corresponded, and he had sent me in manuscript the best tale in my <i>Faery +and Folk Tales</i>, and I think I had something to do with the London +publication of his <i>Beside the Fire</i>, a book written in the beautiful +English of Connaught, which is Gaelic in idiom and Tudor in vocabulary, +and indeed, the first book to use it in the expression of emotion and +romance, for Carleton and his school had turned it into farce. Henley had +praised him, and York Powell had said, “If he goes on as he has begun, he +will be the greatest folk-loreist who has ever lived”; and I know no first +book of verse of our time that is at once so romantic and so concrete as +his Gaelic <i>Abhla de’n Craoibh</i>; but in a few years Dublin was to laugh +him, or rail him, out of his genius. He had no critical capacity, having +indeed for certain years the uncritical folk-genius, as no educated Irish +or Englishman has ever had it, writing out of an imitative sympathy like +that of a child catching a tune and leaving it to chance to call the tune; +and the failure of our first attempt to create a modern Irish literature +permitted the ruin of that genius. He was to create a great popular +movement, far more important in its practical results than any movement I +could have made, no matter what my luck, but, being neither quarrelsome +nor vain, he will not be angry if I say—for the sake of those who come +after us—that I mourn for the “greatest folk-loreist who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> ever lived,” +and for the great poet who died in his youth. The Harps and Pepperpots got +him and the Harps and Pepperpots kept him till he wrote in our common +English—“It must be either English or Irish,” said some patriotic editor, +Young Ireland practice in his head—that needs such sifting that he who +would write it vigorously must write it like a learned language, and took +for his model the newspaper upon his breakfast table, and became for no +base reason beloved by multitudes who should never have heard his name +till their schoolmasters showed it upon his tomb. That very incapacity for +criticism made him the cajoler of crowds, and of individual men and women; +“He should not be in the world at all,” said one admiring elderly woman, +“or doing the world’s work”; and for certain years young Irish women were +to display his pseudonym, “Craoibhin Aoibhin,” in gilt letters upon their +hat bands.</p> + +<p class="poem">“Dear Craoibhin Aoibhin,......impart to us,<br /> +We’ll keep the secret, a new trick to please;<br /> +Is there a bridle for this Proteus<br /> +That turns and changes like his draughty seas,<br /> +Or is there none, most popular of men,<br /> +But, when they mock us, that we mock again?”</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>VII</h3> + +<p>Standish O’Grady, upon the other hand, was at once all passion and all +judgment. And yet those who knew him better than I assured me he could +find quarrel in a straw; and I did know that he had quarrelled a few years +back with Jack Nettleship. Nettleship’s account had been, “My mother +cannot endure the God of the Old Testament, but likes Jesus<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> Christ; +whereas I like the God of the Old Testament, and cannot endure Jesus +Christ; and we have got into the way of quarrelling about it at lunch; and +once, when O’Grady lunched with us, he said it was the most disgraceful +spectacle he had ever seen, and walked out.” Indeed, I wanted him among my +writers, because of his quarrels, for, having much passion and little +rancour, the more he quarrelled, the nobler, the more patched with +metaphor, the more musical his style became, and if he were in his turn +attacked, he knew a trick of speech that made us murmur, “We do it wrong, +being so majestical, to offer it the show of violence.” Sometimes he +quarrelled most where he loved most. A Unionist in politics, a +leader-writer on <i>The Daily Express</i>, the most Conservative paper in +Ireland, hater of every form of democracy, he had given all his heart to +the smaller Irish landowners, to whom he belonged, and with whom his +childhood had been spent, and for them he wrote his books, and would soon +rage over their failings in certain famous passages that many men would +repeat to themselves like poets’ rhymes. All round us people talked or +wrote for victory’s sake, and were hated for their victories—but here was +a man whose rage was a swan-song over all that he had held most dear, and +to whom for that very reason every Irish imaginative writer owed a portion +of his soul. In his unfinished <i>History of Ireland</i> he had made the old +Irish heroes, Fion, and Oisin, and Cuchullan, alive again, taking them, +for I think he knew no Gaelic, from the dry pages of O’Curry and his +school, and condensing and arranging, as he thought Homer would have +arranged and condensed. Lady Gregory has told the same tales, but keeping +closer to the Gaelic text, and with greater powers of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> arrangement and a +more original style, but O’Grady was the first, and we had read him in our +’teens. I think that, had I succeeded, a popular audience could have +changed him little, and that his genius would have stayed, as it had been +shaped by his youth in some provincial society, and that to the end he +would have shown his best in occasional thrusts and parries. But I do +think that if, instead of that one admirable little book <i>The Bog of +Stars</i>, we had got all his histories and imaginative works into the hands +of our young men, he might have brought the imagination of Ireland nearer +the Image and the honeycomb.</p> + +<p>Lionel Johnson was to be our critic, and above all our theologian, for he +had been converted to Catholicism, and his orthdoxy, too learned to +question, had accepted all that we did, and most of our plans. Historic +Catholicism, with all its counsels and its dogmas, stirred his passion +like the beauty of a mistress, and the unlearned parish priests who +thought good literature or good criticism dangerous were in his eyes “all +heretics.” He belonged to a family that had called itself Irish some +generations back, and its recent English generations but enabled him to +see as one single sacred tradition Irish nationality and Catholic +religion. How should he fail to know the Holy Land? Had he not been in +Egypt? He had joined our London Irish Literary Society, attended its +committee meetings, and given lectures in London, in Dublin, and in +Belfast, on Irish novelists and Irish poetry, reading his lectures always, +and yet affecting his audience as I, with my spoken lectures, could not, +perhaps because Ireland had still the shape it had received from the +eighteenth century, and so felt the dignity, not the artifice, of his +elaborate periods. He was very little, and at a first glance<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> he seemed +but a schoolboy of fifteen. I remember saying one night at the Rhymers’, +when he spoke of passing safely, almost nightly, through Seven Dials, then +a dangerous neighbourhood, “Who would expect to find anything in your +pockets but a pegtop and a piece of string?” But one never thought of his +small stature when he spoke or read. He had the delicate strong features +of a certain filleted head of a Greek athlete in the British Museum, an +archaistic Graeco-Roman copy of a masterpiece of the fourth century, and +that resemblance seemed symbolic of the austere nobility of his verse. He +was now in his best years, writing with great ease and power; neither I, +nor, I think, any other, foresaw his tragedy.</p> + +<p>He suffered from insomnia, and some doctor, while he was still at the +University, had recommended alcohol, and he had, in a vain hope of sleep, +increased the amount, as Rossetti had increased his doses of chloral, and +now he drank for drinking’s sake. He drank a great deal too much, and, +though nothing could, it seemed, disturb his calm or unsteady his hand or +foot, his doctrine, after a certain number of glasses, would become more +ascetic, more contemptuous of all that we call human life. I have heard +him, after four or five glasses of wine, praise some church father who +freed himself from sexual passion by a surgical operation, and deny with +scorn, and much historical evidence, that a gelded man lost anything of +intellectual power. Even without stimulant his theology conceded nothing +to human weakness, and I can remember his saying with energy, “I wish +those people who deny the eternity of punishment could realise their +unspeakable vulgarity.”</p> + +<p>Now that I know his end, I see him creating, to use a favourite adjective +of his, “marmorean”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> verse, and believing the most terrible doctrines to +keep down his own turbulence. One image of that stay in Dublin is so clear +before me that it has blotted out most other images of that time. He is +sitting at a lodging-house table, which I have just left at three in the +morning, and round him lie or sit in huddled attitudes half-a-dozen men in +various states of intoxication: and he is looking straight before him with +head erect, and one hand resting upon the table. As I reach the stairs I +hear him say, in a clear, unshaken voice, “I believe in nothing but the +Holy Roman Catholic Church.” He sometimes spoke of drink as something +which he could put aside at any moment, and his friends believed, and I +think he liked us to believe, that he would shortly enter a monastery. Did +he deceive us deliberately? Did he himself already foresee the moment when +he would write <i>The Dark Angel</i>? I am almost certain that he did, for he +had already written <i>Mystic and Cavalier</i>, where the historical setting +is, I believe, but masquerade.</p> + +<p class="poem">“Go from me: I am one of those, who fall.<br /> +What! hath no cold wind swept your heart at all,<br /> +In my sad company? Before the end,<br /> +<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Go from me, dear my friend!</span><br /> +<br /> +Yours are the victories of light: your feet<br /> +Rest from good toil, where rest is brave and sweet.<br /> +But after warfare in a mourning gloom<br /> +<span style="margin-left: 3em;">I rest in clouds of doom.</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></span><br /> +Seek with thine eyes to pierce this crystal sphere:<br /> +Canst read a fate there, prosperous and clear?<br /> +Only the mists, only the weeping clouds:<br /> +<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Dimness, and airy shrouds.</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></span><br /> +<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> +O rich and sounding voices of the air!<br /> +Interpreters and prophets of despair:<br /> +Priests of a fearful sacrament! I come<br /> +<span style="margin-left: 3em;">To make with you my home.”</span></p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>VIII</h3> + +<p>Sir Charles Gavan Duffy arrived. He brought with him much manuscript, the +private letters of a Young Ireland poetess, a dry but informing +unpublished historical essay by Davis, and an unpublished novel by William +Carleton, into the middle of which he had dropped a hot coal, so that +nothing remained but the borders of every page. He hired a young man to +read him, after dinner, Carlyle’s <i>Heroes and Hero-Worship</i>, and before +dinner was gracious to all our men of authority and especially to our +Harps and Pepperpots. Taylor compared him to Odysseus returning to Ithaca, +and every newspaper published his biography. He was a white-haired old +man, who had written the standard history of Young Ireland, had emigrated +to Australia, had been the first Australian Federalist, and later Prime +Minister, but, in all his writings, in which there is so much honesty, so +little rancour, there is not one sentence that has any meaning when +separated from its place in argument or narrative, not one distinguished +because of its thought or music. One imagined his youth in some little +gaunt Irish town, where no building or custom is revered for its +antiquity; and there speaking a language where no word, even in solitude, +is ever spoken slowly and carefully because of emotional implication; and +of his manhood of practical politics, of the dirty piece of orange-peel in +the corner of the stairs as one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> climbs up to some newspaper office; of +public meetings where it would be treacherous amid so much geniality to +speak, or even to think of anything that might cause a moment’s +misunderstanding in one’s own party. No argument of mine was intelligible +to him, and I would have been powerless, but that fifty years ago he had +made an enemy, and though that enemy was long dead, his school remained. +He had attacked, why or with what result I do not remember, the only Young +Ireland politician who had music and personality, though rancorous and +devil-possessed. At some public meeting of ours, where he spoke amid great +applause, in smooth, Gladstonian periods, of his proposed Irish publishing +firm, one heard faint hostile murmurs, and at last a voice cried, +“Remember Newry,” and a voice answered, “There is a grave there!” and a +part of the audience sang, “Here’s to John Mitchell that is gone, boys, +gone; Here’s to the friends that are gone.” The meeting over, a group of +us, indignant that the meeting we had called for his welcome should have +contained those malcontents, gathered about him to apologize. He had +written a pamphlet, he explained: he would give us copies. We would see +that he was in the right, how badly Mitchell had behaved. But in Ireland +personality, if it be but harsh and hard, has lovers, and some of us, I +think, may have gone home muttering, “How dare he be in the right if +Mitchell is in the wrong?”</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>IX</h3> + +<p>He wanted “to complete the Young Ireland movement”—to do all that had +been left undone because of the Famine, or the death of Davis, or his own<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> +emigration; and all the younger men were upon my side in resisting that. +They might not want the books I wanted, but they did want books written by +their own generation, and we began to struggle with him over the control +of the company. Taylor became very angry, and I can understand what I +looked like in his eyes, when I remember Edwin Ellis’s seriously-intended +warning, “It is bad manners for a man under thirty to permit himself to be +in the right.” But John O’Leary supported me throughout.</p> + +<p>When Gavin Duffy had gone to London to draw up articles of association for +his company, for which he had found many shareholders in Dublin, the +dispute became very fierce. One night members of the general public +climbed the six flights of stairs to our committee room, now no longer in +the Mansion House, and found seats for themselves just behind our chairs. +We were all too angry to send them away, or even to notice their presence, +for I was accused of saying at a public meeting in Cork, “Our books,” when +I should have said, “Sir Charles Gavan Duffy’s books.” I was not Taylor’s +match with the spoken word, and barely matched him with the written word. +At twenty-seven or twenty-eight I was immature and clumsy, and O’Leary’s +support was capricious, for, being but a spectator of life, he would +desert me if I used a bad argument, and would not return till I found a +good one; and our chairman, Dr. Hyde, “most popular of men,” sat dreaming +of his old white cockatoo in far-away Roscommon. Our very success had been +a misfortune, for an opposition which had been literary and political, now +that it had spread to the general public, brought religious prejudice to +its aid. Suddenly, when the company<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> seemed all but established, and a +scheme had been thought out which gave some representation on its +governing board to contemporary Irish writers, Gavan Duffy produced a +letter from Archbishop Walsh, and threw the project up. The letter had +warned him that after his death the company would fall under a dangerous +influence. At this moment the always benevolent friend, to whom I had +explained in confidence, when asking his support, my arrangements with my +publisher, went to Gavan Duffy and suggested that they should together +offer Mr Fisher Unwin a series of Irish books, and Mr Fisher Unwin and his +reader accepted the series under the belief that it was my project that +they accepted. I went to London to find the contract signed, and that all +I could do was to get two sub-editors appointed, responsible to the two +societies. Two or three good books were published, especially Dr. Hyde’s +<i>Short History of Gaelic Literature</i>, and Standish O’Grady’s <i>Bog of +Stars</i>; but the series was killed by its first volume, Thomas Davis’s dry +but informing historical essay. So important had our movement seemed that +ten thousand copies had been sold before anybody had time to read it, and +then came a dead stop.</p> + +<p>Gavan Duffy knew nothing of my plans, and so was guiltless, and my friend +had heard me discuss many things that evening. I had perhaps dispraised +the humanitarian Stephen Phillips, already in his first vogue, and praised +Francis Thompson, but half-rescued from his gutter; or flouted his belief +in the perpetual marriage of genius and virtue by numbering the vices of +famous men; this man’s venery, that man’s drink. He could not be expected +to remember that where I had said so much of no account, I said<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> one +thing, and he had made no reply, that I thought of great account. He died +a few months ago, and it would have surprised and shocked him if any man +had told him that he was unforgiven; had he not forgotten all about it +long ago? A German doctor has said that if we leave an umbrella at a +friend’s house it is because we have a sub-conscious desire to re-visit +that house; and he had perhaps a sub-conscious desire that my too +tumultuous generation should not have its say.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>X</h3> + +<p>I was at Sligo when I received a letter from John O’Leary, saying that I +could do no more in Dublin, for even the younger men had turned against +me, were “jealous,” his letter said, though what they had to be jealous of +God knows. He said further that it was all my own fault, that he had +warned me what would happen if I lived on terms of intimacy with those I +tried to influence. I should have kept myself apart and alone. It was all +true; through some influence from an earlier generation, from Walt +Whitman, perhaps, I had sat talking in public bars, had talked late into +the night at many men’s houses, showing all my convictions to men that +were but ready for one, and used conversation to explore and discover +among men who looked for authority. I did not yet know that intellectual +freedom and social equality are incompatible; and yet, if I had, could +hardly have lived otherwise, being too young for silence. The trouble came +from half a dozen obscure young men, who having nothing to do attended +every meeting and were able to overturn a project, that seemed my only +bridge to other projects, including a travelling<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> theatre. We had planned +small libraries of Irish literature in connection with our country +branches; we collected books and money, sending a lecturer to every branch +and taking half the proceeds of that lecture to buy books. Maud Gonne, +whose beauty could draw a great audience in any country town, had been the +lecturer. The scheme was very nearly self-supporting, and six or seven +bundles of books, chosen after much disputation by John O’Leary, J. F. +Taylor, and myself, had been despatched to some six or seven branches. +“The country will support this work” Taylor had said somewhere on some +public platform, “because we are the most inflammable people on God’s +earth,” his harsh voice giving almost a quality of style to Carlylian +commonplace; but we are also a very jealous people. The half-a-dozen young +men, if a little jealous of me, were still more jealous of those country +branches which were getting so much notice, and where there was so much of +that peasant mind their schoolmasters had taught them to despise. One must +be English or Irish, they would have said. I returned to find a great box +of books appropriated for some Dublin purpose and the whole scheme +abandoned. I know that it was a bitter moment because I remember with +gratitude words spoken not to my ear, but for my ear, by a young man who +had lately joined our Society, Mr. Stephen McKenna, now well-known amongst +scholars for his distinguished translations of Plotinus, and I seem to +remember that I lost through anger what gift of persuasion I may possess, +and that I was all the more helpless because I felt that even the best of +us disagreed about everything at heart. I began to feel that I needed a +hostess more than a society, but that I was not to find for years to +come.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> I tried to persuade Maud Gonne to be that hostess, but her social +life was in Paris, and she had already formed a new ambition, the turning +of French public opinion against England. Without intellectual freedom +there can be no agreement, and in Nationalist Dublin there was not—indeed +there still is not—any society where a man is heard by the right ears, +but never overheard by the wrong, and where he speaks his whole mind +gaily, and is not the cautious husband of a part; where phantasy can play +before matured into conviction; where life can shine and ring, and lack +utility. Mere life lacking the protection of wealth or rank, or some +beauty’s privilege of caprice cannot choose its company, taking up and +dropping men merely because it likes, or dislikes, their manners and their +looks, and in its stead opinion crushes and rends, and all is hatred and +bitterness: wheel biting upon wheel, a roar of steel or iron tackle, a +mill of argument grinding all things down to mediocrity. If, as I think, +minds and metals correspond the goldsmiths of Paris foretold the French +Revolution when they substituted steel for that unserviceable gold in the +manufacture of the more expensive jewel work, and made those large, flat +steel buttons for men of fashion whereby the card players were able to +cheat by studying the reflections of the cards.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XI</h3> + +<p>No country could have more natural distaste for equality, for in every +circle there was some man ridiculous for posing as the type of some +romantic or distinguished quality. One of our friends, a man of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> talent +and of learning, whose ancestors had come, he believed, from Denmark in +the ninth century, looked and talked the distinguished foreigner so +perfectly that a patriotic newspaper gave particulars of his supposed +relations in contemporary Denmark! A half-mad old man who had served for a +few months in the Pope’s army, many years before, still rode an old white +warhorse in all national processions, and, if their enemies were not +lying, one Town Councillor had challenged another to a duel by flinging +his glove upon the floor; while a popular Lord Mayor had boasted in a +public speech that he never went to bed at night without reading at least +twelve pages of <i>Sappho</i>. Then, too, in those conversations of the small +hours, to which O’Leary had so much objected, whenever we did not speak of +art and letters, we spoke of Parnell. We told each other that he had +admitted no man to his counsel; that when some member of his party found +himself in the same hotel by chance, that member would think to stay there +a presumption, and move to some other lodging; and, above all, we spoke of +his pride, that made him hide all emotion while before his enemy. Once he +had seemed callous and indifferent to the House of Commons, Foster had +accused him of abetting assassination, but when he came among his +followers his hands were full of blood, because he had torn them with his +nails. What excitement there would have been, what sense of mystery would +have stirred all our hearts, and stirred hearts all through the country, +where there was still, and for many years to come, but one overmastering +topic, had we known the story Mrs. Parnell tells of that scene on Brighton +Pier. He and the woman that he loved stood there upon a night of storm, +when his power was at its greatest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> height, and still unthreatened. He +caught her from the ground and held her at arm’s length out over the water +and she lay there motionless, knowing that, had she moved, he would have +drowned himself and her. Perhaps unmotived self-immolation, were that +possible, or else at mere suggestion of storm and night, were as great +evidence as such a man could give of power over self, and so of the +expression of the self.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XII</h3> + +<p>When I look back upon my Irish propaganda of those years I can see little +but its bitterness. I never met with, or but met to quarrel with, my +father’s old family acquaintance; or with acquaintance I myself might have +found, and kept, among the prosperous educated class, who had all the +great appointments at University or Castle; and this I did by deliberate +calculation. If I must attack so much that seemed sacred to Irish +nationalist opinion, I must, I knew, see to it that no man suspect me of +doing it to flatter Unionist opinion. Whenever I got the support of some +man who belonged by birth and education to University or Castle, I would +say, “Now you must be baptized of the gutter.” I chose Royal visits +especially for demonstrations of disloyalty, rolling up with my own hands +the red carpet spread by some elderly Nationalist, softened or weakened by +time, to welcome Viceroyalty; and threatening, if the London Society drank +to the King’s health, that my friends and I would demonstrate against it +by turning our glasses upside down; and was presently to discover that one +can grow impassioned and fanatical about<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> opinions, which one has chosen +as one might choose a side upon the football field; and I thought many a +time of the pleasant Dublin houses that would never ask me to dine; and +the still pleasanter houses with trout-streams near at hand, that would +never ask me upon a visit. I became absurdly sensitive, glancing about me +in certain public places, the private view of our Academy, or the like, to +discover imagined enemies; and even now, after twenty or thirty years, I +feel at times that I have not recovered my natural manner. Yet it was in +those pleasant houses, among the young men and the young girls, that we +were to make our converts. When we loathe ourselves or our world, if that +loathing but turn to intellect, we see self or world and its anti-self as +in one vision; when loathing remains but loathing, world or self consumes +itself away, and we turn to its mechanical opposite. Popular Nationalism +and Unionism so changed into one another, being each but the other’s +headache. The Nationalist abstractions were like the fixed ideas of some +hysterical woman, a part of the mind turned into stone, and all the rest a +seething and burning; and Unionist Ireland had re-acted from that seething +and burning to a cynical indifference, and from those fixed ideas to +whatever might bring the most easy and obvious success.</p> + +<p>I remember Taylor at some public debate, stiff of body and tense of voice; +and the contrasting figure of Fitzgibbon, the Lord Justice of Appeal of +the moment and his calm, flowing sentences, satisfactory to hear and +impossible to remember. Taylor speaks of a little nation of antiquity, +which he does not name, “set between the great Empire of Persia and the +great Empire of Rome.” Into the mouths of those great Empires he puts the +arguments of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>Fitzgibbon, and such as he, “Join with our greatness! What +in <ins class="correction" title="original: comparson">comparison</ins> to that is your little, beggarly nationality?” And then I +recall the excitement, the shiver of the nerves, as his voice rose to an +ecstatic cry, “Out of that nation came the salvation of the world.” I +remember, too, and grow angry, as it were yesterday, a letter from that +Lord Justice of Appeal, who had changed his politics for advancement’s +sake, recommending a correspondent to avoid us, because we dissuaded +people from the study of “Shakespeare and Kingsley.”</p> + + +<p>Edward Dowden, my father’s old friend, with his dark romantic face, the +one man of letters Dublin Unionism possessed, was withering in that barren +soil. Towards the end of his life he confessed to a near friend that he +would have wished before all things to have been the lover of many women; +and some careless lecture, upon the youthful Goethe, had in early life +drawn down upon him the displeasure of the Protestant Archbishop. And yet +he turned Shakespeare into a British Benthamite, flattered Shelley but to +hide his own growing lack of sympathy, abandoned for like reason that +study of Goethe that should have been his life-work, and at last cared but +for Wordsworth, the one great poet who, after brief blossom, was cut and +sawn into planks of obvious utility. I called upon him from time to time +out of gratitude for old encouragements, and because, among the Dublin +houses open to me, his alone was pleasant to the eye, with its many books +and its air of scholarship. But when O’Grady had declared, rancorous for +once but under substantial provocation, that he had “a bad head and a +worse heart,” I found my welcome troubled and called no more.</p> + +<p> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span></p> +<h3>XIII</h3> + +<p>The one house where nobody thought or talked politics was a house in Ely +Place, where a number of young men lived together, and, for want of a +better name, were called Theosophists. Beside the resident members, other +members dropped in and out during the day, and the reading-room was a +place of much discussion about philosophy and about the arts. The house +had been taken in the name of the engineer to the Board of Works, a +black-bearded young man, with a passion for Manichean philosophy, and all +accepted him as host; and sometimes the conversation, especially when I +was there, became too ghostly for the nerves of his young and delicate +wife, and he would be made angry. I remember young men struggling, with +inexact terminology and insufficient learning, for some new religious +conception, on which they could base their lives; and some few strange or +able men.</p> + +<p>At the top of the house lived a medical student who read Plato and took +haschisch, and a young Scotchman who owned a vegetarian restaurant, and +had just returned from America, where he had gone as the disciple of the +Prophet Harris, and where he would soon return in the train of some new +prophet. When one asked what set him on his wanderings, he told of a young +Highlander, his friend in boyhood, whose cap was always plucked off at a +certain twist in the road, till the fathers of the village fastened it +upon his head by recommending drink and women. When he had gone, his room +was inherited by an American hypnotist, who had lived among the Zuni +Indians with the explorer Cushant, and told of a Zuni Indian who, +irritated by some white man’s praise of telephone<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> and telegraph, cried +out, “Can they do that?” and cast above his head two handfuls of sand that +burst into flame, and flamed till his head seemed wrapped in fire. He +professed to talk the philosophy of the Zuni Indians, but it seemed to me +the vague Platonism that all there talked, except that he spoke much of +men passing in sleep into the heart of mountains; a doctrine that was +presently incorporated in the mythology of the house, to send young men +and women hither and thither inquiring for sacred places. On a lower floor +lived a strange red-haired girl, all whose thoughts were set upon painting +and poetry, conceived as abstract images like Love and Penury in the +<i>Symposium</i>; and to these images she sacrificed herself with Asiatic +fanaticism. The engineer had discovered her starving somewhere in an +unfurnished or half-furnished room, and that she had lived for many weeks +upon bread and shell-cocoa, so that her food never cost her more than a +penny a day. Born into a county family, who were so haughty that their +neighbours called them the Royal Family, she had quarrelled with a mad +father, who had never, his tenants declared, “unscrewed the top of his +flask with any man,” because she wished to study art, had ran away from +home, had lived for a time by selling her watch, and then by occasional +stories in an Irish paper. For some weeks she had paid half-a-crown a week +to some poor woman to see her to the art schools and back, for she +considered it wrong for a woman to show herself in public places +unattended; but of late she had been unable to afford the school fees. The +engineer engaged her as a companion for his wife, and gave her money +enough to begin her studies once more. She had talent and imagination, a +gift for style; but, though ready to face death for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> painting and poetry, +conceived as allegorical figures, she hated her own genius, and had not +met praise and sympathy early enough to overcome the hatred. Face to face +with paint and canvas, pen and paper, she saw nothing of her genius but +its cruelty, and would have scarce arrived before she would find some +excuse to leave the schools for the day, if indeed she had not invented +over her breakfast some occupation so laborious that she could call it a +duty, and so not go at all. Most watched her in mockery, but I watched in +sympathy; composition strained my nerves and spoiled my sleep; and yet, as +far back as I could trace—and in Ireland we have long memories—my +paternal ancestors had worked at some intellectual pursuit, while hers had +shot and hunted. She could at any time, had she given up her profession, +which her father had raged against, not because it was art, but because it +was a profession, have returned to the common comfortable life of women. +When, a little later, she had quarrelled with the engineer or his wife, +and gone back to bread and shell-cocoa I brought her an offer from some +Dublin merchant of fairly well paid advertisement work, which would have +been less laborious than artistic creation; but she said that to draw +advertisements was to degrade art, thanked me elaborately, and did not +disguise her indignation. She had, I believe, returned to starvation with +joy, for constant anaemia would shortly give her an argument strong enough +to silence her conscience when the allegorical images glared upon her, +and, apart from that, starvation and misery had a large share in her +ritual of worship.</p> + +<p> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span></p> +<h3>XIV</h3> + +<p>At the top of the house and at the time I remember best, in the same room +with the young Scotchman, lived Mr. George Russell (A.E.), and the house +and the society were divided into his adherents and those of the engineer; +and I heard of some quarrelling between the factions. The rivalry was +sub-conscious. Neither had willingly opposed the other in any matter of +importance. The engineer had all the financial responsibility, and George +Russell was, in the eyes of the community, saint and genius. Had either +seen that the question at issue was the leadership of mystical thought in +Dublin, he would, I think, have given way, but the dispute seemed trivial. +At the weekly meetings, anything might be discussed; no chairman called a +speaker to order; an atheistic workman could denounce religion, or a pious +Catholic confound theosophy with atheism; and the engineer, precise and +practical, disapproved. He had an object. He wished to make converts for a +definite form of belief, and here an enemy, if a better speaker, might +make all the converts. He wished to confine discussion to members of the +society, and had proposed in committee, I was told, a resolution on the +subject; while Russell, who had refused to join my National Literary +Society, because the party of Harp and Pepperpot had set limits to +discussion, resisted, and at last defeated him. In a couple of years some +new dispute arose; he resigned, and founded a society which drew doctrine +and method from America or London; and Russell became, as he is to-day, +the one masterful influence among young Dublin men and women who love +religious speculation, but have no historical faith.</p> + +<p>When Russell and I had been at the Art School<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> six or seven years before, +he had been almost unintelligible. He had seemed incapable of coherent +thought, and perhaps was so at certain moments. The idea came upon him, he +has told me, that, if he spoke he would reveal that he had lost coherence; +and for the three days that the idea lasted spent the hours of daylight +wandering upon the Dublin mountains, that he might escape the necessity +for speech. I used to listen to him at that time, mostly walking through +the streets at night, for the sake of some stray sentence, beautiful and +profound, amid many words that seemed without meaning; and there were +others, too, who walked and listened, for he had become, I think, to all +his fellow students, sacred, as the fool is sacred in the East. We copied +the model laboriously, but he would draw without research into the natural +form, and call his study “St. John in the Wilderness”; but I can remember +the almost scared look and the half-whisper of a student, now a successful +sculptor, who said, pointing to the modelling of a shoulder, “That is too +easy, a great deal too easy!” For with brush and pencil he was too +coherent.</p> + +<p>We derided each other, told absurd tales to one another’s discredit, but +we never derided him, or told tales to his discredit. He stood outside the +sense of comedy his friend John Eglinton has called “the social cement” of +our civilization; and we would “gush” when we spoke of him, as men do when +they praise something incomprehensible. But when he painted there was no +difficulty in comprehending. How could that ease and rapidity of +composition, so far beyond anything that we could attain to, belong to a +man whose words seemed often without meaning?</p> + +<p>A few months before I had come to Ireland he had sent me some verses, +which I had liked till Edwin<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> Ellis had laughed me from my liking by +proving that no line had a rhythm that agreed with any other, and that, +the moment one thought he had settled upon some scheme of rhyme, he would +break from it without reason. But now his verse was clear in thought and +delicate in form. He wrote without premeditation or labour. It had, as it +were, organized itself, and grown as nervous and living as if it had, as +Dante said of his own work, paled his cheek. The Society he belonged to +published a little magazine, and he had asked the readers to decide +whether they preferred his prose or his verse, and it was because they so +willed it that he wrote the little transcendental verses afterwards +published in <i>Homeward Songs by the Way</i>.</p> + +<p>Life was not expensive in that house, where, I think, no meat was eaten; I +know that out of the sixty or seventy pounds a year which he earned as +accountant in a Dublin shop, he saved a considerable portion for his +private charity; and it was, I think, his benevolence that gave him his +lucidity of speech, and, perhaps, of writing. If he convinced himself that +any particular activity was desirable in the public interest or in that of +his friends, he had at once the ardour that came to another from personal +ambition. He was always surrounded with a little group of infirm or +unlucky persons, whom he explained to themselves and to others, turning +cat to griffin, goose to swan. In later years he was to accept the +position of organizer of a co-operative banking system, before he had even +read a book upon economics or finance, and within a few months to give +evidence before a Royal Commission upon the system, as an acknowledged +expert, though he had brought to it nothing but his impassioned +versatility.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>At the time I write of him, he was the religious teacher, and that +alone—his painting, his poetry, and his conversation all subservient to +that one end. Men watched him with awe or with bewilderment; it was known +that he saw visions continually, perhaps more continually than any modern +man since Swedenborg; and when he painted and drew in pastel what he had +seen, some accepted the record without hesitation, others, like myself, +noticing the academic Graeco-Roman forms, and remembering his early +admiration for the works of Gustave Moreau, divined a subjective element, +but no one doubted his word. One might not think him a good observer, but +no one could doubt that he reported with the most scrupulous care what he +believed himself to have seen; nor did he lack occasional objective +corroboration. Walking with some man in his park—his demesne, as we say +in Ireland—he had seen a visionary church at a particular spot, and the +man had dug and uncovered its foundations; then some woman had met him +with, “Oh, Mr Russell, I am so unhappy,” and he had replied, “You will be +perfectly happy this evening at seven o’clock,” and left her to her +blushes. She had an appointment with a young man for seven o’clock. I had +heard of this a day or so after the event, and I asked him about it, and +was told it had suddenly come into his head to use those words; but why he +did not know. He and I often quarrelled, because I wanted him to examine +and question his visions, and write them out as they occurred; and still +more because I thought symbolic what he thought real like the men and +women that had passed him on the road. Were they so much a part of his +sub-conscious life that they would have vanished had he submitted them to +question; were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> they like those voices that only speak, those strange +sights that only show themselves for an instant, when the attention has +been withdrawn; that phantasmagoria of which I had learnt something in +London: and had his verse and his painting a like origin? And was that why +the same hand that painted a certain dreamy, lovely sandy shore, now in +the Dublin Municipal Gallery, could with great rapidity fill many canvases +with poetical commonplace; and why, after writing <i>Homeward Songs by the +Way</i>, where all is skilful and much exquisite, he would never again write +a perfect book? Was it precisely because in Swedenborg alone the conscious +and the sub-conscious became one, as in that marriage of the angels, which +he has described as a contact of the whole being, that Coleridge thought +Swedenborg both man and woman?</p> + +<p>Russell’s influence, which was already great, had more to support it than +his versatility, or the mystery that surrounded him, for his sense of +justice, and the daring that came from his own confidence in it, had made +him the general counsellor. He would give endless time to a case of +conscience, and no situation was too difficult for his clarity; and +certainly some of the situations were difficult. I remember his being +summoned to decide between two ladies who had quarrelled about a +vacillating admirer, and called each other, to each other’s faces, the +worst names in our somewhat anaemic modern vocabulary; and I have heard of +his success on an occasion when I think no other but Dostoievsky’s idiot +could have avoided offence. The Society was very young, and, as its +members faced the world’s moral complexities as though they were the first +that ever faced them, they drew up very vigorous rules. One rule was that +if any member saw a fault growing upon any other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> member, it was his duty +to point it out to that member. A certain young man become convinced that +a certain young woman had fallen in love with him; and, as an unwritten +rule pronounced love and the spiritual life incompatible, that was a heavy +fault. As the young man felt the delicacy of the situation, he asked for +Russell’s help, and side by side they braved the offender, who, I was +told, received their admonishment with surprised humility, and promised +amendment. His voice would often become high, and lose its self-possession +during intimate conversation, and I especially could put him in a rage; +but the moment the audience became too large for intimacy, or some +exciting event had given formality to speech, he would be at the same +moment impassioned and impersonal. He had, and has, the capacity, beyond +that of any man I have known, to put with entire justice not only the +thoughts, but the emotions, of the most opposite parties and +personalities, as it were dissolving some public or private uproar into +drama by Corneille or by Racine; and men who have hated each other must +sometimes have been reconciled, because each heard his enemy’s argument +put into better words than he himself had found for his own; and this gift +was in later years to give him political influence, and win him respect +from Irish Nationalist and Unionist alike. It was, perhaps, because of it, +joined to a too literal acceptance of those noble images of moral +tradition which are so like late Graeco-Roman statues, that he had seen +all human life as a mythological system, where, though all cats are +griffins, the more dangerous griffins are only found among politicians he +has not spoken to, or among authors he has but glanced at; while those men +and women who bring him their <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>confessions and listen to his advice, carry +but the snowiest of swan’s plumage. Nor has it failed to make him, as I +think, a bad literary critic; demanding plays and poems where the +characters must attain a stature of seven feet, and resenting as something +perverse and morbid all abatement from that measure. I sometimes wonder +what he would have been had he not met in early life the poetry of Emerson +and Walt Whitman, writers who have begun to seem superficial precisely +because they lack the Vision of evil; and those translations of the +Upanishads, which it is so much harder to study by the sinking flame of +Indian tradition than by the serviceable lamp of Emerson and Walt Whitman.</p> + +<p>We are never satisfied with the maturity of those whom we have admired in +boyhood; and, because we have seen their whole circle—even the most +successful life is but a segment—we remain to the end their harshest +critics. One old schoolfellow of mine will never believe that I have +fulfilled the promise of some rough unscannable verses that I wrote before +I was eighteen. Does any imaginative man find in maturity the admiration +that his first half-articulate years aroused in some little circle; and is +not the first success the greatest? Certainly, I demanded of Russell some +impossible things, and if I had any influence upon him—and I have little +doubt that I had, for we were very intimate—it may not have been a good +influence for I thought there could be no aim for poet or artist except +expression of a “Unity of Being” like that of a “perfectly proportioned +human body”—though I would not at the time have used that phrase. I +remember that I was ironic and indignant when he left the Art Schools +because his “will was weak, and must grow weaker if he followed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> any +emotional pursuit;” as, later, when he let the readers of a magazine +decide between his prose and his verse. I now know that there are men who +cannot possess “Unity of Being,” who must not seek it or express it—and +who, so far from seeking an anti-self, a Mask that delineates a being in +all things the opposite to their natural state, can but seek the +suppression of the anti-self, till the natural state alone remains. These +are those who must seek no image of desire, but await that which lies +beyond their mind, unities not of the mind, but unities of nature, unities +of God: the man of science, the moralist, the humanitarian, the +<ins class="correction" title="original: politicion">politician</ins>, St. Simon Stylites upon his pillar, St. Antony in his cavern; +all whose pre-occupation is to know themselves for fragments, and at last +for nothing; to hollow their hearts out till they are void and without +form, to summon a creator by revealing chaos, to become the lamp for +another’s wick and oil; and indeed it may be that it has been for their +guidance in a very special sense that the “perfectly proportioned human +body” suffered crucifixion. For them Mask and Image are of necessity +morbid, turning their eyes upon themselves, as though they were of those +who can be law unto themselves, of whom Chapman has written, “Neither is +it lawful that they should stoop to any other law,” whereas they are +indeed of those who can but ask, “Have I behaved as well as So-and-so?” +“Am I a good man according to the commandments?” or, “Do I realise my own +nothingness before God?” “Have my experiments and observations excluded +the personal factor with sufficient rigour?” Such men do not assume wisdom +or beauty as Shelley did, when he masked himself as Ahasuerus, or as +Prince Athanais, nor do they pursue an Image through a world that had else +seemed an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> uninhabitable wilderness till, amid the privations of that +pursuit, the Image is no more named Pandemos, but Urania; for such men +must cast all Masks away and fly the Image, till that Image, transfigured +because of their cruelties of self-abasement, becomes itself some Image or +epitome of the whole natural or supernatural world, and itself pursues. +The wholeness of the supernatural world can only express itself in +personal form, because it has no epitome but man, nor can <i>The Hound of +Heaven</i> fling itself into any but an empty heart. We may know the +fugitives from others poets because, like George Herbert, like Francis +Thompson, like George Russell, their imaginations grow more vivid in the +expression of something which they have not themselves created, some +historical religion or cause. But if the fugitive should live, as I think +Russell does at times, as it is natural for a Morris or a Henley or a +Shelley to live, hunters and pursuers all, his art surrenders itself to +moral or poetical commonplace, to a repetition of thoughts and images that +have no relation to experience.</p> + +<p>I think that Russell would not have disappointed even my hopes had he, +instead of meeting as an impressionable youth with our modern subjective +romanticism, met with some form of traditional belief, which condemned all +that romanticism admires and praises, indeed, all images of desire; for +such condemnation would have turned his intellect towards the images of +his vision. It might, doubtless, have embittered his life, for his strong +intellect would have been driven out into the impersonal deeps where the +man shudders; but it would have kept him a religious teacher, and set him, +it may be, among the greatest of that species; politics, for a +vision-seeking man, can<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> be but half achievement, a choice of an almost +easy kind of skill instead of that kind which is, of all those not +impossible, the most difficult. Is it not certain that the Creator yawns +in earthquake and thunder and other popular displays, but toils in +rounding the delicate spiral of a shell?</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XV</h3> + +<p>I heard the other day of a Dublin man recognizing in London an elderly man +who had lived in that house in Ely Place in his youth, and of that elderly +man, at the sudden memory, bursting into tears. Though I have no such +poignant memories, for I was never of it, never anything but a +dissatisfied critic, yet certain vivid moments come back to me as I write.</p> + +<p>...Russell has just come in from a long walk on the Two Rock mountain, +very full of his conversation with an old religious beggar, who kept +repeating, “God possesses the heavens, but He covets the earth—He covets +the earth.”</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></p> + +<p>I get in talk with a young man who has taken the orthodox side in some +debate. He is a stranger, but explains that he has inherited magical art +from his father, and asks me to his rooms to see it in operation. He and a +friend of his kill a black cock, and burn herbs in a big bowl, but nothing +happens except that the friend repeats again and again, “Oh, my God,” and +when I ask him why he has said that, does not know that he has spoken; and +I feel that there is something very evil in the room.</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>We are sitting round the fire one night, and a member, a woman, tells a +dream that she has just had. She dreamed that she saw monks digging in a +garden. They dug down till they found a coffin, and when they took off the +lid she saw that in the coffin lay a beautiful young man in a dress of +gold brocade. The young man railed against the glory of the world, and +when he had finished, the monks closed the coffin reverently, and buried +it once more. They smoothed the ground, and then went on with their +gardening.</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></p> + +<p>I have a young man with me, an official of the National Literary Society, +and I leave him in the reading-room with Russell, while I go upstairs to +see the young Scotchman. I return after some minutes to find that the +young man has become a Theosophist, but a month later, after an interview +with a friar, to whom he gives an incredible account of his new beliefs, +he goes to Mass again.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span></p> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span></p> +<h2><a name="BOOK_III" id="BOOK_III"></a>BOOK III<br />HODOS CAMELIONIS</h2> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span></p> + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span></p> +<h2><i>HODOS CAMELIONIS</i></h2> + +<p> </p> +<h3>I</h3> + +<p>When staying with Hyde in Roscommon, I had driven over to Lough Kay, +hoping to find some local memory of the old story of Tumaus Costello, +which I was turning into a story now called <i>Proud Costello, Macdermot’s +Daughter, and the Bitter Tongue</i>. I was rowed up the lake that I might +find the island where he died; I had to find it from Hyde’s account in +<i>The Love-Songs of Connaught</i>, for when I asked the boatman, he told the +story of Hero and Leander, putting Hero’s house on one island, and +Leander’s on another. Presently we stopped to eat our sandwiches at the +“Castle Rock,” an island all castle. It was not an old castle, being but +the invention of some romantic man, seventy or eighty years ago. The last +man who had lived there had been Dr. Hyde’s father, and he had but stayed +a fortnight. The Gaelic-speaking men in the district were accustomed, +instead of calling some specially useless thing a “white elephant,” to +call it “The Castle on the Rock.” The roof was, however, still sound, and +the windows unbroken. The situation in the centre of the lake, that has +little wood-grown islands, and is surrounded by wood-grown hills, is +romantic, and at one end, and perhaps at the other too, there is a stone +platform where meditative persons might pace to and fro. I planned a +mystical Order which should buy or hire the castle, and keep it as a place +where its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> members could retire for a while for contemplation, and where +we might establish mysteries like those of Eleusis and Samothrace; and for +ten years to come my most impassioned thought was a vain attempt to find +philosophy and to create ritual for that Order. I had an unshakeable +conviction, arising how or whence I cannot tell, that invisible gates +would open as they opened for Blake, as they opened for Swedenborg, as +they opened for Boehme, and that this philosophy would find its manuals of +devotion in all imaginative literature, and set before Irishmen for +special manual an Irish literature which, though made by many minds, would +seem the work of a single mind, and turn our places of beauty or legendary +association into holy symbols. I did not think this philosophy would be +altogether pagan, for it was plain that its symbols must be selected from +all those things that had moved men most during many, mainly Christian, +centuries.</p> + +<p>I thought that for a time I could rhyme of love, calling it <i>The Rose</i>, +because of the Rose’s double meaning; of a fisherman who had “never a +crack” in his heart; of an old woman complaining of the idleness of the +young, or of some cheerful fiddler, all those things that “popular poets” +write of, but that I must some day, on that day when the gates began to +open, become difficult or obscure. With a rhythm that still echoed Morris +I prayed to the Red Rose, to Intellectual Beauty:</p> + +<p class="poem">“Come near, come near, come near—ah, leave me still<br /> +A little space for the Rose-breath to fill,<br /> +Lest I no more hear common things....<br /> +But seek alone to hear the strange things said<br /> +By God to the bright hearts of those long dead,<br /> +And learn to chant a tongue men do not know.”</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>I do not remember what I meant by “the bright hearts,” but a little later +I wrote of Spirits “with mirrors in their hearts.”</p> + +<p>My rituals were not to be made deliberately, like a poem, but all got by +that method Mathers had explained to me, and with this hope I plunged +without a clue into a labyrinth of images, into that labyrinth that we are +warned against in those <i>Oracles</i> which antiquity has attributed to +Zoroaster, but modern scholarship to some Alexandrian poet. “Stoop not +down to the darkly <ins class="correction" title="original: spendid">splendid</ins> world wherein lieth continually a faithless +depth and Hades wrapped in cloud, delighting in unintelligible images.”</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>II</h3> + +<p>I found a supporter at Sligo in my elderly uncle, a man of fifty-three or +fifty-four, with the habits of a much older man. He had never left the +West of Ireland, except for a few days to London every year, and a single +fortnight’s voyage to Spain on board a trading schooner, in his boyhood. +He was in politics a Unionist and Tory of the most obstinate kind, and +knew nothing of Irish literature or history. He was, however, strangely +beset by the romance of Ireland, as he discovered it among the people who +served him, sailing upon his ships or attending to his horses, and, though +narrow and obstinate of opinion, and puritanical in his judgment of life, +was perhaps the most tolerant man I have ever known. He never expected +anybody to agree with him, and if you did not upset his habits by cheating +him over a horse, or by offending his taste, he would think as well of you +as he did of other men, and that was not very well; and help<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> you out of +any scrape whatever. I was accustomed to people much better read than he, +much more liberal-minded, but they had no life but the intellectual life, +and if they and I differed, they could not take it lightly, and were often +angry, and so for years now I had gone to Sligo, sometimes because I could +not afford my Dublin lodging, but most often for freedom and peace. He +would receive me with “I have learned that your friend So and So has been +seen at the Gresham Hotel talking to Mr William Redmond. What will not +people do for notoriety?” He considered all Irish Nationalist Members of +Parliament as outside the social pale, but after dinner, when conversation +grew intimate, would talk sympathetically of the Fenians in Ballina, where +he spent his early manhood, or of the Fenian privateer that landed the +wounded man at Sligo in the ’sixties. When Parnell was contesting an +election at Sligo a little before his death, other Unionist magistrates +refused or made difficulties when asked for some assistance, what I do not +remember, made necessary under election law; and so my uncle gave that +assistance. He walked up and down some Town Hall assembly-room or some +courtroom with Parnell, but would tell me nothing of that conversation, +except that Parnell spoke of Gladstone with extravagant hatred. He would +not repeat words spoken by a great man in his bitterness, yet Parnell at +the moment was too angry to care who listened. I knew one other man who +kept as firm a silence; he had attended Parnell’s last public meeting, and +after it sat alone beside him, and heard him speak of the followers that +had fallen away, or were showing their faint hearts; but Parnell was the +chief devotion of his life.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>When I first began my visits, he had lived in the town itself, and close +to a disreputable neighbourhood called the Burrough, till one evening, +while he sat over his dinner, he heard a man and woman quarrelling under +his window. “I mind the time,” shouted the man, “when I slept with you and +your daughter in the one bed.” My uncle was horrified, and moved to a +little house about a quarter of a mile into the country, where he lived +with an old second-sighted servant, and a man-servant to look after the +racehorse that was browsing in the neighbouring field, with a donkey to +keep it company. His furniture had not been changed since he set up house +for himself as a very young man, and in a room opposite his dining-room +were the saddles of his youth, and though he would soon give up riding, +they would be oiled and the stirrups kept clean and bright till the day of +his death. Some love-affair had gone wrong when he was a very young man; +he had now no interest in women; certainly never sought favour of a woman, +and yet he took great care of his appearance. He did not let his beard +grow, though he had, or believed that he had, for he was hypochondriacal, +a sensitiveness of the skin that forced him to spend an hour in shaving, +and he would take to club and dumb-bell if his waist thickened by a hair’s +breadth, and twenty years after, when a very old man, he had the erect +shapely figure of his youth. I often wondered why he went through so much +labour, for it was not pride, which had seemed histrionic in his eyes—and +certainly he had no vanity; and now, looking back, I am convinced that it +was from habit, mere habit, a habit formed when he was a young man, and +the best rider of his district.</p> + +<p>Probably through long association with Mary<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> Battle, the second-sighted +servant, he had come to believe much in the supernatural world, and would +tell how several times, arriving home with an unexpected guest, he had +found the table set for three, and that he himself had dreamed of his +brother’s illness in Liverpool before he had other news of it. He saw me +using images learned from Mathers to start reverie, and, though I held out +for a long time, thinking him too old and habit-bound, he persuaded me to +tell him their use, and from that on we experimented continually, and +after a time I began to keep careful record. In summer he always had the +same little house at Rosses Point, and it was there that he first became +sensitive to the cabalistic symbols. There are some high sandhills and low +cliffs, and I adopted the practice of walking by the seashore while he +walked on cliff or sandhill; I, without speaking, would imagine the +symbol, and he would notice what passed before his mind’s eye, and in a +short time he would practically never fail of the appropriate vision. In +the symbols which are used certain colours are classified as “actives,” +while certain other colours are “passives,” and I had soon discovered that +if I used “actives” George Pollexfen would see nothing. I therefore gave +him exercises to make him sensitive to those colours, and gradually we +found ourselves well fitted for this work, and he began to take as lively +an interest, as was possible to a nature given over to habit, in my plans +for the Castle on the Rock.</p> + +<p>I worked with others, sworn to the scheme for the most part, and I made +many curious observations. It was the symbol itself, or, at any rate, not +my conscious intention that produced the effect, for if I made an error +and told someone, let us say, to gaze at the wrong symbol—they were +painted upon <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>cards—the vision would be suggested by the symbol, not by +my thought, or two visions would appear side by side, one from the symbol +and one from my thought. When two people, between whose minds there was +even a casual sympathy, worked together under the same symbolic influence, +the dream or reverie would divide itself between them, each half being the +complement of the other; and now and again these complementary dreams, or +reveries, would arise spontaneously. I find, for instance, in an old +notebook, “I saw quite suddenly a tent with a wooden badly-carved idol, +painted dull red; a man looking like a Red Indian was prostrate before it. +The idol was seated to the left. I asked G. what he saw. He saw a most +august immense being, glowing with a ruddy opalescent colour, sitting on a +throne to the left”, or, to summarise from a later notebook,... I am +meditating in one room and my fellow-student in another, when I see a boat +full of tumult and movement on a still sea, and my friend sees a boat with +motionless sails upon a tumultuous sea. There was nothing in the +originating symbol to suggest a boat.</p> + +<p>We never began our work until George’s old servant was in her bed; and +yet, when we went upstairs to our beds, we constantly heard her crying out +with nightmare, and in the morning we would find that her dream echoed our +vision. One night, started by what symbol I forget, we had seen an +allegorical marriage of Heaven and Earth. When Mary Battle brought in the +breakfast next morning, I said, “Well, Mary, did you dream anything last +night?” and she replied (I am quoting from an old notebook) “indeed she +had,” and that it was “a dream she would not have liked to have had twice +in one night.” She had dreamed that her bishop, the Catholic bishop<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> of +Sligo, had gone away “without telling anybody,” and had married “a very +high-up lady,” “and she not too young, either.” She had thought in her +dream, “Now all the clergy will get married, and it will be no use going +to confession.” There were “layers upon layers of flowers, many roses, all +round the church.”</p> + +<p>Another time, when George Pollexfen had seen in answer to some evocation +of mine a man with his head cut in two, she woke to find that she “must +have cut her face with a pin, as it was all over blood.” When three or +four saw together, the dream or vision would divide itself into three or +four parts, each seeming complete in itself, and all fitting together, so +that each part was an adaptation of a single meaning to a particular +personality. A visionary being would give, let us say, a lighted torch to +one, an unlighted candle to another, an unripe fruit to a third, and to +the fourth a ripe fruit. At times coherent stories were built up, as if a +company of actors were to improvise, and play, not only without previous +consultation, but without foreseeing at any moment what would be said or +done the moment after. Who made the story? Was it the mind of one of the +visionaries? Perhaps, for I have endless proof that, where two worked +together, the symbolic influence commonly took upon itself, though no word +was spoken, the quality of the mind that had first fixed a symbol in the +mind’s eye. But, if so, what part of the mind? One friend, in whom the +symbolic impulse produced actual trance, described an elaborate and very +strange story while the trance was upon him, but upon waking told a story +that after a certain point was quite different. “They gave me a cup of +wine, and after that I remembered<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> nothing.” While speaking out of trance +he had said nothing of the cup of wine, which must have been offered to a +portion of his mind quite early in the dream. Then, too, from whence come +the images of the dream? Not always, I was soon persuaded, from the +memory, perhaps never in trance or sleep. One man, who certainly thought +that Eve’s apple was the sort that you got from the greengrocer, and as +certainly never doubted its story’s literal truth, said, when I used some +symbol to send him to Eden, that he saw a walled garden on the top of a +high mountain, and in the middle of it a tree with great birds in the +branches, and fruit out of which, if you held a fruit to your ear, came +the sound of fighting. I had not at the time read Dante’s <i>Purgatorio</i>, +and it caused me some trouble to verify the mountain garden, and, from +some passage in the Zohar, the great birds among the boughs; while a young +girl, on being sent to the same garden, heard “the music of heaven” from a +tree, and on listening with her ear against the trunk, found that it was +made by the “continual clashing of swords.” Whence came that fine thought +of music-making swords, that image of the garden, and many like images and +thoughts? I had as yet no clear answer, but knew myself face to face with +the Anima Mundi described by Platonic philosophers, and more especially in +modern times by Henry More, which has a memory independent of individual +memories, though they constantly enrich it with their images and their +thoughts.</p> + +<p> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span></p> +<h3>III</h3> + +<p>At Sligo we walked twice every day, once after lunch and once after +dinner, to the same gate on the road to Knocknarea; and at Rosses Point, +to the same rock upon the shore; and as we walked we exchanged those +thoughts that never rise before me now without bringing some sight of +mountain or of shore. Considering that Mary Battle received our thoughts +in sleep, though coarsened or turned to caricature, do not the thoughts of +the scholar or the hermit, though they speak no word, or something of +their shape and impulse, pass into the general mind? Does not the emotion +of some woman of fashion, caught in the subtle torture of self-analysing +passion, pass down, although she speak no word, to Joan with her Pot, Jill +with her Pail and, it may be, with one knows not what nightmare melancholy +to Tom the Fool?</p> + +<p>Seeing that a vision could divide itself in divers complementary portions, +might not the thought of philosopher or poet or mathematician depend at +every moment of its progress upon some complementary thought in minds +perhaps at a great distance? Is there nation-wide multiform reverie, every +mind passing through a stream of suggestion, and all streams acting and +reacting upon one another, no matter how distant the minds, how dumb the +lips? A man walked, as it were, casting a shadow, and yet one could never +say which was man and which was shadow, or how many the shadows that he +cast. Was not a nation, as distinguished from a crowd of chance comers, +bound together by these parallel streams or shadows; that Unity of Image, +which I sought in national literature, being but an originating symbol?</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>From the moment when these speculations grew vivid, I had created for +myself an intellectual solitude, most arguments that could influence +action had lost something of their meaning. How could I judge any scheme +of education, or of social reform, when I could not measure what the +different classes and occupations contributed to that invisible commerce +of reverie and of sleep; and what is luxury and what necessity when a +fragment of gold braid, or a flower in the wallpaper may be an originating +impulse to revolution or to philosophy? I began to feel myself not only +solitary but helpless.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>IV</h3> + +<p>I had not taken up these subjects wilfully, nor through love of +strangeness, nor love of excitement, nor because I found myself in some +experimental circle, but because unaccountable things had happened even in +my childhood, and because of an ungovernable craving. When supernatural +events begin, a man first doubts his own testimony, but when they repeat +themselves again and again, he doubts all human testimony. At least he +knows his own bias, and may perhaps allow for it, but how trust historian +and psychologist that have for two hundred years ignored in writing of the +history of the world, or of the human mind, so momentous a part of human +experience? What else had they ignored and distorted? When Mesmerists +first travelled about as public entertainers, a favourite trick was to +tell a mesmerised man that some letter of the alphabet had ceased to +exist, and after that to make him write his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> name upon the blackboard. +Brown, or Jones, or Robinson would become upon the instant, and without +any surprise or hesitation, Rown, or Ones, or Obinson.</p> + +<p>Was modern civilisation a conspiracy of the sub-conscious? Did we turn +away from certain thoughts and things because the Middle Ages lived in +terror of the dark, or had some seminal illusion been imposed upon us by +beings greater than ourselves for an unknown purpose? Even when no facts +of experience were denied, might not what had seemed logical proof be but +a mechanism of change, an automatic impulse? Once in London, at a dinner +party, where all the guests were intimate friends, I had written upon a +piece of paper, “In five minutes York Powell will talk of a burning +house,” thrust the paper under my neighbour’s plate, and imagined my fire +symbol, and waited in silence. Powell shifted conversation from topic to +topic and within the five minutes was describing a fire he had seen as a +young man. When Locke’s French translator Coste asked him how, if there +were no “innate ideas,” he could explain the skill shown by a bird in +making its nest, Locke replied, “I did not write to explain the actions of +dumb creatures,” and his translator thought the answer “very good, seeing +that he had named his book <i>A Philosophical Essay upon Human +Understanding</i>.” Henry More, upon the other hand, considered that the +bird’s instinct proved the existence of the Anima Mundi, with its ideas +and memories. Did modern enlightenment think with Coste that Locke had the +better logic, because it was not free to think otherwise?</p> + +<p> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span></p> +<h3>V</h3> + +<p>I ceased to read modern books that were not books of belief older than any +European Church, and founded that interested me, I tried to trace it back +to its earliest use, believing that there must be a tradition of belief +older than any European Church, and founded upon the experience of the +world before the modern bias. It was this search for a tradition that +urged George Pollexfen and myself to study the visions and thoughts of the +country people, and some country conversation repeated by one or the other +often gave us a day’s discussion. These visions, we soon discovered, were +very like those we called up by symbol. Mary Battle, looking out of the +window at Rosses Point, saw coming from Knocknarea, where Queen Maeve, +according to local folklore, is buried under a great heap of stones, “the +finest woman you ever saw travelling right across from the mountains and +straight to here.”—I quote a record written at the time. “She looked very +strong, but not wicked” (that is to say, not cruel). “I have seen the +Irish Giant” (some big man shown at a fair). “And though he was a fine man +he was nothing to her, for he was round and could not have stepped out so +soldierly ... she had no stomach on her but was slight and broad in the +shoulders, and was handsomer than any one you ever saw; she looked about +thirty.” And when I asked if she had seen others like her, she said, “Some +of them have their hair down, but they look quite different, more like the +sleepy-looking ladies one sees in the papers. Those with their hair up are +like this one. The others have long white dresses, but those with their +hair up have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> short dresses, so that you can see their legs right up to +the calf.” And when I questioned her, I found that they wore what might +well be some kind of buskin. “They are fine and dashing-looking, like the +men one sees riding their horses in twos and threes on the slopes of the +mountains with their swords swinging. There is no such race living now, +none so finely proportioned ... When I think of her and the ladies now +they are like little children running about not knowing how to put their +clothes on right ... why, I would not call them women at all.”</p> + +<p>Not at this time, but some three or four years later, when the visions +came without any conscious use of symbol for a short time, and with much +greater vividness, I saw two or three forms of this incredible beauty, one +especially that must always haunt my memory. Then, too, the Master Pilot +told us of meeting at night close to the Pilot House a procession of women +in what seemed the costume of another age. Were they really people of the +past, revisiting, perhaps, the places where they lived, or must I explain +them, as I explained that vision of Eden as a mountain garden, by some +memory of the race, as distinct from individual memory? Certainly these +Spirits, as the country people called them, seemed full of personality; +were they not capricious, generous, spiteful, anxious, angry, and yet did +that prove them more than images and symbols? When I used a combined earth +and fire and lunar symbol, my seer, a girl of twenty-five, saw an obvious +Diana and her dogs, about a fire in a cavern. Presently, judging from her +closed eyes, and from the tone of her voice, that she was in trance, not +in reverie, I wished to lighten the trance a little, and made through +carelessness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> or hasty thinking a symbol of dismissal; and at once she +started and cried out, “She says you are driving her away too quickly. You +have made her angry.” Then, too, if my visions had a subjective element, +so had Mary Battle’s, for her fairies had but one tune, <i>The Distant +Waterfall</i>, and she never heard anything described in a sermon at the +Cathedral that she did not “see it after,” and spoke of seeing in this way +the gates of Purgatory.</p> + +<p>Furthermore, if my images could affect her dreams, the folk-images could +affect mine in turn, for one night I saw between sleeping and waking a +strange long bodied pair of dogs, one black and one white, that I found +presently in some country tale. How, too, could one separate the dogs of +the country tale from those my uncle heard bay in his pillow? In order to +keep myself from nightmare, I had formed the habit of imagining four +watch-dogs, one at each corner of my room, and, though I had not told him +or anybody, he said, “Here is a very curious thing; most nights now, when +I lay my head upon the pillow, I hear a sound of dogs baying—the sound +seems to come up out of the pillow.” A friend of Strindberg’s, in +<i>delirium tremens</i>, was haunted by mice, and a friend in the next room +heard the squealing of the mice.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>VI</h3> + +<p>To that multiplicity of interest and opinion, of arts and sciences, which +had driven me to conceive a Unity of Culture defined and evoked by Unity +of Image, I had but added a multiplicity of images, and I was the more +troubled because, the first excitement over, I had done nothing to rouse +George Pollexfen from the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> gloom and hypochondria always thickening about +him. I asked no help of books, for I believed that the truth I sought +would come to me like the subject of a poem, from some moment of +passionate experience, and that if I filled my exposition with other men’s +thought, other men’s investigation, I would sink into all that +multiplicity of interest and opinion. That passionate experience could +never come—of that I was certain—until I had found the right image or +right images. From what but the image of Apollo, fixed always in memory +and passion, did his priesthood get that occasional power, a classical +historian has described, of lifting great stones and snapping great +branches; and did not Gemma Galgani, like many others that had gone +before, in 1889 cause deep wounds to appear in her body by contemplating +her crucifix? In the essay that Wilde read to me one Christmas Day, +occurred these words—“What does not the world owe to the imitation of +Christ, what to the imitation of Caesar?” and I had seen Macgregor Mathers +paint little pictures combining the forms of men, animals, and birds, +according to a rule which provided a form for every possible mental +condition, and I had heard him describing, upon what authority I do not +remember, how citizens of ancient Egypt assumed, when in contemplation, +the images of their gods.</p> + +<p>But now image called up image in an endless procession, and I could not +always choose among them with any confidence; and when I did choose, the +image lost its intensity, or changed into some other image. I had but +exchanged the Temptation of Flaubert’s <i>Bouvard et Pecuchet</i> for that of +his <i>St. Anthony</i>, and I was lost in that region a cabalistic manuscript, +shown me by Macgregor Mathers, had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> warned me of; astray upon the Path of +the Cameleon, upon <i>Hodos Camelionis</i>.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>VII</h3> + +<p>Now that I am a settled man and have many birds—the canaries have just +hatched out four nestlings—I have before me the problem that Locke waved +aside. As I gave them an artificial nest, a hollow vessel like a saucer, +they had no need of that skill the wild bird shows, each species having +its own preference among the lichen, or moss; but they could sort out wool +and hair and a certain soft white down that I found under a big tree. They +would twist a stem of grass till it was limber, and would wind it all +about the centre of the nest, and when the four grey eggs were laid, the +mother bird knew how to turn them over from time to time, that they might +be warmed evenly; and how long she must leave them uncovered, that the +white might not be dried up, and when to return that the growing bird +might not take cold. Then the young birds, even when they had all their +feathers, were very still as compared with the older birds, as though any +habit of movement would disturb the nest or make them tumble out. One of +them would now and again pass on the food that he had received from his +<ins class="correction" title="original: mother'">mother’s</ins> beak to some other nestling. The father had often pecked the +mother bird before the eggs were laid, but now, until the last nestling +was decently feathered, he took his share in the feeding, and was very +peaceable, and it was only when the young could be left to feed themselves +that he grew jealous and had to be put into another cage.</p> + +<p>When I watch my child, who is not yet three years<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> old, I can see so many +signs of knowledge from beyond her own mind; why else should she be so +excited when a little boy passes outside the window, and take so little +interest in a girl; why should she put a cloak about her, and look over +her shoulder to see it trailing upon the stairs, as she will some day +trail a dress; and why, above all, as she lay against her mother’s side, +and felt the unborn child moving within, did she murmur, “Baby, baby?”</p> + +<p>When a man writes any work of genius, or invents some creative action, is +it not because some knowledge or power has come into his mind from beyond +his mind? It is called up by an image, as I think; all my birds’ +adventures started when I hung a little saucer at one side of the cage, +and at the other a bundle of hair and grass; but our images must be given +to us, we cannot choose them deliberately.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>VIII</h3> + +<p>I know now that revelation is from the self, but from that age-long +memoried self, that shapes the elaborate shell of the mollusc and the +child in the womb, that teaches the birds to make their nest; and that +genius is a crisis that joins that buried self for certain moments to our +trivial daily mind. There are, indeed, personifying spirits that we had +best call but Gates and Gate-keepers, because through their dramatic power +they bring our souls to crisis, to Mask and Image, caring not a straw +whether we be Juliet going to her wedding, or Cleopatra to her death; for +in their eyes nothing has weight but passion. We have dreamed a foolish +dream these many centuries in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> thinking that they value a life of +contemplation, for they scorn that more than any possible life, unless it +be but a name for the worst crisis of all. They have but one purpose, to +bring their chosen man to the greatest obstacle he may confront without +despair. They contrived Dante’s banishment, and snatched away his +Beatrice, and thrust Villon into the arms of harlots, and sent him to +gather cronies at the foot of the gallows, that Dante and Villon might +through passion become conjoint to their buried selves, turn all to Mask +and Image, and so be phantoms in their own eyes. In great lesser writers +like Landor and like Keats we are shown that Image and that Mask as +something set apart; Andromeda and her Perseus—though not the +sea-dragon—but in a few in whom we recognise supreme masters of tragedy, +the whole contest is brought into the circle of their beauty. Such +masters, Villon and Dante, let us say, would not, when they speak through +their art, change their luck; yet they are mirrored in all the suffering +of desire. The two halves of their nature are so completely joined that +they seem to labour for their objects, and yet to desire whatever happens, +being at the same instant predestinate and free, creation’s very self. We +gaze at such men in awe, because we gaze not at a work of art, but at the +re-creation of the man through that art, the birth of a new species of +man, and, it may even seem that the hairs of our heads stand up, because +that birth, that re-creation, is from terror. Had not Dante and Villon +understood that their fate wrecked what life could not rebuild, had they +lacked their Vision of Evil, had they cherished any species of optimism, +they could but have found a false beauty, or some momentary instinctive +beauty, and suffered no change at all, or but changed as do the wild<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> +creatures, or from devil well to devil sick, and so round the clock.</p> + +<p>They and their sort alone earn contemplation, for it is only when the +intellect has wrought the whole of life to drama, to crisis, that we may +live for contemplation, and yet keep our intensity.</p> + +<p>And these things are true also of nations, but the Gate-keepers who drive +the nation to war or anarchy that it may find its Image are different from +those who drive individual men, though I think at times they work +together. And as I look backward upon my own writing, I take pleasure +alone in those verses where it seems to me I have found something hard, +cold, some articulation of the Image, which is the opposite of all that I +am in my daily life, and all that my country is; yet man or nation can no +more make Mask or Image than the seed can be made by the soil into which +it is cast.</p> + +<div class="poem"> +<p><span style="margin-left: 8em;">Ille.</span></p> + +<p>“What portion in the world can the artist have,<br /> +Who has awakened from the common dream,<br /> +But dissipation and despair?</p> + +<p><br /><span style="margin-left: 8em;">Hic.</span></p> + +<p><span style="margin-left: 11em;">And yet</span><br /> +No one denies to Keats, love of the world.<br /> +Remember his deliberate happiness.</p> + +<p><br /><span style="margin-left: 8em;">Ille.</span></p> + +<p>His art is happy, but who knows his mind?<br /> +I see a schoolboy, when I think of him,<br /> +With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window.<br /> +For certainly he sank into his grave<br /> +His senses and his heart unsatisfied,<br /> +And made, being poor, ailing, and ignorant....<br /> +Shut out from all the luxury of the world,<br /> +Luxuriant song.”</p></div> + + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span></p> +<h2><a name="BOOK_IV" id="BOOK_IV"></a>BOOK IV<br />THE TRAGIC GENERATION</h2> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span></p> + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span></p> +<h2><i>THE TRAGIC GENERATION</i></h2> + +<p> </p> +<h3>I</h3> + +<p>Two or three years after our return to Bedford Park <i>The Doll’s House</i> had +been played at the Royalty Theatre in Dean Street, the first Ibsen play to +be played in England, and somebody had given me a seat for the gallery. In +the middle of the first act, while the heroine was asking for macaroons, a +middle-aged washerwoman who sat in front of me, stood up and said to the +little boy at her side, “Tommy, if you promise to go home straight, we +will go now;” and at the end of the play, as I wandered through the +entrance hall, I heard an elderly critic murmur, “A series of +conversations terminated by an accident.” I was divided in mind, I hated +the play; what was it but Carolus Durand, Bastien-Lepage, Huxley and +Tyndall, all over again; I resented being invited to admire dialogue so +close to modern educated speech that music and style were impossible.</p> + +<p>“Art is art because it is not nature,” I kept repeating to myself, but how +could I take the same side with critic and washerwoman? As time passed +Ibsen became in my eyes the chosen author of very clever young +journalists, who, condemned to their treadmill of abstraction, hated music +and style; and yet neither I nor my generation could escape him because, +though we and he had not the same friends, we had the same enemies. I +bought his collected works in Mr.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> Archer’s translation out of my thirty +shillings a week and carried them to and fro upon my journeys to Ireland +and Sligo, and Florence Farr, who had but one great gift, the most perfect +poetical elocution, became prominent as an Ibsen actress and had almost a +success in <i>Rosmersholm</i>, where there is symbolism and a stale odour of +spoilt poetry. She and I and half our friends found ourselves involved in +a quarrel with the supporters of old fashioned melodrama, and conventional +romance, and in the support of the new dramatists who wrote in what the +Daily Press chose to consider the manner of Ibsen. In 1894 she became +manageress of the Avenue Theatre with a play of Dr. Todhunter’s, called +<i>The Comedy of Sighs</i>, and Mr Bernard Shaw’s <i>Arms and the Man</i>. She asked +me to write a one act play for her niece, Miss Dorothy Paget, a girl of +eight or nine, to make her first stage appearance in; and I, with my Irish +Theatre in mind, wrote <i>The Land of Heart’s Desire</i>, in some discomfort +when the child was theme, as I knew nothing of children, but with an +abundant mind when Mary Bruin was for I knew an Irish woman whose unrest +troubled me and lay beyond my comprehension. When she opened her theatre +she had to meet a hostile audience, almost as violent as that Synge met in +January, 1907, and certainly more brutal, for the Abbey audience had no +hatred for the players, and I think but little for Synge himself. Nor had +she the certainty of final victory to give her courage, for <i>The Comedy of +Sighs</i> was a rambling story told with a little paradoxical wit. She had +brought the trouble upon herself perhaps, for always in revolt against her +own poetical gift, which now seemed obsolete, and against her own +Demeter-like face in the mirror, she had tried when interviewed by the +Press to shock and startle—to seem to desire<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> enemies; and yet, unsure of +her own judgment being out of her own trade, had feared to begin with +Shaw’s athletic wit, and now outraged convention saw its chance. For two +hours and a half, pit and gallery drowned the voices of the players with +boos and jeers that were meant to be bitter to the author who sat visible +to all in his box surrounded by his family, and to the actress struggling +bravely through her weary part; and then pit and gallery went home to +spread their lying story that the actress had a fit of hysterics in her +dressing-room.</p> + +<p>Todhunter had sat on to the end, and there were, I think, four acts of it, +listening to the howling of his enemies, while his friends slipped out one +by one, till one saw everywhere their empty seats, but nothing could +arouse the fighting instincts of that melancholy man. Next day I tried to +get him to publish his book of words with satirical designs and +illustrations, by Beardsley, who was just rising into fame, and an +introduction attacking the public, but though petulant and irascible he +was incapable of any emotion that could give life to a cause. He shared +the superstition still current in the theatre, that the public wants +sincere drama, but is kept from it by some conspiracy of managers or +newspapers, and could not get out of his head that the actors were to +blame. Shaw, whose turn came next, had foreseen all months before, and had +planned an opening that would confound his enemies. For the first few +minutes <i>Arms and the Man</i> is crude melodrama and then just when the +audience are thinking how crude it is, it turns into excellent farce. At +the dress rehearsal, a dramatist who had his own quarrel with the public, +was taken in the noose; for at the first laugh he stood up, turned his +back on the stage, scowled at the audience, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> even when everybody else +knew what turn the play had taken, continued to scowl, and order those +nearest to be silent.</p> + +<p>On the first night the whole pit and gallery, except certain members of +the Fabian Society, started to laugh at the author and then, discovering +that they themselves were being laughed at, sat there not converted—their +hatred was too bitter for that—but dumbfounded, while the rest of the +house cheered and laughed. In the silence that greeted the author after +the cry for a speech one man did indeed get his courage and boo loudly. “I +assure the gentleman in the gallery,” was Shaw’s answer, “that he and I +are of exactly the same opinion, but what can we do against a whole house +who are of the contrary opinion?” And from that moment Bernard Shaw became +the most formidable man in modern letters, and even the most drunken of +medical students knew it. My own play, which had been played with <i>The +Comedy of Sighs</i>, had roused no passions, but had pleased a sufficient +minority for Florence Farr to keep it upon the stage with <i>Arms and the +Man</i>, and I was in the theatre almost every night for some weeks. “Oh, +yes, the people seem to like <i>Arms and the Man</i>,” said one of Mr Shaw’s +players to me, “but we have just found out that we are all wrong. Mr Shaw +did really mean it quite seriously, for he has written a letter to say so, +and we must not play for laughs any more.” Another night I found the +manager, triumphant and excited, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of +Edinburgh had been there, and the Duke of Edinburgh had spoken his dislike +out loud so that the whole stalls could hear, but the Prince of Wales had +been “very pleasant” and “got the Duke of Edinburgh away as soon as +possible.” “They asked for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> me,” he went on, “and the Duke of Edinburgh +kept on repeating, ‘The man is mad,’ meaning Mr Shaw, and the Prince of +Wales asked who Mr Shaw was, and what he meant by it.” I myself was almost +as bewildered for though I came mainly to see how my own play went, and +for the first fortnight to vex my most patient actors with new lines, I +listened with excitement to see how the audience would like certain +passages of <i>Arms and the Man</i>. I hated it; it seemed to me inorganic, +logical straightness and not the crooked road of life and I stood aghast +before its energy as to-day before that of the Stone Drill by Mr. Epstein +or of some design by Mr Wyndham Lewis. He was right to claim Samuel Butler +for his master, for Butler was the first Englishman to make the <ins class="correction" title="original: discoverey">discovery</ins>, +that it is possible to write with great effect without music, without +style, either good or bad, to eliminate from the mind all emotional +implication and to prefer plain water to every vintage, so much +metropolitan lead and solder to any tendril of the vine. Presently I had a +nightmare that I was haunted by a sewing machine, that clicked and shone, +but the incredible thing was that the machine smiled, smiled perpetually. +Yet I delighted in Shaw the formidable man. He could hit my enemies and +the enemies of all I loved, as I could never hit, as no living author that +was dear to me could ever hit.</p> + +<p>Florence Farr’s way home was mine also for a part of the way, and it was +often of this that we talked, and sometimes, though not always, she would +share my hesitations, and for years to come I was to wonder whenever Shaw +became my topic, whether the cock crowed for my blame or for my praise.</p> + +<p> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span></p> +<h3>II</h3> + +<p>Shaw and Wilde, had no catastrophe come, would have long divided the stage +between them, though they were most unlike—for Wilde believed himself to +value nothing but words in their emotional associations, and he had turned +his style to a parade as though it were his show, and he Lord Mayor.</p> + +<p>I was at Sligo again and I saw the announcement of his action against Lord +Queensberry, when starting from my uncle’s house to walk to Knocknarea to +dine with Cochrane of the Glen, as he was called, to distinguish him from +others of that name, an able old man. He had a relation, a poor mad girl, +who shared our meals, and at whom I shuddered. She would take a flower +from the vase in front of her and push it along the tablecloth towards any +male guest who sat near. The old man himself had strange opinions, born +not from any mental eccentricity, but from the solitude of his life; and a +freedom from all prejudice that was not of his own discovery. “The world +is getting more manly,” he would say, “it has begun to drink port again,” +or “Ireland is going to become prosperous. Divorced couples now choose +Ireland for a retreat, just as before Scotland became prosperous they +began to go there. There are a divorced wife and her lover living at the +other side of the mountain.” I remember that I spoke that night of Wilde’s +kindness to myself, said I did not believe him guilty, quoted the +psychologist Bain, who has attributed to every sensualist “a voluminous +tenderness,” and described Wilde’s hard brilliance, his dominating +self-possession. I considered him essentially a man of action, that he was +a writer by perversity and accident, and would have been more important as +soldier or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> politician; and I was certain that, guilty or not guilty, he +would prove himself a man. I was probably excited, and did most of the +talking, for if Cochrane had talked, I would have remembered an amusing +sentence or two; but he was certainly sympathetic. A couple of days later +I received a letter from Lionel Johnson, denouncing Wilde with great +bitterness. He had “a cold scientific intellect;” he got a “sense of +triumph and power; at every dinner-table he dominated, from the knowledge +that he was guilty of that sin which, more than any other possible to man, +would turn all those people against him if they but knew.” He wrote in the +mood of his poem, <i>To the Destroyer of a Soul</i>, addressed to Wilde, as I +have always believed, though I know nothing of the circumstance that made +him write it.</p> + +<p>I might have known that Wilde’s phantasy had taken some tragic turn, and +that he was meditating upon possible disaster, but one took all his words +for play—had he not called insincerity “a mere multiplication of the +personality” or some such words? I had met a man who had found him in a +barber’s shop in Venice, and heard him explain, “I am having my hair +curled that I may resemble Nero;” and when, as editor of an Irish +anthology, I had asked leave to quote “Tread gently, she is near under the +snow,” he had written that I might do so if I pleased, but his most +characteristic poem was that sonnet with the lines</p> + +<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 8em;">“Lo! with a little rod</span><br /> +I did but touch the honey’s romance—<br /> +And must I lose a soul’s inheritance.”</p> + +<p>When in London for my play I had asked news from an actor who had seen him +constantly. “He is in deep melancholy,” was the answer. “He says that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> he +tries to sleep away as much of life as possible, only leaving his bed at +two or three in the afternoon, and spending the rest of the day at the +Café Royal. He has written what he calls the best short story in the +world, and will have it that he repeats to himself on getting out of bed +and before every meal. ‘Christ came from a white plain to a purple city, +and as he passed through the first street, he heard voices overhead, and +saw a young man lying drunk upon a window sill, “Why do you waste your +soul in drunkenness?” He said. “Lord, I was a leper and You healed me, +what else can I do?” A little further through the town he saw a young man +following a harlot, and said, “Why do you dissolve your soul in +debauchery?” and the young man answered, “Lord, I was blind, and You +healed me, what else can I do?” At last in the middle of the city He saw +an old man crouching, weeping upon the ground, and when He asked why he +wept, the old man answered, “Lord, I was dead and You raised me into life, +what else can I do but weep?”’”</p> + +<p>Wilde published that story a little later, but spoiled it with the verbal +decoration of his epoch, and I have to repeat it to myself as I first +heard it, before I can see its terrible beauty. I no more doubt its +sincerity than I doubt that his parade of gloom, all that late rising, and +sleeping away his life, that elaborate playing with tragedy, was an +attempt to escape from an emotion by its exaggeration. He had three +successful plays running at once; he had been almost poor, and now, his +head full of Flaubert, found himself with ten thousand a year:—“Lord, I +was dead, and You raised me into life, what else can I do but weep.” A +comedian, he was in the hands of those dramatists who understand nothing +but tragedy.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>A few days after the first production of my <i>Land of Heart’s Desire</i>, I +had my last conversation with him. He had come into the theatre as the +curtain fell upon my play, and I knew that it was to ask my pardon that he +overwhelmed me with compliments; and yet I wonder if he would have chosen +those precise compliments, or spoken so extravagantly, but for the turn +his thoughts had taken: “Your story in <i>The National Observer</i>, <i>The +Crucifixion of the Outcast</i>, is sublime, wonderful, wonderful.”</p> + +<p>Some business or other brought me to London once more and I asked various +Irish writers for letters of sympathy, and I was refused by none but +Edward Dowden, who gave me what I considered an irrelevant excuse—his +dislike for everything that Wilde had written. I heard that Wilde was at +his mother’s house in Oakley Street, and I called there, but the Irish +servant told me, her face drawn and tragic as in the presence of death, +that he was not there, but that I could see his brother. Willie Wilde +received me with, “Who are you; what do you want?” but became all +friendship when I told him that I had brought letters of sympathy. He took +the bundle of letters in his hand, but said, “Do these letters urge him to +run away? Every friend he has is urging him to, but we have made up our +minds that he must stay and take his chance.” “No,” I said, “I certainly +do not think that he should run away, nor do those letters advise it.” +“Letters from Ireland,” he said. “Thank you, thank you. He will be glad to +get those letters, but I would keep them from him if they advised him to +run away.” Then he threw himself back in his chair and began to talk with +incoherent emotion, and in phrases that echoed now and again his brother’s +style at its worst;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> there were tear in his eyes, and he was, I think, +slightly intoxicated. “He could escape, oh, yes, he could escape—there is +a yacht in the Thames, and five thousand pounds to pay his bail—well, not +exactly in the Thames, but there is a yacht—oh, yes, he could escape, +even if I had to inflate a balloon in the back yard with my own hand, but +he has resolved to stay, to face it out, to stand the music like Christ. +You must have heard—it is not necessary to go into detail—but he and I, +we have not been friends; but he came to me like a wounded stag, and I +took him in.” “After his release”—after the failure of his action against +Lord Queensberry, I think—“Stewart Headlam engaged a room at an hotel and +brought him there under another name, but the manager came up and said, +‘Are you Mr. Wilde?’ You know what my brother is, you know how he would +answer that. He said, ‘Yes, I am Oscar Wilde,’ and the manager said he +must not stay. The same thing happened in hotel after hotel, and at last +he made up his mind to come here. It is his vanity that has brought all +this disgrace upon him; they swung incense before him.” He dwelt upon the +rhythm of the words as his brother would have done—“They swung it before +his heart.” His first emotion at the thought of the letters over, he +became more simple, and explained that his brother considered that his +crime was not the vice itself, but that he should have brought such misery +upon his wife and children, and that he was bound to accept any chance, +however slight, that might reestablish his position. “If he is acquitted,” +he said, “he will stay out of England for a few years, and can then gather +his friends about him once more—even if he is condemned he will purge his +offence—but if he runs away he will lose every friend that he has.” I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> +heard later, from whom I forget now, that Lady Wilde had said, “If you +stay, even if you go to prison, you will always be my son, it will make no +difference to my affection, but if you go, I will never speak to you +again.” While I was there, some woman who had just seen him—Willie +Wilde’s wife, I think—came in, and threw herself in a chair, and said in +an exhausted voice, “It is all right now, he has made up his mind to go to +prison if necessary.” Before his release, two years later, his brother and +mother were dead, and a little later his wife, struck by paralysis during +his imprisonment, I think, was dead, too; and he himself, his constitution +ruined by prison life, followed quickly; but I have never doubted, even +for an instant, that he made the right decision, and that he owes to that +decision half of his renown.</p> + +<p>Cultivated London, that before the action against Lord Queensberry had +mocked his pose and affected style, and refused to acknowledge his wit, +was now full of his advocates, though I did not meet a single man who +considered him innocent. One old enemy of his overtook me in the street +and began to praise his audacity, his self-possession. “He has made,” he +said, “of infamy a new Thermopylae.” I had written in reply to Lionel +Johnson’s letter that I regretted Wilde’s downfall but not that of his +imitators, but Johnson had changed with the rest. “Why do you not regret +the fall of Wilde’s imitators”—I had but tried to share what I thought +his opinion—“They were worthless, but should have been left to +criticism.” Wilde himself was a martyr in his eyes, and when I said that +tragedy might give his art a greater depth, he would not even grant a +martyr’s enemies that poor merit, and thought Wilde would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> produce, when +it was all over, some comedy exactly like the others, writing from an art +where events could leave no trace. Everywhere one met writers and artists +who praised his wit and eloquence in the witness box, or repeated some +private saying. Willie Redmond told of finding him, to his astonishment, +at the conversazione of some theatrical society, standing amid an +infuriated crowd, mocking with more than all his old satirical wit the +actors and their country. He had said to a well-known painter during one +or other of the trials, “My poor brother writes to me that he is defending +me all over London; my poor, dear brother, he could compromise a steam +engine.” His brother, too, had suffered a change, for, if rumour did not +wrong him, “the wounded stag” had not been at all graciously received. +“Thank God my vices were decent,” had been his comment, and refusing to +sit at the same table, he had dined at some neighbouring hotel at his +brother’s expense. His successful brother who had scorned him for a +drunken ne’er-do-well was now at his mercy, and besides, he probably +shared, until tragedy awoke another self, the rage and contempt that +filled the crowds in the street, and all men and women who had an +over-abundant normal sexual instinct. “Wilde will never lift his head +again,” said the art critic, Gleeson White, “for he has against him all +men of infamous life.” When the verdict was announced the harlots in the +street outside danced upon the pavement.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>III</h3> + +<p>Somewhere about 1450, though later in some parts of Europe by a hundred +years or so, and in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> some earlier, men attained to personality in great +numbers, “Unity of Being,” and became like a “perfectly proportioned human +body,” and as men so fashioned held places of power, their nations had it +too, prince and ploughman sharing that thought and feeling. What +afterwards showed for rifts and cracks were there already, but imperious +impulse held all together. Then the scattering came, the seeding of the +poppy, bursting of pea-pod, and for a time personality seemed but the +stronger for it. <ins class="correction" title="original: Shakesspeare's">Shakespeare’s</ins> people make all things serve their passion, +and that passion is for the moment the whole energy of their being—birds, +beasts, men, women, landscape, society, are but symbols and metaphors, +nothing is studied in itself, the mind is a dark well, no surface, depth +only. The men that Titian painted, the men that Jongsen painted, even the +men of Van Dyck, seemed at moments like great hawks at rest. In the Dublin +National Gallery there hung, perhaps there still hangs, upon the same +wall, a portrait of some Venetian gentleman by Strozzi, and Mr. Sargent’s +painting of President Wilson. Whatever thought broods in the dark eyes of +that Venetian gentleman, has drawn its life from his whole body; it feeds +upon it as the flame feeds upon the candle—and should that thought be +changed, his pose would change, his very cloak would rustle for his whole +body thinks. President Wilson lives only in the eyes, which are steady and +intent; the flesh about the mouth is dead, and the hands are dead, and the +clothes suggest no movement of his body, nor any movement but that of the +valet, who has brushed and folded in mechanical routine. There, all was an +energy flowing outward from the nature itself; here, all is the anxious +study and slight deflection of external force; there man’s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> mind and body +were predominantly subjective; here all is objective, using those words +not as philosophy uses them, but as we use them in conversation.</p> + +<p>The bright part of the moon’s disk, to adopt the symbolism of a certain +poem, is subjective mind, and the dark, objective mind, and we have eight +and twenty Phases for our classification of mankind, and of the movement +of his thought. At the first Phase—the night where there is no +moonlight—all is objective, while when, upon the fifteenth night, the +moon comes to the full, there is only subjective mind. The mid-renaissance +could but approximate to the full moon “For there is no human life at the +full or the dark,” but we may attribute to the next three nights of the +moon the men of Shakespeare, of Titian, of Strozzi, and of Van Dyck, and +watch them grow more reasonable, more orderly, less turbulent, as the +nights pass; and it is well to find before the fourth—the nineteenth moon +counting from the start—a sudden change, as when a cloud becomes rain, or +water freezes, for the great transitions are sudden; popular, typical men +have grown more ugly and more argumentative; the face that Van Dyck called +a fatal face has faded before Cromwell’s warty opinionated head. +Henceforth no mind made like “a perfectly proportioned human body” shall +sway the public, for great men must live in a portion of themselves, +become professional and abstract; but seeing that the moon’s third quarter +is scarce passed, that abstraction has attained but not passed its climax, +that a half, as I affirm it, of the twenty-second night still lingers, +they may subdue and conquer; cherish, even, some Utopian dream; spread +abstraction ever further till thought is but a film, and there is no dark +depth any more, surface only. But men who belong by nature<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> to the nights +near to the full are still born, a tragic minority, and how shall they do +their work when too ambitious for a private station, except as Wilde of +the nineteenth Phase, as my symbolism has it, did his work. He understood +his weakness, true personality was impossible, for that is born in +solitude, and at his moon one is not solitary; he must project himself +before the eyes of others, and, having great ambition, before some great +crowd of eyes; but there is no longer any great crowd that cares for his +true thought. He must humour and cajole and pose, take worn-out stage +situations, for he knows that he may be as romantic as he please, so long +as he does not believe in his romance, and all that he may get their ears +for a few strokes of contemptuous wit in which he does believe.</p> + +<p>We Rhymers did not humour and cajole; but it was not wholly from demerit, +it was in part because of different merit, that he refused our exile. +Shaw, as I understand him, has no true quarrel with his time, its moon and +his almost exactly coincide. He is quite content to exchange Narcissus and +his Pool for the signal box at a railway junction, where goods and +travellers pass perpetually upon their logical glittering road. Wilde was +a monarchist, though content that monarchy should turn demagogue for its +own safety, and he held a theatre by the means whereby he held a London +dinner table. “He who can dominate a London dinner table,” he had boasted, +“can dominate the world.” While Shaw has but carried his street-corner +socialist eloquence on to the stage, and in him one discovers, in his +writing and his public speech, as once—before their outline had been +softened by prosperity or the passage of the years—in his clothes and in +his stiff joints, the civilization that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> Sargent’s picture has explored. +Neither his crowd nor he have yet made that discovery that brought +President Wilson so near his death, that the moon draws to its fourth +quarter. But what happens to the individual man whose moon has come to +that fourth quarter, and what to the civilization...?</p> + +<p>I can but remember pipe music to-night, though I can half hear beyond it +in the memory a weightier music, but this much at any rate is certain—the +dream of my early manhood, that a modern nation can return to Unity of +Culture, is false; though it may be we can achieve it for some small +circle of men and women, and there leave it till the moon bring round its +century.</p> + +<p class="poem">“The cat went here and there<br /> +And the moon spun round like a top,<br /> +And the nearest kin of the moon<br /> +The creeping cat looked up.<br /> +<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></span><br /> +Minnaloushe creeps through the grass<br /> +From moonlit place to place;<br /> +The sacred moon overhead<br /> +Has taken a new phase.<br /> +Does Minnaloushe know that her pupils<br /> +Will pass from change to change,<br /> +And that from round to crescent<br /> +From crescent to round they range?<br /> +Minnaloushe creeps through the grass<br /> +Alone, important and wise,<br /> +And lifts to the changing moon<br /> +Her changing eyes.”</p> + +<p> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span></p> +<h3>IV</h3> + +<p>Henley’s troubles and infirmities were growing upon him. He, too, an +ambitious, formidable man, who showed alike in his practice and in his +theory, in his lack of sympathy for Rossetti and Landor, for instance, +that he never understood how small a fragment of our own nature can be +brought to perfect expression, nor that even but with great toil, in a +much divided civilization; though, doubtless, if our own Phase be right, a +fragment may be an image of the whole, the moon’s still scarce crumbled +image, as it were, in a glass of wine. He would be, and have all poets be, +a true epitome of the whole mass, a Herrick and Dr. Johnson in the same +body and because this—not so difficult before the Mermaid closed its +door—is no longer possible, his work lacks music, is abstract, as even an +actor’s movement can be when the thought of doing is plainer to his mind +than the doing itself: the straight line from cup to lip, let us say, more +plain than the hand’s own sensation weighed down by that heavy spillable +cup. I think he was content, when he had called before our eyes—before +the too understanding eyes of his chosen crowd—the violent burly man that +he had dreamed, content with the mere suggestion, and so did not work long +enough at his verses. He disliked Victor Hugo as much as he did Rossetti, +and yet Rossetti’s translation from <i>Les Burgraves</i>, because of its mere +technical mastery, out-sings Henley in his own song—</p> + +<p class="poem">“My mother is dead; God’s patience wears;<br /> +It seems my Chaplain will not have done.<br /> +<span style="margin-left: 4em;">Love on: who cares?</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 4em;">Who cares? Love on.”</span></p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>I can read his poetry with emotion, but I read it for some glimpse of what +he might have been as Border balladist, or Cavalier, or of what he +actually was, not as poet but as man. He had what Wilde lacked, even in +his ruin, passion, was maybe as passionate as some great man of action, as +Parnell, let us say. When he and Stevenson quarrelled, he cried over it +with some woman or other, and his notorious article was but for vengeance +upon Mrs. Stevenson, who had arranged for the public eye, what he +considered an imaginary figure, with no resemblance to the gay companion +who had founded his life, to that life’s injury, upon “The august, the +immortal musketeers.” She had caused the quarrel, as he believed, and now +she had robbed him over again, by blotting from the world’s memory the +friend of his youth; and because he believed it I read those angry +paragraphs with but deeper sympathy for the writer; and I think that the +man who has left them out of Henley’s collected writings has wronged his +memory, as Mrs. Stevenson wronged the memory of Stevenson.</p> + +<p>He was no contemplative man, no pleased possessor of wooden models and +paper patterns, but a great passionate man, and no friend of his would +have him pictured otherwise. I saw little of him in later years, but I +doubt if he was ever the same after the death of his six-year old +daughter. Few passages of his verse touch me as do those few mentions of +her though they lack precision of word and sound. When she is but a hope, +he prays that she may have his ‘gift of life’ and his wife’s ‘gift of +love,’ and when she is but a few months old he murmurs over her sleep—</p> + +<p class="poem"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> +When you wake in your crib,<br /> +You an inch of experience—<br /> +Vaulted about<br /> +With the wonder of darkness;<br /> +Wailing and striving<br /> +To reach from your feebleness<br /> +Something you feel<br /> +Will be good to and cherish you.</p> + +<p>And now he commends some friend “boyish and kind, and shy,” who greeted +him, and greeted his wife, “that day we brought our beautiful one to lie +in the green peace” and who is now dead himself, and after that he speaks +of love “turned by death to longing” and so, to an enemy.</p> + +<p>When I spoke to him of his child’s death he said, “she was a person of +genius; she had the genius of the mind, and the genius of the body.” And +later I heard him talk of her as a man talks of something he cannot keep +silence over because it is in all his thoughts. I can remember, too, his +talking of some book of natural history he had read, that he might be able +to answer her questions.</p> + +<p>He had a house now at Mortlake on the Thames with a great ivy tod +shadowing door and window, and one night there he shocked and startled a +roomful of men by showing how far he could be swept beyond our reach in +reveries of affection. The dull man, who had tried to put Wilde out of +countenance, suddenly said to the whole room, roused by I cannot remember +what incautious remark of mine made to some man at my side: “Yeats +believes in magic; what nonsense.” Henley said, “No, it may not be +nonsense; black magic is all the go in Paris now.” And then turning +towards me with a changed sound in his voice, “It is just a game, isn’t +it.” I replied, not noticing till too late his serious tone, and wishing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> +to avoid discussion in the dull man’s company, “One has had a vision; one +wants to have another, that is all.” Then Henley said, speaking in a very +low voice, “I want to know how I am to get to my daughter. I was sitting +here the other night when she came into the room and played round the +table and went out again. Then I saw that the door was shut and I knew +that I had seen a vision.” There was an embarrassed silence, and then +somebody spoke of something else and we began to discuss it hurriedly and +eagerly.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>V</h3> + +<p>I came now to be more in London, never missing the meetings of the +Rhymers’ Club, nor those of the council of the Irish Literary Society, +where I constantly fought out our Irish quarrels and pressed upon the +unwilling Gavan Duffy the books of our new movement. The Irish members of +Parliament looked upon us with some hostility because we had made it a +matter of principle never to put a politician in the chair, and upon other +grounds. One day, some old Irish member of Parliament made perhaps his +only appearance at a gathering of members. He recited with great emotion a +ballad of his own composition in the manner of Young Ireland, repeating +over his sacred names, Wolfe Tone, Emmet, and Owen Roe, and mourning that +new poets and new movements should have taken something of their +sacredness away. The ballad had no literary merit, but I went home with a +troubled conscience; and for a dozen years perhaps, till I began to see +the result of our work in a deepened perception of all those things that +strengthen race, that trouble<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> remained. I had in mind that old politician +as I wrote but the other day—</p> + +<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 9em;">“Our part</span><br /> +To murmur name upon name<br /> +As a mother names her child.”</p> + +<p>The Rhymers had begun to break up in tragedy, though we did not know that +till the play had finished. I have never found a full explanation of that +tragedy; sometimes I have remembered that, unlike the Victorian poets, +almost all were poor men, and had made it a matter of conscience to turn +from every kind of money-making that prevented good writing, and that +poverty meant strain, and for the most part, a refusal of domestic life. +Then I have remembered that Johnson had private means, and that others who +came to tragic ends, had wives and families. Another day I think that +perhaps our form of lyric, our insistence upon emotion which has no +relation to any public interest, gathered together, overwrought, unstable +men; and remember the moment after that the first to go out of his mind +had no lyrical gift, and that we valued him mainly because he seemed a +witty man of the world; and that a little later another who seemed, alike +as man and writer, dull and formless, went out of his mind, first burning +poems which I cannot believe would have proved him as the one man who saw +them claims, a man of genius. The meetings were always decorous and often +dull; some one would read out a poem and we would comment, too politely +for the criticism to have great value; and yet that we read out our poems, +and thought that they could be so tested, was a definition of our aims. +<i>Love’s Nocturne</i> is one of the most beautiful poems in the world, but no +one can find out its beauty, so intricate its thought and metaphor, till +he has read<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> it over several times, or often stopped his reading to think +out the meaning of some passage, and the <i>Faustine</i> of Swinburne, where +many separate verses are powerful and musical, could not, were it read +out, be understood with pleasure, however clearly it were read, because it +has no more logical structure than a bag of shot. I shall, however, +remember all my life that evening when Lionel Johnson read or spoke aloud +in his musical monotone, where meaning and cadence found the most precise +elocution, his poem suggested “by the Statue of King Charles at Charing +Cross.” It was as though I listened to a great speech. Nor will that poem +be to me again what it was that first night. For long I only knew Dowson’s +<i>O Mors</i>, to quote but the first words of its long title, and his +<i>Villanelle of Sunset</i> from his reading, and it was because of the desire +to hold them in my hand that I suggested the first <i>Book of The Rhymers’ +Club</i>. They were not speech but perfect song, though song for the speaking +voice. It was perhaps our delight in poetry that was, before all else, +speech or song, and could hold the attention of a fitting audience like a +good play or good conversation, that made Francis Thompson, whom we +admired so much—before the publication of his first poem I had brought to +the Cheshire Cheese the proof sheets of his <i>Ode to the Setting Sun</i>, his +first published poem—come but once and refuse to contribute to our book. +Preoccupied with his elaborate verse, he may have seen only that which we +renounced, and thought what seemed to us simplicity, mere emptiness. To +some members this simplicity was perhaps created by their tumultuous +lives, they praised a desired woman and hoped that she would find amid +their praise her very self, or at worst, their very passion; and knew that +she, ignoramus that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> she was, would have slept in the middle of <i>Love’s +Nocturne</i>, lofty and tender though it be. Woman herself was still in our +eyes, for all that, romantic and mysterious, still the priestess of her +shrine, our emotions remembering the <i>Lilith</i> and the <i>Sybilla Palmifera</i> +of Rossetti; for as yet that sense of comedy, which was soon to mould the +very fashion plates, and, in the eyes of men of my generation, to destroy +at last the sense of beauty itself, had scarce begun to show here and +there, in slight subordinate touches among the designs of great painters +and craftsmen. It could not be otherwise, for Johnson’s favourite phrase, +that life is ritual, expressed something that was in some degree in all +our thoughts, and how could life be ritual if woman had not her symbolical +place?</p> + +<p>If Rossetti was a sub-conscious influence, and perhaps the most powerful +of all, we looked consciously to Pater for our philosophy. Three or four +years ago I re-read <i>Marius the Epicurean</i>, expecting to find I cared for +it no longer, but it still seemed to me, as I think it seemed to us all, +the only great prose in modern English, and yet I began to wonder if it, +or the attitude of mind of which it was the noblest expression, had not +caused the disaster of my friends. It taught us to walk upon a rope, +tightly stretched through serene air, and we were left to keep our feet +upon a swaying rope in a storm. Pater had made us learned; and, whatever +we might be elsewhere, ceremonious and polite, and distant in our +relations to one another, and I think none knew as yet that Dowson, who +seemed to drink so little and had so much dignity and reserve, was +breaking his heart for the daughter of the keeper of an Italian eating +house, in dissipation and drink; and that he might that very night sleep +upon a sixpenny bed in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> a doss house. It seems to me that even yet, and I +am speaking of 1894 and 1895, we knew nothing of one another, but the +poems that we read and criticised; perhaps I have forgotten or was too +much in Ireland for knowledge, but of this I am certain, we shared nothing +but the artistic life. Sometimes Johnson and Symons would visit our sage +at Oxford, and I remember Johnson, whose reports however were not always +to be trusted, returning with a sentence that long ran in my head. He had +noticed books on political economy among Pater’s books, and Pater had +said, “Everything that has occupied man, for any length of time, is worthy +of our study.” Perhaps it was because of Pater’s influence that we, with +an affectation of learning, claimed the whole past of literature for our +authority, instead of finding it like the young men in the age of comedy +that followed us, in some new, and so still unrefuted authority; that we +preferred what seemed still uncrumbled rock, to the still unspotted foam; +that we were traditional alike in our dress, in our manner, in our +opinions, and in our style.</p> + +<p>Why should men, who spoke their opinions in low voices, as though they +feared to disturb the readers in some ancient library, and timidly as +though they knew that all subjects had long since been explored, all +questions long since decided in books whereon the dust settled—live lives +of such disorder and seek to rediscover in verse the syntax of impulsive +common life? Was it that we lived in what is called “an age of transition” +and so lacked coherence, or did we but pursue antithesis?</p> + +<p> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span></p> +<h3>VI</h3> + +<p>All things, apart from love and melancholy, were a study to us; Horne +already learned in Botticelli had begun to boast that when he wrote of him +there would be no literature, all would be but learning; Symons, as I +wrote when I first met him, studied the music halls, as he might have +studied the age of Chaucer; while I gave much time to what is called the +Christian Cabala; nor was there any branch of knowledge Johnson did not +claim for his own. When I had first gone to see him in 1888 or 1889, at +the Charlotte Street house, I had called about five in the afternoon, but +the man servant that he shared with Horne and Image, told me that he was +not yet up, adding with effusion “he is always up for dinner at seven.” +This habit of breakfasting when others dined had been started by insomnia, +but he came to defend it for its own sake. When I asked if it did not +separate him from men and women he replied, “In my library I have all the +knowledge of the world that I need.” He had certainly a considerable +library, far larger than that of any young man of my acquaintance, so +large that he wondered if it might not be possible to find some way of +hanging new shelves from the ceiling like chandeliers. That room was +always a pleasure to me, with its curtains of grey corduroy over door and +window and book case, and its walls covered with brown paper, a fashion +invented, I think, by Horne, that was soon to spread. There was a portrait +of Cardinal Newman, looking a little like Johnson himself, some religious +picture by Simeon Solomon, and works upon theology in Greek and Latin and +a general air of neatness and severity;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> and talking there by candle light +it never seemed very difficult to murmur Villiers de L’isle Adam’s proud +words, “As for living—our servants will do that for us.” Yet I can now +see that Johnson himself in some hidden, half-conscious part of him +desired the world he had renounced, desired it as an object of study. I +was often puzzled as to when and where he could have met the famous men or +beautiful women, whose conversation, often wise, and always appropriate, +he quoted so often, and it was not till a little before his death that I +discovered that these conversations were imaginary. He never altered a +detail of speech, and would quote what he had invented for Gladstone or +Newman for years without amplification or amendment, with what seemed a +scholar’s accuracy. His favourite quotations were from Newman, whom, I +believe, he had never met, though I can remember nothing now but Newman’s +greeting to Johnson, “I have always considered the profession of a man of +letters a third order of the priesthood!” and these quotations became so +well known that at Newman’s death, the editor of <i>The Nineteenth Century</i> +asked them for publication. Because of his delight in all that was formal +and arranged he objected to the public quotation of private conversation +even after death, and this scruple helped his refusal. Perhaps this +dreaming was made a necessity by his artificial life, yet before that life +began he wrote from Oxford to his Tory but flattered family, that as he +stood mounted upon a library ladder in his rooms taking a book from a +shelf, Gladstone, about to pass the open door on his way upstairs to some +college authority, had stopped, hesitated, come into the room and there +spent an hour of talk. Presently it was discovered that Gladstone had not +been near Oxford on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> the date given; yet he quoted that conversation +without variation of a word until the end of his life, and I think +believed in it as firmly as did his friends. These conversations were +always admirable in their drama, but never too dramatic or even too +polished to lose their casual accidental character; they were the +phantasmagoria through which his philosophy of life found its expression. +If he made his knowledge of the world out of his phantasy, his knowledge +of tongues and books was certainly very great; and yet was that <ins class="correction" title="original: knowlege">knowledge</ins> +as great as he would have us believe? Did he really know Welsh, for +instance, had he really as he told me, made his only love song, his +incomparable <i>Morfydd</i> out of three lines in Welsh, heard sung by a woman +at her door on a walking tour in Wales, or did he but wish to hide that he +shared in their emotion?</p> + +<p class="poem">“O, what are the winds?<br /> +And what are the waters?<br /> +<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">Mine are your eyes.”</span></p> + +<p>He wanted us to believe that all things, his poetry with its Latin weight, +his religion with its constant reference to the Fathers of the Church, or +to the philosophers of the Church, almost his very courtesy were a study +and achievement of the intellect. Arthur Symons’ poetry made him angry, +because it would substitute for that achievement, Parisian impressionism, +“a London fog, the blurred tawny lamplight, the red omnibus, the dreary +rain, the depressing mud, the glaring gin shop, the slatternly shivering +women, three dexterous stanzas telling you that and nothing more.” I, on +the other hand, angered him by talking as if art existed for emotion only, +and for refutation he would quote the close of the Aeschylean<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> Trilogy, +the trial of Orestes on the Acropolis. Yet at moments the thought came to +him that intellect, as he conceived it, was too much a thing of many +books, that it lacked lively experience. “Yeats,” he has said to me, “You +need ten years in a library, but I have need of ten years in the +wilderness.” When he said “Wilderness” I am certain, however, that he +thought of some historical, some bookish desert, the Thebaid, or the lands +about the Mareotic sea. His best poetry is natural and impassioned, but he +spoke little of it, but much about his prose, and would contend that I had +no right to consider words made to read, less natural than words made to +be spoken; and he delighted in a sentence in his book on Thomas Hardy, +that kept its vitality, as he contended, though two pages long. He +punctuated after the manner of the seventeenth century and was always +ready to spend an hour discussing the exact use of the colon. “One should +use a colon where other people use a semi-colon, a semi-colon where other +people use a comma,” was, I think, but a condescension to my ignorance for +the matter was plainly beset with many subtleties.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>VII</h3> + +<p>Not till some time in 1895 did I think he could ever drink too much for +his sobriety—though what he drank would certainly be too much for that of +most of the men whom I knew—I no more doubted his self-control, though we +were very intimate friends, than I doubted his memories of Cardinal +Newman. The discovery that he did was a great shock to me, and, I think, +altered my general view of the world.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> I had, by my friendship with +O’Leary, by my fight against Gavan Duffy, drawn the attention of a group +of men, who at that time controlled what remained of the old Fenian +movement in England and Scotland; and at a moment when an attempt, that +came to nothing, was being made to combine once more our constitutional +and unconstitutional politics, I had been asked to represent them at some +convention in the United States. I went to consult Johnson, whom I found +sitting at a table with books about him. I was greatly tempted, because I +was promised complete freedom of speech; and I was at the time enraged by +some wild articles published by some Irish American newspaper, suggesting +the burning down of the houses of Irish landlords. Nine years later I was +lecturing in America, and a charming old Irishman came to see me with an +interview to write, and we spent, and as I think in entire neglect of his +interview, one of the happiest hours I have ever spent, comparing our +tales of the Irish fairies, in which he very firmly believed. When he had +gone I looked at his card, to discover that he was the writer of that +criminal incitement. I told Johnson that if I had a week to decide in I +would probably decide to go, but as they had only given me three days, I +had refused. He would not hear of my refusal with so much awaiting my +condemnation; and that condemnation would be effective with Catholics, for +he would find me passages in the Fathers, condemning every kind of +political crime, that of the dynamiter and the incendiary especially. I +asked how could the Fathers have condemned weapons they had never heard +of, but those weapons, he contended, were merely developments of old +methods and weapons; they had decided all in principle; but I need not +trouble myself about the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> matter, for he would put into my hands before I +sailed the typewritten statement of their doctrine, dealing with the +present situation in the utmost detail. He seemed perfectly logical, but a +little more confident and impassioned than usual, and I had, I think, +promised to accept—when he rose from his chair, took a step towards me in +his eagerness, and fell on to the floor; and I saw that he was drunk. From +that on, he began to lose control of his life; he shifted from Charlotte +Street, where, I think, there was fear that he would overset lamp or +candle and burn the house, to Gray’s Inn, and from Gray’s Inn to old +rambling rooms in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and at last one called to find his +outer door shut, the milk on the doorstep sour. Sometimes I would urge him +to put himself, as Jack Nettleship had done, into an Institute. One day +when I had been very urgent, he spoke of “a craving that made every atom +of his body cry out” and said the moment after, “I do not want to be +cured,” and a moment after that, “In ten years I shall be penniless and +shabby, and borrow half-crowns from friends.” He seemed to contemplate a +vision that gave him pleasure, and now that I look back, I remember that +he once said to me that Wilde got, perhaps, an increase of pleasure and +excitement from the degradation of that group of beggars and blackmailers +where he sought his pathics, and I remember, too, his smile at my +surprise, as though he spoke of psychological depths I could never enter. +Did the austerity, the melancholy of his thoughts, that spiritual ecstasy +which he touched at times, heighten, as complementary colours heighten one +another, not only the Vision of Evil, but its fascination? Was it only +Villon, or did Dante also feel the fascination of evil, when shown in its +horror, and, as it were, judged<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> and lost; and what proud man does not +feel temptation strengthened from the certainty that his intellect is not +deceived?</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>VIII</h3> + +<p>I began now to hear stories of Dowson, whom I knew only at the Rhymers, or +through some chance meeting at Johnson’s. I was indolent and +procrastinating, and when I thought of asking him to dine, or taking some +other step towards better knowledge, he seemed to be in Paris, or at +Dieppe. He was drinking, but, unlike Johnson, who, at the autopsy after +his death, was discovered never to have grown, except in the brain, after +his fifteenth year, he was full of sexual desire. Johnson and he were +close friends, and Johnson lectured him out of the Fathers upon chastity, +and boasted of the great good done him thereby. But the rest of us counted +the glasses emptied in their talk. I began to hear now in some detail of +the restaurant-keeper’s daughter, and of her marriage to the waiter, and +of that weekly game of cards with her that filled so great a share of +Dowson’s emotional life. Sober, he would look at no other woman, it was +said, but, drunk, would desire whatever woman chance brought, clean or +dirty.</p> + +<p>Johnson was stern by nature, strong by intellect, and always, I think, +deliberately picked his company, but Dowson seemed gentle, affectionate, +drifting. His poetry shows how sincerely he felt the fascination of +religion, but his religion had certainly no dogmatic outline, being but a +desire for a condition of virginal ecstasy. If it is true, as Arthur +Symons, his very close friend, has written, that he loved the +restaurant-keeper’s daughter for her youth, one may be almost<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> certain +that he sought from religion some similar quality, something of that which +the angels find who move perpetually, as Swedenborg has said, towards “the +dayspring of their youth.” Johnson’s poetry, like Johnson himself before +his last decay, conveys an emotion of joy, of intellectual clearness, of +hard energy; he gave us of his triumph; while Dowson’s poetry is sad, as +he himself seemed, and pictures his life of temptation and defeat,</p> + +<p class="poem">“Unto us they belong<br /> +Us the bitter and gay,<br /> +Wine and women and song.”</p> + +<p>Their way of looking at their intoxication showed their characters. +Johnson, who could not have written <i>Dark Angel</i> if he did not suffer from +remorse, showed to his friends an impenitent face, and defeated me when I +tried to prevent the foundation of an Irish convivial club—it was brought +to an end after one meeting by the indignation of the members’ +wives—whereas the last time I saw Dowson he was pouring out a glass of +whiskey for himself in an empty corner of my room and murmuring over and +over in what seemed automatic apology “The first to-day.”</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>IX</h3> + +<p>Two men are always at my side, Lionel Johnson and John Synge whom I was to +meet a little later; but Johnson is to me the more vivid in memory, +possibly because of the external finish, the clearly-marked lineaments of +his body, which seemed but to express the clarity of his mind. I think +Dowson’s best verse immortal, bound, that is, to outlive<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> famous novels +and plays and learned histories and other discursive things, but he was +too vague and gentle for my affections. I understood him too well, for I +had been like him but for the appetite that made me search out strong +condiments. Though I cannot explain what brought others of my generation +to such misfortune, I think that (falling backward upon my parable of the +moon) I can explain some part of Dowson’s and Johnson’s dissipation—</p> + +<p class="poem">“What portion in the world can the artist have,<br /> +Who has awaked from the common dream,<br /> +But dissipation and despair?”</p> + +<p>When Edmund Spencer described the islands of Phaedria and of Acrasia he +aroused the indignation of Lord Burleigh, “that rugged forehead” and Lord +Burleigh was in the right if morality were our only object.</p> + +<p>In those islands certain qualities of beauty, certain forms of sensuous +loveliness were separated from all the general purposes of life, as they +had not been hitherto in European literature—and would not be again, for +even the historical process has its ebb and flow, till Keats wrote his +<i>Endymion</i>. I think that the movement of our thought has more and more so +separated certain images and regions of the mind, and that these images +grow in beauty as they grow in sterility. Shakespeare leaned, as it were, +even as craftsman, upon the general fate of men and nations, had about him +the excitement of the playhouse; and all poets, including Spencer in all +but a few pages, until our age came, and when it came almost all, have had +some propaganda or traditional doctrine to give companionship with their +fellows. Had not Matthew Arnold his faith in what he described as the +best<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> thought of his generation? Browning his psychological curiosity, +Tennyson, as before him Shelley and Wordsworth, moral values that were not +aesthetic values? But Coleridge of the <i>Ancient Mariner</i>, and <i>Kubla +Khan</i>, and Rossetti in all his writings made what Arnold has called that +“morbid effort,” that search for “perfection of thought and feeling, and +to unite this to perfection of form,” sought this new, pure beauty, and +suffered in their lives because of it. The typical men of the classical +age (I think of Commodus, with his half-animal beauty, his cruelty, and +his caprice), lived public lives, pursuing curiosities of appetite, and so +found in Christianity, with its Thebaid and its Mariotic Sea the needed +curb. But what can the Christian confessor say to those who more and more +must make all out of the privacy of their thought, calling up perpetual +images of desire, for he cannot say “Cease to be artist, cease to be +poet,” where the whole life is art and poetry, nor can he bid men leave +the world, who suffer from the terrors that pass before shut-eyes. +Coleridge, and Rossetti though his dull brother did once persuade him that +he was an agnostic, were devout Christians, and Steinbock and Beardsley +were so towards their lives’ end, and Dowson and Johnson always, and yet I +think it but deepened despair and multiplied temptation.</p> + +<p class="poem">“Dark Angel, with thine aching lust,<br /> +To rid the world of penitence:<br /> +Malicious angel, who still dost<br /> +My soul such subtil violence!<br /> +<br /> +When music sounds, then changest thou<br /> +A silvery to a sultry fire:<br /> +Nor will thine envious heart allow<br /> +Delight untortured by desire.<br /> +<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span><br /> +Through thee, the gracious Muses turn<br /> +To Furies, O mine Enemy!<br /> +And all the things of beauty burn<br /> +With flames of evil ecstasy.<br /> +<br /> +Because of thee, the land of dreams<br /> +Becomes a gathering place of fears:<br /> +Until tormented slumber seems<br /> +One vehemence of useless tears.”</p> + +<p>Why are these strange souls born everywhere to-day? with hearts that +Christianity, as shaped by history, cannot satisfy. Our love letters wear +out our love; no school of painting outlasts its founders, every stroke of +the brush exhausts the impulse, Pre-Raphaelitism had some twenty years; +impressionism thirty perhaps. Why should we believe that religion can +never bring round its antithesis? Is it true that our air is disturbed, as +Malarmé said, by “the trembling of the veil of the temple,” or “that our +whole age is seeking to bring forth a sacred book?” Some of us thought +that book near towards the end of last century, but the tide sank again.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>X</h3> + +<p>I do not know whether John Davidson, whose life also was tragic, made that +“morbid effort,” that search for “perfection of thought and feeling,” for +he is hidden behind failure, to unite it “to perfection of form.” At +eleven one morning I met him in the British Museum reading room, probably +in 1894, when I was in London for the production of <i>The Land of Heart’s +Desire</i>, but certainly after some long absence from London. “Are you +working here?” I said; “No,” he said, “I am loafing, for I have finished<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> +my day’s work.” “What, already?” “I work an hour a day—I cannot work +longer without exhaustion, and even as it is, if I meet anybody and get +into talk, I cannot write the next day; that is why I loaf when my work is +finished.” No one had ever doubted his industry; he had supported his wife +and family for years by “devilling” many hours a day for some popular +novelist. “What work is it?” I said. “I am writing verse,” he answered. “I +had been writing prose for a long time, and then one day I thought I might +just as well write what I liked, as I must starve in any case. It was the +luckiest thought I ever had, for my agent now gets me forty pounds for a +ballad, and I made three hundred out of my last book of verse.”</p> + +<p>He was older by ten years than his fellow Rhymers; a national schoolmaster +from Scotland, he had been dismissed, he told us, for asking for a rise in +his salary, and had come to London with his wife and children. He looked +older than his years. “Ellis,” he had said, “how old are you?” “Fifty,” +Edwin Ellis replied, or whatever his age was. “Then I will take off my +wig. I never take off my wig when there is a man under thirty in the +room.” He had endured and was to endure again, a life of tragic penury, +which was made much harder by the conviction that the world was against +him, that he was refused for some reason his rightful position. Ellis +thought that he pined even for social success, and I that his Scots +jealousy kept him provincial and but half articulate.</p> + +<p>During the quarrel over Parnell’s grave a quotation from Goethe ran +through the papers, describing our Irish jealousy: “The Irish seem to me +like a pack of hounds, always dragging down some noble stag.” But I do not +think we object to distinction for its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> own sake; if we kill the stag, it +is that we may carry off his head and antlers. “The Irish people,” O’Leary +used to say, “do not know good from bad in any art, but they do not hate +the good once it is pointed out to them because it is good.” An infallible +Church, with its Mass in Latin, and its mediaeval philosophy, and our +Protestant social prejudice, have kept our ablest men from levelling +passions; but Davidson with a jealousy, which may be Scottish, seeing that +Carlyle had it, was quick to discover sour grapes. He saw in delicate, +laborious, discriminating taste, an effeminate pedantry, and would, when +that mood was on him, delight in all that seemed healthy, popular, and +bustling. Once when I had praised Herbert Horne for his knowledge and his +taste, he burst out, “If a man must be a connoisseur, let him be a +connoisseur in women.” He, indeed, was accustomed, in the most +characteristic phrase of his type, to describe the Rhymers as lacking in +“blood and guts,” and very nearly brought us to an end by attempting to +supply the deficiency by the addition of four Scotsmen. He brought all +four upon the same evening, and one read out a poem upon the Life Boat, +evidently intended for a recitation; another described how, when +gold-digging in Australia, he had fought and knocked down another miner +for doubting the rotundity of the earth; while of the remainder I can +remember nothing except that they excelled in argument. He insisted upon +their immediate election, and the Rhymers, through that complacency of +good manners whereby educated Englishmen so often surprise me, obeyed, +though secretly resolved never to meet again; and it cost me seven hours’ +work to get another meeting, and vote the Scotsmen out. A few days later I +chanced upon Davidson at some<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> restaurant; he was full of amiability, and +when we parted shook my hand, and proclaimed enthusiastically that I had +“blood and guts.” I think he might have grown to be a successful man had +he been enthusiastic instead about Dowson or Johnson, or Horne or Symons, +for they had what I still lacked, conscious deliberate craft, and what I +must lack always, scholarship. They had taught me that violent energy, +which is like a fire of straw, consumes in a few minutes the nervous +vitality, and is useless in the arts. Our fire must burn slowly, and we +must constantly turn away to think, constantly analyse what we have done, +be content even to have little life outside our work, to show, perhaps, to +other men, as little as the watch-mender shows, his magnifying glass +caught in his screwed-up eye. Only then do we learn to conserve our +vitality, to keep our mind enough under control and to make our technique +sufficiently flexible for expression of the emotions of life as they +arise. A few months after our meeting in the Museum, Davidson had spent +his inspiration. “The fires are out,” he said, “and I must hammer the cold +iron.” When I heard a few years ago that he had drowned himself, I knew +that I had always expected some such end. With enough passion to make a +great poet, through meeting no man of culture in early life, he lacked +intellectual receptivity, and, anarchic and indefinite, lacked pose and +gesture, and now no verse of his clings to my memory.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XI</h3> + +<p>Gradually Arthur Symons came to replace in my intimate friendship, Lionel +Johnson from whom<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> I was slowly separated by a scruple of conscience. If +he came to see me he sat tongue-tied unless I gave him the drink that +seemed necessary to bring his vitality to but its normal pitch, and if I +called upon him he drank so much that I became his confederate. Once, when +a friend and I had sat long after our proper bed-time at his constantly +repeated and most earnest entreaty, knowing what black melancholy would +descend upon him at our departure, and with the unexpressed hope of +getting him to his bed, he fixed upon us a laughing and whimsical look, +and said:—“I want you two men to understand that you are merely two men +that I am drinking with.” That was the only time that I was to hear from +him an imaginary conversation that had not an air of the most scrupulous +accuracy. He gave two accounts of a conversation with Wilde in prison; in +one Wilde wore his hair long, and in the other it had been cropped by the +prison barber. He was gradually losing, too, the faculty of experience, +and in his prose and verse repeated the old ideas and emotions, but +faintly, as though with fading interest. I am certain that he prayed much, +and on those rare days that I came upon him dressed and active before +midday or but little after, I concluded that he had been to morning Mass +at Farm Street.</p> + +<p>When with Johnson I had tuned myself to his mood, but Arthur Symons, more +than any man I have ever known, could slip as it were into the mind of +another, and my thoughts gained in richness and in clearness from his +sympathy, nor shall I ever know how much my practice and my theory owe to +the passages that he read me from Catullus and from Verlaine and Mallarmé. +I had read <i>Axel</i> to myself or was still reading it, so slowly, and with +so much difficulty, that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> certain passages had an exaggerated importance, +while all remained so obscure that I could without much effort imagine +that here at last was the Sacred Book I longed for. An Irish friend of +mine lives in a house where beside a little old tower rises a great new +Gothic hall and stair, and I have sometimes got him to extinguish all +light but a little Roman lamp, and in that faint light and among great +vague shadows, blotting away the unmeaning ornament, have imagined myself +partaking in some incredible romance. Half-a-dozen times, beginning in +boyhood with Shelley’s <i>Prometheus Unbound</i>, I have in that mood possessed +for certain hours or months the book that I long for; and Symons, without +ever being false to his own impressionist view of art and of life, +deepened as I think my longing.</p> + +<p>It seems to me, looking backward, that we always discussed life at its +most intense moment, that moment which gives a common sacredness to the +Song of Songs, and to the Sermon on the Mount, and in which one discovers +something supernatural, a stirring as it were of the roots of the hair. He +was making those translations from Mallarmé and from Verlaine, from +Calderon, from St. John of the Cross, which are the most accomplished +metrical translations of our time, and I think that those from Mallarmé +may have given elaborate form to my verses of those years, to the latter +poems of <i>The Wind Among the Reeds</i>, to <i>The Shadowy Waters</i>, while +Villiers de L’Isle Adam had shaped whatever in my <i>Rosa Alchemica</i> Pater +had not shaped. I can remember the day in Fountain Court when he first +read me Herodiade’s address to some Sibyl who is her nurse and it may be +the moon also:</p> + +<p class="poem"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> +“The horror of my virginity<br /> +Delights me, and I would envelope me<br /> +In the terror of my tresses, that, by night,<br /> +Inviolate reptile, I might feel the white<br /> +And glimmering radiance of thy frozen fire,<br /> +Thou that art chaste and diest of desire,<br /> +White night of ice and of the cruel snow!<br /> +Eternal sister, my lone sister, lo<br /> +My dreams uplifted before thee! now, apart,<br /> +So rare a crystal is my dreaming heart,<br /> +And all about me lives but in mine own<br /> +Image, the idolatrous mirror of my pride,<br /> +Mirroring this Herodiade diamond-eyed.”</p> + +<p>Yet I am certain that there was something in myself compelling me to +attempt creation of an art as separate from everything heterogenous and +casual, from all character and circumstance, as some Herodiade of our +theatre, dancing seemingly alone in her narrow moving luminous circle. +Certainly I had gone a great distance from my first poems, from all that I +had copied from the folk-art of Ireland, as from the statue of Mausolus +and his Queen, where the luminous circle is motionless and contains the +entire popular life; and yet why am I so certain? I can imagine an Aran +Islander who had strayed into the Luxembourg Gallery, turning bewildered +from Impressionist or Post-Impressionist, but lingering at Moreau’s +“Jason,” to study in minute astonishment the elaborate background, where +there are so many jewels, so much wrought stone and moulded bronze. Had +not lover promised mistress in his own island song, “A ship with a gold +and silver mast, gloves of the skin of a fish, and shoes of the skin of a +bird, and a suit of the dearest silk in Ireland?”</p> + +<p> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span></p> +<h3>XII</h3> + +<p>Hitherto when in London I had stayed with my family in Bedford Park, but +now I was to live for some twelve months in chambers in the Temple that +opened through a little passage into those of Arthur Symons. If anybody +rang at either door, one or other would look through a window in the +connecting passage, and report. We would then decide whether one or both +should receive the visitor, whether his door or mine should be opened, or +whether both doors were to remain closed. I have never liked London, but +London seemed less disagreeable when one could walk in quiet, empty places +after dark, and upon a Sunday morning sit upon the margin of a fountain +almost as alone as if in the country. I was already settled there, I +imagine, when a publisher called and proposed that Symons should edit a +Review or Magazine, and Symons consented on the condition that Beardsley +were Art Editor—and I was delighted at his condition, as I think were all +his other proposed contributors. Aubrey Beardsley had been dismissed from +the Art editorship of <i>The Yellow Book</i> under circumstances that had made +us indignant. He had illustrated Wilde’s <i>Salome</i>, his strange satiric art +had raised the popular press to fury, and at the height of the excitement +aroused by Wilde’s condemnation, a popular novelist, a woman who had great +influence among the most conventional part of the British public, had +written demanding his dismissal. “She owed it to her position before the +British people,” she had said. Beardsley was not even a friend of +Wilde’s—they even disliked each other—he had no sexual abnormality, but +he was certainly unpopular, and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> moment had come to get rid of +unpopular persons. The public at once concluded—they could hardly +conclude otherwise, he was dismissed by telegram—that there was evidence +against him, and Beardsley, who was some twenty-three years old, being +embittered and miserable, plunged into dissipation. We knew that we must +face an infuriated press and public, but being all young we delighted in +enemies and in everything that had an heroic air.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XIII</h3> + +<p>We might have survived but for our association with Beardsley, perhaps, +but for his <i>Under the Hill</i>, a Rabelaisian fragment promising a literary +genius as great maybe as his artistic genius, and for the refusal of the +bookseller who controlled the railway bookstalls to display our wares. The +bookseller’s manager, no doubt looking for a design of Beardsley’s, +pitched upon Blake’s <i>Anteus setting Virgil and Dante upon the verge of +Cocytus</i> as the ground of refusal, and when Arthur Symons pointed out that +Blake was considered “a very spiritual artist” replied, “O, Mr Symons, you +must remember that we have an audience of young ladies as well as an +audience of agnostics.” However, he called Arthur Symons back from the +door to say, “If contrary to our expectations <i>The Savoy</i> should have a +large sale, we should be very glad to see you again.” As Blake’s design +illustrated an article of mine, I wrote a letter upon that remarkable +saying to a principal daily newspaper. But I had mentioned Beardsley, and +I was told that the editor had made it a rule that his paper was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> never to +mention Beardsley’s name. I said upon meeting him later, “Would you have +made the same rule in the case of Hogarth?” against whom much the same +objection could be taken, and he replied with what seemed to me a dreamy +look, as though suddenly reminded of a lost opportunity—“Ah, there was no +popular press in Hogarth’s day.” We were not allowed to forget that in our +own day there was a popular press, and its opinions began to affect our +casual acquaintance, and even our comfort in public places. At some +well-known house, an elderly man to whom I had just been introduced, got +up from my side and walked to the other end of the room; but it was as +much my reputation as an Irish rebel as the evil company that I was +supposed to keep, that excited some young men in a railway carriage to +comment upon my general career in voices raised that they might catch my +attention. I discovered, however, one evening that we were perhaps envied +as well as despised. I was in the pit at some theatre, and had just +noticed Arthur Symons a little in front of me, when I heard a young man, +who looked like a shop-assistant or clerk, say, “There is Arthur Symons. +If he can’t get an order, why can’t he pay for a stall.” Clearly we were +supposed to prosper upon iniquity, and to go to the pit added a sordid +parsimony. At another theatre I caught sight of a woman that I once liked, +the widow of some friend of my father’s youth, and tried to attract her +attention, but she had no eyes for anything but the stage curtain; and at +some house where I met no hostility to myself, a popular novelist snatched +out of my hand a copy of <i>The Savoy</i>, and opening it at Beardsley’s +drawing, called <i>The Barber</i>, began to expound its bad drawing and wound +up with, “Now if you want to admire really great<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> black and white art, +admire the Punch Cartoons of Mr Lindley Sambourne,” and our hostess, after +making peace between us, said, “O, Mr Yeats, why do you not send your +poems to <i>The Spectator</i> instead of to <i>The Savoy</i>.” The answer, “My +friends read the <i>Savoy</i> and they do not read <i>The Spectator</i>,” brought a +look of deeper disapproval.</p> + +<p>Yet, even apart from Beardsley, we were a sufficiently distinguished body: +Max Beerbohm, Bernard Shaw, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Symons, +Charles Conder, Charles Shannon, Havelock Ellis, Selwyn Image, Joseph +Conrad; but nothing counted but the one hated name. I think that had we +been challenged we might have argued something after this +fashion:—“Science through much ridicule and some persecution has won its +right to explore whatever passes before its corporeal eye, and merely +because it passes: to set as it were upon an equality the beetle and the +whale though Ben Jonson could find no justification for the entomologist +in <i>The New Inn</i>, but that he had been crossed in love. Literature now +demands the same right of exploration of all that passes before the mind’s +eyes, and merely because it passes.” Not a complete defence, for it +substitutes a spiritual for a physical objective, but sufficient it may be +for the moment, and to settle our place in the historical process.</p> + +<p>The critic might well reply that certain of my generation delighted in +writing with an unscientific partiality for subjects long forbidden. Yet +is it not most important to explore especially what has been long +forbidden, and to do this not only “with the highest moral purpose,” like +the followers of Ibsen, but gaily, out of sheer mischief, or sheer delight +in that play of the mind. Donne could be as <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>metaphysical as he pleased, +and yet never seemed unhuman and hysterical as Shelley often does, because +he could be as physical as he pleased; and besides who will thirst for the +metaphysical, who have a parched tongue, if we cannot recover the Vision +of Evil?</p> + +<p>I have felt in certain early works of my own which I have long abandoned, +and here and there in the work of others of my generation, a slight, +sentimental sensuality which is disagreeable, and doesn’t exist in the +work of Donne, let us say, because he, being permitted to say what he +pleased, was never tempted to linger, or rather to pretend that we can +linger, between spirit and sense. How often had I heard men of my time +talk of the meeting of spirit and sense, yet there is no meeting but only +change upon the instant, and it is by the perception of a change like the +sudden “blacking out” of the lights of the stage, that passion creates its +most violent sensation.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XIV</h3> + +<p>Dowson was now at Dieppe, now at a Normandy village. Wilde, too, was at +Dieppe; and Symons, Beardsley, and others would cross and recross, +returning with many tales, and there were letters and telegrams. Dowson +wrote a protest against some friend’s too vivid essay upon the disorder of +his life, and explained that in reality he was living a life of industry +in a little country village; but before the letter arrived that friend +received a wire, “arrested, sell watch and send proceeds.” Dowson’s watch +had been left in London—and then another wire, “Am free.” Dowson, ran the +tale as I heard it ten years after, had got drunk and fought the baker, +and a deputation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> of villagers had gone to the magistrate and pointed out +that Monsieur Dowson was one of the most illustrious of English poets. +“Quite right to remind me,” said the magistrate, “I will imprison the +baker.”</p> + +<p>A Rhymer had seen Dowson at some cafe in Dieppe with a particularly common +harlot, and as he passed, Dowson, who was half drunk, caught him by the +sleeve and whispered, “She writes poetry—it is like Browning and Mrs +Browning.” Then there came a wonderful tale, repeated by Dowson himself, +whether by word of mouth or by letter I do not remember. Wilde has arrived +in Dieppe, and Dowson presses upon him the necessity of acquiring “a more +wholesome taste.” They empty their pockets on to the café table, and +though there is not much, there is enough if both heaps are put into one. +Meanwhile the news has spread, and they set out accompanied by a cheering +crowd. Arrived at their destination, Dowson and the crowd remain outside, +and presently Wilde returns. He says in a low voice to Dowson, “The first +these ten years, and it will be the last. It was like cold +mutton”—always, as Henley had said, “a scholar and a gentleman,” he no +doubt remembered the sense in which the Elizabethan dramatists used the +words “Cold mutton”—and then aloud so that the crowd may hear him, “But +tell it in England, for it will entirely restore my character.”</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XV</h3> + +<p>When the first few numbers of <i>The Savoy</i> had been published, the +contributors and the publisher gave themselves a supper, and Symons +explained that <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>certain among us were invited afterwards to the +publisher’s house, and if I went there that once I need never go again. I +considered the publisher a scandalous person, and had refused to meet him; +we were all agreed as to his character, and only differed as to the +distance that should lie between him and us. I had just received two +letters, one from T. W. Rolleston protesting with all the conventional +moral earnestness of an article in <i>The Spectator</i> newspaper, against my +writing for such a magazine; and one from A. E. denouncing that magazine, +which he called the “Organ of the Incubi and the Succubi,” with the +intensity of a personal conviction. I had forgotten that Arthur Symons had +borrowed the letters until as we stood about the supper table waiting for +the signal to be seated, I heard the infuriated voice of the publisher +shouting, “Give me the letter, give me the letter, I will prosecute that +man,” and I saw Symons waving Rolleston’s letter just out of reach. Then +Symons folded it up and put it in his pocket, and began to read out A. E. +and the publisher was silent, and I saw Beardsley listening. Presently +Beardsley came to me and said, “Yeats, I am going to surprise you very +much. I think your friend is right. All my life I have been fascinated by +the spiritual life—when a child I saw a vision of a Bleeding Christ over +the mantelpiece—but after all to do one’s work when there are other +things one wants to do so much more, is a kind of religion.”</p> + +<p>Something, I forget what, delayed me a few minutes after the supper was +over, and when I arrived at our publisher’s I found Beardsley propped up +on a chair in the middle of the room, grey and exhausted, and as I came in +he left the chair and went into another room to spit blood, but returned +immediately. Our<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> publisher, perspiration pouring from his face, was +turning the handle of a hurdy gurdy piano—it worked by electricity, I was +told, when the company did not cut off the supply—and very plainly had +had enough of it, but Beardsley pressed him to labour on, “The tone is so +beautiful,” “It gives me such deep pleasure,” etc., etc. It was his method +of keeping our publisher at a distance.</p> + +<p>Another image competes with that image in my memory. Beardsley has arrived +at Fountain Court a little after breakfast with a young woman who belongs +to our publisher’s circle and certainly not to ours, and is called +“twopence coloured,” or is it “penny plain.” He is a little drunk and his +mind has been running upon his dismissal from <i>The Yellow Book</i>, for he +puts his hand upon the wall and stares into a mirror. He mutters, “Yes, +yes. I look like a Sodomite,” which he certainly did not. “But no, I am +not that,” and then begins railing, against his ancestors, accusing them +of that and this, back to and including the great Pitt, from whom he +declares himself descended.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XVI</h3> + +<p>I can no more justify my convictions in these brief chapters, where I +touch on fundamental things, than Shakespeare could justify within the +limits of a sonnet, his conviction that the soul of the wide world dreams +of things to come; and yet as I have set out to describe nature as I see +it, I must not only describe events but those patterns into which they +fall, when I am the looker-on. A French miracle-working priest once said +to Maud Gonne and myself and to an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> English Catholic who had come with us, +that a certain holy woman had been the “victim” for his village, and that +another holy woman who had been “victim” for all France, had given him her +Crucifix, because he, too, was doomed to become a “victim.”</p> + +<p>French psychical research has offered evidence to support the historical +proofs that such saints as Lydwine of Schiedam, whose life suggested to +Paul Claudel his <i>L’Annonce faite à Marie</i>, did really cure disease by +taking it upon themselves. As disease was considered the consequence of +sin, to take it upon themselves was to copy Christ. All my proof that mind +flows into mind, and that we cannot separate mind and body, drives me to +accept the thought of victimage in many complex forms, and I ask myself if +I cannot so explain the strange, precocious genius of Beardsley. He was in +my Lunar metaphor a man of the thirteenth Phase, his nature on the edge of +Unity of Being, the understanding of that Unity by the intellect his one +overmastering purpose; whereas Lydwine de Schiedam and her like, being of +the saints, are at the seven and twentieth Phase, and seek a unity with a +life beyond individual being; and so being all subjective he would take +upon himself not the consequences, but the knowledge of sin. I surrender +myself to the wild thought that by so doing he enabled persons who had +never heard his name, to recover innocence. I have so often, too, +practised meditations, or experienced dreams, where the meditations or +dreams of two or three persons contrast and complement one another, in so +far as those persons are in themselves complementary or contrasting, that +I am convinced that it is precisely from the saint or potential saint that +he would gather this knowledge. I see in his fat women and shadowy, +pathetic girls, his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> horrible children, half child, half embryo, in all +the lascivious monstrous imagery of the privately published designs, the +phantasms that from the beginning have defied the scourge and the hair +shirt. I once said to him half seriously, “Beardsley, I was defending you +last night in the only way in which it is possible to defend you, by +saying that all you draw is inspired by rage against iniquity,” and he +answered, “If it were so inspired the work would be in no way different,” +meaning, as I think, that he drew with such sincerity that no change of +motive could change the image.</p> + +<p>I know that some turn of disease had begun to parade erotic images before +his eyes, and I do not doubt that he drew these images. “I make a blot +upon the paper,” he said to me; “And I begin to shove the ink about and +something comes.” But I was wrong to say that he drew these things in rage +against iniquity, for to know that rage he must needs be objective, +concerned with other people, with the Church or the Divinity, with +something outside his own head, and responsible not for the knowledge but +for the consequence of sin. His preparation had been the exhaustion of sin +in act, while the preparation of the Saint is the exhaustion of his pride, +and instead of the Saint’s humility, he had come to see the images of the +mind in a kind of frozen passion, the virginity of the intellect.</p> + +<p>Does not all art come when a nature, that never ceases to judge itself, +exhausts personal emotion in action or desire so completely that something +impersonal, something that has nothing to do with action or desire, +suddenly starts into its place, something which is as unforeseen, as +completely organized, even as unique, as the images that pass before the +mind between sleeping and waking.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>But all art is not victimage; and much of the hatred of the art of +Beardsley came from the fact that victimage, though familiar under another +name to French criticism since the time of Baudelaire, was not known in +England. He pictures almost always disillusion, and apart from those +privately published drawings which he tried upon his deathbed to have +destroyed, there is no representation of desire. Even the beautiful women +are exaggerated into doll-like prettiness by a spirit of irony, or are +poignant with a thwarted or corrupted innocence. I see his art with more +understanding now, than when he lived, for in 1895 or 1896, I was in +despair at the new breath of comedy that had begun to wither the beauty +that I loved, just when that beauty seemed about to unite itself to +mystery. I said to him once, “You have never done anything to equal your +Salome with the head of John the Baptist.” I think, that for the moment he +was sincere when he replied, “Yes, yes; but beauty is so difficult.” It +was for the moment only, for as the popular rage increased and his own +disease increased, he became more and more violent in his satire, or +created out of a spirit of mockery a form of beauty where his powerful +logical intellect eliminated every outline that suggested meditation or +even satisfied passion.</p> + +<p>The distinction between the Image, between the apparition as it were, and +the personal action and desire, took a new form at the approach of death. +He made two or three charming and blasphemous designs; I think especially +of a Madonna and Child, where the Child has a foolish, doll-like face, and +an elaborate modern baby’s dress; and of a St. Rose of Lima in an +expensive gown decorated with roses, ascending to Heaven upon the bosom of +the Madonna,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> her face enraptured with love, but with that form of it +which is least associated with sanctity. I think that his conversion to +Catholicism was sincere, but that so much of impulse as could exhaust +itself in prayer and ceremony, in formal action and desire, found itself +mocked by the antithetical image; and yet I am perhaps mistaken, perhaps +it was merely his recognition that historical Christianity had dwindled to +a box of toys, and that it might be amusing to empty the whole box on to +the counterpane.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XVII</h3> + +<p>I had been a good deal in Paris, though never very long at any time, my +later visits with a member of the Rhymer’s Club whose curiosity or emotion +was roused by every pretty girl. He treated me with a now admiring, now +mocking wonder, because being in love, and in no way lucky in that love, I +had grown exceedingly puritanical so far as my immediate neighbourhood was +concerned. One night, close to the Luxembourg, a strange young woman in +bicycling costume, came out of a side street, threw one arm about his +neck, walked beside us in perfect silence for a hundred yards or so, and +then darted up another side street. He had a red and white complexion and +fair hair, but how she discovered that in the dark I could not understand. +I became angry and reproachful, but he defended himself by saying, “You +never meet a stray cat without caressing it: I have similar instincts.” +Presently we found ourselves at some Café—the Café D’Harcourt, I +think—and when I looked up from my English newspaper, I found <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span>myself +surrounded with painted ladies and saw that he was taking vengeance. I +could not have carried on a conversation in French, but I was able to say, +“That gentleman over there has never refused wine or coffee to any lady,” +and in a little they had all settled about him like greedy pigeons.</p> + +<p>I had put my ideal of those years, an ideal that passed away with youth, +into my description of <i>Proud Costello</i>. “He was of those ascetics of +passion, who keep their hearts pure for love or for hatred, as other men +for God, for Mary and for the Saints.” My friend was not interested in +passion. A woman drew him to her by some romantic singularity in her +beauty or her circumstance, and drew him the more if the curiosity she +aroused were half intellectual. A little after the time I write of, +throwing himself into my chair after some visit to a music-hall or +hippodrome, he began, “O, Yeats, I was never in love with a +serpent-charmer before.” He was objective. For him “the visible world +existed” as he was fond of quoting, and I suspect him of a Moon that had +entered its fourth quarter.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XVIII</h3> + +<p>At first I used to stay with Macgregor Mathers and his gracious young wife +near the Champ de Mars, or in the Rue Mozart, but later by myself in a +student’s hotel in the Latin quarter, and I cannot remember always where I +stayed when this or that event took place. Macgregor Mathers, or +Macgregor, for he had now shed the “Mathers,” would come down to breakfast +one day with his Horace, the next<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> day with his Macpherson’s Ossian, and +read out fragments during breakfast, considering both books of equal +authenticity. Once when I questioned that of Ossian, he got into a +rage—what right had I to take sides with the English enemy—and I found +that for him the eighteenth century controversy still raged. At night he +would dress himself in Highland dress, and dance the sword dance, and his +mind brooded upon the ramifications of clans and tartans. Yet I have at +moments doubted whether he had seen the Highlands, or even, until invited +there by some White Rose Society, Scotland itself. Every Sunday he gave to +the evocation of Spirits, and I noted that upon that day he would spit +blood. That did not matter, he said, because it came from his head, not +his lungs; what ailed him I do not know, but I think that he lived under +some great strain, and presently I noted that he was drinking neat brandy, +not to drunkenness, but to detriment of mind and body.</p> + +<p>He began to foresee changes in the world, announcing in 1893 or 1894, the +imminence of immense wars, and was it in 1895 or 1896 that he learned +ambulance work, and made others learn it? He had a sabre wound on his +wrist—or perhaps his forehead, for my memory is not clear—got in some +student riot that he had mistaken for the beginning of war. It may have +been some talk of his that made me write the poem that begins:</p> + +<p class="poem">“The dews drop slowly and dreams gather;<br /> +<span style="margin-left: 3em;">unknown spears</span><br /> +Suddenly hurtle before my dream awakened eyes,<br /> +And then the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries<br /> +Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears.”</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span>War was to bring, or be brought by, anarchy, but that would be a passing +stage, he declared, for his dreams were all Napoleonic. He certainly +foresaw some great role that he could play, had made himself an +acknowledged master of the war-game, and for a time taught it to French +officers for his living. He was to die of melancholia, and was perhaps +already mad at certain moments or upon certain topics, though he did not +make upon me that impression in those early days, being generous, gay, and +affable. I have seen none that lacked philosophy and trod <i>Hodos +Camelionis</i> come to good there; and he lacked it but for a vague +affirmation, that he would have his friends affirm also, each for himself, +“There is no part of me that is not of the Gods.” Once, when he had told +me that he met his Teachers in some great crowd, and only knew that they +were phantoms by a shock that was like an electric shock to his heart, I +asked him how he knew that he was not deceived or hallucinated. He said, +“I had been visited by one of them the other night, and I followed him +out, and followed him down that little lane to the right. Presently I fell +over the milk boy, and the milk boy got in a rage because he said that not +only I but the man in front had fallen over him.” He like all that I have +known, who have given themselves up to images, and to the murmuring of +images, thought that when he had proved that an image could act +independently of his mind, he had proved also that neither it, nor what it +had murmured, had originated there. Yet had I need of proof to the +contrary, I had it while under his roof. I was eager for news of the +Spanish-American war, and went to the Rue Mozart before breakfast to buy a +<i>New York Herald</i>. As I went out past the young Normandy servant who was +laying breakfast,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> I was telling myself some schoolboy romance, and had +just reached a place where I carried my arm in a sling after some +remarkable escape. I bought my paper and returned, to find Macgregor on +the doorstep. “Why, you are all right,” he said, “What did the Bonne mean +by telling me that you had hurt your arm and carried it in a sling.”</p> + +<p>Once when I met him in the street in his Highland clothes, with several +knives in his stocking, he said, “When I am dressed like this I feel like +a walking flame,” and I think that everything he did was but an attempt to +feel like a walking flame. Yet at heart he was, I think, gentle, and +perhaps even a little timid. He had some impediment in his nose that gave +him a great deal of trouble, and it could have been removed had he not +shrunk from the slight operation; and once when he was left in a +mouse-infested flat with some live traps, he collected his captives into a +large birdcage, and to avoid the necessity of their drowning, fed them +there for weeks. Being a self-educated, un-scholarly, though learned man, +he was bound to express the fundamental antithesis in the most crude form, +and being arrogant, to prevent as far as possible that alternation between +the two natures which is, it may be, necessary to sanity. When the nature +turns to its spiritual opposite alone there can be no alternation, but +what nature is pure enough for that.</p> + +<p>I see Paris in the Eighteen-nineties as a number of events separated from +one another, and without cause or consequence, without lot or part in the +logical structure of my life; I can often as little find their dates as I +can those of events in my early childhood. William Sharp, who came to see +me there, may have come in 1895, or on some visit four or five<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> years +later, but certainly I was in an hotel in the Boulevard Raspail. When he +stood up to go he said, “What is that?” pointing to a geometrical form +painted upon a little piece of cardboard that lay upon my window sill. And +then before I could answer, looked out of the window saying, “There is a +funeral passing.” I said, “That is curious, as the Death symbol is painted +upon the card.” I did not look, but I am sure there was no funeral. A few +days later he came back and said, “I have been very ill; you must never +allow me to see that symbol again.” He did not seem anxious to be +questioned, but years later he said, “I will now tell you what happened in +Paris. I had two rooms at my hotel, a front sitting-room and a bedroom +leading out of it. As I passed the threshold of the sitting-room, I saw a +woman standing at the bureau writing, and presently she went into my +bedroom. I thought somebody had got into the wrong room by mistake, but +when I went to the bureau I saw the sheet of paper she had seemed to write +upon, and there was no writing upon it. I went into my bed-room and I +found nobody, but as there was a door from the bedroom on to the stairs I +went down the stairs to see if she had gone that way. When I got out into +the street I saw her just turning a corner, but when I turned the corner +there was nobody there, and then I saw her at another corner. Constantly +seeing her and losing her like that I followed till I came to the Seine, +and there I saw her standing at an opening in the wall, looking down into +the river. Then she vanished, and I cannot tell why, but I went to the +opening in the wall and stood there, just as she had stood, taking just +the same attitude. Then I thought I was in Scotland, and that I heard a +sheep bell. After that I must have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> lost consciousness, for I knew nothing +till I found myself lying on my back, dripping wet, and people standing +all round. I had thrown myself into the Seine.”</p> + +<p>I did not believe him, and not because I thought the story impossible, for +I knew he had a susceptibility beyond that of any one I had ever known, to +symbolic or telepathic influence, but because he never told one anything +that was true; the facts of life disturbed him and were forgotten. The +story had been created by the influence but it had remained a reverie, +though he may in the course of years have come to believe that it happened +as an event. The affectionate husband of his admiring and devoted wife, he +had created an imaginary beloved, had attributed to her the authorship of +all his books that had any talent, and though habitually a sober man, I +have known him to get drunk, and at the height of his intoxication when +most men speak the truth, to attribute his state to remorse for having +been unfaithful to Fiona Macleod.</p> + +<p>Paul Verlaine alternated between the two halves of his nature with so +little apparent resistance that he seemed like a bad child, though to read +his sacred poems is to remember perhaps that the Holy Infant shared His +first home with the beasts. In what month was it that I received a note +inviting me to “coffee and cigarettes plentifully,” and signed “Yours +quite cheerfully, Paul Verlaine?” I found him at the top of a tenement +house in the Rue St. Jacques, sitting in an easy chair, his bad leg +swaddled in many bandages. He asked me, speaking in English, if I knew +Paris well, and added, pointing to his leg, that it had scorched his leg +for he know it “well, too well” and “lived in it like a fly in a pot of +marmalade.” He<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> took up an English dictionary, one of the few books in the +room, and began searching for the name of his disease, selecting after a +long search and with, as I understood, only comparative accuracy +“Erysipelas.” Meanwhile his homely, middle-aged mistress made the coffee +and found the cigarettes; it was obviously she who had given the room its +character; her canaries in several cages hanging in the window, and her +sentimental lithographs nailed here and there among the nude drawings and +newspaper caricatures of her lover as various kinds of monkey, which he +had pinned upon the wall. A slovenly, ragged man came in, his trousers +belted with a piece of rope and an opera hat upon his head. She drew a box +over to the fire, and he sat down, now holding the opera hat upon his +knees, and I think he must have acquired it very lately for he kept +constantly closing and opening it. Verlaine introduced him by saying, “He +is a poor man, but a good fellow, and is so like Louis XI to look at that +we call him Louis the XIth.” I remember that Verlaine talked of Victor +Hugo who was “a supreme poet, but a volcano of mud as well as of flame,” +and of Villiers de L’Isle Adam who was “exalté” and wrote excellent +French; and of <i>In Memoriam</i>, which he had tried to translate and could +not. “Tennyson is too noble, too Anglais; when he should have been +brokenhearted, he had many reminiscences.”</p> + +<p>At Verlaine’s burial, but a few months after, his mistress quarrelled with +a publisher at the graveside as to who owned the sheet by which the body +had been covered, and Louis XI stole fourteen umbrellas that he found +leaning against a tree in the Cemetery.</p> + +<p> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span></p> +<h3>XIX</h3> + +<p>I am certain of one date, for I have gone to much trouble to get it right. +I met John Synge for the first time in the Autumn of 1896, when I was one +and thirty, and he four and twenty. I was at the Hotel Corneille instead +of my usual lodging, and why I cannot remember for I thought it expensive. +Synge’s biographer says that you boarded there for a pound a week, but I +was accustomed to cook my own breakfast, and dine at an anarchist +restaurant in the Boulevard S. Jacques for little over a shilling. Some +one, whose name I forget, told me there was a poor Irishman at the top of +the house, and presently introduced us. Synge had come lately from Italy, +and had played his fiddle to peasants in the Black Forest; six months of +travel upon fifty pounds; and was now reading French literature and +writing morbid and melancholy verse. He told me that he had learned Irish +at Trinity College, so I urged him to go to the Aran Islands and find a +life that had never been expressed in literature, instead of a life where +all had been expressed. I did not divine his genius, but I felt he needed +something to take him out of his morbidity and melancholy. Perhaps I would +have given the same advice to any young Irish writer who knew Irish, for I +had been that summer upon Inishmaan and Inishmore, and was full of the +subject. My friends and I had landed from a fishing boat to find ourselves +among a group of islanders, one of whom said he would bring us to the +oldest man upon Inishmaan. This old man, speaking very slowly, but with +laughing eyes, had said, “If any gentleman has done a crime, we’ll hide +him. There was a gentleman that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> killed his father, and I had him in my +own house six months till he got away to America.”</p> + +<p>From that on I saw much of Synge, and brought him to Maude Gonne’s, under +whose persuasion perhaps, he joined the “Young Ireland Society of Paris,” +the name we gave to half a dozen Parisian Irish, signed, but resigned +after a few months because “it wanted to stir up Continental nations +against England, and England will never give us freedom until she feels +she is safe,” the one political sentence I ever heard him speak. Over a +year was to pass before he took my advice and settled for a while in an +Aran cottage, and became happy, having escaped at last, as he wrote, “from +the squalor of the poor and the nullity of the rich.” I almost forget the +prose and verse he showed me in Paris, though I read it all through again +when after his death I decided, at his written request, what was to be +published and what not. Indeed, I have but a vague impression, as of a man +trying to look out of a window and blurring all that he sees by breathing +upon the window. According to my Lunar parable, he was a man of the +twenty-third Phase, a man whose subjective lives—for a constant return to +our life is a part of my dream—were over, who must not pursue an image, +but fly from it, all that subjective dreaming, that had once been power +and joy, now corrupting within him. He had to take the first plunge into +the world beyond himself, the first plunge away from himself that is +always pure technique, the delight in doing, not because one would or +should, but merely because one can do.</p> + +<p>He once said to me, “a man has to bring up his family and be as virtuous +as is compatible with so doing, and if he does more than that he is a +puritan; a dramatist has to express his subject and to find as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> much +beauty as is compatible with that, and if he does more he is an aesthete,” +that is to say, he was consciously objective. Whenever he tried to write +drama without dialect he wrote badly, and he made several attempts, +because only through dialect could he escape self-expression, see all that +he did from without, allow his intellect to judge the images of his mind +as if they had been created by some other mind. His objectivity was, +however, technical only, for in those images paraded all the desires of +his heart. He was timid, too shy for general conversation, an invalid and +full of moral scruple, and he was to create now some ranting braggadocio, +now some tipsy hag full of poetical speech, and now some young man or girl +full of the most abounding health. He never spoke an unkind word, had +admirable manners, and yet his art was to fill the streets with rioters, +and to bring upon his dearest friends enemies that may last their +lifetime.</p> + +<p>No mind can engender till divided into two, but that of a Keats or a +Shelley falls into an intellectual part that follows, and a hidden +emotional flying image, whereas in a mind like that of Synge the emotional +part is dreaded and stagnant, while the intellectual part is a clear +mirror-like technical achievement.</p> + +<p>But in writing of Synge I have run far ahead, for in 1896 he was but one +picture among many. I am often astonished when I think that we can meet +unmoved some person, or pass some house, that in later years is to bear a +chief part in our life. Should there not be some flutter of the nerve or +stopping of the heart like that Macgregor experienced at the first meeting +with a phantom?</p> + +<p> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span></p> +<h3>XX</h3> + +<p>Many pictures come before me without date or order. I am walking somewhere +near the Luxembourg Gardens when Synge, who seldom generalises and only +after much thought, says, “There are three things any two of which have +often come together but never all three; ecstasy, asceticism, austerity; I +wish to bring all three together.”</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></p> + +<p>I notice that Macgregor considers William Sharp vague and sentimental, +while Sharp is repelled by Macgregor’s hardness and arrogance. William +Sharp met Macgregor in the Louvre, and said, “No doubt considering your +studies you live upon milk and fruit.” And Macgregor replied, “No, not +exactly milk and fruit, but very nearly so;” and now Sharp has lunched +with Macgregor and been given nothing but brandy and radishes.</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></p> + +<p>Macgregor is much troubled by ladies who seek spiritual advice, and one +has called to ask his help against phantoms who have the appearance of +decayed corpses, and try to get into bed with her at night. He has driven +her away with one furious sentence, “Very bad taste on both sides.”</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></p> + +<p>I am sitting in a Café with two French Americans, one in the morning, +while we are talking wildly, and some are dancing, there is a tap at the +shuttered <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>window; we open it and three ladies enter, the wife of a man of +letters, who thought to find no one but a confederate, and her husband’s +two young sisters whom she has brought secretly to some disreputable +dance. She is very confused at seeing us, but as she looks from one to +another understands that we have taken some drug and laughs; caught in our +dream we know vaguely that she is scandalous according to our code and to +all codes, but smile at her benevolently and laugh.</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></p> + +<p>I am at Stuart Merrill’s, and I meet there a young Jewish Persian scholar. +He has a large gold ring, seemingly very rough, made by some amateur, and +he shows me that it has shaped itself to his finger, and says, “That is +because it contains no alloy—it is alchemical gold.” I ask who made the +gold, and he says a certain Rabbi, and begins to talk of the Rabbi’s +miracles. We do not question him—perhaps it is true—perhaps he has +imagined at all—we are inclined to accept every historical belief once +more.</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></p> + +<p>I am sitting in a Cafe with two French Americans, a German poet +Douchenday, and a silent man whom I discover to be Strindberg, and who is +looking for the Philosopher’s Stone. The French American reads out a +manifesto he is about to issue to the Latin Quarter; it proposes to +establish a communistic colony of artists in Virginia, and there is a +footnote to explain why he selects Virginia, “Art has never flourished +twice in the same place. Art has never flourished in Virginia.”</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>Douchenday, who has some reputation as a poet, explains that his poems are +without verbs, as the verb is the root of all evil in the world. He wishes +for an art where all things are immoveable, as though the clouds should be +made of marble. I turn over the page of one of his books which he shows +me, and find there a poem in dramatic form, but when I ask if he hopes to +have it played he says:—“It could only be played by actors before a black +marble wall, with masks in their hands. They must not wear the masks for +that would not express my scorn for reality.”</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></p> + +<p>I go to the first performance of Alfred Jarry’s <i>Ubu Roi</i>, at the Théatre +de L’Oeuvre, with the Rhymer who had been so attractive to the girl in the +bicycling costume. The audience shake their fists at one another, and the +Rhymer whispers to me, “There are often duels after these performances,” +and he explains to me what is happening on the stage. The players are +supposed to be dolls, toys, marionettes, and now they are all hopping like +wooden frogs, and I can see for myself that the chief personage, who is +some kind of King, carries for Sceptre a brush of the kind that we use to +clean a closet. Feeling bound to support the most spirited party, we have +shouted for the play, but that night at the Hotel Corneille I am very sad, +for comedy, objectivity, has displayed its growing power once more. I say, +“After Stephane Mallarmé, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after +Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our subtle colour and +nervous rhythm, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is +possible? After us the Savage God.”</p> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span></p> +<h2><a name="BOOK_V" id="BOOK_V"></a>BOOK V<br />THE STIRRING OF THE BONES</h2> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span></p> + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p> +<h2><i>THE STIRRING OF THE BONES</i></h2> + +<p> </p> +<h3>I</h3> + +<p>It may have been the Spring of 1897 that Maud Gonne, who was passing +through London, told me that for some reason unknown to her, she had +failed to get a Dublin authorization for an American lecturing tour. The +young Dublin Nationalists planned a monument to Wolfe Tone which, it was +hoped, might exceed in bulk and in height that of the too compromised and +compromising Daniel O’Connell, and she proposed to raise money for it by +these lectures. I had left the Temple and taken two rooms in Bloomsbury, +and in Bloomsbury lived important London Nationalists, elderly doctors, +who had been medical students during the Fenian movement. So I was able to +gather a sufficient committee to pass the necessary resolution. She had no +sooner sailed than I found out why the Dublin committee had refused it, or +rather put it off by delay and vague promises. A prominent Irish American +had been murdered for political reasons, and another Irish American had +been tried and acquitted, but was still accused by his political +opponents, and the dispute had spread to London and to Ireland, and had +there intermixed itself with current politics and gathered new bitterness. +My committee, and the majority of the Nationalist Irish Societies +throughout England were upon one side, and the Dublin committee and the +majority of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> Nationalist Societies in Ireland upon the other, and +feeling ran high. Maud Gonne had the same friends that I had, and the +Dublin committee could not be made to understand that whatever money she +collected would go to the movement, and not to her friends and their +opponents. It seemed to me that if I accepted the Presidency of the ’98 +Commemoration Association of Great Britain, I might be able to prevent a +public quarrel, and so make a great central council possible; and a public +quarrel I did prevent, though with little gain perhaps to anybody, for at +least one active man assured me that I had taken the heart out of his +work, and no gain at all perhaps to the movement, for our central council +had commonly to send two organizers or to print two pamphlets, that both +parties might be represented when one pamphlet or one organizer had +served.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>II</h3> + +<p>It was no business of mine, and that was precisely why I could not keep +out of it. Every enterprise that offered, allured just in so far as it was +not my business. I still think that in a species of man, wherein I count +myself, nothing so much matters as Unity of Being, but if I seek it as +Goethe sought, who was not of that species, I but combine in myself, and +perhaps as it now seems, looking backward, in others also, incompatibles. +Goethe, in whom objectivity and subjectivity were intermixed I hold, as +the dark is mixed with the light at the eighteenth Lunar Phase, could but +seek it as Wilhelm Meister seeks it intellectually, critically, and +through a multitude of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> deliberately chosen experiences; events and forms +of skill gathered as if for a collector’s cabinet; whereas true Unity of +Being, where all the nature murmurs in response if but a single note be +touched, is found emotionally, instinctively, by the rejection of all +experience not of the right quality, and by the limitation of its +quantity. Of all this I knew nothing, for I saw the world by the light of +what my father had said, speaking about some Frenchman who frequented the +dissecting rooms to overcome his dread in the interest of that Unity. My +father had mocked, but had not explained why he had mocked, and I, for my +unhappiness had felt a shuddering fascination. Nor did I understand as yet +how little that Unity, however wisely sought, is possible without a Unity +of Culture in class or people that is no longer possible at all.</p> + +<p class="poem">“The fascination of what’s difficult<br /> +Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent<br /> +Spontaneous joy and natural content<br /> +Out of my heart.”</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>III</h3> + +<p>I went hither and thither speaking at meetings in England and Scotland and +occasionally at tumultuous Dublin conventions, and endured some of the +worst months of my life. I had felt years before that I had made a great +achievement when the man who trained my uncle’s horses invited me to share +his Xmas dinner, which we roasted in front of his harness room fire; and +now I took an almost equal pride in an evening spent with some small +organizer into whose<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> spitoon I secretly poured my third glass of whiskey. +I constantly hoped for some gain in self-possession, in rapidity of +decision, in capacity for disguise, and am at this moment, I dare say, no +different for it all, having but burgeoned and withered like a tree.</p> + +<p>When Maud Gonne returned she became our directing mind both in England and +in Ireland, and it was mainly at her bidding that our movement become a +protest against the dissensions, the lack of dignity, of the Parnellite +and Anti-Parnellite parties, who had fought one another for seven or eight +years, till busy men passed them by, as they did those performing cats +that in my childhood I used to see, pretending to spit at one another on a +table, outside Charing Cross station. Both parliamentary parties seeing +that all young Ireland, and a good part of old, were in the movement, +tried to join us, the Anti-Parnellite without abandoning its separate +identity. They were admitted I think, but upon what terms I do not +remember. I and two or three others had to meet Michael Davitt, and a +member of parliament called F. X. O’Brien to talk out the question of +separate identity, and I remember nothing of what passed but the manner +and image of Michael Davitt. He seemed hardly more unfitted for such +negotiation, perhaps even for any possible present politics, than I +myself, and I watched him with sympathy. One knows by the way a man sits +in his chair if he have emotional intensity, and Davitt’s suggested to me +a writer, a painter, an artist of some kind, rather than a man of action. +Then, too, F. X. O’Brien did not care whether he used a good or a bad +argument, whether he seemed a fool or a clever man, so that he carried his +point, but if he used a bad argument Davitt would bring our thought back +to it though he had to wait several<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> minutes and re-state it. One felt +that he had lived always with small unimaginative, effective men whom he +despised; and that perhaps through some lack of early education, perhaps +because nine years’ imprisonment at the most plastic period of his life +had jarred or broken his contact with reality, he had failed, except +during the first months of the Land League, to dominate those men. He told +me that if the split in the Irish Party had not come he would have carried +the Land League into the Highlands, and recovered for Ireland as much of +Scotland as was still Gaelic in blood or in language. Our negotiations, +which interested so much F. X. O’Brien and my two negotiators, a barrister +and a doctor, bored him I thought, even more than they did me, to whom +they were a novelty; but the Highland plan with its historical foundation +and its vague possibilities excited him, and it seemed to me that what we +said or did stirred him, at other moments also, to some similar remote +thought and emotion. I think he returned my sympathy, for a little before +his death he replied to some words of congratulation I sent him after the +speech in which he resigned his seat in the House of Commons, with an +account of some project of his for improving the quality of the Irish +representation there.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>IV</h3> + +<p>I think that he shared with poet and philosopher the necessity of speaking +the whole mind or remaining silent or ineffective, and he had been for +years in a movement, where, to adapt certain words of a friend of mine, it +was as essential to carry the heart upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> the sleeve as the tongue in the +cheek. The founders of the Irish Agrarian movement had acted upon the +doctrine, contradicted by religious history, that ignorant men will not +work for an idea, or feel a political passion for its own sake, and that +you must find “a lever” as it was called, some practical grievance; and I +do not think that I am fantastic in believing that this faith in “levers,” +universal among revolutionaries, is but a result of that <ins class="correction" title="original: mechnical">mechanical</ins> +philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, which has, as Coleridge said, turned +the human mind into the quicksilver at the back of a mirror, though it +still permits a work of art to seem “a mirror dawdling along a road.”</p> + +<p>O’Leary had told me the story, not I think hitherto published. A prominent +Irish American, not long released from the prison where Fenianism had sent +him, cabled to Parnell:—“Take up Land Reform side by side with the +National Question and we will support you. See Kickham.” What had Parnell, +a landowner and a haughty man, to do with the peasant or the peasant’s +grievance? And he was indeed so ignorant of both that he asked Kickham, +novelist and Fenian leader, if he thought the people would take up a land +agitation, and Kickham answered:—“I am only afraid they would go to the +Gates of Hell for it;” and O’Leary’s comment was, “and so they have.”</p> + +<p>And so was founded an agitation where some men pretended to national +passion for the land’s sake; some men to agrarian passion for the nation’s +sake; some men to both for their own advancement, and this agitation at +the time I write of had but old men to serve it, who found themselves +after years of labour, some after years of imprisonment, derided for +unscrupulous rascals. Unscrupulous they certainly were,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> for they had +grown up amid make-believe, and now because their practical grievance was +too near settlement to blind and to excite, their make-believe was visible +to all. They were as eloquent as ever, they had never indeed shared +anything in common but the sentimental imagery, the poetical allusions +inherited from a still earlier generation, but were faced by a generation +that had turned against all oratory. I recall to my memory a member of +Parliament who had fought for Parnell’s policy after Parnell’s death, and +much against his own interest, who refused to attend a meeting my friends +had summoned at the declaration of the Boer War, because he thought +“England was in the right,” and yet a week later when the Dublin mob had +taken the matter up, advised Irish soldiers to shoot their officers and +join President Kruger. I recall another and more distinguished politician +who supported the Anti-Parnellite Party in his declining years, and in his +vigorous years had raked up some scandal about some Colonial Governor. A +friend of mine, after advising that Governor’s son to write his father’s +life, had remembered the scandal and called in her alarm upon the +politician; “I do beseech you,” he had said and with the greatest +earnestness, “to pay no attention whatever to anything I may have said +during an election.”</p> + +<p>Certain of these men, all public prepossessions laid aside, were excellent +talkers, genial and friendly men, with memories enriched by country +humour, and much half sentimental, half practical philosophy, and at +moments by poetical feeling that was not all an affectation, found very +moving by English sympathisers, of the tear and the smile in Erin’s eye. +They may even have had more sincerity than their sort elsewhere, but they +had inherited a cause that men<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> had died for, and they themselves had gone +to jail for it, and had so worn their hereditary martyrdom that they had +seemed for a time no common men, and now must pay the penalty. “I have +just told Mahaffy,” Wilde had said to me, “that it is a party of men of +genius,” and now John O’Leary, Taylor, and many obscure sincere men had +pulled them down; and yet, should what followed, judged by an eye that +thinks most of the individual soul, be counted as more clearly out of the +common? A movement first of poetry, then of sentimentality, and land +hunger, had struggled with, and as the nation passed into the second +period of all revolutions, had given way before a movement of abstraction +and hatred; and after some twenty years of the second period, though +abstraction and hatred have won their victory, there is no clear sign, of +a third, a <i>tertium quid</i>, and a reasonable frame of mind.</p> + +<p>Seeing that only the individual soul can attain to its spiritual opposite, +a nation in tumult must needs pass to and fro between mechanical +opposites, but one hopes always that those opposites may acquire sex and +engender. At moments when I have thought of the results of political +subjection upon Ireland I have remembered a story told me by Oscar Wilde +who professed to have found it in a book of magic, “if you carve a +Cerberus upon an emerald,” he said, “and put it in the oil of a lamp and +carry it into a room where your enemy is, two heads will come upon his +shoulders and devour one another.”</p> + +<p>Instead of sharing our traditional sentimental rhetoric with every man who +had found a practical grievance, whether one care a button for the +grievance or not, most of us were prosecuting heretics.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> Nationality was +like religion, few could be saved, and meditation had but one theme—the +perfect nation and its perfect service. “Public opinion,” said an +anonymous postcard sent to a friend of mine, “will compel you to learn +Irish,” and it certainly did compel many persons of settled habits to +change tailor and cloth. I believed myself dressed according to public +opinion, until a letter of apology from my tailor informed me that “It +takes such a long time getting Connemara cloth as it has to come all the +way from Scotland.”</p> + +<p>The Ireland of men’s affections must be, as it were, self-moving, +self-creating, though as yet (avoiding a conclusion that seemed hopeless) +but few added altogether separate from England politically. Men for the +moment were less concerned with the final achievement than with +independence from English parties and influence during the struggle for +it. We had no longer any leaders, abstractions were in their place; and +our Conventions, where O’Leary presided interrupting discussion without +the least consideration for rules of procedure when the moment came for +his cup of coffee, were dominated by little groups, the Gaelic +propagandists, though still very few, being the most impassioned, which +had the intensity and narrowness of theological sects.</p> + +<p>I had in my head a project to reconcile old and new that gave Maud Gonne +and myself many stirring conversations upon journeys by rail to meetings +in Scotland, in Dublin, or in the Midlands. Should we not persuade the +organizations in Dublin and in London, when the time drew near for the +unveiling of our statue, or even perhaps for the laying of its foundation +stone, to invite the leaders of Parnellite or Anti-Parnellite, of the new +group of Unionists who had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> almost changed sides in their indignation at +the over-taxation of Ireland, to lay their policy before our +Convention—could we not then propose and carry that the Convention sit +permanently, or appoint some Executive Committee to direct Irish policy +and report from time to time. The total withdrawal from Westminster had +been proposed in the ’Seventies, before the two devouring heads were of +equal strength, and now that the abstract head seemed the strongest, would +be proposed again, but the Convention could send them thither, not as an +independent power, but as its <ins class="correction" title="original: delgation">delegation</ins>, and only when, and for what +purpose the Convention might decide. I dreaded some wild Fenian movement, +and with literature perhaps more in my mind than politics, dreamed of that +Unity of Culture which might begin with some few men controlling some form +of administration. I began to talk my project over with various +organizers, who often interrupted their attention which was perhaps only +politeness, with some new jibe at Mr. Dillon or Mr. Redmond. I thought I +had Maud Gonne’s support, but when I overheard her conversation, she +commonly urged the entire withdrawal of the Irish Members, or if she did +refer to my scheme, it was to suggest the sending to England of eighty +ragged and drunken Dublin beggars or eighty pugilists “to be paid by +results.”</p> + +<p>She was the first who spoke publicly or semi-publicly of the withdrawal of +the Irish Members as a practical policy for our time, so far as I know, +but others may have been considering it. A nation in crisis becomes almost +like a single mind, or rather like those minds I have described that +become channels for parallel streams of thought, each stream taking the +colour of the mind it flows through. These<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> streams are not set moving, as +I think, through conversation or publication, but through “telepathic +contact” at some depth below that of normal consciousness, and it is only +years afterwards, when future events have shown the themes’ importance, +that we discover that they are different expressions of a common theme. +That self-moving, self-creating nation necessitated an Irish centre of +policy, and I planned a premature impossible peace between those two +devouring heads because I was sedentary and thoughtful; but Maud Gonne was +not sedentary, and I noticed that before some great event she did not +think but became exceedingly superstitous. Are not such as she aware, at +moments of great crisis, of some power beyond their own minds; or are they +like some good portrait painter of my father’s generation and only think +when the model is under their eye? Once upon the eve of some +demonstration, I found her with many caged larks and finches which she was +about to set free for the luck’s sake.</p> + +<p>I abandoned my plans on discovering that our young men, not yet educated +by Mr. Birrell’s university, would certainly shout down everyone they +disagreed with, and that their finance was so extravagant that we must +content ourselves with a foundation stone and an iron rail to protect it, +for there could never be a statue; while she carried out every plan she +made.</p> + +<p>Her power over crowds was at its height, and some portion of the power +came because she could still, even when pushing an abstract principle to +what seemed to me an absurdity, keep her own mind free, and so when men +and women did her bidding they did it not only because she was beautiful, +but because that beauty suggested joy and freedom. Besides there was an +element in her beauty that moved minds<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> full of old Gaelic stories and +poems, for she looked as though she lived in an ancient civilization where +all superiorities whether of the mind or the body were a part of public +ceremonial, were in some way the crowd’s creation, as the Pope entering +the Vatican is the crowd’s creation. Her beauty, backed by her great +stature, could instantly affect an assembly, and not as often with our +stage beauties because obvious and florid, for it was incredibly +distinguished, and if—as must be that it might seem that assembly’s very +self, fused, unified, and solitary—her face, like the face of some Greek +statue, showed little thought, her whole body seemed a master work of long +labouring thought, as though a Scopas had measured and calculated, +consorted with Egyptian sages, and mathematicians out of Babylon, that he +might outface even Artemisia’s sepulchral image with a living norm.</p> + +<p>But in that ancient civilization abstract thought scarce existed, while +she but rose partially and for a moment out of raging abstraction; and for +that reason, as I have known another woman do, she hated her own beauty, +not its effect upon others, but its image in the mirror. Beauty is from +the antithetical self, and a woman can scarce but hate it, for not only +does it demand a painful daily service, but it calls for the denial or the +dissolution of the self.</p> + +<p class="poem">“How many centuries spent<br /> +The sedentary soul,<br /> +In toil of measurement<br /> +Beyond eagle or mole<br /> +Beyond hearing and seeing<br /> +Or Archimedes’ guess,<br /> +To raise into being<br /> +That loveliness?”</p> + +<p> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span></p> +<h3>V</h3> + +<p>On the morning of the great procession, the greatest in living memory, the +Parnellite and Anti-Parnellite members of Parliament, huddled together +like cows in a storm, gather behind our carriage, and I hear John Redmond +say to certain of his late enemies, “I went up nearer the head of the +Procession, but one of the Marshals said, ‘This is not your place, Mr +Redmond; your place is further back.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I will stay here.’ +‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I will lead you back.’” Later on I can see by +the pushing and shouldering of a delegate from South Africa how important +place and <ins class="correction" title="original: precedure">procedure</ins> is; and noticing that Maud Gonne is cheered +everywhere, and that the Irish Members march through street after street +without welcome, I wonder if their enemies have not intended their +humiliation.</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></p> + +<p>We are at the Mansion House Banquet, and John Dillon is making the first +speech he has made before a popular Dublin audience since the death of +Parnell; and I have several times to keep my London delegates from +interrupting. Dillon is very nervous, and as I watch him the abstract +passion begins to rise within me, and I am almost overpowered by an +instinct of cruelty; I long to cry out, “Had Zimri peace who slew his +master?”</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></p> + +<p>Is our Foundation Stone still unlaid when the more important streets are +decorated for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee?</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>I find Maud Gonne at her hotel talking to a young working-man who looks +very melancholy. She had offered to speak at one of the regular meetings +of his socialist society about Queen Victoria, and he has summoned what +will be a great meeting in the open air. She has refused to speak, and he +says that her refusal means his ruin, as nobody will ever believe that he +had any promise at all. When he has left without complaint or anger, she +gives me very cogent reasons against the open air meeting, but I can think +of nothing but the young man and his look of melancholy. He has left his +address, and presently at my persuasion, she drives to his tenement, where +she finds him and his wife and children crowded into a very small +space—perhaps there was only one room—and, moved by the sight, promises +to speak. The young man is James Connolly who, with Padraic Pearce, is to +make the Insurrection of 1916 and to be executed.</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></p> + +<p>The meeting is held in College Green and is very crowded, and Maud Gonne +speaks, I think, standing upon a chair. In front of her is an old woman +with a miniature of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, which she waves in her +excitement, crying out, “I was in it before she was born.” Maud Gonne +tells how that morning she had gone to lay a wreath upon a martyr’s tomb +at St. Michael’s Church, for it is the one day in the year when such +wreaths are laid, but has been refused admission because it is the +Jubilee. Then she pauses, and after that her voice rises to a cry, “Must +the graves of our dead go undecorated because Victoria has her Jubilee?”</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>It is eight or nine at night, and she and I have come from the City Hall, +where the Convention has been sitting, that we may walk to the National +Club in Rutland Square, and we find a great crowd in the street, who +surround us and accompany us. Presently I hear a sound of breaking glass, +the crowd has begun to stone the windows of decorated houses, and when I +try to speak that I may restore order, I discover that I have lost my +voice through much speaking at the Convention. I can only whisper and +gesticulate, and as I am thus freed from responsibility, I share the +emotion of the crowd, and perhaps even feel as they feel when the glass +crashes. Maud Gonne has a look of exultation as she walks with her +laughing head thrown back.</p> + +<p>Later that night Connolly carries in procession a coffin with the words +“British Empire” upon it, and police and mob fight for its ownership, and +at last that the police may not capture, it is thrown into the Liffey. And +there are fights between police and window-breakers, and I read in the +morning papers that many have been wounded; some two hundred heads have +been dressed at the hospitals; an old woman killed by baton blows, or +perhaps trampled under the feet of the crowd; and that two thousand pounds +worth of decorated plate glass windows have been broken. I count the links +in the chain of responsibility, run them across my fingers, and wonder if +any link there is from my workshop.</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></p> + +<p>Queen Victoria visits the city, and Dublin Unionists have gathered +together from all Ireland some twelve thousand children and built for them +a grandstand, and bought them sweets and buns that they may<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> cheer. A week +later Maud Gonne marches forty thousand children through the streets of +Dublin, and in a field beyond Drumcondra, and in the presence of a Priest +of their Church, they swear to cherish towards England until the freedom +of Ireland has been won, an undying enmity.</p> + +<p>How many of these children will carry bomb or rifle when a little under or +a little over thirty?</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></p> + +<p>Feeling is still running high between the Dublin and London organizations, +for a London doctor, my fellow-delegate, has called a little after +breakfast to say he was condemned to death by a certain secret society the +night before. He is very angry, though it does not seem that his life is +in danger, for the insult is beyond endurance.</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></p> + +<p>We arrive at Chancery Lane for our Committee meeting, but it is Derby Day, +and certain men who have arranged a boxing match are in possession of our +rooms. We adjourn to a neighbouring public-house where there are little +pannelled cubicles as in an old-fashioned eating house, that we may direct +the secretary how to answer that week’s letters. We are much interrupted +by a committee man who has been to the Derby, and now, half lying on the +table, keeps repeating, “I know what you all think. Let us hand on the +torch, you think, let us hand it on to our children, but I say no! I say, +let us order an immediate rising.”</p> + +<p>Presently one of the boxers arrives, sent up to apologise it seems, and to +explain that we had not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> been recognized. He begins his apology but stops, +and for a moment fixes upon us a meditative critical eye. “No, I will +not,” he cries. “What do I care for anyone now but Venus and Adonis and +the other Planets of Heaven.”</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></p> + +<p>French sympathisers have been brought to see the old buildings in Galway, +and with the towns of Southern France in their mind’s eye, are not in the +least moved. The greater number are in a small crowded hotel. Presently an +acquaintance of mine, peeping, while it is still broad day, from his +bedroom window, sees the proprietress of the hotel near the hall door, and +in the road a serious-minded, quixotic Dublin barrister, with a little boy +who carries from a stick over his shoulder twelve chamber pots. He hears +one angry, and one soft pleading explanatory voice, “But, Madam, I feel +certain that at the unexpected arrival of so many guests, so many guests +of the Nation, I may say, you must have found yourself unprepared.” “Never +have I been so insulted.” “Madam, I am thinking of the honour of my +country.”</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></p> + +<p>I am at Maud Gonne’s hotel, and an Italian sympathiser Cipriani, the +friend of Garibaldi, is there, and though an old man now, he is the +handsomest man I have ever seen. I am telling a ghost story in English at +one end of the room, and he is talking politics in French at the other. +Somebody says, “Yeats believes in ghosts,” and Cipriani interrupts for a +moment his impassioned declamation to say in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> English, and with a +magnificent movement and intonation, “As for me, I believe in nothing but +cannon.”</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></p> + +<p>I call at the office of the Dublin organization in Westmoreland Street, +and find the front door open, and the office door open, and though the +office is empty the cupboard door open and eighteen pounds in gold upon +the shelf.</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></p> + +<p>At a London Committee meeting I notice a middle-aged man who slips into +the room for a moment, whispers something to the secretary, lays three or +four shillings on a table, and slips out. I am told that he is an Irish +board-school teacher who, in early life, took an oath neither to drink nor +smoke, but to contribute the amount so saved weekly to the Irish Cause.</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>VI</h3> + +<p>A few months before I was drawn into politics, I made a friendship that +was to make possible that old project of an Irish Theatre. Arthur Symons +and I were staying at Tillyra Castle in County Galway with Mr. Edward +Martyn, when Lady Gregory, whom I had met once in London for a few minutes +drove over, and after Symon’s return to London I stayed at her house, +which is some four miles from Tillyra. I was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> in poor health, the strain +of youth had been greater than it commonly is, even with imaginative men, +who must always, I think, find youth bitter, and I had lost myself besides +as I had done periodically for years, upon <i>Hodos Camelionis</i>. The first +time was in my eighteenth or nineteenth years, when I tried to create a +more multitudinous dramatic form, and now I had got there through a novel +that I could neither write nor cease to write which had <i>Hodos Camelionis</i> +for its theme. My chief person was to see all the modern visionary sects +pass before his bewildered eyes, as Flaubert’s St. Anthony saw the +Christian sects, and I was as helpless to create artistic, as my chief +person to create philosophic order. It was not that I do not love order, +or that I lack capacity for it, but that—and not in the arts and in +thought only—I outrun my strength. It is not so much that I choose too +many elements, as that the possible unities themselves seem without +number, like those angels, that in Henry More’s paraphrase of the +Schoolman’s problem, dance spurred and booted upon the point of a needle. +Perhaps fifty years ago I had been in less trouble, but what can one do +when the age itself has come to <i>Hodos Camelionis</i>?</p> + +<p>Lady Gregory seeing that I was ill brought me from cottage to cottage to +gather folk-belief, tales of the fairies, and the like, and wrote down +herself what we had gathered, considering that this work, in which one let +others talk, and walked about the fields so much, would lie, to use a +country phrase, “Very light upon the mind.” She asked me to return there +the next year, and for years to come I was to spend my summers at her +house. When I was in good health again, I found myself indolent, partly +perhaps because I was affrighted by that impossible novel, and asked<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> her +to send me to my work every day at eleven, and at some other hour to my +letters, rating me with idleness if need be, and I doubt if I should have +done much with my life but for her firmness and her care. After a time, +though not very quickly, I recovered tolerable industry, though it has +only been of late years that I have found it possible to face an hour’s +verse without a preliminary struggle and much putting off.</p> + +<p>Certain woods at Sligo, the woods above Dooney Rock and those above the +waterfall at Ben Bulben, though I shall never perhaps walk there again, +are so deep in my affections that I dream about them at night; and yet the +woods at Coole, though they do not come into my dream are so much more +knitted to my thought, that when I am dead they will have, I am persuaded, +my longest visit. When we are dead, according to my belief, we live our +lives backward for a certain number of years, treading the paths that we +have trodden, growing young again, even childish again, till some attain +an innocence that is no longer a mere accident of nature, but the human +intellect’s crowning achievement. It was at Coole that the first few +simple thoughts that now, grown complex, through their contact with other +thoughts, explain the world, came to me from beyond my own mind. I +practised meditations, and these, as I think, so affected my sleep that I +began to have dreams that differed from ordinary dreams in seeming to take +place amid brilliant light, and by their invariable coherence, and certain +half-dreams, if I can call them so, between sleep and waking. I have +noticed that such experiences come to me most often amid distraction, at +some time that seems of all times the least fitting, as though it were +necessary for the exterior<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> mind to be engaged elsewhere, and it was +during 1897 and 1898, when I was always just arriving from or just setting +out to some political meeting, that the first dreams came. I was crossing +a little stream near Inchy Wood and actually in the middle of a stride +from bank to bank, when an emotion never experienced before swept down +upon me. I said, “That is what the devout Christian feels, that is how he +surrenders his will to the will of God.” I felt an extreme surprise for my +whole imagination was preoccupied with the pagan mythology of ancient +Ireland, I was marking in red ink upon a large map, every sacred mountain. +The next morning I awoke near dawn, to hear a voice saying, “The love of +God is infinite for every human soul because every human soul is unique, +no other can satisfy the same need in God.”</p> + +<p>Lady Gregory and I had heard many tales of changelings, grown men and +women as well as children, who as the people believe are taken by the +fairies, some spirit or inanimate object bewitched into their likeness +remaining in their stead, and I constantly asked myself what reality there +could be in these tales, often supported by so much testimony. I woke one +night to find myself lying upon my back with all my limbs rigid, and to +hear a ceremonial measured voice which did not seem to be mine speaking +through my lips, “We make an image of him who sleeps,” it said, “and it is +not him who sleeps, and we call it Emmanuel.” After many years that +thought, others often found as strangely being added to it, became the +thought of the Mask, which I have used in these memoirs to explain men’s +characters. A few months ago at Oxford I was asking myself why it should +be “An image of him who sleeps,” and took<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> down from the shelf not knowing +why I was doing so, a book which I had never read, Burkitt’s <i>Early +Eastern Christianity</i>, and opened it at random. My eyes lit upon a passage +from a Gnostic Hymn telling how a certain King’s son being exiled, slept +in Egypt, a symbol of the natural state, and while he slept an Angel +brought him a royal mantle; and at the bottom of the page I found a +footnote saying that the word mantle did not represent the meaning +properly for that which the Angel gave had the exile’s own form and +likeness. I did not, however, find in the Gnostic Hymn my other thought +that Egypt and that which the Mask represents are antithetical. That, I +think, became clear, though I had had some premonitions when a countryman +told Lady Gregory and myself that he had heard the crying of new-dropped +lambs in November—Spring in the world of Fairy, being November with us.</p> + +<p class="center"><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span><span class="spacer">·</span></p> + +<p>On the sea coast at Duras, a few miles from Coole, an old French Count, +Florimond de Bastero, lived for certain months in every year. Lady Gregory +and I talked over my project of an Irish Theatre looking out upon the lawn +of his house, watching a large flock of ducks that was always gathered for +his arrival from Paris, and that would be a very small flock, if indeed it +were a flock at all, when he set out for Rome in the autumn. I told her +that I had given up my project because it was impossible to get the few +pounds necessary for a start in little halls, and she promised to collect +or give the money necessary. That was her first great service to the Irish +intellectual movement. She reminded me the other day that when she first +asked me what she could do to help our movement I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> suggested nothing; and, +certainly, no more foresaw her genius that I foresaw that of John Synge, +nor had she herself foreseen it. Our theatre had been established before +she wrote or had any ambition to write, and yet her little comedies have +merriment and beauty, an unusual combination, and those two volumes where +the Irish heroic tales are arranged and translated in an English so simple +and so noble, may do more than other books to deepen Irish imagination. +They contain our ancient literature, are something better than our +<i>Mabinogion</i>, are almost our <i>Morte D’Arthur</i>. It is more fitting, +however, that in a book of memoirs I should speak of her personal +influence, and especially as no witness is likely to arise better +qualified to speak. If that influence were lacking, Ireland would be +greatly impoverished, so much has been planned out in the library, or +among the woods at Coole; for it was there that John Shawe Taylor found +the independence from class and family that made him summon the conference +between landlord and tenant, that brought land purchase, and it was there +that Hugh Lane formed those Irish ambitions that led to his scattering +many thousands, and gathering much ingratitude; and where, but for that +conversation at Florimond de Bastero’s, had been the genius of Synge?</p> + +<p>I have written these words instead of leaving all to posterity, and though +my friend’s ear seems indifferent to praise or blame, that young men to +whom recent events are often more obscure than those long past, may learn +what debts they owe and to what creditor.</p> + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<p class="center">END.</p> + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<p class="center">PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY<br />THE DUNEDIN PRESS LIMITED, EDINBURGH</p> + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<p><b>Transcriber’s Notes:</b></p> + +<p>Other than the corrections noted by hover information, inconsistencies in +spelling and hyphenation have been retained from the original.</p> + +<p>Periods after “Mr” and “Mrs” are used inconsistently in the original text.</p> + + + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's The Trembling of the Veil, by William Butler Yeats + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL *** + +***** This file should be named 33505-h.htm or 33505-h.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/3/3/5/0/33505/ + +Produced by Brian Foley and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was +produced from images generously made available by The +Internet Archive/American Libraries.) + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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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 + + +Title: The Trembling of the Veil + +Author: William Butler Yeats + +Release Date: August 23, 2010 [EBook #33505] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL *** + + + + +Produced by Brian Foley and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was +produced from images generously made available by The +Internet Archive/American Libraries.) + + + + + + + + + +_THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL_ + + + + + PRIVATELY PRINTED BOOKS + + (_Uniform with this Volume_) + + THE STORY-TELLER'S HOLIDAY (_George Moore_) _July 1918_ + + AVOWALS (_George Moore_) _September 1919_ + + ESTHER WATERS (_George Moore_) _October 1920_ + + THE COMING OF GABRIELLE (_George Moore_) _December 1920_ + + HELOISE AND ABELARD (_George Moore_) _February 1921_ + + NINE TALES FROM "LES CONTES DROLATIQUES" OF BALZAC + (_Translated by Robert Crawford_) _November 1921_ + + A PORTRAIT OF GEORGE MOORE IN A STUDY OF HIS WORK + (_John Freeman_) _May 1922_ + + THE CAULDRON OF ANNWN (_Thomas Evelyn Ellis_) _June 1922_ + + + + +[Illustration: _Emery Walker Ph.oc. From a picture by Charles Shannon_] + + + + + THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL + + + By W. B. YEATS + + + LONDON + PRIVATELY PRINTED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY BY + T. WERNER LAURIE, LTD. + 1922 + + + + + _To_ + JOHN QUINN + _my friend and helper, + and friend and helper of certain people + mentioned in this book_. + + + GIFT + + PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN + + + + + THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL + + _This edition consists of one thousand copies numbered and signed._ + + _This is No._ 24 + + + + +PREFACE + + +_I have found in an old diary a quotation from Stephane Mallarme, saying +that his epoch was troubled by the trembling of the veil of the Temple. As +those words were still true, during the years of my life described in this +book, I have chosen The Trembling of the Veil for its title._ + +_Except in one or two trivial details, where I have the warrant of old +friendship, I have not, without permission, quoted conversation or +described occurrence from the private life of named or recognisable +persons. I have not felt my freedom abated, for most of the friends of my +youth are dead and over the dead I have an historian's rights. They were +artists and writers and certain among them men of genius, and the life of +a man of genius, because of his greater sincerity, is often an experiment +that needs analysis and record. At least my generation so valued +personality that it thought so. I have said all the good I know and all +the evil: I have kept nothing back necessary to understanding._ + +_W. B. YEATS._ + + + _May, 1922. + Thoor Ballylee._ + + + + +CONTENTS + + + PAGE + + BOOK I FOUR YEARS 1887-1891 3 + + BOOK II IRELAND AFTER THE FALL OF PARNELL 83 + + BOOK III HODOS CAMELIONIS 135 + + BOOK IV THE TRAGIC GENERATION 157 + + BOOK V THE STIRRING OF THE BONES 225 + + + + +BOOK I FOUR YEARS--1887-1891 + + + + +THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL + + + + +_FOUR YEARS_ 1887-1891 + + +I + +At the end of the 'eighties my father and mother, my brother and sisters +and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were settled in Bedford Park in +a red-brick house with several mantelpieces of wood, copied from marble +mantelpieces designed by the brothers Adam, a balcony and a little garden +shadowed by a great horse-chestnut tree. Years before we had lived there, +when the crooked ostentatiously picturesque streets with great trees +casting great shadows had been a new enthusiasm: the Pre-Raphaelite +movement at last affecting life. But now exaggerated criticism had taken +the place of enthusiasm, the tiled roofs, the first in modern London, were +said to leak, which they did not, and the drains to be bad, though that +was no longer true; and I imagine that houses were cheap. I remember +feeling disappointed because the co-operative stores, with their little +seventeenth century panes, had lost the romance they had when I had passed +them still unfinished on my way to school; and because the public house, +called The Tabard after Chaucer's Inn, was so plainly a common public +house; and because the great sign of a trumpeter designed by Rooke, the +Pre-Raphaelite artist, had been freshened by some inferior hand. The big +red-brick church had never pleased me, and I was accustomed, when I saw +the wooden balustrade that ran along the slanting edge of the roof where +nobody ever walked or could walk, to remember the opinion of some +architect friend of my father's, that it had been put there to keep the +birds from falling off. Still, however, it had some village characters and +helped us to feel not wholly lost in the metropolis. I no longer went to +church as a regular habit, but go I sometimes did, for one Sunday morning +I saw these words painted on a board in the porch: "The congregation are +requested to kneel during prayers; the kneelers are afterwards to be hung +upon pegs provided for the purpose." In front of every seat hung a little +cushion and these cushions were called "kneelers." Presently the joke ran +through the community, where there were many artists who considered +religion at best an unimportant accessory to good architecture and who +disliked that particular church. + + +II + +I could not understand where the charm had gone that I had felt, when as a +school-boy of twelve or thirteen I had played among the unfinished houses, +once leaving the marks of my two hands, blacked by a fall among some +paint, upon a white balustrade. Sometimes I thought it was because these +were real houses, while my play had been among toy-houses some day to be +inhabited by imaginary people full of the happiness that one can see in +picture books. + +I was in all things Pre-Raphaelite. When I was fifteen or sixteen my +father had told me about Rossetti and Blake and given me their poetry to +read; and once at Liverpool on my way to Sligo I had seen Dante's Dream in +the gallery there, a picture painted when Rossetti had lost his dramatic +power and to-day not very pleasing to me, and its colour, its people, its +romantic architecture had blotted all other pictures away. It was a +perpetual bewilderment that my father, who had begun life as a +Pre-Raphaelite painter, now painted portraits of the first comer, children +selling newspapers, or a consumptive girl with a basket of fish upon her +head, and that when, moved perhaps by some memory of his youth, he chose +some theme from poetic tradition, he would soon weary and leave it +unfinished. I had seen the change coming bit by bit and its defence +elaborated by young men fresh from the Paris art-schools. "We must paint +what is in front of us," or "A man must be of his own time," they would +say, and if I spoke of Blake or Rossetti they would point out his bad +drawing and tell me to admire Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage. Then, too, +they were very ignorant men; they read nothing, for nothing mattered but +"knowing how to paint," being in reaction against a generation that seemed +to have wasted its time upon so many things. I thought myself alone in +hating these young men, now indeed getting towards middle life, their +contempt for the past, their monopoly of the future, but in a few months I +was to discover others of my own age, who thought as I did, for it is not +true that youth looks before it with the mechanical gaze of a well-drilled +soldier. Its quarrel is not with the past, but with the present, where its +elders are so obviously powerful and no cause seems lost if it seem to +threaten that power. Does cultivated youth ever really love the future, +where the eye can discover no persecuted Royalty hidden among oak leaves, +though from it certainly does come so much proletarian rhetoric? + +I was unlike others of my generation in one thing only. I am very +religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the +simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion, almost +an infallible church out of poetic tradition: a fardel of stories, and of +personages, and of emotions, inseparable from their first expression, +passed on from generation to generation by poets and painters with some +help from philosophers and theologians. I wished for a world, where I +could discover this tradition perpetually, and not in pictures and in +poems only, but in tiles round the chimney-piece and in the hangings that +kept out the draught. I had even created a dogma: "Because those imaginary +people are created out of the deepest instinct of man, to be his measure +and his norm, whatever I can imagine those mouths speaking may be the +nearest I can go to truth." When I listened they seemed always to speak of +one thing only: they, their loves, every incident of their lives, were +steeped in the supernatural. Could even Titian's "Ariosto" that I loved +beyond other portraits have its grave look, as if waiting for some perfect +final event, if the painters before Titian had not learned portraiture, +while painting into the corner of compositions full of saints and +Madonnas, their kneeling patrons? At seventeen years old I was already an +old-fashioned brass cannon full of shot, and nothing had kept me from +going off but a doubt as to my capacity to shoot straight. + + +III + +I was not an industrious student and knew only what I had found by +accident and I found nothing I cared for after Titian, and Titian I knew +from an imitation of his _Supper of Emmaus_ in Dublin, till Blake and the +Pre-Raphaelites; and among my father's friends were no Pre-Raphaelites. +Some indeed had come to Bedford Park in the enthusiasm of the first +building and others to be near those that had. There was Todhunter, a +well-off man who had bought my father's pictures while my father was still +Pre-Raphaelite; once a Dublin doctor he was now a poet and a writer of +poetical plays; a tall, sallow, lank, melancholy man, a good scholar and a +good intellect; and with him my father carried on a warm exasperated +friendship, fed I think by old memories and wasted by quarrels over +matters of opinion. Of all the survivors he was the most dejected and the +least estranged, and I remember encouraging him, with a sense of worship +shared, to buy a very expensive carpet designed by Morris. He displayed it +without strong liking and would have agreed had there been any to find +fault. If he had liked anything strongly he might have been a famous man, +for a few years later he was to write, under some casual patriotic +impulse, certain excellent verses now in all Irish anthologies; but with +him every book was a new planting, and not a new bud on an old bough. He +had I think no peace in himself. But my father's chief friend was York +Powell, a famous Oxford Professor of history, a broad-built, broad-headed, +brown-bearded man clothed in heavy blue cloth and looking, but for his +glasses and the dim sight of a student, like some captain in the merchant +service. One often passed with pleasure from Todhunter's company to that +of one who was almost ostentatiously at peace. He cared nothing for +philosophy, nothing for economics, nothing for the policy of nations; for +history, as he saw it, was a memory of men who were amusing or exciting to +think about. He impressed all who met him, and seemed to some a man of +genius, but he had not enough ambition to shape his thought, or conviction +to give rhythm to his style and remained always a poor writer. I was too +full of unfinished speculations and premature convictions to value rightly +his conversation, informed by a vast erudition, which would give itself to +every casual association of speech and company, precisely because he had +neither cause nor design. My father, however, found Powell's concrete +narrative manner in talk a necessary completion of his own, and when I +asked him in a letter many years later where he got his philosophy replied +"from York Powell" and thereon added, no doubt remembering that Powell was +without ideas, "by looking at him." Then there was a good listener, a +painter in whose hall hung a big picture painted in his student days of +Ulysses sailing home from the Phaeacian court, an orange and a skin of +wine at his side, blue mountains towering behind; but who lived by drawing +domestic scenes and lovers' meetings for a weekly magazine that had an +immense circulation among the imperfectly educated. To escape the boredom +of work, which he never turned to but under pressure of necessity and +usually late at night, with the publisher's messenger in the hall, he had +half-filled his studio with mechanical toys, of his own invention, and +perpetually increased their number. A model railway train at intervals +puffed its way along the walls, passing several railway stations and +signal boxes; and on the floor lay a camp with attacking and defending +soldiers and a fortification that blew up when the attackers fired a pea +through a certain window; while a large model of a Thames barge hung from +the ceiling. Opposite our house lived an old artist who worked also for +the illustrated papers for a living, but painted landscapes for his +pleasure, and of him I remember nothing except that he had outlived +ambition, was a good listener, and that my father explained his gaunt +appearance by his descent from Pocahontas. If all these men were a little +like becalmed ships, there was certainly one man whose sails were full. +Three or four doors off on our side of the road lived a decorative artist +in all the naive confidence of popular ideals and the public approval. He +was our daily comedy. "I myself and Sir Frederick Leighton are the +greatest decorative artists of the age," was among his sayings, and a +great Lych-gate, bought from some country church-yard, reared its thatched +roof, meant to shelter bearers and coffin, above the entrance to his front +garden to show that he at any rate knew nothing of discouragement. In this +fairly numerous company--there were others though no other face rises +before me--my father and York Powell found listeners for a conversation +that had no special loyalties, or antagonisms; while I could only talk +upon set topics, being in the heat of my youth, and the topics that filled +me with excitement were never spoken of. + + +IV + +Bedford Park had a red brick clubhouse with a little theatre that began to +stir my imagination. I persuaded Todhunter to write a pastoral play and +have it performed there. + +A couple of years before, while we were still in Dublin, he had given at +Hengler's Circus, remodelled as a Greek Theatre, a most expensive +performance of his _Helena of Troas_, an oratorical Swinburnian play which +I had thought as unactable as it was unreadable. Since I was seventeen I +had constantly tested my own ambition with Keats's praise of him who "left +great verses to a little clan," so it was but natural that I should spend +an evening persuading him that we had nothing to do with the great public, +that it should be a point of honour to be content with our own little +public, that he should write of shepherds and shepherdesses because people +would expect them to talk poetry and move without melodrama. He wrote his +_Sicilian Idyll_, which I have not looked at for thirty years, and never +rated very high as poetry, and had the one unmistakable success of his +life. The little theatre was full for twice the number of performances +intended, for artists, men of letters and students had come from all over +London. + +I made through these performances a close friend and a discovery that was +to influence my life. Todhunter had engaged several professional actors +with a little reputation, but had given the chief woman's part to Florence +Farr, who had qualities no contemporary professional practice could have +increased, the chief man's part to an amateur, Heron Allen, solicitor, +fiddler and popular writer on palmistry. Heron Allen and Florence Farr +read poetry for their pleasure. While they were upon the stage no one else +could hold an eye or an ear. Their speech was music, the poetry acquired a +nobility, a passionate austerity that made it seem akin for certain +moments to the great poetry of the world. Heron Allen, who had never +spoken in public before except to lecture upon the violin, had the wisdom +to reduce his acting to a series of poses, to be the stately shepherd with +not more gesture than was needed to "twitch his mantle blue" and to let +his grace be foil to Florence Farr's more impassioned delivery. When they +closed their mouths, and some other player opened his, breaking up the +verse to make it conversational, jerking his body or his arms that he +might seem no austere poetical image but very man, I listened in raging +hatred. I kept my seat with difficulty, I searched my memory for insulting +phrases, I even muttered them to myself that the people about might hear. +I had discovered for the first time that in the performance of all drama +that depends for its effect upon beauty of language, poetical culture may +be more important than professional experience. + +Florence Farr lived in lodgings some twenty minutes' walk away at Brook +Green, and I was soon a constant caller, talking over plays that I would +some day write her. She had three great gifts, a tranquil beauty like that +of Demeter's image near the British Museum reading room door, and an +incomparable sense of rhythm and a beautiful voice, the seeming natural +expression of the image. And yet there was scarce another gift that she +did not value above those three. We all have our simplifying image, our +genius, and such hard burden does it lay upon us that, but for the praise +of others, we would deride it and hunt it away. She could only express +hers through an unfashionable art, an art that has scarce existed since +the seventeenth century, and so could only earn unimportant occasional +praise. She would dress without care or calculation as if to hide her +beauty and seem contemptuous of its power. If a man fell in love with her +she would notice that she had seen just that movement upon the stage or +had heard just that intonation and all seemed unreal. If she read out some +poem in English or in French all was passion, all a traditional splendour, +but she spoke of actual things with a cold wit or under the strain of +paradox. Wit and paradox alike sought to pull down whatever had tradition +or passion and she was soon to spend her days in the British Museum +reading room and become erudite in many heterogeneous studies moved by an +insatiable, destroying curiosity. I formed with her an enduring friendship +that was an enduring exasperation--"why do you play the part with a bent +back and a squeak in the voice? How can you be a character actor, you who +hate all our life, you who belong to a life that is a vision?" But +argument was no use, and some Nurse in Euripedes must be played with all +an old woman's infirmities and not as I would have it, with all a Sybil's +majesty, because "it is no use doing what nobody wants," or because she +would show that she "could do what the others did." + +I used in my rage to compare her thoughts, when her worst mood was upon +her, to a game called Spillikens which I had seen played in my childhood +with little pieces of bone that you had to draw out with a hook from a +bundle of like pieces. A bundle of bones instead of Demeter's golden +sheaf! Her sitting room at the Brook Green lodging house was soon a +reflection of her mind, the walls covered with musical instruments, pieces +of oriental drapery, and Egyptian gods and goddesses painted by herself in +the British Museum. + + +V + +Presently a hansom drove up to our door at Bedford Park with Miss Maud +Gonne, who brought an introduction to my father from old John O'Leary, the +Fenian leader. She vexed my father by praise of war, war for its own sake, +not as the creator of certain virtues but as if there were some virtue in +excitement itself. I supported her against my father, which vexed him the +more, though he might have understood that, apart from the fact that +Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage were somehow involved, a man so young as +I could not have differed from a woman so beautiful and so young. To-day, +with her great height and the unchangeable lineaments of her form, she +looks the Sybil I would have had played by Florence Farr, but in that day +she seemed a classical impersonation of the Spring, the Virgilian +commendation "She walks like a goddess" made for her alone. Her complexion +was luminous, like that of apple blossom through which the light falls, +and I remember her standing that first day by a great heap of such +blossoms in the window. In the next few years I saw her always when she +passed to and fro between Dublin and Paris, surrounded, no matter how +rapid her journey and how brief her stay at either end of it, by cages +full of birds, canaries, finches of all kinds, dogs, a parrot, and once a +full-grown hawk from Donegal. Once when I saw her to her railway carriage +I noticed how the cages obstructed wraps and cushions and wondered what +her fellow travellers would say, but the carriage remained empty. It was +years before I could see into the mind that lay hidden under so much +beauty and so much energy. + + +VI + +Some quarter of an hour's walk from Bedford Park, out on the high road to +Richmond, lived W. E. Henley, and I, like many others, began under him my +education. His portrait, a lithograph by Rothenstein, hangs over my +mantelpiece among portraits of other friends. He is drawn standing, but +because doubtless of his crippled legs he leans forward, resting his +elbows upon some slightly suggested object--a table or a window-sill. His +heavy figure and powerful head, the disordered hair standing upright, his +short irregular beard and moustache, his lined and wrinkled face, his eyes +steadily fixed upon some object, in complete confidence and +self-possession, and yet as in half-broken reverie, all are there exactly +as I remember him. I have seen other portraits and they too show him +exactly as I remember him, as though he had but one appearance and that +seen fully at the first glance and by all alike. He was most human--human +I used to say like one of Shakespeare's characters--and yet pressed and +pummelled, as it were, into a single attitude, almost into a gesture and a +speech as by some overwhelming situation. I disagreed with him about +everything, but I admired him beyond words. With the exception of some +early poems founded upon old French models I disliked his poetry, mainly +because he wrote in _vers libre_, which I associated with Tyndall and +Huxley, and Bastien-Lepage's clownish peasant staring with vacant eyes at +her great boots; and filled it with unimpassioned description of an +hospital ward where his leg had been amputated. I wanted the strongest +passions, passions that had nothing to do with observation, sung in +metrical forms that seemed old enough to be sung by men half-asleep or +riding upon a journey. Furthermore, Pre-Raphaelism affected him as some +people are affected by a cat in the room, and though he professed himself +at our first meeting without political interests or convictions, he soon +grew into a violent unionist and imperialist. I used to say when I spoke +of his poems: "He is like a great actor with a bad part; yet who would +look at Hamlet in the grave scene if Salvini played the grave-digger?" and +I might so have explained much that he said and did. I meant that he was +like a great actor of passion--character-acting meant nothing to me for +many years--and an actor of passion will display some one quality of soul, +personified again and again, just as a great poetical painter, Titian, +Botticelli, Rossetti, may depend for his greatness upon a type of beauty +which presently we call by his name. Irving, the last of the sort on the +English stage, and in modern England and France it is the rarest sort, +never moved me but in the expression of intellectual pride and though I +saw Salvini but once I am convinced that his genius was a kind of animal +nobility. Henley, half inarticulate--"I am very costive," he would +say--beset with personal quarrels, built up an image of power and +magnanimity till it became, at moments, when seen as it were by lightning, +his true self. Half his opinions were the contrivance of a +sub-consciousness that sought always to bring life to the dramatic crisis +and expression to that point of artifice where the true self could find +its tongue. Without opponents there had been no drama, and in his youth +Ruskinism and Pre-Raphaelitism, for he was of my father's generation, were +the only possible opponents. How could one resent his prejudice when, that +he himself might play a worthy part, he must find beyond the common rout, +whom he derided and flouted daily, opponents he could imagine moulded like +himself? Once he said to me in the height of his imperial propaganda, +"Tell those young men in Ireland that this great thing must go on. They +say Ireland is not fit for self-government, but that is nonsense. It is as +fit as any other European country, but we cannot grant it." And then he +spoke of his desire to found and edit a Dublin newspaper. It would have +expounded the Gaelic propaganda then beginning, though Dr Hyde had, as +yet, no league, our old stories, our modern literature--everything that +did not demand any shred or patch of government. He dreamed of a tyranny, +but it was that of Cosimo de' Medici. + + +VII + +We gathered on Sunday evenings in two rooms, with folding doors between, +and hung, I think, with photographs from Dutch masters, and in one room +there was always, I think, a table with cold meat. I can recall but one +elderly man--Dunn his name was--rather silent and full of good sense, an +old friend of Henley's. We were young men, none as yet established in his +own, or in the world's opinion, and Henley was our leader and our +confidant. One evening, I found him alone amused and exasperated: "Young +A----," he cried "has just been round to ask my advice. Would I think it a +wise thing if he bolted with Mrs B----? 'Have you quite determined to do +it?' I asked him. 'Quite.' 'Well,' I said, 'in that case I refuse to give +you any advice.'" Mrs B---- was a beautiful talented woman, who, as the +Welsh Triad said of Guinievere, "was much given to being carried off." I +think we listened to him, and often obeyed him, partly because he was +quite plainly not upon the side of our parents. We might have a different +ground of quarrel, but the result seemed more important than the ground, +and his confident manner and speech made us believe, perhaps for the first +time, in victory. And besides, if he did denounce, and in my case he +certainly did, what we held in secret reverence, he never failed to +associate it with things or persons that did not move us to reverence. +Once I found him just returned from some art congress in Liverpool or in +Manchester. "The salvation armyism of art," he called it, and gave a +grotesque description of some city councillor he had found admiring +Turner. Henley, who hated all that Ruskin praised, thereupon derided +Turner, and finding the city councillor the next day on the other side of +the gallery, admiring some Pre-Raphaelite there, derided that +Pre-Raphaelite. The third day Henley discovered the poor man on a chair in +the middle of the room staring disconsolately upon the floor. He terrified +us also and certainly I did not dare, and I think none of us dared, to +speak our admiration for book or picture he condemned, but he made us feel +always our importance, and no man among us could do good work, or show the +promise of it, and lack his praise. I can remember meeting of a Sunday +night Charles Whibley, Kenneth Grahame, author of _The Golden Age_, Barry +Pain, now a well-known novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a +famous talker, George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chief +secretary, and now or later Oscar Wilde, who was some ten years older than +the rest of us. But faces and names are vague to me and while faces that +I met but once may rise clearly before me, a face met on many a Sunday has +perhaps vanished. Kipling came sometimes, I think, but I never met him; +and Stepniak, the Nihilist, whom I knew well elsewhere but not there, +said--"I cannot go more than once a year, it is too exhausting." Henley +got the best out of us all, because he had made us accept him as our judge +and we knew that his judgment could neither sleep, nor be softened, nor +changed, nor turned aside. When I think of him, the antithesis that is the +foundation of human nature being ever in my sight, I see his crippled legs +as though he were some Vulcan perpetually forging swords for other men to +use; and certainly I always thought of C----, a fine classical scholar, a +pale and seemingly gentle man, as our chief swordsman and bravo. When +Henley founded his weekly newspaper, first _The Scots_, afterwards _The +National Observer_, this young man wrote articles and reviews notorious +for savage wit; and years afterwards when _The National Observer_ was +dead, Henley dying, and our cavern of outlaws empty, I met him in Paris +very sad and I think very poor. "Nobody will employ me now," he said. +"Your master is gone," I answered, "and you are like the spear in an old +Irish story that had to be kept dipped in poppy-juice that it might not go +about killing people on its own account." I wrote my first good lyrics and +tolerable essays for _The National Observer_, and as I always signed my +work could go my own road in some measure. Henley often revised my lyrics, +crossing out a line or a stanza and writing in one of his own, and I was +comforted by my belief that he also rewrote Kipling then in the first +flood of popularity. At first, indeed, I was ashamed of being rewritten +and thought that others were not, and only began investigation when the +editorial characteristics--epigrams, archaisms, and all--appeared in the +article upon Paris fashions and in that upon opium by an Egyptian Pasha. I +was not compelled to full conformity for verse is plainly stubborn; and in +prose, that I might avoid unacceptable opinions, I wrote nothing but ghost +or fairy stories, picked up from my mother or some pilot at Rosses Point +and Henley saw that I must needs mix a palette fitted to my subject +matter. But if he had changed every "has" into "hath" I would have let +him, for had not we sunned ourselves in his generosity? "My young men +outdo me and they write better than I," he wrote in some letter praising +Charles Whibley's work, and to another friend with a copy of my _Man Who +Dreamed of Fairyland_: "See what a fine thing has been written by one of +my lads." + + +VIII + +My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never before +heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all +over night with labour and yet all spontaneous. There was present that +night at Henley's, by right of propinquity or of accident, a man full of +the secret spite of dulness, who interrupted from time to time, and always +to check or disorder thought; and I noticed with what mastery he was +foiled and thrown. I noticed, too, that the impression of artificiality +that I think all Wilde's listeners have recorded came from the perfect +rounding of the sentences and from the deliberation that made it possible. +That very impression helped him, as the effect of metre, or of the +antithetical prose of the seventeenth century, which is itself a true +metre, helped its writers, for he could pass without incongruity from some +unforeseen, swift stroke of wit to elaborate reverie. I heard him say a +few nights later: "Give me _The Winter's Tale_, 'Daffodils that come +before the swallow dare' but not _King Lear_. What is _King Lear_ but poor +life staggering in the fog?" and the slow, carefully modulated cadence +sounded natural to my ears. That first night he praised Walter Pater's +_Studies in the History of the Renaissance_: "It is my golden book; I +never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of decadence: +the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written." "But," +said the dull man, "would you not have given us time to read it?" "Oh no," +was the retort, "there would have been plenty of time afterwards--in +either world." I think he seemed to us, baffled as we were by youth, or by +infirmity, a triumphant figure, and to some of us a figure from another +age, an audacious Italian fifteenth century figure. A few weeks before I +had heard one of my father's friends, an official in a publishing firm +that had employed both Wilde and Henley as editors, blaming Henley who was +"no use except under control" and praising Wilde, "so indolent but such a +genius"; and now the firm became the topic of our talk. "How often do you +go to the office?" said Henley. "I used to go three times a week," said +Wilde, "for an hour a day but I have since struck off one of the days." +"My God," said Henley, "I went five times a week for five hours a day and +when I wanted to strike off a day they had a special committee meeting." +"Furthermore," was Wilde's answer, "I never answered their letters. I have +known men come to London full of bright prospects and seen them complete +wrecks in a few months through a habit of answering letters." He too knew +how to keep our elders in their place, and his method was plainly the more +successful, for Henley had been dismissed. "No he is not an aesthete," +Henley commented later, being somewhat embarrassed by Wilde's +Pre-Raphaelite entanglement; "one soon finds that he is a scholar and a +gentleman." And when I dined with Wilde a few days afterwards he began at +once, "I had to strain every nerve to equal that man at all"; and I was +too loyal to speak my thought: "You and not he said all the brilliant +things." He like the rest of us had felt the strain of an intensity that +seemed to hold life at the point of drama. He had said on that first +meeting "The basis of literary friendship is mixing the poisoned bowl"; +and for a few weeks Henley and he became close friends till, the +astonishment of their meeting over, diversity of character and ambition +pushed them apart, and, with half the cavern helping, Henley began mixing +the poisoned bowl for Wilde. Yet Henley never wholly lost that first +admiration, for after Wilde's downfall he said to me: "Why did he do it? I +told my lads to attack him and yet we might have fought under his banner." + + +IX + +It became the custom, both at Henley's and at Bedford Park, to say that R. +A. M. Stevenson, who frequented both circles, was the better talker. Wilde +had been trussed up like a turkey by undergraduates, dragged up and down a +hill, his champagne emptied into the ice tub, hooted in the streets of +various towns, and I think stoned, and no newspaper named him but in +scorn; his manner had hardened to meet opposition and at times he allowed +one to see an unpardonable insolence. His charm was acquired and +systematized, a mask which he wore only when it pleased him, while the +charm of Stevenson belonged to him like the colour of his hair. If +Stevenson's talk became monologue we did not know it, because our one +object was to show by our attention that he need never leave off. If +thought failed him we would not combat what he had said, or start some new +theme, but would encourage him with a question; and one felt that it had +been always so from childhood up. His mind was full of phantasy for +phantasy's sake and he gave as good entertainment in monologue as his +cousin Robert Louis in poem or story. He was always "supposing"; "Suppose +you had two millions what would you do with it?" and "Suppose you were in +Spain and in love how would you propose?" I recall him one afternoon at +our house at Bedford Park, surrounded by my brother and sisters and a +little group of my father's friends, describing proposals in half a dozen +countries. There your father did it, dressed in such and such a way with +such and such words, and there a friend must wait for the lady outside the +chapel door, sprinkle her with holy water and say, "My friend Jones is +dying for love of you." But when it was over those quaint descriptions, so +full of laughter and sympathy, faded or remained in the memory as +something alien from one's own life, like a dance I once saw in a great +house, where beautifully dressed children wound a long ribbon in and out +as they danced. I was not of Stevenson's party and mainly I think because +he had written a book in praise of Velasquez, praise at that time +universal wherever Pre-Raphaelism was accurst, and to my mind, that had +to pick its symbols where its ignorance permitted, Velasquez seemed the +first bored celebrant of boredom. I was convinced from some obscure +meditation that Stevenson's conversational method had joined him to my +elders and to the indifferent world, as though it were right for old men, +and unambitious men and all women, to be content with charm and humour. It +was the prerogative of youth to take sides and when Wilde said: "Mr +Bernard Shaw has no enemies but is intensely disliked by all his friends," +I knew it to be a phrase I should never forget, and felt revenged upon a +notorious hater of romance, whose generosity and courage I could not +fathom. + + +X + +I saw a good deal of Wilde at that time--was it 1887 or 1888?--I have no +way of fixing the date except that I had published my first book _The +Wanderings of Usheen_ and that Wilde had not yet published his _Decay of +Lying_. He had, before our first meeting, reviewed my book and despite its +vagueness of intention, and the inexactness of its speech, praised without +qualification; and what was worth more than any review he had talked about +it and now he asked me to eat my Christmas dinner with him believing, I +imagine, that I was alone in London. He had just renounced his velveteen, +and even those cuffs turned backward over the sleeves, and had begun to +dress very carefully in the fashion of the moment. He lived in a little +house at Chelsea that the architect Godwin had decorated with an elegance +that owed something to Whistler. There was nothing mediaeval, nor +Pre-Raphaelite, no cupboard door with figures upon flat gold, no peacock +blue, no dark background. I remember vaguely a white drawing room with +Whistler etchings, "let in" to white panels, and a dining room all white, +chairs, walls, mantelpiece, carpet, except for a diamond-shaped piece of +red cloth in the middle of the table under a terra-cotta statuette, and I +think a red shaded lamp hanging from the ceiling to a little above the +statuette. It was perhaps too perfect in its unity, his past of a few +years before had gone too completely, and I remember thinking that the +perfect harmony of his life there, with his beautiful wife and his two +young children, suggested some deliberate artistic composition. + +He commended and dispraised himself during dinner by attributing +characteristics like his own to his country: "We Irish are too poetical to +be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest +talkers since the Greeks." When dinner was over he read me from the proofs +of _The Decay of Lying_ and when he came to the sentence: "Schopenhauer +has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet +invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once +melancholy," I said, "Why do you change 'sad' to 'melancholy'?" He replied +that he wanted a full sound at the close of his sentence, and I thought it +no excuse and an example of the vague impressiveness that spoilt his +writing for me. Only when he spoke, or when his writing was the mirror of +his speech, or in some simple fairy tale, had he words exact enough to +hold a subtle ear. He alarmed me, though not as Henley did, for I never +left his house thinking myself fool or dunce. He flattered the intellect +of every man he liked; he made me tell him long Irish stories and +compared my art of storytelling to Homer's; and once when he had described +himself as writing in the census paper "age 19, profession genius, +infirmity talent" the other guest, a young journalist fresh from Oxford or +Cambridge, said, "What should I have written?" and was told that it should +have been "profession talent, infirmity genius." When, however, I called, +wearing shoes a little too yellow--unblackened leather had just become +fashionable--I realized their extravagance when I saw his eyes fixed upon +them; and another day Wilde asked me to tell his little boy a fairy story, +and I had but got as far as "Once upon a time there was a giant" when the +little boy screamed and ran out of the room. Wilde looked grave and I was +plunged into the shame of clumsiness that afflicts the young. When I asked +for some literary gossip for some provincial newspaper, that paid me a few +shillings a month, he explained very explicitly that writing literary +gossip was no job for a gentleman. + +Though to be compared to Homer passed the time pleasantly, I had not been +greatly perturbed had he stopped me with: "Is it a long story?" as Henley +would certainly have done. I was abashed before him as wit and man of the +world alone. I remember that he deprecated the very general belief in his +success or his efficiency, and I think with sincerity. One form of success +had gone: he was no more the lion of the season and he had not discovered +his gift for writing comedy, yet I think I knew him at the happiest moment +of his life. No scandal had touched his name, his fame as a talker was +growing among his equals, and he seemed to live in the enjoyment of his +own spontaneity. One day he began: "I have been inventing a Christian +heresy," and he told a detailed story, in the style of some early father, +of how Christ recovered after the Crucifixion, and escaping from the tomb, +lived on for many years, the one man upon earth who knew the falsehood of +Christianity. Once St Paul visited his town and he alone in the +carpenters' quarter did not go to hear him preach. The other carpenters +noticed that henceforth, for some unknown reason, he kept his hands +covered. A few days afterwards I found Wilde with smock frocks in various +colours spread out upon the floor in front of him, while a missionary +explained that he did not object to the heathen going naked upon week +days, but insisted upon clothes in church. He had brought the smock frocks +in a cab that the only art-critic whose fame had reached Central Africa +might select a colour; so Wilde sat there weighing all with a conscious +ecclesiastic solemnity. + + +XI + +Of late years I have often explained Wilde to myself by his family +history. His father was a friend or acquaintance of my father's father and +among my family traditions there is an old Dublin riddle: "Why are Sir +William Wilde's nails so black?" Answer, "Because he has scratched +himself." And there is an old story still current in Dublin of Lady Wilde +saying to a servant, "Why do you put the plates on the coal-scuttle? What +are the chairs meant for?" They were famous people and there are many like +stories; and even a horrible folk story, the invention of some Connaught +peasant, that tells how Sir William Wilde took out the eyes of some men, +who had come to consult him as an oculist, and laid them upon a plate, +intending to replace them in a moment, and how the eyes were eaten by a +cat. As a certain friend of mine, who has made a prolonged study of the +nature of cats, said when he first heard the tale, "Cats love eyes." The +Wilde family was clearly of the sort that fed the imagination of Charles +Lever, dirty, untidy, daring, and what Charles Lever, who loved more +normal activities, might not have valued so highly, very imaginative and +learned. Lady Wilde, who when I knew her received her friends with blinds +drawn and shutters closed that none might see her withered face, longed +always perhaps, though certainly amid much self-mockery, for some +impossible splendour of character and circumstance. She lived near her son +in level Chelsea, but I have heard her say, "I want to live on some high +place, Primrose Hill or Highgate, because I was an eagle in my youth." I +think her son lived with no self-mockery at all an imaginary life; +perpetually performed a play which was in all things the opposite of all +that he had known in childhood and early youth; never put off completely +his wonder at opening his eyes every morning on his own beautiful house, +and in remembering that he had dined yesterday with a duchess, and that he +delighted in Flaubert and Pater, read Homer in the original and not as a +schoolmaster reads him for the grammar. I think, too, that because of all +that half-civilized blood in his veins he could not endure the sedentary +toil of creative art and so remained a man of action, exaggerating, for +the sake of immediate effect, every trick learned from his masters, +turning their easel painting into painted scenes. He was a parvenu, but a +parvenu whose whole bearing proved that if he did dedicate every story in +_The House of Pomegranates_ to a lady of title, it was but to show that he +was Jack and the social ladder his pantomime beanstalk. "Did you ever +hear him say 'Marquess of Dimmesdale'?" a friend of his once asked me. "He +does not say 'the Duke of York' with any pleasure." + +He told me once that he had been offered a safe seat in Parliament and, +had he accepted, he might have had a career like that of Beaconsfield, +whose early style resembles his, being meant for crowds, for excitement, +for hurried decisions, for immediate triumphs. Such men get their +sincerity, if at all, from the contact of events; the dinner table was +Wilde's event and made him the greatest talker of his time, and his plays +and dialogues have what merit they possess from being now an imitation, +now a record, of his talk. Even in those days I would often defend him by +saying that his very admiration for his predecessors in poetry, for +Browning, for Swinburne and Rossetti, in their first vogue while he was a +very young man, made any success seem impossible that could satisfy his +immense ambition: never but once before had the artist seemed so great, +never had the work of art seemed so difficult. I would then compare him +with Benvenuto Cellini who, coming after Michael Angelo, found nothing +left to do so satisfactory as to turn bravo and quarrel with the man who +broke Michael Angelo's nose. + + +XII + +I cannot remember who first brought me to the old stable beside Kelmscott +House, William Morris's house at Hammersmith, and to the debates held +there upon Sunday evenings by the Socialist League. I was soon of the +little group who had supper with Morris afterwards. I met at these +suppers very constantly Walter Crane, Emery Walker, in association with +Cobden Sanderson, the printer of many fine books, and less constantly +Bernard Shaw and Cockerell, now of the Museum of Cambridge, and perhaps +but once or twice Hyndman the Socialist and the Anarchist Prince +Kropotkin. There, too, one always met certain more or less educated +workmen, rough of speech and manner, with a conviction to meet every turn. +I was told by one of them, on a night when I had done perhaps more than my +share of the talking, that I had talked more nonsense in one evening than +he had heard in the whole course of his past life. I had merely preferred +Parnell, then at the height of his career, to Michael Davitt, who had +wrecked his Irish influence by international politics. We sat round a long +unpolished and unpainted trestle table of new wood in a room where hung +Rossetti's _Pomegranate_, a portrait of Mrs. Morris, and where one wall +and part of the ceiling were covered by a great Persian carpet. Morris had +said somewhere or other that carpets were meant for people who took their +shoes off when they entered a house and were most in place upon a tent +floor. I was a little disappointed in the house, for Morris was an old man +content at last to gather beautiful things rather than to arrange a +beautiful house. I saw the drawing-room once or twice, and there alone all +my sense of decoration, founded upon the background of Rossetti's +pictures, was satisfied by a big cupboard painted with a scene from +Chaucer by Burne-Jones; but even there were objects, perhaps a chair or a +little table, that seemed accidental, bought hurriedly perhaps and with +little thought, to make wife or daughter comfortable. I had read as a boy, +in books belonging to my father, the third volume of _The Earthly +Paradise_, and _The Defence of Guenevere_, which pleased me less, but had +not opened either for a long time. _The Man Who Never Laughed Again_ had +seemed the most wonderful of tales till my father had accused me of +preferring Morris to Keats, got angry about it, and put me altogether out +of countenance. He had spoiled my pleasure, for now I questioned while I +read and at last ceased to read; nor had Morris written as yet those prose +romances that became after his death so great a joy that they were the +only books I was ever to read slowly that I might not come too quickly to +the end. It was now Morris himself that stirred my interest, and I took to +him first because of some little tricks of speech and body that reminded +me of my old grandfather in Sligo, but soon discovered his spontaneity and +joy and made him my chief of men. To-day I do not set his poetry very +high, but for an odd altogether wonderful line, or thought; and yet, if +some angel offered me the choice, I would choose to live his life, poetry +and all, rather than my own or any other man's. A reproduction of his +portrait by Watts hangs over my mantelpiece with Henley's, and those of +other friends. Its grave wide-open eyes, like the eyes of some dreaming +beast, remind me of the open eyes of Titian's "Ariosto," while the broad +vigorous body suggests a mind that has no need of the intellect to remain +sane, though it give itself to every phantasy: the dreamer of the middle +ages. It is "the fool of fairy ... wide and wild as a hill," the resolute +European image that yet half remembers Buddha's motionless meditation, and +has no trait in common with the wavering, lean image of hungry +speculation, that cannot but fill the mind's eye because of certain famous +Hamlets of our stage. Shakespeare himself foreshadowed a symbolic change, +that shows a change in the whole temperament of the world, for though he +called his Hamlet "fat" and even "scant of breath," he thrust between his +fingers agile rapier and dagger. + +The dream world of Morris was as much the antithesis of daily life as with +other men of genius, but he was never conscious of the antithesis and so +knew nothing of intellectual suffering. His intellect, unexhausted by +speculation or casuistry, was wholly at the service of hand and eye, and +whatever he pleased he did with an unheard of ease and simplicity, and if +style and vocabulary were at times monotonous, he could not have made them +otherwise without ceasing to be himself. Instead of the language of +Chaucer and Shakespeare, its warp fresh from field and market, if the woof +were learned, his age offered him a speech, exhausted from abstraction, +that only returned to its full vitality when written learnedly and slowly. + +The roots of his antithetical dream were visible enough: a never idle man +of great physical strength and extremely irascible--did he not fling a +badly baked plum pudding through the window upon Christmas Day?--a man +more joyous than any intellectual man of our world, called himself "the +idle singer of an empty day," created new forms of melancholy, and faint +persons, like the knights and ladies of Burne-Jones, who are never, no not +once in forty volumes, put out of temper. A blunderer who had said to the +only unconverted man at a Socialist picnic in Dublin, to prove that +equality came easy, "I was brought up a gentleman and now as you can see +associate with all sorts" and left wounds thereby that rankled after +twenty years, a man of whom I have heard it said "He is always afraid that +he is doing something wrong and generally is," wrote long stories with +apparently no other object than that his persons might show to one +another, through situations of poignant difficulty the most exquisite +tact. + +He did not project like Henley or like Wilde, an image of himself, because +having all his imagination set upon making and doing he had little self +knowledge. He imagined instead new conditions of making and doing; and in +the teeth of those scientific generalizations that cowed my boyhood, I can +see some like imagining in every great change, believing that the first +flying fish first leaped, not because it sought "adaptation" to the air, +but out of horror of the sea. + + +XIII + +Soon after I began to attend the lectures a French class was started in +the old coach-house for certain young Socialists who planned a tour in +France, and I joined it, and was for a time a model student constantly +encouraged by the compliments of the old French mistress. I told my father +of the class, and he asked me to get my sisters admitted. I made +difficulties and put off speaking of the matter, for I knew that the new +and admirable self I was making would turn, under family eyes, into plain +rag-doll. How could I pretend to be industrious, and even carry +dramatisation to the point of learning my lessons, when my sisters were +there and knew that I was nothing of the kind? But I had no argument I +could use, and my sisters were admitted. They said nothing unkind, so far +as I can remember, but in a week or two I was my old procrastinating idle +self and had soon left the class altogether. My elder sister stayed on +and became an embroideress under Miss May Morris, and the hangings round +Morris's big bed at Kelmscott House, Oxfordshire, with their verses about +lying happily in bed when "all birds sing in the town of the tree," were +from her needle, though not from her design. She worked for the first few +months at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, and in my imagination I cannot +always separate what I saw and heard from her report, or indeed from the +report of that tribe or guild who looked up to Morris as to some +worshipped mediaeval king. He had no need for other people. I doubt if +their marriage or death made him sad or glad, and yet no man I have known +was so well loved; you saw him producing everywhere organisation and +beauty, seeming, almost in the same instant, helpless and triumphant; and +people loved him as children are loved. People much in his neighbourhood +became gradually occupied with him or about his affairs, and, without any +wish on his part, as simple people become occupied with children. I +remember a man who was proud and pleased because he had distracted +Morris's thoughts from an attack of gout by leading the conversation +delicately to the hated name of Milton. He began at Swinburne: "O, +Swinburne," said Morris, "is a rhetorician; my masters have been Keats and +Chaucer, for they make pictures." "Does not Milton make pictures?" asked +my informant. "No," was the answer, "Dante makes pictures, but Milton, +though he had a great earnest mind, expressed himself as a rhetorician." +"Great earnest mind" sounded strange to me, and I doubt not that were his +questioner not a simple man Morris had been more violent. Another day the +same man started by praising Chaucer, but the gout was worse, and Morris +cursed Chaucer for destroying the English language with foreign words. + +He had few detachable phrases, and I can remember little of his speech, +which many thought the best of all good talk, except that it matched his +burly body and seemed within definite boundaries inexhaustible in fact and +expression. He alone of all the men I have known seemed guided by some +beast-like instinct and never ate strange meat. "Balzac! Balzac!" he said +to me once, "oh, that was the man the French Bourgeoisie read so much a +few years ago." I can remember him at supper praising wine: "Why do people +say it is prosaic to be inspired by wine? Has it not been made by the +sunlight and the sap?" and his dispraising houses decorated by himself: +"Do you suppose I like that kind of house? I would like a house like a big +barn, where one ate in one corner, cooked in another corner, slept in the +third corner, and in the fourth received one's friends"; and his +complaining of Ruskin's objection to the underground railway: "If you must +have a railway the best thing you can do with it is to put it in a tube +with a cork at each end." I remember, too, that when I asked what led up +to his movement, he replied: "Oh, Ruskin and Carlyle, but somebody should +have been beside Carlyle and punched his head every five minutes." Though +I remember little, I do not doubt that, had I continued going there on +Sunday evenings, I should have caught fire from his words and turned my +hand to some mediaeval work or other. + +Just before I had ceased to go there I had sent my _Wanderings of Usheen_ +to his daughter, hoping of course that it might meet his eyes, and soon +after sending it I came upon him by chance in Holborn--"You write my sort +of poetry," he said and began to praise me and to promise to send his +praise to _The Commonwealth_, the League organ, and he would have said +more had he not caught sight of a new ornamental cast-iron lamp post and +got very heated upon that subject. + +I did not read economics, having turned socialist because of Morris's +lectures and pamphlets, and I think it unlikely that Morris himself could +read economics. That old dogma of mine seemed germane to the matter. If +the men and women imagined by the poets were the norm, and if Morris had, +in let us say "News from Nowhere," then running through _The +Commonwealth_, described such men and women, living under their natural +conditions, or as they would desire to live, then those conditions +themselves must be the norm and could we but get rid of certain +institutions the world would turn from eccentricity. Perhaps Morris +himself justified himself in his own heart by as simple an argument, and +was, as the socialist D---- said to me one night, walking home after some +lecture, "an anarchist without knowing it." Certainly I and all about me, +including D---- himself, were for chopping up the old king for Medea's +pot. Morris had told us to have nothing to do with the parliamentary +socialists, represented for men in general by the Fabian Society and +Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation and for us in particular by D----. +During the period of transition mistakes must be made, and the discredit +of these mistakes must be left to "the Bourgeoisie"; and besides, when you +begin to talk of this measure, or that other, you lose sight of the goal, +and see, to reverse Swinburne's description of Tiresias, "Light on the way +but darkness on the goal." By mistakes Morris meant vexatious restrictions +and compromises--"If any man puts me into a labour squad, I will lie on +my back and kick." That phrase very much expresses our idea of +revolutionary tactics: we all intended to lie upon our back and kick. +D----, pale and sedentary, did not dislike labour squads and we all hated +him with the left side of our heads, while admiring him immensely with the +right side. He alone was invited to entertain Mrs Morris, having many +tales of his Irish uncles, more especially of one particular uncle who had +tried to commit suicide by shutting his head into a carpet-bag. At that +time he was an obscure man, known only for a witty speaker at street +corners and in Park demonstrations. He had, with an assumed truculence and +fury, cold logic, an invariable gentleness, an unruffled courtesy, and yet +could never close a speech without being denounced by a journeyman hatter, +with an Italian name. Converted to socialism by D----, and to anarchism by +himself, with swinging arm and uplifted voice, this man put, and perhaps, +exaggerated our scruple about Parliament. "I lack," said D----, "the bump +of reverence"; whereon the wild man shouted: "You 'ave a 'ole." There are +moments when looking back I somewhat confuse my own figure with that of +the hatter, image of our hysteria, for I too became violent with the +violent solemnity of a religious devotee. I can even remember sitting +behind D---- and saying some rude thing or other over his shoulder. + +I don't remember why I gave it up but I did quite suddenly and the push +may have come from a young workman who was educating himself between +Morris and Karl Marx. He had planned a history of the Navy, and when I had +spoken of the battleships of Nelson's day had said, "O, that was the +decadence of the battleship," but if his naval interests were mediaeval, +his ideas about religion were pure Karl Marx, and we were soon in +perpetual argument. Then gradually the attitude towards religion of almost +everybody but Morris, who avoided the subject altogether, got upon my +nerves, for I broke out after some lecture or other with all the arrogance +of raging youth. They attacked religion, I said, or some such words, and +yet there must be a change of heart and only religion could make it. What +was the use of talking about some new revolution putting all things right, +when the change must come, if come it did, with astronomical slowness, +like the cooling of the sun, or it may have been like the drying of the +moon? Morris rang his chairman's bell, but I was too angry to listen, and +he had to ring it a second time before I sat down. He said that night at +supper, "Of course I know there must be a change of heart, but it will not +come as slowly as all that. I rang my bell because you were not being +understood." He did not show any vexation, but I never returned after that +night; and yet I did not always believe what I had said, and only +gradually gave up thinking of and planning for some near sudden change for +the better. + + +XIV + +I spent my days at the British Museum and must, I think, have been +delicate, for I remember often putting off hour after hour consulting some +necessary book because I shrank from lifting the heavy volumes of the +catalogue; and yet to save money for my afternoon coffee and roll I often +walked the whole way home to Bedford Park. I was compiling, for a series +of shilling books, an anthology of Irish fairy-stories and, for an +American publisher, a two-volume selection from the Irish novelists that +would be somewhat dearer. I was not well paid, for each book cost me more +than three months' reading; and I was paid for the first some twelve +pounds ("O, Mr. E.," said publisher to editor, "you must never again pay +so much!") and for the second twenty, but I did not think myself badly +paid, for I had chosen the work for my own purposes. + +Though I went to Sligo every summer, I was compelled to live out of +Ireland the greater part of every year, and was but keeping my mind upon +what I knew must be the subject-matter of my poetry. I believed that if +Morris had set his stories amid the scenery of his own Wales, for I knew +him to be of Welsh extraction and supposed wrongly that he had spent his +childhood there, that if Shelley had nailed his _Prometheus_, or some +equal symbol, upon some Welsh or Scottish rock, their art had entered more +intimately, more microscopically, as it were, into our thought and had +given perhaps to modern poetry a breadth and stability like that of +ancient poetry. The statues of Mausolus and Artemisia at the British +Museum, private, half-animal, half-divine figures, all unlike the Grecian +athletes and Egyptian kings in their near neighbourhood, that stand in the +middle of the crowd's applause, or sit above measuring it out +unpersuadable justice, became to me, now or later, images of an +unpremeditated joyous energy, that neither I nor any other man, racked by +doubt and inquiry, can achieve; and that yet, if once achieved, might seem +to men and women of Connemara or of Galway their very soul. In our study +of that ruined tomb raised by a queen to her dead lover, and finished by +the unpaid labour of great sculptors, after her death from grief, or so +runs the tale, we cannot distinguish the handiworks of Scopas and +Praxiteles; and I wanted to create once more an art where the artist's +handiwork would hide as under those half anonymous chisels, or as we find +it in some old Scots ballads, or in some twelfth or thirteenth century +Arthurian Romance. That handiwork assured, I had martyred no man for +modelling his own image upon Pallas Athena's buckler; for I took great +pleasure in certain allusions to the singer's life, one finds in old +romances and ballads, and thought his presence there all the more poignant +because we discover it half lost, like portly Chaucer, behind his own +maunciple and pardoner upon the Canterbury roads. Wolfram von Eschenbach, +singing his German Parsifal, broke off some description of a famished city +to remember that in his own house at home the very mice lacked food, and +what old ballad singer was it who claimed to have fought by day in the +very battle he sang by night? So masterful indeed was that instinct that +when the minstrel knew not who his poet was, he must needs make up a man: +"When any stranger asks who is the sweetest of singers, answer with one +voice: 'a blind man; he dwells upon rocky Chios; his songs shall be the +most beautiful for ever.'" Elaborate modern psychology sounds egotistical, +I thought, when it speaks in the first person, but not those simple +emotions which resemble the more, the more powerful they are, everybody's +emotion, and I was soon to write many poems where an always personal +emotion was woven into a general pattern of myth and symbol. When the +Fenian poet says that his heart has grown cold and callous--"For thy +hapless fate, dear Ireland, and sorrows of my own"--he but follows +tradition and if he does not move us deeply, it is because he has no +sensuous musical vocabulary that comes at need, without compelling him to +sedentary toil and so driving him out from his fellows. I thought to +create that sensuous, musical vocabulary, and not for myself only, but +that I might leave it to later Irish poets, much as a mediaeval Japanese +painter left his style as an inheritance to his family, and was careful to +use a traditional manner and matter, yet did something altogether +different, changed by that toil, impelled by my share in Cain's curse, by +all that sterile modern complication, by my "originality," as the +newspapers call it. Morris set out to make a revolution that the persons +of his _Well at the World's End_ or his _Waters of the Wondrous Isles_, +always, to my mind, in the likeness of Artemisia and her man, might walk +his native scenery; and I, that my native scenery might find imaginary +inhabitants, half-planned a new method and a new culture. My mind began +drifting vaguely towards that doctrine of "the mask" which has convinced +me that every passionate man (I have nothing to do with mechanist, or +philanthropist, or man whose eyes have no preference) is, as it were, +linked with another age, historical or imaginary, where alone he finds +images that rouse his energy. Napoleon was never of his own time, as the +naturalistic writers and painters bid all men be, but had some Roman +emperor's image in his head and some condottiere blood in his heart; and +when he crowned that head at Rome with his own hands he had covered, as +may be seen from David's painting, his hesitation with that emperor's old +suit. + + +XV + +I had various women friends on whom I would call towards five o'clock +mainly to discuss my thoughts that I could not bring to a man without +meeting some competing thought, but partly because their tea and toast +saved my pennies for the 'bus ride home; but with women, apart from their +intimate exchanges of thought, I was timid and abashed. I was sitting on a +seat in front of the British Museum feeding pigeons when a couple of girls +sat near and began enticing my pigeons away, laughing and whispering to +one another, and I looked straight in front of me, very indignant, and +presently went into the Museum without turning my head towards them. Since +then I have often wondered if they were pretty or merely very young. +Sometimes I told myself very adventurous love-stories with myself for +hero, and at other times I planned out a life of lonely austerity, and at +other times mixed the ideals and planned a life of lonely austerity +mitigated by periodical lapses. I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo +in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little +island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick +I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which +balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. +From the sudden remembrance came my poem _Innisfree_, my first lyric with +anything in its rhythm of my own music. I had begun to loosen rhythm as an +escape from rhetoric and from that emotion of the crowd that rhetoric +brings, but I only understood vaguely and occasionally that I must for my +special purpose use nothing but the common syntax. A couple of years +later I would not have written that first line with its conventional +archaism--"Arise and go"--nor the inversion in the last stanza. Passing +another day by the new Law Courts, a building that I admired because it +was Gothic--"It is not very good," Morris had said, "but it is better than +anything else they have got and so they hate it"--I grew suddenly +oppressed by the great weight of stone, and thought, "There are miles and +miles of stone and brick all round me," and presently added, "If John the +Baptist or his like were to come again and had his mind set upon it, he +could make all these people go out into some wilderness leaving their +buildings empty," and that thought, which does not seem very valuable now, +so enlightened the day that it is still vivid in the memory. I spent a few +days at Oxford copying out a seventeenth century translation of Poggio's +_Liber Facetiarum_ or the _Hypneroto-machia_ of Poliphili for a publisher; +I forget which, for I copied both; and returned very pale to my troubled +family. I had lived upon bread and tea because I thought that if antiquity +found locust and wild honey nutritive, my soul was strong enough to need +no better. I was always planning some great gesture, putting the whole +world into one scale of the balance and my soul into the other and +imagining that the whole world somehow kicked the beam. More than thirty +years have passed and I have seen no forcible young man of letters brave +the metropolis, without some like stimulant; and all after two or three, +or twelve or fifteen years, according to obstinacy, have understood that +we achieve, if we do achieve, in little sedentary stitches as though we +were making lace. I had one unmeasured advantage from my stimulant: I +could ink my socks, that they might not show through my shoes, with a most +haughty mind, imagining myself, and my torn tackle, somewhere else, in +some far place "under the canopy ... i' the city of kites and crows." + +In London I saw nothing good and constantly remembered that Ruskin had +said to some friend of my father's--"As I go to my work at the British +Museum I see the faces of the people become daily more corrupt." I +convinced myself for a time, that on the same journey I saw but what he +saw. Certain old women's faces filled me with horror, faces that are no +longer there, or if they are pass before me unnoticed: the fat blotched +faces, rising above double chins, of women who have drunk too much beer +and eaten much meat. In Dublin I had often seen old women walking with +erect heads and gaunt bodies, talking to themselves with loud voices, mad +with drink and poverty, but they were different, they belonged to romance. +Da Vinci had drawn women who looked so and so carried their bodies. + + +XVI + +I attempted to restore one old friend of my father's to the practice of +his youth, but failed, though he, unlike my father, had not changed his +belief. My father brought me to dine with Jack Nettleship at Wigmore +Street, once inventor of imaginative designs and now a painter of +melodramatic lions. At dinner I had talked a great deal--too much, I +imagine, for so young a man, or maybe for any man--and on the way home my +father, who had been plainly anxious that I should make a good impression, +was very angry. He said I had talked for effect and that talking for +effect was precisely what one must never do; he had always hated rhetoric +and emphasis and had made me hate it; and his anger plunged me into great +dejection. I called at Nettleship's studio the next day to apologise, and +Nettleship opened the door himself and received me with enthusiasm. He had +explained to some woman guest that I would probably talk well, being an +Irishman, but the reality had surpassed, etc., etc. I was not flattered, +though relieved at not having to apologise, for I soon discovered that +what he really admired was my volubility, for he himself was very silent. +He seemed about sixty, had a bald head, a grey beard, and a nose, as one +of my father's friends used to say, like an opera-glass, and sipped cocoa +all the afternoon and evening from an enormous tea-cup that must have been +designed for him alone, not caring how cold the cocoa grew. Years before +he had been thrown from his horse, while hunting, and broke his arm, and +because it had been badly set suffered great pain for a long time. A +little whisky would always stop the pain, and soon a little became a great +deal and he found himself a drunkard, but having signed his liberty away +for certain months he was completely cured. He had acquired, however, the +need of some liquid which he could sip constantly. I brought him an +admiration settled in early boyhood, for my father had always said, +"George Wilson was our born painter, but Nettleship our genius," and even +had he shown me nothing I could care for, I had admired him still because +my admiration was in my bones. He showed me his early designs, and they, +though often badly drawn, fulfilled my hopes. Something of Blake they +certainly did show, but had in place of Blake's joyous, intellectual +energy a Saturnian passion and melancholy. "God Creating Evil," the +death-like head with a woman and a tiger coming from the forehead, which +Rossetti--or was it Browning?--had described "as the most sublime design +of ancient or modern art," had been lost, but there was another version of +the same thought, and other designs never published or exhibited. They +rise before me even now in meditation, especially a blind Titan-like ghost +floating with groping hands above the tree-tops. I wrote a criticism, and +arranged for reproductions with the editor of an art magazine, but after +it was written and accepted the proprietor, lifting what I considered an +obsequious caw in the Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage +rookery, insisted upon its rejection. Nettleship did not mind its +rejection, saying, "Who cares for such things now? Not ten people," but he +did mind my refusal to show him what I had written. Though what I had +written was all eulogy, I dreaded his judgment for it was my first art +criticism. I hated his big lion pictures, where he attempted an art too +much concerned with the sense of touch, with the softness or roughness, +the minutely observed irregularity of surfaces, for his genius; and I +think he knew it. "Rossetti used to call my pictures pot-boilers," he +said, "but they are all--all"--and he waved his arm to the +canvasses--"symbols." When I wanted him to design gods, and angels, and +lost spirits once more, he always came back to the point "Nobody would be +pleased." "Everybody should have a _raison d'etre_" was one of his +phrases. "Mrs ----'s articles are not good but they are her _raison +d'etre_." I had but little knowledge of art for there was little +scholarship in the Dublin art school, so I overrated the quality of +anything that could be connected with my general beliefs about the world. +If I had been able to give angelical or diabolical names to his lions I +might have liked them also and I think that Nettleship himself would have +liked them better and liking them better have become a better painter. We +had the same kind of religious feeling, but I could give a crude +philosophical expression to mine while he could only express his in action +or with brush and pencil. He often told me of certain ascetic ambitions, +very much like my own, for he had kept all the moral ambition of youth, as +for instance--"Yeats, the other night I was arrested by a policeman--was +walking round Regent's Park barefooted to keep the flesh under--good sort +of thing to do. I was carrying my boots in my hand and he thought I was a +burglar and even when I explained and gave him half a crown, he would not +let me go till I had promised to put on my boots before I met the next +policeman." + +He was very proud and shy and I could not imagine anybody asking him +questions and so I was content to take these stories as they came: +confirmations of what I had heard of him in boyhood. One story in +particular had stirred my imagination for, ashamed all my boyhood of my +lack of physical courage, I admired what was beyond my imitation. He +thought that any weakness, even a weakness of body, had the character of +sin and while at breakfast with his brother, with whom he shared a room on +the third floor of a corner house, he said that his nerves were out of +order. Presently he left the table, and got out through the window and on +to a stone ledge that ran along the wall under the windowsills. He sidled +along the ledge, and turning the corner with it, got in at a different +window and returned to the table. "My nerves," he said, "are better than I +thought." + +Nettleship said to me: "Has Edwin Ellis ever said anything about the +effect of drink upon my genius?" "No," I answered. "I ask," he said, +"because I have always thought that Ellis has some strange medical +insight." Though I had answered no, Ellis had only a few days before used +these words: "Nettleship drank his genius away." Ellis, but lately +returned from Perugia where he had lived many years, was another old +friend of my father's but some years younger than Nettleship or my father. +Nettleship had found his simplifying image, but in his painting had turned +away from it, while Ellis, the son of Alexander Ellis, a once famous man +of science, who was perhaps the last man in England to run the circle of +the sciences without superficiality, had never found that image at all. He +was a painter and poet, but his painting, which did not interest me, +showed no influence but that of Leighton. He had started perhaps a couple +of years too late for Pre-Raphaelite influence, for no great +Pre-Raphaelite picture was painted after 1870, and left England too soon +for that of the French painters. He was, however, sometimes moving as a +poet and still more often an astonishment. I have known him cast something +just said into a dozen lines of musical verse, without apparently ceasing +to talk; but the work once done he could not or would not amend it, and my +father thought he lacked all ambition. Yet he had at times nobility of +rhythm--an instinct for grandeur, and after thirty years I still repeat to +myself his address to Mother Earth-- + + "O mother of the hills, forgive our towers, + O mother of the clouds forgive our dreams." + +And there are certain whole poems that I read from time to time or try to +make others read. There is that poem where the manner is unworthy of the +matter, being loose and facile, describing Adam and Eve fleeing from +Paradise. Adam asks Eve what she carries so carefully, and Eve replies +that it is a little of the apple-core kept for their children. There is +that vision concerning _Christ the Less_, a too hurriedly written ballad, +where the half of Christ sacrificed to the divine half "that fled to seek +felicity" wanders wailing through Golgotha, and there is _The Saint and +the Youth_, in which I can discover no fault at all. He loved +complexities--"Seven silences like candles round her face" is a line of +his--and whether he wrote well or ill had always a manner which I would +have known from that of any other poet. He would say to me, "I am a +mathematician with the mathematics left out"--his father was a great +mathematician--or "A woman once said to me, 'Mr Ellis, why are your poems +like sums?'" And certainly he loved symbols and abstractions. He said +once, when I had asked him not to mention something or other, "Surely you +have discovered by this time that I know of no means whereby I can mention +a fact in conversation." + +He had a passion for Blake, picked up in Pre-Raphaelite studios, and early +in our acquaintance put into my hands a scrap of notepaper on which he had +written some years before an interpretation of the poem that begins + + "The fields from Islington to Marylebone, + To Primrose Hill and St. John's Wood, + Were builded over with pillars of gold, + And there Jerusalem's pillars stood." + +The four quarters of London represented Blake's four great mythological +personages, the Zoas, and also the four elements. These few sentences were +the foundation of all study of the philosophy of William Blake that +requires an exact knowledge for its pursuit and that traces the +connection between his system and that of Swedenborg or of Boehme. I +recognised certain attributions, from what is sometimes called the +Christian Cabbala, of which Ellis had never heard, and with this proof +that his interpretation was more than fantasy he and I began our four +years' work upon the Prophetic Books of William Blake. We took it as +almost a sign of Blake's personal help when we discovered that the spring +of 1889, when we first joined our knowledge, was one hundred years from +the publication of _The Book of Thel_, the first published of the +Prophetic Books, as though it were firmly established that the dead +delight in anniversaries. After months of discussion and reading we made a +concordance of all Blake's mystical terms, and there was much copying to +be done in the Museum and at Red Hill, where the descendants of Blake's +friend and patron, the landscape painter John Linnell, had many +manuscripts. The Linnells were narrow in their religious ideas and +doubtful of Blake's orthodoxy, whom they held, however, in great honour, +and I remember a timid old lady who had known Blake when a child saying, +"He had very wrong ideas, he did not believe in the historical Jesus." One +old man sat always beside us, ostensibly to sharpen our pencils but +perhaps really to see that we did not steal the manuscripts, and they gave +us very old port at lunch, and I have upon my dining-room walls their +present of Blake's Dante engravings. Going thither and returning Ellis +would entertain me by philosophical discussion varied with improvised +stories, at first folk-tales which he professed to have picked up in +Scotland, and, though I had read and collected many folk tales, I did not +see through the deceit. I have a partial memory of two more elaborate +tales, one of an Italian conspirator flying barefoot, from I forget what +adventure through I forget what Italian city, in the early morning. +Fearing to be recognised by his bare feet, he slipped past the sleepy +porter at an hotel, calling out "number so and so" as if he were some +belated guest. Then passing from bedroom door to door he tried on the +boots, and just as he got a pair to fit, a voice cried from the room: "Who +is that?" "Merely me, sir," he called back, "taking your boots." The other +was of a martyr's Bible, round which the cardinal virtues had taken +personal form--this a fragment of Blake's philosophy. It was in the +possession of an old clergyman when a certain jockey called upon him, and +the cardinal virtues, confused between jockey and clergyman, devoted +themselves to the jockey. As whenever he sinned a cardinal virtue +interfered and turned him back to virtue, he lived in great credit, and +made, but for one sentence, a very holy death. As his wife and family +knelt round in admiration and grief he suddenly said "damn." "O my dear," +said his wife, "what a dreadful expression." He answered, "I am going to +heaven," and straightway died. It was a long tale, for there were all the +jockey's vain attempts to sin, as well as all the adventures of the +clergyman, who became very sinful indeed, but it ended happily for when +the jockey died the cardinal virtues returned to the clergyman. I think he +would talk to any audience that offered, one audience being the same as +another in his eyes, and it may have been for this reason that my father +called him unambitious. When he was a young man he had befriended a +reformed thief and had asked the grateful thief to take him round the +thieves' quarters of London. The thief, however, hurried him away from the +worst saying, "Another minute and they would have found you out. If they +were not the stupidest of men in London, they had done so already." Ellis +had gone through a detailed, romantic and witty account of all the houses +he had robbed and all the throats he had cut in one short life. + +His conversation would often pass out of my comprehension, or indeed I +think of any man's, into a labyrinth of abstraction and subtlety and then +suddenly return with some verbal conceit or turn of wit. The mind is known +to attain in certain conditions of trance a quickness so extraordinary +that we are compelled at times to imagine a condition of unendurable +intellectual intensity from which we are saved by the merciful stupidity +of the body, and I think that the mind of Edwin Ellis was constantly upon +the edge of trance. Once we were discussing the symbolism of sex in the +philosophy of Blake and had been in disagreement all the afternoon. I +began talking with a new sense of conviction and after a moment Ellis, who +was at his easel, threw down his brush and said that he had just seen the +same explanation in a series of symbolic visions. "In another moment," he +said, "I should have been off." We went into the open air and walked up +and down to get rid of that feeling, but presently we came in again and I +began again my explanation, Ellis lying upon the sofa. I had been talking +some time when Mrs Ellis came into the room and said, "Why are you sitting +in the dark?" Ellis answered, "But we are not," and then added in a voice +of wonder, "I thought the lamp was lit, and that I was sitting up, and +now I find that I am lying down and that we are in darkness." I had seen a +flicker of light over the ceiling but thought it a reflection from some +light outside the house, which may have been the case. + + +XVII + +I had already met most of the poets of my generation. I had said, soon +after the publication of _The Wanderings of Usheen_, to the editor of a +series of shilling reprints, who had set me to compile tales of the Irish +fairies, "I am growing jealous of other poets and we will all grow jealous +of each other unless we know each other and so feel a share in each +other's triumph." He was a Welshman, lately a mining engineer, Ernest +Rhys, a writer of Welsh translations and original poems, that have often +moved me greatly though I can think of no one else who has read them. He +was perhaps a dozen years older than myself and through his work as editor +knew everybody who would compile a book for seven or eight pounds. Between +us we founded The Rhymers' Club, which for some years was to meet every +night in an upper room with a sanded floor in an ancient eating house in +the Strand called The Cheshire Cheese. Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, +Victor Plarr, Ernest Radford, John Davidson, Richard le Gallienne, T. W. +Rolleston, Selwyn Image, Edwin Ellis, and John Todhunter came constantly +for a time, Arthur Symons and Herbert Home, less constantly, while William +Watson joined but never came and Francis Thompson came once but never +joined; and sometimes if we met in a private house, which we did +occasionally, Oscar Wilde came. It had been useless to invite him to The +Cheshire Cheese for he hated Bohemia. "Olive Schreiner," he said once to +me, "is staying in the East End because that is the only place where +people do not wear masks upon their faces, but I have told her that I live +in the West End because nothing in life interests me but the mask." + +We read our poems to one another and talked criticism and drank a little +wine. I sometimes say when I speak of the club, "We had such and such +ideas, such and such a quarrel with the great Victorians, we set before us +such and such aims," as though we had many philosophical ideas. I say this +because I am ashamed to admit that I had these ideas and that whenever I +began to talk of them a gloomy silence fell upon the room. A young Irish +poet, who wrote excellently but had the worst manners, was to say a few +years later, "You do not talk like a poet, you talk like a man of +letters," and if all the Rhymers had not been polite, if most of them had +not been to Oxford or Cambridge, the greater number would have said the +same thing. I was full of thought, often very abstract thought, longing +all the while to be full of images, because I had gone to the art school +instead of a university. Yet even if I had gone to a university, and +learned all the classical foundations of English literature and English +culture, all that great erudition which once accepted frees the mind from +restlessness, I should have had to give up my Irish subject matter, or +attempt to found a new tradition. Lacking sufficient recognized precedent +I must needs find out some reason for all I did. I knew almost from the +start that to overflow with reasons was to be not quite well-born, and +when I could I hid them, as men hide a disagreeable ancestry; and that +there was no help for it seeing that my country was not born at all. I was +of those doomed to imperfect achievement, and under a curse, as it were, +like some race of birds compelled to spend the time, needed for the making +of the nest, in argument as to the convenience of moss and twig and +lichen. Le Gallienne and Davidson, and even Symons, were provincial at +their setting out, but their provincialism was curable, mine incurable; +while the one conviction shared by all the younger men, but principally by +Johnson and Home, who imposed their personalities upon us, was an +opposition to all ideas, all generalizations that can be explained and +debated. E---- fresh from Paris would sometimes say--"We are concerned +with nothing but impressions," but that itself was a generalization and +met but stony silence. Conversation constantly dwindled into "Do you like +so and so's last book?" "No, I prefer the book before it," and I think +that but for its Irish members, who said whatever came into their heads, +the club would not have survived its first difficult months. I saw--now +ashamed that I saw "like a man of letters," now exasperated at their +indifference to the fashion of their own river-bed--that Swinburne in one +way, Browning in another, and Tennyson in a third, had filled their work +with what I called "impurities," curiosities about politics, about +science, about history, about religion; and that we must create once more +the pure work. + +Our clothes were, for the most part unadventurous like our conversation, +though I indeed wore a brown velveteen coat, a loose tie, and a very old +inverness cape, discarded by my father twenty years before and preserved +by my Sligo-born mother whose actions were unreasoning and habitual like +the seasons. But no other member of the club, except Le Gallienne, who +wore a loose tie, and Symons, who had an inverness cape that was quite new +and almost fashionable, would have shown himself for the world in any +costume but "that of an English gentleman." "One should be quite +unnoticeable," Johnson explained to me. Those who conformed most carefully +to the fashion in their clothes, generally departed furthest from it in +their handwriting, which was small, neat, and studied, one poet--which, I +forget--having founded his upon the handwriting of George Herbert. Dowson +and Symons I was to know better in later years when Symons became a very +dear friend, and I never got behind John Davidson's Scottish roughness and +exasperation, though I saw much of him, but from the first I devoted +myself to Lionel Johnson. He and Horne and Image and one or two others, +shared a man-servant and an old house in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, +typical figures of transition, doing as an achievement of learning and of +exquisite taste what their predecessors did in careless abundance. All +were Pre-Raphaelite, and sometimes one might meet in the rooms of one or +other a ragged figure, as of some fallen dynasty, Simeon Solomon the +Pre-Raphaelite painter, once the friend of Rossetti and of Swinburne, but +fresh now from some low public house. Condemned to a long term of +imprisonment for a criminal offence, he had sunk into drunkenness and +misery. Introduced one night, however, to some man who mistook him, in the +dim candle light, for another Solomon, a successful academic painter and +R.A., he started to his feet in a rage with, "Sir, do you dare to mistake +me for that mountebank?" Though not one had hearkened to the feeblest +caw, or been spattered by the smallest dropping from any Huxley, Tyndall, +Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage bundle of old twigs I began by suspecting +them of lukewarmness, and even backsliding, and I owe it to that suspicion +that I never became intimate with Horne, who lived to become the greatest +English authority upon Italian life in the fourteenth century and to write +the one standard work on Botticelli. Connoisseur in several arts, he had +designed a little church in the manner of Inigo Jones for a burial ground +near the Marble Arch. Though I now think his little church a masterpiece, +its style was more than a century too late to hit my fancy, at two or +three and twenty; and I accused him of leaning towards that eighteenth +century + + "That taught a school + Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit + Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit, + Their verses tallied." + +Another fanaticism delayed my friendship with two men, who are now my +friends and in certain matters my chief instructors. Somebody, probably +Lionel Johnson, brought me to the studio of Charles Ricketts and Charles +Shannon, certainly heirs of the great generation, and the first thing I +saw was a Shannon picture of a lady and child, arrayed in lace silk and +satin, suggesting that hated century. My eyes were full of some more +mythological mother and child and I would have none of it and I told +Shannon that he had not painted a mother and child, but elegant people +expecting visitors and I thought that a great reproach. Somebody writing +in _The Germ_ had said that a picture of a pheasant and an apple was +merely a picture of something to eat and I was so angry with the +indifference to subject, which was the commonplace of all art criticism +since Bastien-Lepage, that I could at times see nothing else but subject. +I thought that, though it might not matter to the man himself whether he +loved a white woman or a black, a female pickpocket or a regular +communicant of the Church of England, if only he loved strongly, it +certainly did matter to his relations and even under some circumstances to +his whole neighbourhood. Sometimes indeed, like some father in Moliere, I +ignored the lover's feelings altogether and even refused to admit that a +trace of the devil, perhaps a trace of colour, may lend piquancy, +especially if the connection be not permanent. + +Among these men, of whom so many of the greatest talents were to live such +passionate lives and die such tragic deaths, one serene man, T. W. +Rolleston, seemed always out of place; it was I brought him there, +intending to set him to some work in Ireland later on. I have known young +Dublin working men slip out of their workshop to see the second Thomas +Davis passing by, and even remember a conspiracy, by some three or four, +to make him "the leader of the Irish race at home and abroad," and all +because he had regular features; and when all is said Alexander the Great +and Alcibiades were personable men, and the Founder of the Christian +religion was the only man who was neither a little too tall nor a little +too short, but exactly six feet high. We in Ireland thought as do the +plays and ballads, not understanding that, from the first moment wherein +nature foresaw the birth of Bastien-Lepage, she has only granted great +creative power to men whose faces are contorted with extravagance or +curiosity, or dulled with some protecting stupidity. + +I had now met all those who were to make the 'nineties of the last century +tragic in the history of literature, but as yet we were all seemingly +equal, whether in talent or in luck, and scarce even personalties to one +another. I remember saying one night at the Cheshire Cheese, when more +poets than usual had come, "None of us can say who will succeed, or even +who has or has not talent. The only thing certain about us is that we are +too many." + + +XVIII + +I have described what image--always opposite to the natural self or the +natural world--Wilde, Henley, Morris, copied or tried to copy, but I have +not said if I found an image for myself. I know very little about myself +and much less of that anti-self: probably the woman who cooks my dinner or +the woman who sweeps out my study knows more than I. It is perhaps because +nature made me a gregarious man, going hither and thither looking for +conversation, and ready to deny from fear or favour his dearest +conviction, that I love proud and lonely things. When I was a child and +went daily to the sexton's daughter for writing lessons, I found one poem +in her School Reader that delighted me beyond all others: a fragment of +some metrical translation from Aristophanes wherein the birds sing scorn +upon mankind. In later years my mind gave itself to gregarious Shelley's +dream of a young man, his hair blanched with sorrow, studying philosophy +in some lonely tower, or of his old man, master of all human knowledge, +hidden from human sight in some shell-strewn cavern on the Mediterranean +shore. One passage above all ran perpetually in my ears-- + + "Some feign that he is Enoch: others dream + He was pre-Adamite, and has survived + Cycles of generation and of ruin. + The sage, in truth, by dreadful abstinence, + And conquering penance of the mutinous flesh, + Deep contemplation and unwearied study, + In years outstretched beyond the date of man, + May have attained to sovereignty and science + Over those strong and secret things and thoughts + Which others fear and know not. + _Mahmud._ I would talk + With this old Jew. + _Hassan._ Thy will is even now + Made known to him where he dwells in a sea-cavern + 'Mid the Demonesi, less accessible + Than thou or God! He who would question him + Must sail alone at sunset where the stream + Of ocean sleeps around those foamless isles, + When the young moon is westering as now, + And evening airs wander upon the wave; + And, when the pines of that bee-pasturing isle, + Green Erebinthus, quench the fiery shadow + Of his gilt prow within the sapphire water, + Then must the lonely helmsman cry aloud + 'Ahasuerus!' and the caverns round + Will answer 'Ahasuerus!' If his prayer + Be granted, a faint meteor will arise, + Lighting him over Marmora; and a wind + Will rush out of the sighing pine-forest, + And with the wind a storm of harmony + Unutterably sweet, and pilot him + Through the soft twilight to the Bosphorus: + Thence, at the hour and place and circumstance + Fit for the matter of their conference, + The Jew appears. Few dare, and few who dare + Win the desired communion." + +Already in Dublin, I had been attracted to the Theosophists because they +had affirmed the real existence of the Jew, or of his like, and, apart +from whatever might have been imagined by Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, +and Bastien-Lepage, I saw nothing against his reality. Presently having +heard that Madame Blavatsky had arrived from France, or from India, I +thought it time to look the matter up. Certainly if wisdom existed +anywhere in the world it must be in some such lonely mind admitting no +duty to us, communing with God only, conceding nothing from fear or +favour. Have not all peoples, while bound together in a single mind and +taste, believed that such men existed and paid them that honour, or paid +it to their mere shadow, which they have refused to philanthropists and to +men of learning. + + +XIX + +I found Madame Blavatsky in a little house at Norwood, with but, as she +said, three followers left--the Society of Psychical Research had just +reported on her Indian phenomena--and as one of the three followers sat in +an outer room to keep out undesirable visitors, I was kept a long time +kicking my heels. Presently I was admitted and found an old woman in a +plain loose dark dress: a sort of old Irish peasant woman with an air of +humour and audacious power. I was still kept waiting, for she was deep in +conversation with a woman visitor. I strayed through folding doors into +the next room and stood, in sheer idleness of mind, looking at a cuckoo +clock. It was certainly stopped, for the weights were off and lying upon +the ground, and yet, as I stood there the cuckoo came out and cuckooed at +me. I interrupted Madame Blavatsky to say, "Your clock has hooted me." +"It oftens hoots at a stranger," she replied. "Is there a spirit in it?" I +said. "I do not know," she said, "I should have to be alone to know what +is in it." I went back to the clock and began examining it and heard her +say: "Do not break my clock." I wondered if there was some hidden +mechanism and I should have been put out, I suppose, had I found any, +though Henley had said to me, "Of course she gets up fraudulent miracles, +but a person of genius has to do something; Sarah Bernhardt sleeps in her +coffin." Presently the visitor went away and Madame Blavatsky explained +that she was a propagandist for women's rights who had called to find out +"why men were so bad." "What explanation did you give her?" I said. "That +men were born bad, but women made themselves so," and then she explained +that I had been kept waiting because she had mistaken me for some man, +whose name resembled mine and who wanted to persuade her of the flatness +of the earth. + +When I next saw her she had moved into a house at Holland Park, and some +time must have passed--probably I had been in Sligo where I returned +constantly for long visits--for she was surrounded by followers. She sat +nightly before a little table covered with green baize and on this green +baize she scribbled constantly with a piece of white chalk. She would +scribble symbols, sometimes humorously explained, and sometimes +unintelligible figures, but the chalk was intended to mark down her score +when she played patience. One saw in the next room a large table where +every night her followers and guests, often a great number, sat down to +their vegetable meal, while she encouraged or mocked through the folding +doors. A great passionate nature, a sort of female Dr Johnson, impressive +I think to every man or woman who had themselves any richness, she seemed +impatient of the formalism of the shrill abstract idealism of those about +her, and this impatience broke out in railing and many nicknames: "O you +are a flap-doodle, but then you are a theosophist and a brother." The most +devout and learned of all her followers said to me, "H. P. B. has just +told me that there is another globe stuck on to this at the north pole, so +that the earth has really a shape something like a dumb-bell." I said, for +I knew that her imagination contained all the folklore of the world, "That +must be some piece of Eastern mythology." "O no it is not," he said, "of +that I am certain, and there must be something in it or she would not have +said it." Her mockery was not kept for her followers alone, and her voice +would become harsh, and her mockery lose fantasy and humour, when she +spoke of what seemed to her scientific materialism. Once I saw this +antagonism, guided by some kind of telepathic divination, take a form of +brutal fantasy. I brought a very able Dublin woman to see her and this +woman had a brother, a physiologist whose reputation, though known to +specialists alone, was European, and because of this brother a family +pride in everything scientific and modern. The Dublin woman scarcely +opened her mouth the whole evening and her name was certainly unknown to +Madame Blavatsky, yet I saw at once in that wrinkled old face bent over +the cards, and the only time I ever saw it there, a personal hostility, +the dislike of one woman for another. Madame Blavatsky seemed to bundle +herself up, becoming all primeval peasant, and began complaining of her +ailments, more especially of her bad leg. But of late her master--her +"old Jew," her "Ahasuerus"--cured it, or set it on the way to be cured. "I +was sitting here in my chair," said she, "when the master came in and +brought something with him which he put over my knee, something warm which +enclosed my knee--it was a live dog which he had cut open." I recognized a +cure used sometimes in mediaeval medicine. She had two masters and their +portraits, ideal Indian heads, painted by some most incompetent artist, +stood upon either side of the folding doors. One night when talk was +impersonal and general, I sat gazing through the folding doors into the +dimly lighted dining room beyond. I noticed a curious red light shining +upon a picture and got up to see where the red light came from. It was the +picture of an Indian and as I came near it slowly vanished. When I +returned to my seat, Madame Blavatsky said, "What did you see?" "A +picture," I said. "Tell it to go away." "It is already gone." "So much the +better," she said, "I was afraid it was mediumship. But it is only +clairvoyance." "What is the difference?" "If it had been mediumship, it +would have stayed in spite of you. Beware of mediumship; it is a kind of +madness; I know for I have been through it." + +I found her almost always full of gaiety that, unlike the occasional +joking of those about her, was illogical and incalculable and yet always +kindly and tolerant. I had called one evening to find her absent but +expected every moment. She had been somewhere at the seaside for her +health and arrived with a little suite of followers. She sat down at once +in her big chair, and began unfolding a brown paper parcel while all +looked on full of curiosity. It contained a large family Bible. "This is a +present for my maid," she said. "What a Bible and not even annotated!" +said some shocked voice. "Well, my children," was the answer, "what is the +good of giving lemons to those who want oranges?" When I first began to +frequent her house, as I soon did very constantly, I noticed a handsome +clever woman of the world there, who seemed certainly very much out of +place, penitent though she thought herself. Presently there was much +scandal and gossip for the penitent was plainly entangled with two young +men, who were expected to grow into ascetic sages. The scandal was so +great that Madame Blavatsky had to call the penitent before her and to +speak after this fashion, "We think that it is necessary to crush the +animal nature; you should live in chastity in act and thought. Initiation +is granted only to those who are entirely chaste," and so it ran on for +some time. However, after some minutes in that vehement style, the +penitent standing crushed and shamed before her, she had wound up, "I +cannot permit you more than one." She was quite sincere but thought that +nothing mattered but what happened in the mind, and that if we could not +master the mind our actions were of little importance. One young man +filled her with exasperation for she thought that his settled gloom came +from his chastity. I had known him in Dublin where he had been accustomed +to interrupt long periods of asceticism, in which he would eat vegetables +and drink water, with brief outbreaks of what he considered the devil. +After an outbreak he would for a few hours dazzle the imagination of the +members of the local theosophical society with poetical rhapsodies about +harlots and street lamps, and then sink into weeks of melancholy. A +fellow-theosophist once found him hanging from the windowpole, but cut him +down in the nick of time. I said to the man who cut him down, "What did +you say to each other?" He said, "We spent the night telling comic stories +and laughing a great deal." This man, torn between sensuality and +visionary ambition, was now the most devout of all, and told me that in +the middle of the night he could often hear the ringing of the little +"astral bell" whereby Madame Blavatsky's master called her attention, and +that, although it was a silvery low tone, it made the whole house shake. +Another night I found him waiting in the hall to show in those who had +right of entrance, on some night when the discussion was private, and as I +passed he whispered into my ear, "Madame Blavatsky is perhaps not a real +woman at all. They say that her dead body was found many years ago upon +some Russian battlefield." She had two dominant moods, both of extreme +activity, one calm and philosophic, and this was the mood always on that +night in the week when she answered questions upon her system, and as I +look back after thirty years I often ask myself, "Was her speech +automatic? Was she a trance medium, or in some similar state, one night in +every week?" In the other mood she was full of fantasy and inconsequent +raillery. "That is the Greek Church, a triangle like all true religion," I +recall her saying, as she chalked out a triangle on the green baize, and +then as she made it disappear in meaningless scribbles, "it spread out and +became a bramble bush like the Church of Rome." Then rubbing it all out +except one straight line, "Now they have lopped off the branches and +turned it into a broomstick and that is protestantism." And so it was +night after night always varied and unforeseen. I have observed a like +sudden extreme change in others, half whose thought was supernatural and +Lawrence Oliphant records somewhere or other like observations. I can +remember only once finding her in a mood of reverie, something had +happened to damp her spirits, some attack upon her movement, or upon +herself. She spoke of Balzac, whom she had seen but once, of Alfred de +Musset, whom she had known well enough to dislike for his morbidity, and +George Sand, whom she had known so well that they had dabbled in magic +together of which "neither knew anything at all" in those days; and she +ran on, as if there was nobody there to overhear her, "I used to wonder at +and pity the people who sell their souls to the devil, but now I only pity +them. They do it to have somebody on their side," and added to that, after +some words I have forgotten, "I write, write, write as the Wandering Jew +walks, walks, walks." + +Besides the devotees, who came to listen and to turn every doctrine into a +new sanction for the puritanical convictions of their Victorian childhood, +cranks came from half Europe and from all America, and they came that they +might talk. One American said to me, "She has become the most famous woman +in the world by sitting in a big chair and permitting us to talk." They +talked and she played patience, and totted up her score on the green +baize, and generally seemed to listen, but sometimes she would listen no +more. There was a woman who talked perpetually of "the divine spark" +within her, until Madame Blavatsky stopped her with--"Yes, my dear, you +have a divine spark within you and if you are not very careful you will +hear it snore." A certain Salvation Army captain probably pleased her, for +if vociferous and loud of voice, he had much animation. He had known +hardship and spoke of his visions while starving in the streets and he +was still perhaps a little light in the head. I wondered what he could +preach to ignorant men, his head ablaze with wild mysticism, till I met a +man who had heard him talking near Covent Garden to some crowd in the +street. "My friends," he was saying, "you have the kingdom of heaven +within you and it would take a pretty big pill to get that out." + +Meanwhile I had got no nearer to proving that the sage Ahasuerus "dwells +in a sea cavern 'mid the Demonesi," nor did I learn any more of those +"Masters" whose representative Madame Blavatsky claimed to be. All there +seemed to feel their presence, and all spoke of them as if they were more +important than any visible inhabitant of the house. When Madame Blavatsky +was more silent, less vivid than usual, it was "because her Masters were +angry;" they had rebuked her because of some error, and she professed +constant error. Once I seemed in their presence, or that of some messenger +of theirs. It was about nine at night, and half a dozen of us sat round +her big table cloth, when the room seemed to fill with the odour of +incense. Somebody came from upstairs, but could smell nothing--had been +outside the influence it seems--but to myself and the others, it was very +strong. Madame Blavatsky said it was a common Indian incense, and that +some pupil of her master's was present; she seemed anxious to make light +of the matter and turned the conversation to something else. Certainly it +was a romantic house, and I did not separate myself from it by my own +will. I had learned from Blake to hate all abstraction, and, affected by +the abstraction of what were called "esoteric teachings," I began a series +of experiments. Some book or magazine published by the society had quoted +from that essay of magic, which Sibley, the eighteenth century astrologer, +had bound up with his big book upon astrology. If you burnt a flower to +ashes and put the ashes under, I think, the receiver of an air pump, and +stood the receiver in the moonlight for so many nights, the ghost of the +flower would appear hovering over its ashes. I got together a committee +which performed this experiment without results. The "esoteric teachings" +had declared that a certain very pure kind of indigo was the symbol of one +of the seven principles into which they divided human nature. I got with +some difficulty a little of this pure indigo, and gave portions of it to +members of the committee, and asked them to put it under their pillows at +night and record their dreams. I argued that all natural scenery must be +divided into seven types according to these principles, and by their study +we could rid the mind of abstraction. Presently a secretary, a friendly, +intelligent man, asked me to come and see him, and, when I did, complained +that I was causing discussion and disturbance. A certain fanatical hungry +face had been noticed red and tearful, and it was quite plain that I was +not in agreement with their methods or their philosophy. "We have certain +definite ideas," he said, "and we have but one duty, to spread them +through the world. I know that all these people become dogmatic, that they +believe what they can never prove, that their withdrawal from family life +is for them a great misfortune, but what are we to do? We have been told +that all spiritual influx into the society will come to an end in 1897 for +exactly one hundred years; before that date our fundamental ideas must be +spread in all countries." I knew the doctrine, and it made me wonder why +that old woman, or the "masters" from whom, whatever they were or were +not, her genius had come, insisted upon it; for influx of some kind there +must always be. Did they dread heresy, or had they no purpose but the +greatest possible immediate effect? + + +XX + +At the British Museum reading room I often saw a man of thirty-six, or +thirty-seven, in a brown velveteen coat, with a gaunt resolute face, and +an athletic body, who seemed before I heard his name, or knew the nature +of his studies, a figure of romance. Presently I was introduced, where or +by what man or woman I do not remember. He was called Liddle Mathers, but +would soon, under the touch of "The Celtic Movement," become Macgregor +Mathers, and then plain Macgregor. He was the author of _The Kabbala +Unveiled_, and his studies were two only--magic and the theory of war, for +he believed himself a born commander and all but equal in wisdom and in +power to that old Jew. He had copied many manuscripts on magic ceremonial +and doctrine in the British Museum, and was to copy many more in +Continental libraries, and it was through him mainly that I began certain +studies and experiences, that were to convince me that images well up +before the mind's eye from a deeper source than conscious or subconscious +memory. I believe that his mind in those early days did not belie his face +and body, though in later years it became unhinged, for he kept a proud +head amid great poverty. One that boxed with him nightly has told me that +for many weeks he could knock him down, though Mathers was the stronger +man, and only knew long after that during those weeks Mathers starved. +With him I met an old white-haired Oxfordshire clergyman, the most +panic-stricken person I have ever known, though Mathers' introduction had +been "he unites us to the great adepts of antiquity." This old man took me +aside that he might say--"I hope you never invoke spirits--that is a very +dangerous thing to do. I am told that even the planetary spirits turn upon +us in the end." I said, "Have you ever seen an apparition?" "O yes, once," +he said. "I have my alchemical laboratory in a cellar under my house where +the Bishop cannot see it. One day I was walking up and down there when I +heard another footstep walking up and down beside me. I turned and saw a +girl I had been in love with when I was a young man, but she died long +ago. She wanted me to kiss her. O no, I would not do that." "Why not?" I +said. "O she might have got power over me." "Has your alchemical research +had any success?" I said. "Yes, I once made the elixir of life. A French +alchemist said it had the right smell and the right colour" (the alchemist +may have been Eliphas Levi, who visited England in the 'sixties, and would +have said anything) "but the first effect of the elixir is that your nails +fall out and your hair falls off. I was afraid that I might have made a +mistake and that nothing else might happen, so I put it away on a shelf. I +meant to drink it when I was an old man, but when I got it down the other +day it had all dried up." + +Soon after my first meeting with Mathers he emerged into brief prosperity, +becoming for two or three years Curator of a private museum at Forest +Hill, and marrying a young and beautiful wife, the sister of the +philosopher, Henri Bergson. His house at Forest Hill was soon a romantic +place to a little group, Florence Farr, myself, and some dozen fellow +students. I think that it was she, her curiosity being insatiable, who +first brought news of that house and that she brought it in mockery and in +wonder. Mathers had taken her for a walk through a field of sheep and had +said, "Look at the sheep. I am going to imagine myself a ram," and at once +all the sheep ran after him; another day he had tried to quell a thunder +storm by making symbols in the air with a masonic sword, but the storm had +not been quelled; and then came the crowning wonder. He had given her a +piece of cardboard on which was a coloured geometrical symbol and had told +her to hold it to her forehead and she had found herself walking upon a +cliff above the sea, seagulls shrieking overhead. I did not think the ram +story impossible, and even tried half a dozen times to excite a cat by +imagining a mouse in front of its nose, but still some chance movement of +the flock might have deceived her. But what could have deceived her in +that final marvel? Then another brought a like report, and presently my +own turn came. He gave me a cardboard symbol and I closed my eyes. Sight +came slowly, there was not that sudden miracle as if the darkness had been +cut with a knife, for that miracle is mostly a woman's privilege, but +there rose before me mental images that I could not control: a desert and +black Titan raising himself up by his two hands from the middle of a heap +of ancient ruins. Mathers explained that I had seen a being of the order +of Salamanders because he had shown me their symbol, but it was not +necessary even to show the symbol, it would have been sufficient that he +imagined it. I had already written in my diary, under some date in 1887, +that Madame Blavatsky's Masters were "trance personalities," and I must +have meant such beings as my black Titan, only more lasting and more +powerful. I had found when a boy in Dublin on a table in the Royal Irish +Academy a pamphlet on Japanese art and read there of an animal painter so +remarkable that horses he had painted upon a Temple wall, had slipped down +after dark and trampled the neighbours' fields of rice. Somebody had come +into the temple in the early morning, had been startled by a shower of +water drops, had looked up and seen painted horses still wet from the +dew-covered fields, but now "trembling into stillness." + +I had soon mastered Mathers' symbolic system, and discovered that for a +considerable minority--whom I could select by certain unanalysable +characteristics--the visible world would completely vanish, and that +world, summoned by the symbol, take its place. One day when alone in a +third-class carriage, in the very middle of the railway bridge that +crosses the Thames near Victoria, I smelt incense. I was on my way to +Forest Hill; might it not come from some spirit Mathers had called up? I +had wondered when I smelt it at Madame Blavatsky's--if there might be some +contrivance, some secret censer, but that explanation was no longer +possible. I believed that Salamander of his but an image, and presently I +found analogies between smell and image. It must be from thought but what +certainty had I, that what had taken me by surprise, could be from my own +thought, and if a thought could affect the sense of smell, why not the +sense of touch? Then I discovered among that group of students that +surrounded Macgregor, a man who had fought a cat in his dreams and awaked +to find his breast covered with scratches. Was there an impassable +barrier between those scratches and the trampled fields of rice? It would +seem so, and yet all was uncertainty. What fixed law would our experiments +leave to our imagination? + +Mathers had learning but no scholarship, much imagination and imperfect +taste, but if he made some absurd statement, some incredible claim, some +hackneyed joke, we would half consciously change claim, statement or joke, +as though he were a figure in a play of our composition. He was a +necessary extravagance, and he had carried further than anyone else, a +claim implicit in the romantic movement from the time of Shelley and of +Goethe; and in body and in voice at least he was perfect; so might Faust +have looked at the end of his hundred years. In the credulity of our youth +we secretly wondered if he had not met with, perhaps even been taught by +some old man who had found the elixir. Nor did he undeceive us. "If you +find the elixir," he was accustomed to say, "you always look a few years +younger than the age at which you found it. If you find it at sixty you +will look fifty for a hundred years." None of us would have admitted that +we believed in stone or elixir, the old Oxfordshire clergyman excited no +belief, yet one among us certainly laboured with crucible or athanor. Ten +years ago I called upon an elderly solicitor, on some business, but at his +private house, and I remembered whose pupil he had been when I found among +the ashes of the hearth a little earthen pot. He pretended that he studied +alchemy that he might some day write its history, and I found when I +questioned others, that for twenty years there had been just such a little +pot among the ashes. + + +XXI + +I generalized a great deal and was ashamed of it. I thought it was my +business in life to be an artist and a poet, and that there could be no +business comparable to that. I refused to read books and even to meet +people who excited me to generalization, all to no purpose. I said my +prayers much as in childhood, though without the old regularity of hour +and place, and I began to pray that my imagination might somehow be +rescued from abstraction and became as preoccupied with life as had been +the imagination of Chaucer. For ten or twelve years more I suffered +continual remorse, and only became content when my abstractions had +composed themselves into picture and dramatization. My very remorse helped +to spoil my early poetry, giving it an element of sentimentality through +my refusal to permit it any share of an intellect which I considered +impure. Even in practical life I only very gradually began to use +generalizations, that have since become the foundation of all I have done, +or shall do, in Ireland. For all I know all men may have been so timid, +for I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we +shall ever find, but as yet we do not know truths that belong to us from +opinions, caught up in casual irritation or momentary fantasy. As life +goes on we discover that certain thoughts sustain us in defeat, or give us +victory, whether over ourselves or others, and it is these thoughts, +tested by passion, that we call convictions. Among subjective men (in all +those, that is, who must spin a web out of their own bowels) the victory +is an intellectual daily recreation of all that exterior fate snatches +away, and so that fate's antithesis; while what I have called "the Mask" +is an emotional antithesis to all that comes out of their internal nature. +We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy. + + +XXII + +A conviction that the world was now but a bundle of fragments possessed me +without ceasing. I had tried this conviction on the Rhymers, thereby +plunging into greater silence an already too silent evening. "Johnson," I +was accustomed to say, "you are the only man I know whose silence has beak +and claw." I had lectured on it to some London Irish society, and I was to +lecture upon it later on in Dublin, but I never found but one interested +man, an official of the Primrose League, who was also an active member of +the Fenian Brotherhood. "I am an extreme conservative apart from Ireland," +I have heard him explain; and I have no doubt that personal experience +made him share the sight of any eye that saw the world in fragments. I had +been put into a rage by the followers of Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, +and Bastien-Lepage, who not only asserted the unimportance of subject +whether in art or literature, but the independence of the arts from one +another. Upon the other hand, I delighted in every age where poet and +artist confined themselves gladly to some inherited subject matter known +to the whole people, for I thought that in man and race alike there is +something called "Unity of Being," using that term as Dante used it when +he compared beauty in the _Convito_ to a perfectly proportioned human +body. My father, from whom I had learned the term, preferred a comparison +to a musical instrument so strung that if we touch a string all the +strings murmur faintly. There is not more desire, he had said, in lust +than in true love, but in true love desire awakens pity, hope, affection, +admiration, and, given appropriate circumstance, every emotion possible to +man. When I began, however, to apply this thought to the state and to +argue for a law-made balance among trades and occupations my father +displayed at once the violent free trader and propagandist of liberty. I +thought that the enemy of this unity was abstraction, meaning by +abstraction not the distinction but the isolation of occupation, or class +or faculty-- + + "Call down the hawk from the air + Let him be hooded, or caged, + Till the yellow eye has grown mild, + For larder and spit are bare, + The old cook enraged, + The scullion gone wild." + +I knew no mediaeval cathedral, and Westminster, being a part of abhorred +London, did not interest me, but I thought constantly of Homer and Dante, +and the tombs of Mausolus and Artemisia, the great figures of King and +Queen and the lesser figures of Greek and Amazon, Centaur and Greek. I +thought that all art should be a Centaur finding in the popular lore its +back and its strong legs. I got great pleasure too from remembering that +Homer was sung, and from that tale of Dante hearing a common man sing some +stanza from _The Divine Comedy_, and from Don Quixote's meeting with some +common man that sang Ariosto. Morris had never seemed to care greatly for +any poet later than Chaucer and though I preferred Shakespeare to Chaucer +I begrudged my own preference. Had not Europe shared one mind and heart, +until both mind and heart began to break into fragments a little before +Shakespeare's birth? Music and verse began to fall apart when Chaucer +robbed verse of its speed that he might give it greater meditation, though +for another generation or so minstrels were to sing his lengthy elaborated +_Troilus and Criseyde_; painting parted from religion in the later +Renaissance that it might study effects of tangibility undisturbed; while, +that it might characterize, where it had once personified, it renounced, +in our own age, all that inherited subject matter which we have named +poetry. Presently I was indeed to number character itself among the +abstractions, encouraged by Congreve's saying that "passions are too +powerful in the fair sex to let humour," or as we say character, "have its +course." Nor have we fared better under the common daylight, for pure +reason has notoriously made but light of practical reason, and has been +made light of in its turn from that morning when Descartes discovered that +he could think better in his bed than out of it; nor needed I original +thought to discover, being so late of the school of Morris, that machinery +had not separated from handicraft wholly for the world's good, nor to +notice that the distinction of classes had become their isolation. If the +London merchants of our day competed together in writing lyrics they would +not, like the Tudor merchants, dance in the open street before the house +of the victor; nor do the great ladies of London finish their balls on the +pavement before their doors as did the great Venetian ladies, even in the +eighteenth century, conscious of an all enfolding sympathy. Doubtless +because fragments broke into ever smaller fragments we saw one another in +a light of bitter comedy, and in the arts, where now one technical element +reigned and now another, generation hated generation, and accomplished +beauty was snatched away when it had most engaged our affections. One +thing I did not foresee, not having the courage of my own thought: the +growing murderousness of the world. + + "Turning and turning in the widening gyre + The falcon cannot hear the falconer; + Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; + Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, + The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere + The ceremony of innocence is drowned; + The best lack all conviction while the worst + Are full of passionate intensity." + + +XXIII + +If abstraction had reached, or all but reached its climax, escape might be +possible for many, and if it had not, individual men might still escape. +If Chaucer's personages had disengaged themselves from Chaucer's crowd, +forgot their common goal and shrine, and after sundry magnifications +became each in turn the centre of some Elizabethan play, and had after +split into their elements and so given birth to romantic poetry, must I +reverse the cinematograph? I thought that the general movement of +literature must be such a reversal, men being there displayed in casual, +temporary, contact as at the Tabard door. I had lately read Tolstoy's +_Anna Karenina_ and thought that where his theoretical capacity had not +awakened there was such a turning back: but a nation or an individual with +great emotional intensity might follow the pilgrims as it were to some +unknown shrine, and give to all those separated elements and to all that +abstract love and melancholy, a symbolical, a mythological coherence. Not +Chaucer's rough tongued riders, but rather an ended pilgrimage, a +procession of the Gods! Arthur Symons brought back from Paris stories of +Verhaeren and Maeterlinck, and so brought me confirmation, as I thought, +and I began to announce a poetry like that of the Sufi's. I could not +endure, however, an international art, picking stories and symbols where +it pleased. Might I not, with health and good luck to aid me, create some +new _Prometheus Unbound_; Patrick or Columbkil, Oisin or Fion, in +Prometheus' stead; and, instead of Caucasus, Cro-Patric or Ben Bulben? +Have not all races had their first unity from a polytheism, that marries +them to rock and hill? We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which the +uneducated classes knew and even sang, and might we not make those stories +current among the educated classes, rediscovering for the work's sake what +I have called "the applied arts of literature," the association of +literature, that is, with music, speech, and dance; and at last, it might +be, so deepen the political passion of the nation that all, artist and +poet, craftsman and day-labourer would accept a common design? Perhaps +even these images, once created and associated with river and mountain, +might move of themselves and with some powerful, even turbulent life, like +those painted horses that trampled the rice fields of Japan. + + +XXIV + +I used to tell the few friends to whom I could speak these secret thoughts +that I would make the attempt in Ireland but fail, for our civilization, +its elements multiplying by division like certain low forms of life, was +all-powerful; but in reality I had the wildest hopes. To-day I add to that +first conviction, to that first desire for unity, this other conviction, +long a mere opinion vaguely or intermittently apprehended: Nations, races, +and individual men are unified by an image, or bundle of related images, +symbolical or evocative of the state of mind, which is of all states of +mind not impossible, the most difficult to that man, race, or nation; +because only the greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without +despair, rouses the will to full intensity. + +A powerful class by terror, rhetoric, and organized sentimentality, may +drive their people to war but the day draws near when they cannot keep +them there; and how shall they face the pure nations of the East when the +day comes to do it with but equal arms? I had seen Ireland in my own time +turn from the bragging rhetoric and gregarious humour of O'Connell's +generation and school, and offer herself to the solitary and proud Parnell +as to her anti-self, buskin following hard on sock, and I had begun to +hope, or to half hope, that we might be the first in Europe to seek unity +as deliberately as it had been sought by theologian, poet, sculptor, +architect, from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. Doubtless we must +seek it differently, no longer considering it convenient to epitomize all +human knowledge, but find it we well might could we first find philosophy +and a little passion. + + + + +BOOK II + +IRELAND AFTER THE FALL OF PARNELL + + + + + +_IRELAND AFTER THE FALL OF PARNELL_ + + +I + +A couple of years before the death of Parnell, I had wound up my +introduction to those selections from the Irish novelists with the +prophecy of an intellectual movement at the first lull in politics, and +now I wished to fulfil my prophecy. I did not put it in that way, for I +preferred to think that the sudden emotion that now came to me, the sudden +certainty that Ireland was to be like soft wax for years to come, was a +moment of supernatural insight. How could I tell, how can I tell even now? + +There was a little Irish Society of young people, clerks, shop boys, and +shop girls, called "The Southwark Irish Literary Society," and it had +ceased to meet because the girls got the giggles when any member of the +Committee got up to speak. Every member of it had said all he had to say +many times over. I had given them a lecture about the falling asunder of +the human mind, as an opening flower falls asunder, and all had professed +admiration because I had made such a long speech without quotation or +narrative; and now I invited the Committee to my father's house at Bedford +Park, and there proposed a new organization, "The Irish Literary Society." +T. W. Rolleston came to that first meeting, and it was because he had much +tact, and a knowledge of the technical business of committees, that a +society was founded which was joined by every London-Irish author and +journalist. In a few months somebody had written its history, and +published that history, illustrated by our portraits, at a shilling. When +it was published I was in Dublin, founding a society there called "The +National Literary Society," and affiliating it with certain Young Ireland +Societies in country towns which seemed anxious to accept its leadership. +I had definite plans; I wanted to create an Irish Theatre; I was finishing +my _Countess Cathleen_ in its first meagre version, and thought of a +travelling company to visit our country branches; but before that there +must be a popular imaginative literature. I arranged with Mr. Fisher Unwin +and his reader, Mr Edward Garnett--a personal friend of mine--that when +our organization was complete Mr Fisher Unwin was to publish for it a +series of books at a shilling each. I told only one man of this +arrangement, for after I had made my plans I heard an alarming rumour. Old +Sir Charles Gavan Duffy was coming from Australia to start an Irish +publishing house, and publish a series of books, and I did not expect to +agree with him, but knew that I must not seek a quarrel. The two societies +were necessary because their lectures must take the place of an educated +popular press, which we had not, and have not now, and create a standard +of criticism. Irish literature had fallen into contempt; no educated man +ever bought an Irish book; in Dublin Professor Dowden, the one man of +letters with an international influence, was accustomed to say that he +knew an Irish book by its smell, because he had once seen some books whose +binding had been fastened together by rotten glue; and Standish O'Grady's +last book upon ancient Irish history--a book rather wild, rather too +speculative, but forestalling later research--had not been reviewed by any +periodical or newspaper in England or in Ireland. + +At first I had great success, for I brought with me a list of names +written down by some member of the Southwark Irish Literary Society, and +for six weeks went hither and thither appealing and persuading. My first +conversation was over a butter-tub in some Dublin back street, and the man +agreed with me at once; everybody agreed with me; all felt that something +must be done, but nobody knew what. Perhaps they did not understand me, +perhaps I kept back my full thoughts, perhaps they only seemed to listen; +it was enough that I had a plan, and was determined about it. When I went +to lecture in a provincial town, a workman's wife, who wrote patriotic +stories in some weekly newspaper, invited me to her house, and I found all +her children in their Sunday best. She made a little speech, very formal +and very simple, in which she said that what she wrote had no merit, but +that it paid for her children's schooling; and she finished her speech by +telling her children never to forget that they had seen me. One man +compared me to Thomas Davis, another said I could organise like Davitt, +and I thought to succeed as they did, and as rapidly. I did not examine +this applause, nor the true thoughts of those I met, nor the general +condition of the country, but I examined myself a great deal, and was +puzzled at myself. I knew that I was shy and timid, that I would often +leave some business undone, or purchase unmade, because I shrank from +facing a strange office or a shop a little grander than usual, and yet, +here was I delightedly talking to strange people every day. It was many +years before I understood that I had surrendered myself to the chief +temptation of the artist, creation without toil. Metrical composition is +always very difficult to me, nothing is done upon the first day, not one +rhyme is in its place; and when at last the rhymes begin to come, the +first rough draft of a six-line stanza takes the whole day. At that time I +had not formed a style, and sometimes a six-line stanza would take several +days, and not seem finished even then; and I had not learnt, as I have +now, to put it all out of my head before night, and so the last night was +generally sleepless, and the last day a day of nervous strain. But now I +had found the happiness that Shelley found when he tied a pamphlet to a +fire balloon. + + +II + +At first I asked no help from prominent persons, and when some clerk or +shop-assistant would say "Dr So-and-so or Professor So-and-so will have +nothing to do with us" I would answer, "When we prove we can gather sheep +shepherds will come." Presently, come they did, old, middle-aged, or but +little older than myself, but all with some authority in their town: John +O'Leary, John F. Taylor, and Douglas Hyde, and Standish O'Grady, and of +these much presently; Dr. Sigerson who has picked a quarrel with me and of +whom I shall say nothing that he may not pick another; Count Plunkett, +Sinn Feiner of late and Minister of Dail Eireann; Dr. Coffey, now head of +the National University; George Coffey, later on Curator of the Irish +Antiquities at the Museum of the Royal Dublin Society; Patrick J. McCall, +poet and publican of Patrick Street, and later member of corporation; +Richard Ashe King, novelist and correspondent of _Truth_, a gentle, +intelligent person, typical of nothing; and others, known or unknown. We +were now important, had our Committee room in the Mansion House, and I +remember that the old Mansion House butler recognised our importance so +fully, that he took us into his confidence once in every week, while we +sat waiting for a quorum. He had seen many Lord Mayors, and remembered +those very superior Lord Mayors who lived before the extension of the +municipal franchise, and spoke of his present masters with contempt. Among +our persons of authority, and among the friends and followers they had +brought, there were many who at that time found it hard to refuse if +anybody offered for sale a pepper-pot shaped to suggest a round tower with +a wolf-dog at its foot, and who would have felt it inappropriate to +publish an Irish book, that had not harp and shamrock and green cover, so +completely did their minds move amid Young Ireland images and metaphors, +and I thought with alarm of the coming of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy; while +here and there I noticed that smooth, smiling face that we discover for +the first time in certain pictures by Velasquez; all that hungry, +mediaeval speculation vanished, that had worn the faces of El Greco and in +its place a self-complacent certainty that all had been arranged, provided +for, set out in clear type, in manual of devotion or of doctrine. These, +however, were no true disciples of Young Ireland, for Young Ireland had +sought a nation unified by political doctrine, a subservient art and +letters aiding and abetting. The movement of thought, which had in the +'fifties and 'fourties at Paris and London and Boston, filled literature, +and especially poetical literature with curiosities about science, about +history about politics, with moral purpose and educational +fervour--abstractions all--had created a new instrument for Irish +politics, a method of writing that took its poetical style from Campbell, +Scott, Macauley, and Beranger, with certain elements from Gaelic, and its +prose style--in John Mitchell, the only Young Ireland prose writer who had +a style at all--from Carlyle. To recommend this method of writing as +literature without much reservation and discrimination I contended was to +be deceived or to practice deception. If one examined some country +love-song, one discovered that it was not written by a man in love, but by +a patriot who wanted to prove that we did indeed possess, in the words of +Daniel O'Connell, "the finest peasantry upon earth." Yet one well-known +anthology was introduced by the assertion that such love-poetry was +superior to "affected and artificial" English love-songs like "Drink to me +only with thine eyes"--"affected and artificial," the very words used by +English Victorians who wrote for the newspapers to discourage capricious, +personal writing. However, the greater number even of those who thought +our famous anthology, _The Spirit of the Nation_, except for three or four +songs, but good election rhyme, looked upon it much as certain enlightened +believers look upon the story of Adam and Eve and the apple, or that of +Jonah and the whale, which they do not question publicly, because such +stories are an integral part of religion to simple men and women. I, upon +the other hand, being in the intemperance of my youth, denied, as publicly +as possible, merit to all but a few ballads translated from Gaelic +writers, or written out of a personal and generally tragic experience. + + +III + +The greater number of those who joined my society had come under the seal +of Young Ireland at that age when we are all mere wax; the more ambitious +had gone daily to some public library to read the bound volumes of Thomas +Davis's old newspaper, and tried to see the world as Davis saw it. No +philosophic speculation, no economic question of the day, disturbed an +orthodoxy which, unlike that of religion had no philosophic history, and +the religious bigot was glad that it should be so. Some few of the younger +men were impatient, and it was these younger men, more numerous in the +London than in the Dublin Society, who gave me support; and we had been +joined by a few older men--some personal friends of my own or my +father--who had only historical interest in Thomas Davis and his school. +Young Ireland's prose had been as much occupied with Irish virtue, and +more with the invader's vices, than its poetry, and we were soon mired and +sunk into such problems as to whether Cromwell was altogether black, the +heads of the old Irish clans altogether white, the Danes mere robbers and +church burners (they tell me at Rosses Point that the Danes keep to this +day the maps of the Rosses fields they were driven out of in the 9th +century, and plot their return) and as to whether we were or were not once +the greatest orators in the world. All the past had been turned into a +melodrama with Ireland for blameless hero and poet, novelist and historian +had but one object, that we should hiss the villain, and only a minority +doubted that the greater the talent the greater the hiss. It was all the +harder to substitute for that melodrama a nobler form of art, because +there really had been, however different in their form, villain and +victim; yet fight that rancour I must, and if I had not made some head +against it in 1892 and 1893 it might have silenced in 1907 John Synge, the +greatest dramatic genius of Ireland. I am writing of disputes that +happened many years ago, that led in later years to much bitterness, and I +may exaggerate their immediate importance and violence, but I think I am +right in saying that disputes about the merits of Young Ireland so often +interrupted our discussion of rules, or of the merit of this or that +lecturer, and were so aggravated and crossed by the current wrangle +between Parnellite and anti-Parnellite that they delayed our public +appearance for a year. Other excited persons, doubtless, seeing that we +are of a race intemperate of speech, had looked up from their rancours to +the dead Lord Mayors upon the wall, superior men whose like we shall not +see again, but never, I think, from rancours so seemingly academic. I was +preparing the way without knowing it for a great satirist and master of +irony, for master works stir vaguely in many before they grow definite in +one man's mind, and to help me I had already flitting through my head, +jostling other ideas and so not yet established there, a conviction that +we should satirize rather than praise, that original virtue arises from +the discovery of evil. If we were, as I had dreaded, declamatory, loose, +and bragging, we were but the better fitted, that once declared and +measured, to create unyielding personality, manner at once cold and +passionate, daring long premeditated act; and if bitter beyond all the +people of the world, we might yet lie, that too declared and measured, +nearest the honeyed comb:-- + + "Like the clangour of a bell + Sweet and harsh, harsh and sweet, + That is how he learnt so well + To take the roses for his meat." + + +IV + +There were others with followers of their own, and too old or indifferent +to join our society. Old men who had never accepted Young Ireland, or +middle-aged men kept by some family tradition to the school of thought +before it arose, to the Ireland of Daniel O'Connell and of Lever and of +Thomas Moore, convivial Ireland with the traditional tear and smile. They +sang Moore's _Melodies_, admitted no poetry but his, and resented Young +Ireland's political objections to it as much as my generation's objection +to its artificial and easy rhythm; one, an old commercial traveller, a +Gaelic scholar who kept an erect head and the animal vigour of youth, +frequented the houses of our leading men, and would say in a loud voice, +"Thomas Moore, sir, is the greatest heroic poet of ancient or modern +times." I think it was the Fire Worshippers in _Lalla Rookh_ that he +preferred to Homer; or, jealous for the music of the _Melodies_, denounce +Wagner, then at the top of his vogue; "I would run ten miles through a bog +to escape him," he would cry. Then there was a maker of tombstones of whom +we had heard much but had seen little, an elderly fighting man, lately +imprisoned for beating a wine-merchant. A young member of the London +society, afterwards librarian to the National University, D. J. O'Donohue, +who had published a dictionary of the Irish poets, containing, I think, +two thousand names, had come to Dublin and settled there in a fit of +patriotism. He had been born in London, and spoke the most Cockney dialect +imaginable, and had picked up--probably from London critics--a dislike for +the poetry of Thomas Moore. The tombstone maker invited him to tea, and he +arrived with a bundle of books, which he laid beside him upon the table. +During tea he began expounding that dislike of his; his host was silent, +but he went on, for he was an obstinate little man. Presently the +tombstone-maker rose, and having said solemnly, "I have never permitted +that great poet to be slandered in my presence," seized his guest by the +back of the collar, and flung him out into the street, and after that +flung out the books one after another. Meanwhile the guest--as he himself +told the tale--stood in the middle of the street repeating, "Nice way to +treat a man in your own 'ouse." + + +V + +I shared a lodging full of old books and magazines, covered with dirt and +dust, with the head of the Fenian Brotherhood, John O'Leary. "In this +country," he had said to me, "a man must have upon his side the Church or +the Fenians, and you will never have the Church." He had been converted to +nationality by the poems of Davis, and he wished for some analogous +movement to that of Davis, but he had known men of letters, had been the +friend of Whistler, and knew the faults of the old literature. We had made +him the President of our Society, and without him I could do nothing, for +his long imprisonment and longer exile, his magnificent appearance, and, +above all, the fact that he alone had personality, a point of view not +made for the crowd's sake, but for self-expression, made him magnetic to +my generation. He and I had long been friends, he had stayed with us at +Bedford Park, and my father had painted his portrait, but if I had not +shared his lodging he would have opposed me. He was an old man, and my +point of view was not that of his youth, and it often took me half the day +to make him understand--so suspicious he was of all innovation--some +simple thing that he would presently support with ardour. He had grown up +in a European movement when the revolutionist thought that he, above all +men, must appeal to the highest motive, be guided by some ideal principle, +be a little like Cato or like Brutus, and he had lived to see the change +Dostoievsky examined in _The Possessed_. Men who had been of his +party--and oftener their sons--preached assassination and the bomb; and, +worst of all, the majority of his countrymen followed after constitutional +politicians who practised opportunism, and had, as he believed, such low +morals that they would lie, or publish private correspondence, if it might +advance their cause. He would split every practical project into its +constituent elements, like a clerical casuist, to find if it might not +lead into some moral error; but, were the project revolutionary, he would +sometimes temper condemnation with pity. Though he would cast off his +oldest acquaintance did he suspect him of rubbing shoulders with some +carrier of bombs, I have heard him say of a man who blew himself up in an +attempt to blow up Westminster Bridge, "He was not a bad man, but he had +too great a moral nature for his intellect, not that he lacked intellect." +He did not explain, but he meant, I suppose, that the spectacle of +injustice might madden a good man more quickly than some common man. Such +men were of his own sort, though gone astray, but the constitutional +politicians he had been fighting all his life, and all they did displeased +him. It was not that he thought their aim wrong, or that they could not +achieve it; he had accepted Gladstone's Home Rule Bill; but that in his +eyes they degraded manhood. "If England has been brought to do us justice +by such men," he would say, "that is not because of our strength, but +because of her weakness." He had a particular hatred for the rush of +emotion that followed the announcement of Gladstone's conversion, for what +was called "The Union of Hearts," and derided its sentimentality; "Nations +may respect one another," he would say, "they cannot love." His ancestors +had probably kept little shops, or managed little farms in County +Tipperary, yet he hated democracy, though he never used the word either +for praise or blame, with more than feudal hatred. "No gentleman can be a +socialist," he said, and then, with a thoughtful look, "He might be an +anarchist." He had no philosophy, but things distressed his palate, and +two of those things were International propaganda and the Organised State, +and Socialism aimed at both, nor could he speak such words as +"philanthropy," "humanitarianism," without showing by his tone of voice +that they offended him. The Church pleased him little better; there was an +old Fenian quarrel there, and he would say, "My religion is the old +Persian, to pull the bow and tell the truth." He had no +self-consciousness, no visible pride, and would have hated anything that +could have been called a gesture, was indeed scarce artist enough to +invent a gesture; yet he would never speak of the hardship of his prison +life--though abundantly enough of its humours--and once, when I pressed +him, replied, "I was in the hands of my enemy, why should I complain?" A +few years ago I heard that the Governor of the prison had asked why he did +not report some unnecessary discomfort, and O'Leary had said, "I did not +come here to complain." Now that he is dead, I wish that I could question +him, and perhaps discover whether in early youth he had come across some +teacher who had expounded Roman virtue, but I doubt if I would have learnt +anything, for I think the wax had long forgotten the seal--if seal there +were. The seal was doubtless made before the eloquent humanitarian +'forties and 'fifties, and was one kind with that that had moulded the +youthful mind of Savage Landor. Stephens, the founder of Fenianism, had +discovered him searching the second-hand bookstalls for rare editions, and +enrolled him in his organization. "You have no chance of success," O'Leary +had said "but it will be good for the _morale_ of the country" (_morale_ +was his great word), "and I will join on the condition that I am never +asked to enrol anybody." He still searched the second-hand bookstalls, and +had great numbers of books, especially of Irish history and literature, +and when I, exhausted over our morning's casuistry, would sit down to my +day's work (I was writing _The Secret Rose_) he would make his tranquil +way to the Dublin Quays. In the evening, over his coffee, he would write +passages for his memoirs upon postcards and odd scraps of paper, taking +immense trouble with every word and comma, for the great work must be a +masterpiece of style. When it was finished, it was unreadable, being dry, +abstract, and confused; no picture had ever passed before his mind's eye. +He was a victim, I think, of a movement where opinions stick men together, +or keep them apart, like a kind of bird lime, and without any relation to +their natural likes and tastes, and where men of rich nature must give +themselves up to an irritation which they no longer recognise because it +is always present. I often wonder why he gave me his friendship, why it +was he who found almost all the subscribers for my _Wanderings of Usheen_, +and why he now supported me in all I did, for how could he like verses +that were all picture, all emotion, all association, all mythology? He +could not have approved my criticism either, for I exalted Mask and Image +above the 18th century logic which he loved, and set experience before +observation, emotion before fact. Yet he would say, "I have only three +followers, Taylor, Yeats, and Rolleston," and presently he cast out +Rolleston--"Davitt wants to convert thousands, but I want two or three." I +think that perhaps it was because he no more wished to strengthen Irish +Nationalism by second-rate literature than by second-rate morality, and +was content that we agreed in that. "There are things a man must not do to +save a Nation," he had once told me, and when I asked what things, had +said, "To cry in public," and I think it probable that he would have +added, if pressed, "To write oratorical or insincere verse." + +O'Leary's movements and intonations were full of impulse, but John F. +Taylor's voice in private discussion had no emotional quality except in +the expression of scorn; if he moved an arm it moved from the shoulder or +elbow alone, and when he walked he moved from the waist only, and seemed +an automaton, a wooden soldier, as if he had no life that was not dry and +abstract. Except at moments of public oratory, he lacked all personality, +though when one saw him respectful and gentle with O'Leary, as with some +charming woman, one saw that he felt its fascination. In letters, or in +painting, it repelled him unless it were harsh and obvious, and, +therefore, though his vast erudition included much art and letters, he +lacked artistic feeling, and judged everything by the moral sense. He had +great ambition, and had he joined some established party, or found some +practicable policy, he might have been followed, might have produced even +some great effect, but he must have known that in defeat no man would +follow him, as they followed O'Leary, as they followed Parnell. His +oratory was noble, strange, even beautiful, at moments the greatest I have +ever listened to; but, the speech over, where there had been, as it +seemed, so little of himself, all coming from beyond himself, we saw +precisely as before an ungainly body in unsuitable, badly-fitting clothes, +and heard an excited voice speaking ill of this man or that other. We knew +that he could never give us that one price we would accept, that he would +never find a practicable policy; that no party would admit, no government +negotiate with, a man notorious for a temper, that, if it gave him genius, +could at times carry him to the edge of insanity. + +Born in some country town, the son of some little watchmaker, he had been +a shop assistant, put himself to college and the bar, learned to speak at +temperance meetings and Young Ireland societies, and was now a Queen's +Counsel famous for his defence of country criminals, whose cases had +seemed hopeless--Taylor's boys, their neighbours called them or they +called themselves. He had shaped his style and his imagination from +Carlyle, the chief inspirer of self-educated men in the 'eighties and +early 'nineties. "I prefer Emerson's _Oversoul_," the Condalkin cobbler +said to me, "but I always read Carlyle when I am wild with the +neighbours"; but he used his master's style, as Mitchell had done before, +to abase what his master loved, to exalt what his master scorned. His +historical erudition seemed as vast as that of York Powell, but his +interests were not Powell's, for he had no picture before the mind's eye, +and had but one object--a plea of not guilty--entered in his country's +name before a jury which he believed to be packed. O'Leary cared nothing +for his country's glory, its individuality alone seemed important in his +eyes; he was like some man, who serves a woman all his life without asking +whether she be good or bad, wise or foolish; but Taylor cared for nothing +else; he was so much O'Leary's disciple that he would say in conversation, +"We are demoralised, what case for change if we are not?" for O'Leary +admitted no ground for reform outside the moral life, but when he spoke to +the great plea he would make no admission. He spoke to it in the most +obscure places, in little halls in back streets where the white-washed +walls are foul with grease from many heads, before some audience of +medical students or of shop assistants, for he was like a man under a +curse, compelled to hide his genius, and compelled to show in conspicuous +places his ill judgment and his temper. + +His distaste for myself, broken by occasional tolerance, in so far as it +was not distaste for an imagination that seemed to him aesthetic rather +than ethical, was because I had published Irish folk-lore in English +reviews to the discredit, as he thought, of the Irish peasantry, and +because, England within earshot, I found fault with the Young Ireland +prose and poetry. He would have hated _The Playboy of the Western World_, +and his death a little before its performance was fortunate for Synge and +myself. His articles are nothing, and his one historical work, a life of +Hugh O'Neill, is almost nothing, lacking the living voice; and now, though +a most formidable man, he is forgotten, but for the fading memory of a few +friends, and for what an enemy has written here and elsewhere. Did not +Leonardo da Vinci warn the imaginative man against pre-occupation with +arts that cannot survive his death? + + +VI + +When Carleton was dying in 1870, he said there would be nothing more about +Irish Literature for twenty years, and his words were fulfilled, for the +land war had filled Ireland with its bitterness; but imagination had begun +to stir again. I had the same confidence in the future that Lady Gregory +and I had eight or nine years later, when we founded an Irish Theatre, +though there were neither, as it seemed, plays or players. There were +already a few known men to start my popular series, and to keep it popular +until the men, whose names I did not know, had learnt to express +themselves. I had met Dr. Douglas Hyde when I lived in Dublin, and he was +still an undergraduate. I have a memory of meeting in college rooms for +the first time a very dark young man, who filled me with surprise, partly +because he had pushed a snuffbox towards me, and partly because there was +something about his vague serious eyes, as in his high cheek bones, that +suggested a different civilization, a different race. I had set him down +as a peasant, and wondered what brought him to college, and to a +Protestant college, but somebody explained that he belonged to some branch +of the Hydes of Castle Hyde, and that he had a Protestant Rector for +father. He had much frequented the company of old countrymen, and had so +acquired the Irish language, and his taste for snuff, and for moderate +quantities of a detestable species of illegal whiskey distilled from the +potato by certain of his neighbours. He had already--though intellectual +Dublin knew nothing of it--considerable popularity as a Gaelic poet, +mowers and reapers singing his songs from Donegal to Kerry. Years +afterwards I was to stand at his side and listen to Galway mowers singing +his Gaelic words without knowing whose words they sang. It is so in India, +where peasants sing the words of the great poet of Bengal without knowing +whose words they sing, and it must often be so where the old imaginative +folk life is undisturbed, and it is so amongst schoolboys who hand their +story books to one another without looking at the title page to read the +author's name. Here and there, however, the peasants had not lost the +habit of Gaelic criticism, picked up, perhaps, from the poets who took +refuge among them after the ruin of the great Catholic families, from men +like that O'Rahilly, who cries in a translation from the Gaelic that is +itself a masterpiece of concentrated passion-- + + "The periwinkle and the tough dog-fish + Towards evening time have got into my dish." + +An old rascal was kept in food and whiskey for a fortnight by some +Connaught village under the belief that he was Craoibhin Aoibhin, "the +pleasant little branch," as Doctor Hyde signed himself in the newspapers +where the villagers had found his songs. The impostor's thirst only +strengthened belief in his genius, for the Gaelic song-writers have had +the infirmities of Robert Burns, "It is not the drink but the company," +one of the last has sung. Since that first meeting Doctor Hyde and I had +corresponded, and he had sent me in manuscript the best tale in my _Faery +and Folk Tales_, and I think I had something to do with the London +publication of his _Beside the Fire_, a book written in the beautiful +English of Connaught, which is Gaelic in idiom and Tudor in vocabulary, +and indeed, the first book to use it in the expression of emotion and +romance, for Carleton and his school had turned it into farce. Henley had +praised him, and York Powell had said, "If he goes on as he has begun, he +will be the greatest folk-loreist who has ever lived"; and I know no first +book of verse of our time that is at once so romantic and so concrete as +his Gaelic _Abhla de'n Craoibh_; but in a few years Dublin was to laugh +him, or rail him, out of his genius. He had no critical capacity, having +indeed for certain years the uncritical folk-genius, as no educated Irish +or Englishman has ever had it, writing out of an imitative sympathy like +that of a child catching a tune and leaving it to chance to call the tune; +and the failure of our first attempt to create a modern Irish literature +permitted the ruin of that genius. He was to create a great popular +movement, far more important in its practical results than any movement I +could have made, no matter what my luck, but, being neither quarrelsome +nor vain, he will not be angry if I say--for the sake of those who come +after us--that I mourn for the "greatest folk-loreist who ever lived," +and for the great poet who died in his youth. The Harps and Pepperpots got +him and the Harps and Pepperpots kept him till he wrote in our common +English--"It must be either English or Irish," said some patriotic editor, +Young Ireland practice in his head--that needs such sifting that he who +would write it vigorously must write it like a learned language, and took +for his model the newspaper upon his breakfast table, and became for no +base reason beloved by multitudes who should never have heard his name +till their schoolmasters showed it upon his tomb. That very incapacity for +criticism made him the cajoler of crowds, and of individual men and women; +"He should not be in the world at all," said one admiring elderly woman, +"or doing the world's work"; and for certain years young Irish women were +to display his pseudonym, "Craoibhin Aoibhin," in gilt letters upon their +hat bands. + + "Dear Craoibhin Aoibhin,......impart to us, + We'll keep the secret, a new trick to please; + Is there a bridle for this Proteus + That turns and changes like his draughty seas, + Or is there none, most popular of men, + But, when they mock us, that we mock again?" + + +VII + +Standish O'Grady, upon the other hand, was at once all passion and all +judgment. And yet those who knew him better than I assured me he could +find quarrel in a straw; and I did know that he had quarrelled a few years +back with Jack Nettleship. Nettleship's account had been, "My mother +cannot endure the God of the Old Testament, but likes Jesus Christ; +whereas I like the God of the Old Testament, and cannot endure Jesus +Christ; and we have got into the way of quarrelling about it at lunch; and +once, when O'Grady lunched with us, he said it was the most disgraceful +spectacle he had ever seen, and walked out." Indeed, I wanted him among my +writers, because of his quarrels, for, having much passion and little +rancour, the more he quarrelled, the nobler, the more patched with +metaphor, the more musical his style became, and if he were in his turn +attacked, he knew a trick of speech that made us murmur, "We do it wrong, +being so majestical, to offer it the show of violence." Sometimes he +quarrelled most where he loved most. A Unionist in politics, a +leader-writer on _The Daily Express_, the most Conservative paper in +Ireland, hater of every form of democracy, he had given all his heart to +the smaller Irish landowners, to whom he belonged, and with whom his +childhood had been spent, and for them he wrote his books, and would soon +rage over their failings in certain famous passages that many men would +repeat to themselves like poets' rhymes. All round us people talked or +wrote for victory's sake, and were hated for their victories--but here was +a man whose rage was a swan-song over all that he had held most dear, and +to whom for that very reason every Irish imaginative writer owed a portion +of his soul. In his unfinished _History of Ireland_ he had made the old +Irish heroes, Fion, and Oisin, and Cuchullan, alive again, taking them, +for I think he knew no Gaelic, from the dry pages of O'Curry and his +school, and condensing and arranging, as he thought Homer would have +arranged and condensed. Lady Gregory has told the same tales, but keeping +closer to the Gaelic text, and with greater powers of arrangement and a +more original style, but O'Grady was the first, and we had read him in our +'teens. I think that, had I succeeded, a popular audience could have +changed him little, and that his genius would have stayed, as it had been +shaped by his youth in some provincial society, and that to the end he +would have shown his best in occasional thrusts and parries. But I do +think that if, instead of that one admirable little book _The Bog of +Stars_, we had got all his histories and imaginative works into the hands +of our young men, he might have brought the imagination of Ireland nearer +the Image and the honeycomb. + +Lionel Johnson was to be our critic, and above all our theologian, for he +had been converted to Catholicism, and his orthdoxy, too learned to +question, had accepted all that we did, and most of our plans. Historic +Catholicism, with all its counsels and its dogmas, stirred his passion +like the beauty of a mistress, and the unlearned parish priests who +thought good literature or good criticism dangerous were in his eyes "all +heretics." He belonged to a family that had called itself Irish some +generations back, and its recent English generations but enabled him to +see as one single sacred tradition Irish nationality and Catholic +religion. How should he fail to know the Holy Land? Had he not been in +Egypt? He had joined our London Irish Literary Society, attended its +committee meetings, and given lectures in London, in Dublin, and in +Belfast, on Irish novelists and Irish poetry, reading his lectures always, +and yet affecting his audience as I, with my spoken lectures, could not, +perhaps because Ireland had still the shape it had received from the +eighteenth century, and so felt the dignity, not the artifice, of his +elaborate periods. He was very little, and at a first glance he seemed +but a schoolboy of fifteen. I remember saying one night at the Rhymers', +when he spoke of passing safely, almost nightly, through Seven Dials, then +a dangerous neighbourhood, "Who would expect to find anything in your +pockets but a pegtop and a piece of string?" But one never thought of his +small stature when he spoke or read. He had the delicate strong features +of a certain filleted head of a Greek athlete in the British Museum, an +archaistic Graeco-Roman copy of a masterpiece of the fourth century, and +that resemblance seemed symbolic of the austere nobility of his verse. He +was now in his best years, writing with great ease and power; neither I, +nor, I think, any other, foresaw his tragedy. + +He suffered from insomnia, and some doctor, while he was still at the +University, had recommended alcohol, and he had, in a vain hope of sleep, +increased the amount, as Rossetti had increased his doses of chloral, and +now he drank for drinking's sake. He drank a great deal too much, and, +though nothing could, it seemed, disturb his calm or unsteady his hand or +foot, his doctrine, after a certain number of glasses, would become more +ascetic, more contemptuous of all that we call human life. I have heard +him, after four or five glasses of wine, praise some church father who +freed himself from sexual passion by a surgical operation, and deny with +scorn, and much historical evidence, that a gelded man lost anything of +intellectual power. Even without stimulant his theology conceded nothing +to human weakness, and I can remember his saying with energy, "I wish +those people who deny the eternity of punishment could realise their +unspeakable vulgarity." + +Now that I know his end, I see him creating, to use a favourite adjective +of his, "marmorean" verse, and believing the most terrible doctrines to +keep down his own turbulence. One image of that stay in Dublin is so clear +before me that it has blotted out most other images of that time. He is +sitting at a lodging-house table, which I have just left at three in the +morning, and round him lie or sit in huddled attitudes half-a-dozen men in +various states of intoxication: and he is looking straight before him with +head erect, and one hand resting upon the table. As I reach the stairs I +hear him say, in a clear, unshaken voice, "I believe in nothing but the +Holy Roman Catholic Church." He sometimes spoke of drink as something +which he could put aside at any moment, and his friends believed, and I +think he liked us to believe, that he would shortly enter a monastery. Did +he deceive us deliberately? Did he himself already foresee the moment when +he would write _The Dark Angel_? I am almost certain that he did, for he +had already written _Mystic and Cavalier_, where the historical setting +is, I believe, but masquerade. + + "Go from me: I am one of those, who fall. + What! hath no cold wind swept your heart at all, + In my sad company? Before the end, + Go from me, dear my friend! + + Yours are the victories of light: your feet + Rest from good toil, where rest is brave and sweet. + But after warfare in a mourning gloom + I rest in clouds of doom. + + * * * * * + + Seek with thine eyes to pierce this crystal sphere: + Canst read a fate there, prosperous and clear? + Only the mists, only the weeping clouds: + Dimness, and airy shrouds. + + * * * * * + + O rich and sounding voices of the air! + Interpreters and prophets of despair: + Priests of a fearful sacrament! I come + To make with you my home." + + +VIII + +Sir Charles Gavan Duffy arrived. He brought with him much manuscript, the +private letters of a Young Ireland poetess, a dry but informing +unpublished historical essay by Davis, and an unpublished novel by William +Carleton, into the middle of which he had dropped a hot coal, so that +nothing remained but the borders of every page. He hired a young man to +read him, after dinner, Carlyle's _Heroes and Hero-Worship_, and before +dinner was gracious to all our men of authority and especially to our +Harps and Pepperpots. Taylor compared him to Odysseus returning to Ithaca, +and every newspaper published his biography. He was a white-haired old +man, who had written the standard history of Young Ireland, had emigrated +to Australia, had been the first Australian Federalist, and later Prime +Minister, but, in all his writings, in which there is so much honesty, so +little rancour, there is not one sentence that has any meaning when +separated from its place in argument or narrative, not one distinguished +because of its thought or music. One imagined his youth in some little +gaunt Irish town, where no building or custom is revered for its +antiquity; and there speaking a language where no word, even in solitude, +is ever spoken slowly and carefully because of emotional implication; and +of his manhood of practical politics, of the dirty piece of orange-peel in +the corner of the stairs as one climbs up to some newspaper office; of +public meetings where it would be treacherous amid so much geniality to +speak, or even to think of anything that might cause a moment's +misunderstanding in one's own party. No argument of mine was intelligible +to him, and I would have been powerless, but that fifty years ago he had +made an enemy, and though that enemy was long dead, his school remained. +He had attacked, why or with what result I do not remember, the only Young +Ireland politician who had music and personality, though rancorous and +devil-possessed. At some public meeting of ours, where he spoke amid great +applause, in smooth, Gladstonian periods, of his proposed Irish publishing +firm, one heard faint hostile murmurs, and at last a voice cried, +"Remember Newry," and a voice answered, "There is a grave there!" and a +part of the audience sang, "Here's to John Mitchell that is gone, boys, +gone; Here's to the friends that are gone." The meeting over, a group of +us, indignant that the meeting we had called for his welcome should have +contained those malcontents, gathered about him to apologize. He had +written a pamphlet, he explained: he would give us copies. We would see +that he was in the right, how badly Mitchell had behaved. But in Ireland +personality, if it be but harsh and hard, has lovers, and some of us, I +think, may have gone home muttering, "How dare he be in the right if +Mitchell is in the wrong?" + + +IX + +He wanted "to complete the Young Ireland movement"--to do all that had +been left undone because of the Famine, or the death of Davis, or his own +emigration; and all the younger men were upon my side in resisting that. +They might not want the books I wanted, but they did want books written by +their own generation, and we began to struggle with him over the control +of the company. Taylor became very angry, and I can understand what I +looked like in his eyes, when I remember Edwin Ellis's seriously-intended +warning, "It is bad manners for a man under thirty to permit himself to be +in the right." But John O'Leary supported me throughout. + +When Gavin Duffy had gone to London to draw up articles of association for +his company, for which he had found many shareholders in Dublin, the +dispute became very fierce. One night members of the general public +climbed the six flights of stairs to our committee room, now no longer in +the Mansion House, and found seats for themselves just behind our chairs. +We were all too angry to send them away, or even to notice their presence, +for I was accused of saying at a public meeting in Cork, "Our books," when +I should have said, "Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's books." I was not Taylor's +match with the spoken word, and barely matched him with the written word. +At twenty-seven or twenty-eight I was immature and clumsy, and O'Leary's +support was capricious, for, being but a spectator of life, he would +desert me if I used a bad argument, and would not return till I found a +good one; and our chairman, Dr. Hyde, "most popular of men," sat dreaming +of his old white cockatoo in far-away Roscommon. Our very success had been +a misfortune, for an opposition which had been literary and political, now +that it had spread to the general public, brought religious prejudice to +its aid. Suddenly, when the company seemed all but established, and a +scheme had been thought out which gave some representation on its +governing board to contemporary Irish writers, Gavan Duffy produced a +letter from Archbishop Walsh, and threw the project up. The letter had +warned him that after his death the company would fall under a dangerous +influence. At this moment the always benevolent friend, to whom I had +explained in confidence, when asking his support, my arrangements with my +publisher, went to Gavan Duffy and suggested that they should together +offer Mr Fisher Unwin a series of Irish books, and Mr Fisher Unwin and his +reader accepted the series under the belief that it was my project that +they accepted. I went to London to find the contract signed, and that all +I could do was to get two sub-editors appointed, responsible to the two +societies. Two or three good books were published, especially Dr. Hyde's +_Short History of Gaelic Literature_, and Standish O'Grady's _Bog of +Stars_; but the series was killed by its first volume, Thomas Davis's dry +but informing historical essay. So important had our movement seemed that +ten thousand copies had been sold before anybody had time to read it, and +then came a dead stop. + +Gavan Duffy knew nothing of my plans, and so was guiltless, and my friend +had heard me discuss many things that evening. I had perhaps dispraised +the humanitarian Stephen Phillips, already in his first vogue, and praised +Francis Thompson, but half-rescued from his gutter; or flouted his belief +in the perpetual marriage of genius and virtue by numbering the vices of +famous men; this man's venery, that man's drink. He could not be expected +to remember that where I had said so much of no account, I said one +thing, and he had made no reply, that I thought of great account. He died +a few months ago, and it would have surprised and shocked him if any man +had told him that he was unforgiven; had he not forgotten all about it +long ago? A German doctor has said that if we leave an umbrella at a +friend's house it is because we have a sub-conscious desire to re-visit +that house; and he had perhaps a sub-conscious desire that my too +tumultuous generation should not have its say. + + +X + +I was at Sligo when I received a letter from John O'Leary, saying that I +could do no more in Dublin, for even the younger men had turned against +me, were "jealous," his letter said, though what they had to be jealous of +God knows. He said further that it was all my own fault, that he had +warned me what would happen if I lived on terms of intimacy with those I +tried to influence. I should have kept myself apart and alone. It was all +true; through some influence from an earlier generation, from Walt +Whitman, perhaps, I had sat talking in public bars, had talked late into +the night at many men's houses, showing all my convictions to men that +were but ready for one, and used conversation to explore and discover +among men who looked for authority. I did not yet know that intellectual +freedom and social equality are incompatible; and yet, if I had, could +hardly have lived otherwise, being too young for silence. The trouble came +from half a dozen obscure young men, who having nothing to do attended +every meeting and were able to overturn a project, that seemed my only +bridge to other projects, including a travelling theatre. We had planned +small libraries of Irish literature in connection with our country +branches; we collected books and money, sending a lecturer to every branch +and taking half the proceeds of that lecture to buy books. Maud Gonne, +whose beauty could draw a great audience in any country town, had been the +lecturer. The scheme was very nearly self-supporting, and six or seven +bundles of books, chosen after much disputation by John O'Leary, J. F. +Taylor, and myself, had been despatched to some six or seven branches. +"The country will support this work" Taylor had said somewhere on some +public platform, "because we are the most inflammable people on God's +earth," his harsh voice giving almost a quality of style to Carlylian +commonplace; but we are also a very jealous people. The half-a-dozen young +men, if a little jealous of me, were still more jealous of those country +branches which were getting so much notice, and where there was so much of +that peasant mind their schoolmasters had taught them to despise. One must +be English or Irish, they would have said. I returned to find a great box +of books appropriated for some Dublin purpose and the whole scheme +abandoned. I know that it was a bitter moment because I remember with +gratitude words spoken not to my ear, but for my ear, by a young man who +had lately joined our Society, Mr. Stephen McKenna, now well-known amongst +scholars for his distinguished translations of Plotinus, and I seem to +remember that I lost through anger what gift of persuasion I may possess, +and that I was all the more helpless because I felt that even the best of +us disagreed about everything at heart. I began to feel that I needed a +hostess more than a society, but that I was not to find for years to +come. I tried to persuade Maud Gonne to be that hostess, but her social +life was in Paris, and she had already formed a new ambition, the turning +of French public opinion against England. Without intellectual freedom +there can be no agreement, and in Nationalist Dublin there was not--indeed +there still is not--any society where a man is heard by the right ears, +but never overheard by the wrong, and where he speaks his whole mind +gaily, and is not the cautious husband of a part; where phantasy can play +before matured into conviction; where life can shine and ring, and lack +utility. Mere life lacking the protection of wealth or rank, or some +beauty's privilege of caprice cannot choose its company, taking up and +dropping men merely because it likes, or dislikes, their manners and their +looks, and in its stead opinion crushes and rends, and all is hatred and +bitterness: wheel biting upon wheel, a roar of steel or iron tackle, a +mill of argument grinding all things down to mediocrity. If, as I think, +minds and metals correspond the goldsmiths of Paris foretold the French +Revolution when they substituted steel for that unserviceable gold in the +manufacture of the more expensive jewel work, and made those large, flat +steel buttons for men of fashion whereby the card players were able to +cheat by studying the reflections of the cards. + + +XI + +No country could have more natural distaste for equality, for in every +circle there was some man ridiculous for posing as the type of some +romantic or distinguished quality. One of our friends, a man of talent +and of learning, whose ancestors had come, he believed, from Denmark in +the ninth century, looked and talked the distinguished foreigner so +perfectly that a patriotic newspaper gave particulars of his supposed +relations in contemporary Denmark! A half-mad old man who had served for a +few months in the Pope's army, many years before, still rode an old white +warhorse in all national processions, and, if their enemies were not +lying, one Town Councillor had challenged another to a duel by flinging +his glove upon the floor; while a popular Lord Mayor had boasted in a +public speech that he never went to bed at night without reading at least +twelve pages of _Sappho_. Then, too, in those conversations of the small +hours, to which O'Leary had so much objected, whenever we did not speak of +art and letters, we spoke of Parnell. We told each other that he had +admitted no man to his counsel; that when some member of his party found +himself in the same hotel by chance, that member would think to stay there +a presumption, and move to some other lodging; and, above all, we spoke of +his pride, that made him hide all emotion while before his enemy. Once he +had seemed callous and indifferent to the House of Commons, Foster had +accused him of abetting assassination, but when he came among his +followers his hands were full of blood, because he had torn them with his +nails. What excitement there would have been, what sense of mystery would +have stirred all our hearts, and stirred hearts all through the country, +where there was still, and for many years to come, but one overmastering +topic, had we known the story Mrs. Parnell tells of that scene on Brighton +Pier. He and the woman that he loved stood there upon a night of storm, +when his power was at its greatest height, and still unthreatened. He +caught her from the ground and held her at arm's length out over the water +and she lay there motionless, knowing that, had she moved, he would have +drowned himself and her. Perhaps unmotived self-immolation, were that +possible, or else at mere suggestion of storm and night, were as great +evidence as such a man could give of power over self, and so of the +expression of the self. + + +XII + +When I look back upon my Irish propaganda of those years I can see little +but its bitterness. I never met with, or but met to quarrel with, my +father's old family acquaintance; or with acquaintance I myself might have +found, and kept, among the prosperous educated class, who had all the +great appointments at University or Castle; and this I did by deliberate +calculation. If I must attack so much that seemed sacred to Irish +nationalist opinion, I must, I knew, see to it that no man suspect me of +doing it to flatter Unionist opinion. Whenever I got the support of some +man who belonged by birth and education to University or Castle, I would +say, "Now you must be baptized of the gutter." I chose Royal visits +especially for demonstrations of disloyalty, rolling up with my own hands +the red carpet spread by some elderly Nationalist, softened or weakened by +time, to welcome Viceroyalty; and threatening, if the London Society drank +to the King's health, that my friends and I would demonstrate against it +by turning our glasses upside down; and was presently to discover that one +can grow impassioned and fanatical about opinions, which one has chosen +as one might choose a side upon the football field; and I thought many a +time of the pleasant Dublin houses that would never ask me to dine; and +the still pleasanter houses with trout-streams near at hand, that would +never ask me upon a visit. I became absurdly sensitive, glancing about me +in certain public places, the private view of our Academy, or the like, to +discover imagined enemies; and even now, after twenty or thirty years, I +feel at times that I have not recovered my natural manner. Yet it was in +those pleasant houses, among the young men and the young girls, that we +were to make our converts. When we loathe ourselves or our world, if that +loathing but turn to intellect, we see self or world and its anti-self as +in one vision; when loathing remains but loathing, world or self consumes +itself away, and we turn to its mechanical opposite. Popular Nationalism +and Unionism so changed into one another, being each but the other's +headache. The Nationalist abstractions were like the fixed ideas of some +hysterical woman, a part of the mind turned into stone, and all the rest a +seething and burning; and Unionist Ireland had re-acted from that seething +and burning to a cynical indifference, and from those fixed ideas to +whatever might bring the most easy and obvious success. + +I remember Taylor at some public debate, stiff of body and tense of voice; +and the contrasting figure of Fitzgibbon, the Lord Justice of Appeal of +the moment and his calm, flowing sentences, satisfactory to hear and +impossible to remember. Taylor speaks of a little nation of antiquity, +which he does not name, "set between the great Empire of Persia and the +great Empire of Rome." Into the mouths of those great Empires he puts the +arguments of Fitzgibbon, and such as he, "Join with our greatness! What +in comparison to that is your little, beggarly nationality?" And then I +recall the excitement, the shiver of the nerves, as his voice rose to an +ecstatic cry, "Out of that nation came the salvation of the world." I +remember, too, and grow angry, as it were yesterday, a letter from that +Lord Justice of Appeal, who had changed his politics for advancement's +sake, recommending a correspondent to avoid us, because we dissuaded +people from the study of "Shakespeare and Kingsley." + +Edward Dowden, my father's old friend, with his dark romantic face, the +one man of letters Dublin Unionism possessed, was withering in that barren +soil. Towards the end of his life he confessed to a near friend that he +would have wished before all things to have been the lover of many women; +and some careless lecture, upon the youthful Goethe, had in early life +drawn down upon him the displeasure of the Protestant Archbishop. And yet +he turned Shakespeare into a British Benthamite, flattered Shelley but to +hide his own growing lack of sympathy, abandoned for like reason that +study of Goethe that should have been his life-work, and at last cared but +for Wordsworth, the one great poet who, after brief blossom, was cut and +sawn into planks of obvious utility. I called upon him from time to time +out of gratitude for old encouragements, and because, among the Dublin +houses open to me, his alone was pleasant to the eye, with its many books +and its air of scholarship. But when O'Grady had declared, rancorous for +once but under substantial provocation, that he had "a bad head and a +worse heart," I found my welcome troubled and called no more. + + +XIII + +The one house where nobody thought or talked politics was a house in Ely +Place, where a number of young men lived together, and, for want of a +better name, were called Theosophists. Beside the resident members, other +members dropped in and out during the day, and the reading-room was a +place of much discussion about philosophy and about the arts. The house +had been taken in the name of the engineer to the Board of Works, a +black-bearded young man, with a passion for Manichean philosophy, and all +accepted him as host; and sometimes the conversation, especially when I +was there, became too ghostly for the nerves of his young and delicate +wife, and he would be made angry. I remember young men struggling, with +inexact terminology and insufficient learning, for some new religious +conception, on which they could base their lives; and some few strange or +able men. + +At the top of the house lived a medical student who read Plato and took +haschisch, and a young Scotchman who owned a vegetarian restaurant, and +had just returned from America, where he had gone as the disciple of the +Prophet Harris, and where he would soon return in the train of some new +prophet. When one asked what set him on his wanderings, he told of a young +Highlander, his friend in boyhood, whose cap was always plucked off at a +certain twist in the road, till the fathers of the village fastened it +upon his head by recommending drink and women. When he had gone, his room +was inherited by an American hypnotist, who had lived among the Zuni +Indians with the explorer Cushant, and told of a Zuni Indian who, +irritated by some white man's praise of telephone and telegraph, cried +out, "Can they do that?" and cast above his head two handfuls of sand that +burst into flame, and flamed till his head seemed wrapped in fire. He +professed to talk the philosophy of the Zuni Indians, but it seemed to me +the vague Platonism that all there talked, except that he spoke much of +men passing in sleep into the heart of mountains; a doctrine that was +presently incorporated in the mythology of the house, to send young men +and women hither and thither inquiring for sacred places. On a lower floor +lived a strange red-haired girl, all whose thoughts were set upon painting +and poetry, conceived as abstract images like Love and Penury in the +_Symposium_; and to these images she sacrificed herself with Asiatic +fanaticism. The engineer had discovered her starving somewhere in an +unfurnished or half-furnished room, and that she had lived for many weeks +upon bread and shell-cocoa, so that her food never cost her more than a +penny a day. Born into a county family, who were so haughty that their +neighbours called them the Royal Family, she had quarrelled with a mad +father, who had never, his tenants declared, "unscrewed the top of his +flask with any man," because she wished to study art, had ran away from +home, had lived for a time by selling her watch, and then by occasional +stories in an Irish paper. For some weeks she had paid half-a-crown a week +to some poor woman to see her to the art schools and back, for she +considered it wrong for a woman to show herself in public places +unattended; but of late she had been unable to afford the school fees. The +engineer engaged her as a companion for his wife, and gave her money +enough to begin her studies once more. She had talent and imagination, a +gift for style; but, though ready to face death for painting and poetry, +conceived as allegorical figures, she hated her own genius, and had not +met praise and sympathy early enough to overcome the hatred. Face to face +with paint and canvas, pen and paper, she saw nothing of her genius but +its cruelty, and would have scarce arrived before she would find some +excuse to leave the schools for the day, if indeed she had not invented +over her breakfast some occupation so laborious that she could call it a +duty, and so not go at all. Most watched her in mockery, but I watched in +sympathy; composition strained my nerves and spoiled my sleep; and yet, as +far back as I could trace--and in Ireland we have long memories--my +paternal ancestors had worked at some intellectual pursuit, while hers had +shot and hunted. She could at any time, had she given up her profession, +which her father had raged against, not because it was art, but because it +was a profession, have returned to the common comfortable life of women. +When, a little later, she had quarrelled with the engineer or his wife, +and gone back to bread and shell-cocoa I brought her an offer from some +Dublin merchant of fairly well paid advertisement work, which would have +been less laborious than artistic creation; but she said that to draw +advertisements was to degrade art, thanked me elaborately, and did not +disguise her indignation. She had, I believe, returned to starvation with +joy, for constant anaemia would shortly give her an argument strong enough +to silence her conscience when the allegorical images glared upon her, +and, apart from that, starvation and misery had a large share in her +ritual of worship. + + +XIV + +At the top of the house and at the time I remember best, in the same room +with the young Scotchman, lived Mr. George Russell (A.E.), and the house +and the society were divided into his adherents and those of the engineer; +and I heard of some quarrelling between the factions. The rivalry was +sub-conscious. Neither had willingly opposed the other in any matter of +importance. The engineer had all the financial responsibility, and George +Russell was, in the eyes of the community, saint and genius. Had either +seen that the question at issue was the leadership of mystical thought in +Dublin, he would, I think, have given way, but the dispute seemed trivial. +At the weekly meetings, anything might be discussed; no chairman called a +speaker to order; an atheistic workman could denounce religion, or a pious +Catholic confound theosophy with atheism; and the engineer, precise and +practical, disapproved. He had an object. He wished to make converts for a +definite form of belief, and here an enemy, if a better speaker, might +make all the converts. He wished to confine discussion to members of the +society, and had proposed in committee, I was told, a resolution on the +subject; while Russell, who had refused to join my National Literary +Society, because the party of Harp and Pepperpot had set limits to +discussion, resisted, and at last defeated him. In a couple of years some +new dispute arose; he resigned, and founded a society which drew doctrine +and method from America or London; and Russell became, as he is to-day, +the one masterful influence among young Dublin men and women who love +religious speculation, but have no historical faith. + +When Russell and I had been at the Art School six or seven years before, +he had been almost unintelligible. He had seemed incapable of coherent +thought, and perhaps was so at certain moments. The idea came upon him, he +has told me, that, if he spoke he would reveal that he had lost coherence; +and for the three days that the idea lasted spent the hours of daylight +wandering upon the Dublin mountains, that he might escape the necessity +for speech. I used to listen to him at that time, mostly walking through +the streets at night, for the sake of some stray sentence, beautiful and +profound, amid many words that seemed without meaning; and there were +others, too, who walked and listened, for he had become, I think, to all +his fellow students, sacred, as the fool is sacred in the East. We copied +the model laboriously, but he would draw without research into the natural +form, and call his study "St. John in the Wilderness"; but I can remember +the almost scared look and the half-whisper of a student, now a successful +sculptor, who said, pointing to the modelling of a shoulder, "That is too +easy, a great deal too easy!" For with brush and pencil he was too +coherent. + +We derided each other, told absurd tales to one another's discredit, but +we never derided him, or told tales to his discredit. He stood outside the +sense of comedy his friend John Eglinton has called "the social cement" of +our civilization; and we would "gush" when we spoke of him, as men do when +they praise something incomprehensible. But when he painted there was no +difficulty in comprehending. How could that ease and rapidity of +composition, so far beyond anything that we could attain to, belong to a +man whose words seemed often without meaning? + +A few months before I had come to Ireland he had sent me some verses, +which I had liked till Edwin Ellis had laughed me from my liking by +proving that no line had a rhythm that agreed with any other, and that, +the moment one thought he had settled upon some scheme of rhyme, he would +break from it without reason. But now his verse was clear in thought and +delicate in form. He wrote without premeditation or labour. It had, as it +were, organized itself, and grown as nervous and living as if it had, as +Dante said of his own work, paled his cheek. The Society he belonged to +published a little magazine, and he had asked the readers to decide +whether they preferred his prose or his verse, and it was because they so +willed it that he wrote the little transcendental verses afterwards +published in _Homeward Songs by the Way_. + +Life was not expensive in that house, where, I think, no meat was eaten; I +know that out of the sixty or seventy pounds a year which he earned as +accountant in a Dublin shop, he saved a considerable portion for his +private charity; and it was, I think, his benevolence that gave him his +lucidity of speech, and, perhaps, of writing. If he convinced himself that +any particular activity was desirable in the public interest or in that of +his friends, he had at once the ardour that came to another from personal +ambition. He was always surrounded with a little group of infirm or +unlucky persons, whom he explained to themselves and to others, turning +cat to griffin, goose to swan. In later years he was to accept the +position of organizer of a co-operative banking system, before he had even +read a book upon economics or finance, and within a few months to give +evidence before a Royal Commission upon the system, as an acknowledged +expert, though he had brought to it nothing but his impassioned +versatility. + +At the time I write of him, he was the religious teacher, and that +alone--his painting, his poetry, and his conversation all subservient to +that one end. Men watched him with awe or with bewilderment; it was known +that he saw visions continually, perhaps more continually than any modern +man since Swedenborg; and when he painted and drew in pastel what he had +seen, some accepted the record without hesitation, others, like myself, +noticing the academic Graeco-Roman forms, and remembering his early +admiration for the works of Gustave Moreau, divined a subjective element, +but no one doubted his word. One might not think him a good observer, but +no one could doubt that he reported with the most scrupulous care what he +believed himself to have seen; nor did he lack occasional objective +corroboration. Walking with some man in his park--his demesne, as we say +in Ireland--he had seen a visionary church at a particular spot, and the +man had dug and uncovered its foundations; then some woman had met him +with, "Oh, Mr Russell, I am so unhappy," and he had replied, "You will be +perfectly happy this evening at seven o'clock," and left her to her +blushes. She had an appointment with a young man for seven o'clock. I had +heard of this a day or so after the event, and I asked him about it, and +was told it had suddenly come into his head to use those words; but why he +did not know. He and I often quarrelled, because I wanted him to examine +and question his visions, and write them out as they occurred; and still +more because I thought symbolic what he thought real like the men and +women that had passed him on the road. Were they so much a part of his +sub-conscious life that they would have vanished had he submitted them to +question; were they like those voices that only speak, those strange +sights that only show themselves for an instant, when the attention has +been withdrawn; that phantasmagoria of which I had learnt something in +London: and had his verse and his painting a like origin? And was that why +the same hand that painted a certain dreamy, lovely sandy shore, now in +the Dublin Municipal Gallery, could with great rapidity fill many canvases +with poetical commonplace; and why, after writing _Homeward Songs by the +Way_, where all is skilful and much exquisite, he would never again write +a perfect book? Was it precisely because in Swedenborg alone the conscious +and the sub-conscious became one, as in that marriage of the angels, which +he has described as a contact of the whole being, that Coleridge thought +Swedenborg both man and woman? + +Russell's influence, which was already great, had more to support it than +his versatility, or the mystery that surrounded him, for his sense of +justice, and the daring that came from his own confidence in it, had made +him the general counsellor. He would give endless time to a case of +conscience, and no situation was too difficult for his clarity; and +certainly some of the situations were difficult. I remember his being +summoned to decide between two ladies who had quarrelled about a +vacillating admirer, and called each other, to each other's faces, the +worst names in our somewhat anaemic modern vocabulary; and I have heard of +his success on an occasion when I think no other but Dostoievsky's idiot +could have avoided offence. The Society was very young, and, as its +members faced the world's moral complexities as though they were the first +that ever faced them, they drew up very vigorous rules. One rule was that +if any member saw a fault growing upon any other member, it was his duty +to point it out to that member. A certain young man become convinced that +a certain young woman had fallen in love with him; and, as an unwritten +rule pronounced love and the spiritual life incompatible, that was a heavy +fault. As the young man felt the delicacy of the situation, he asked for +Russell's help, and side by side they braved the offender, who, I was +told, received their admonishment with surprised humility, and promised +amendment. His voice would often become high, and lose its self-possession +during intimate conversation, and I especially could put him in a rage; +but the moment the audience became too large for intimacy, or some +exciting event had given formality to speech, he would be at the same +moment impassioned and impersonal. He had, and has, the capacity, beyond +that of any man I have known, to put with entire justice not only the +thoughts, but the emotions, of the most opposite parties and +personalities, as it were dissolving some public or private uproar into +drama by Corneille or by Racine; and men who have hated each other must +sometimes have been reconciled, because each heard his enemy's argument +put into better words than he himself had found for his own; and this gift +was in later years to give him political influence, and win him respect +from Irish Nationalist and Unionist alike. It was, perhaps, because of it, +joined to a too literal acceptance of those noble images of moral +tradition which are so like late Graeco-Roman statues, that he had seen +all human life as a mythological system, where, though all cats are +griffins, the more dangerous griffins are only found among politicians he +has not spoken to, or among authors he has but glanced at; while those men +and women who bring him their confessions and listen to his advice, carry +but the snowiest of swan's plumage. Nor has it failed to make him, as I +think, a bad literary critic; demanding plays and poems where the +characters must attain a stature of seven feet, and resenting as something +perverse and morbid all abatement from that measure. I sometimes wonder +what he would have been had he not met in early life the poetry of Emerson +and Walt Whitman, writers who have begun to seem superficial precisely +because they lack the Vision of evil; and those translations of the +Upanishads, which it is so much harder to study by the sinking flame of +Indian tradition than by the serviceable lamp of Emerson and Walt Whitman. + +We are never satisfied with the maturity of those whom we have admired in +boyhood; and, because we have seen their whole circle--even the most +successful life is but a segment--we remain to the end their harshest +critics. One old schoolfellow of mine will never believe that I have +fulfilled the promise of some rough unscannable verses that I wrote before +I was eighteen. Does any imaginative man find in maturity the admiration +that his first half-articulate years aroused in some little circle; and is +not the first success the greatest? Certainly, I demanded of Russell some +impossible things, and if I had any influence upon him--and I have little +doubt that I had, for we were very intimate--it may not have been a good +influence for I thought there could be no aim for poet or artist except +expression of a "Unity of Being" like that of a "perfectly proportioned +human body"--though I would not at the time have used that phrase. I +remember that I was ironic and indignant when he left the Art Schools +because his "will was weak, and must grow weaker if he followed any +emotional pursuit;" as, later, when he let the readers of a magazine +decide between his prose and his verse. I now know that there are men who +cannot possess "Unity of Being," who must not seek it or express it--and +who, so far from seeking an anti-self, a Mask that delineates a being in +all things the opposite to their natural state, can but seek the +suppression of the anti-self, till the natural state alone remains. These +are those who must seek no image of desire, but await that which lies +beyond their mind, unities not of the mind, but unities of nature, unities +of God: the man of science, the moralist, the humanitarian, the +politician, St. Simon Stylites upon his pillar, St. Antony in his cavern; +all whose pre-occupation is to know themselves for fragments, and at last +for nothing; to hollow their hearts out till they are void and without +form, to summon a creator by revealing chaos, to become the lamp for +another's wick and oil; and indeed it may be that it has been for their +guidance in a very special sense that the "perfectly proportioned human +body" suffered crucifixion. For them Mask and Image are of necessity +morbid, turning their eyes upon themselves, as though they were of those +who can be law unto themselves, of whom Chapman has written, "Neither is +it lawful that they should stoop to any other law," whereas they are +indeed of those who can but ask, "Have I behaved as well as So-and-so?" +"Am I a good man according to the commandments?" or, "Do I realise my own +nothingness before God?" "Have my experiments and observations excluded +the personal factor with sufficient rigour?" Such men do not assume wisdom +or beauty as Shelley did, when he masked himself as Ahasuerus, or as +Prince Athanais, nor do they pursue an Image through a world that had else +seemed an uninhabitable wilderness till, amid the privations of that +pursuit, the Image is no more named Pandemos, but Urania; for such men +must cast all Masks away and fly the Image, till that Image, transfigured +because of their cruelties of self-abasement, becomes itself some Image or +epitome of the whole natural or supernatural world, and itself pursues. +The wholeness of the supernatural world can only express itself in +personal form, because it has no epitome but man, nor can _The Hound of +Heaven_ fling itself into any but an empty heart. We may know the +fugitives from others poets because, like George Herbert, like Francis +Thompson, like George Russell, their imaginations grow more vivid in the +expression of something which they have not themselves created, some +historical religion or cause. But if the fugitive should live, as I think +Russell does at times, as it is natural for a Morris or a Henley or a +Shelley to live, hunters and pursuers all, his art surrenders itself to +moral or poetical commonplace, to a repetition of thoughts and images that +have no relation to experience. + +I think that Russell would not have disappointed even my hopes had he, +instead of meeting as an impressionable youth with our modern subjective +romanticism, met with some form of traditional belief, which condemned all +that romanticism admires and praises, indeed, all images of desire; for +such condemnation would have turned his intellect towards the images of +his vision. It might, doubtless, have embittered his life, for his strong +intellect would have been driven out into the impersonal deeps where the +man shudders; but it would have kept him a religious teacher, and set him, +it may be, among the greatest of that species; politics, for a +vision-seeking man, can be but half achievement, a choice of an almost +easy kind of skill instead of that kind which is, of all those not +impossible, the most difficult. Is it not certain that the Creator yawns +in earthquake and thunder and other popular displays, but toils in +rounding the delicate spiral of a shell? + + +XV + +I heard the other day of a Dublin man recognizing in London an elderly man +who had lived in that house in Ely Place in his youth, and of that elderly +man, at the sudden memory, bursting into tears. Though I have no such +poignant memories, for I was never of it, never anything but a +dissatisfied critic, yet certain vivid moments come back to me as I write. + +...Russell has just come in from a long walk on the Two Rock mountain, +very full of his conversation with an old religious beggar, who kept +repeating, "God possesses the heavens, but He covets the earth--He covets +the earth." + + * * * * * + +I get in talk with a young man who has taken the orthodox side in some +debate. He is a stranger, but explains that he has inherited magical art +from his father, and asks me to his rooms to see it in operation. He and a +friend of his kill a black cock, and burn herbs in a big bowl, but nothing +happens except that the friend repeats again and again, "Oh, my God," and +when I ask him why he has said that, does not know that he has spoken; and +I feel that there is something very evil in the room. + + * * * * * + +We are sitting round the fire one night, and a member, a woman, tells a +dream that she has just had. She dreamed that she saw monks digging in a +garden. They dug down till they found a coffin, and when they took off the +lid she saw that in the coffin lay a beautiful young man in a dress of +gold brocade. The young man railed against the glory of the world, and +when he had finished, the monks closed the coffin reverently, and buried +it once more. They smoothed the ground, and then went on with their +gardening. + + * * * * * + +I have a young man with me, an official of the National Literary Society, +and I leave him in the reading-room with Russell, while I go upstairs to +see the young Scotchman. I return after some minutes to find that the +young man has become a Theosophist, but a month later, after an interview +with a friar, to whom he gives an incredible account of his new beliefs, +he goes to Mass again. + + + + +BOOK III + +HODOS CAMELIONIS + + + + +_HODOS CAMELIONIS_ + + +I + +When staying with Hyde in Roscommon, I had driven over to Lough Kay, +hoping to find some local memory of the old story of Tumaus Costello, +which I was turning into a story now called _Proud Costello, Macdermot's +Daughter, and the Bitter Tongue_. I was rowed up the lake that I might +find the island where he died; I had to find it from Hyde's account in +_The Love-Songs of Connaught_, for when I asked the boatman, he told the +story of Hero and Leander, putting Hero's house on one island, and +Leander's on another. Presently we stopped to eat our sandwiches at the +"Castle Rock," an island all castle. It was not an old castle, being but +the invention of some romantic man, seventy or eighty years ago. The last +man who had lived there had been Dr. Hyde's father, and he had but stayed +a fortnight. The Gaelic-speaking men in the district were accustomed, +instead of calling some specially useless thing a "white elephant," to +call it "The Castle on the Rock." The roof was, however, still sound, and +the windows unbroken. The situation in the centre of the lake, that has +little wood-grown islands, and is surrounded by wood-grown hills, is +romantic, and at one end, and perhaps at the other too, there is a stone +platform where meditative persons might pace to and fro. I planned a +mystical Order which should buy or hire the castle, and keep it as a place +where its members could retire for a while for contemplation, and where +we might establish mysteries like those of Eleusis and Samothrace; and for +ten years to come my most impassioned thought was a vain attempt to find +philosophy and to create ritual for that Order. I had an unshakeable +conviction, arising how or whence I cannot tell, that invisible gates +would open as they opened for Blake, as they opened for Swedenborg, as +they opened for Boehme, and that this philosophy would find its manuals of +devotion in all imaginative literature, and set before Irishmen for +special manual an Irish literature which, though made by many minds, would +seem the work of a single mind, and turn our places of beauty or legendary +association into holy symbols. I did not think this philosophy would be +altogether pagan, for it was plain that its symbols must be selected from +all those things that had moved men most during many, mainly Christian, +centuries. + +I thought that for a time I could rhyme of love, calling it _The Rose_, +because of the Rose's double meaning; of a fisherman who had "never a +crack" in his heart; of an old woman complaining of the idleness of the +young, or of some cheerful fiddler, all those things that "popular poets" +write of, but that I must some day, on that day when the gates began to +open, become difficult or obscure. With a rhythm that still echoed Morris +I prayed to the Red Rose, to Intellectual Beauty: + + "Come near, come near, come near--ah, leave me still + A little space for the Rose-breath to fill, + Lest I no more hear common things.... + But seek alone to hear the strange things said + By God to the bright hearts of those long dead, + And learn to chant a tongue men do not know." + +I do not remember what I meant by "the bright hearts," but a little later +I wrote of Spirits "with mirrors in their hearts." + +My rituals were not to be made deliberately, like a poem, but all got by +that method Mathers had explained to me, and with this hope I plunged +without a clue into a labyrinth of images, into that labyrinth that we are +warned against in those _Oracles_ which antiquity has attributed to +Zoroaster, but modern scholarship to some Alexandrian poet. "Stoop not +down to the darkly splendid world wherein lieth continually a faithless +depth and Hades wrapped in cloud, delighting in unintelligible images." + + +II + +I found a supporter at Sligo in my elderly uncle, a man of fifty-three or +fifty-four, with the habits of a much older man. He had never left the +West of Ireland, except for a few days to London every year, and a single +fortnight's voyage to Spain on board a trading schooner, in his boyhood. +He was in politics a Unionist and Tory of the most obstinate kind, and +knew nothing of Irish literature or history. He was, however, strangely +beset by the romance of Ireland, as he discovered it among the people who +served him, sailing upon his ships or attending to his horses, and, though +narrow and obstinate of opinion, and puritanical in his judgment of life, +was perhaps the most tolerant man I have ever known. He never expected +anybody to agree with him, and if you did not upset his habits by cheating +him over a horse, or by offending his taste, he would think as well of you +as he did of other men, and that was not very well; and help you out of +any scrape whatever. I was accustomed to people much better read than he, +much more liberal-minded, but they had no life but the intellectual life, +and if they and I differed, they could not take it lightly, and were often +angry, and so for years now I had gone to Sligo, sometimes because I could +not afford my Dublin lodging, but most often for freedom and peace. He +would receive me with "I have learned that your friend So and So has been +seen at the Gresham Hotel talking to Mr William Redmond. What will not +people do for notoriety?" He considered all Irish Nationalist Members of +Parliament as outside the social pale, but after dinner, when conversation +grew intimate, would talk sympathetically of the Fenians in Ballina, where +he spent his early manhood, or of the Fenian privateer that landed the +wounded man at Sligo in the 'sixties. When Parnell was contesting an +election at Sligo a little before his death, other Unionist magistrates +refused or made difficulties when asked for some assistance, what I do not +remember, made necessary under election law; and so my uncle gave that +assistance. He walked up and down some Town Hall assembly-room or some +courtroom with Parnell, but would tell me nothing of that conversation, +except that Parnell spoke of Gladstone with extravagant hatred. He would +not repeat words spoken by a great man in his bitterness, yet Parnell at +the moment was too angry to care who listened. I knew one other man who +kept as firm a silence; he had attended Parnell's last public meeting, and +after it sat alone beside him, and heard him speak of the followers that +had fallen away, or were showing their faint hearts; but Parnell was the +chief devotion of his life. + +When I first began my visits, he had lived in the town itself, and close +to a disreputable neighbourhood called the Burrough, till one evening, +while he sat over his dinner, he heard a man and woman quarrelling under +his window. "I mind the time," shouted the man, "when I slept with you and +your daughter in the one bed." My uncle was horrified, and moved to a +little house about a quarter of a mile into the country, where he lived +with an old second-sighted servant, and a man-servant to look after the +racehorse that was browsing in the neighbouring field, with a donkey to +keep it company. His furniture had not been changed since he set up house +for himself as a very young man, and in a room opposite his dining-room +were the saddles of his youth, and though he would soon give up riding, +they would be oiled and the stirrups kept clean and bright till the day of +his death. Some love-affair had gone wrong when he was a very young man; +he had now no interest in women; certainly never sought favour of a woman, +and yet he took great care of his appearance. He did not let his beard +grow, though he had, or believed that he had, for he was hypochondriacal, +a sensitiveness of the skin that forced him to spend an hour in shaving, +and he would take to club and dumb-bell if his waist thickened by a hair's +breadth, and twenty years after, when a very old man, he had the erect +shapely figure of his youth. I often wondered why he went through so much +labour, for it was not pride, which had seemed histrionic in his eyes--and +certainly he had no vanity; and now, looking back, I am convinced that it +was from habit, mere habit, a habit formed when he was a young man, and +the best rider of his district. + +Probably through long association with Mary Battle, the second-sighted +servant, he had come to believe much in the supernatural world, and would +tell how several times, arriving home with an unexpected guest, he had +found the table set for three, and that he himself had dreamed of his +brother's illness in Liverpool before he had other news of it. He saw me +using images learned from Mathers to start reverie, and, though I held out +for a long time, thinking him too old and habit-bound, he persuaded me to +tell him their use, and from that on we experimented continually, and +after a time I began to keep careful record. In summer he always had the +same little house at Rosses Point, and it was there that he first became +sensitive to the cabalistic symbols. There are some high sandhills and low +cliffs, and I adopted the practice of walking by the seashore while he +walked on cliff or sandhill; I, without speaking, would imagine the +symbol, and he would notice what passed before his mind's eye, and in a +short time he would practically never fail of the appropriate vision. In +the symbols which are used certain colours are classified as "actives," +while certain other colours are "passives," and I had soon discovered that +if I used "actives" George Pollexfen would see nothing. I therefore gave +him exercises to make him sensitive to those colours, and gradually we +found ourselves well fitted for this work, and he began to take as lively +an interest, as was possible to a nature given over to habit, in my plans +for the Castle on the Rock. + +I worked with others, sworn to the scheme for the most part, and I made +many curious observations. It was the symbol itself, or, at any rate, not +my conscious intention that produced the effect, for if I made an error +and told someone, let us say, to gaze at the wrong symbol--they were +painted upon cards--the vision would be suggested by the symbol, not by +my thought, or two visions would appear side by side, one from the symbol +and one from my thought. When two people, between whose minds there was +even a casual sympathy, worked together under the same symbolic influence, +the dream or reverie would divide itself between them, each half being the +complement of the other; and now and again these complementary dreams, or +reveries, would arise spontaneously. I find, for instance, in an old +notebook, "I saw quite suddenly a tent with a wooden badly-carved idol, +painted dull red; a man looking like a Red Indian was prostrate before it. +The idol was seated to the left. I asked G. what he saw. He saw a most +august immense being, glowing with a ruddy opalescent colour, sitting on a +throne to the left", or, to summarise from a later notebook,... I am +meditating in one room and my fellow-student in another, when I see a boat +full of tumult and movement on a still sea, and my friend sees a boat with +motionless sails upon a tumultuous sea. There was nothing in the +originating symbol to suggest a boat. + +We never began our work until George's old servant was in her bed; and +yet, when we went upstairs to our beds, we constantly heard her crying out +with nightmare, and in the morning we would find that her dream echoed our +vision. One night, started by what symbol I forget, we had seen an +allegorical marriage of Heaven and Earth. When Mary Battle brought in the +breakfast next morning, I said, "Well, Mary, did you dream anything last +night?" and she replied (I am quoting from an old notebook) "indeed she +had," and that it was "a dream she would not have liked to have had twice +in one night." She had dreamed that her bishop, the Catholic bishop of +Sligo, had gone away "without telling anybody," and had married "a very +high-up lady," "and she not too young, either." She had thought in her +dream, "Now all the clergy will get married, and it will be no use going +to confession." There were "layers upon layers of flowers, many roses, all +round the church." + +Another time, when George Pollexfen had seen in answer to some evocation +of mine a man with his head cut in two, she woke to find that she "must +have cut her face with a pin, as it was all over blood." When three or +four saw together, the dream or vision would divide itself into three or +four parts, each seeming complete in itself, and all fitting together, so +that each part was an adaptation of a single meaning to a particular +personality. A visionary being would give, let us say, a lighted torch to +one, an unlighted candle to another, an unripe fruit to a third, and to +the fourth a ripe fruit. At times coherent stories were built up, as if a +company of actors were to improvise, and play, not only without previous +consultation, but without foreseeing at any moment what would be said or +done the moment after. Who made the story? Was it the mind of one of the +visionaries? Perhaps, for I have endless proof that, where two worked +together, the symbolic influence commonly took upon itself, though no word +was spoken, the quality of the mind that had first fixed a symbol in the +mind's eye. But, if so, what part of the mind? One friend, in whom the +symbolic impulse produced actual trance, described an elaborate and very +strange story while the trance was upon him, but upon waking told a story +that after a certain point was quite different. "They gave me a cup of +wine, and after that I remembered nothing." While speaking out of trance +he had said nothing of the cup of wine, which must have been offered to a +portion of his mind quite early in the dream. Then, too, from whence come +the images of the dream? Not always, I was soon persuaded, from the +memory, perhaps never in trance or sleep. One man, who certainly thought +that Eve's apple was the sort that you got from the greengrocer, and as +certainly never doubted its story's literal truth, said, when I used some +symbol to send him to Eden, that he saw a walled garden on the top of a +high mountain, and in the middle of it a tree with great birds in the +branches, and fruit out of which, if you held a fruit to your ear, came +the sound of fighting. I had not at the time read Dante's _Purgatorio_, +and it caused me some trouble to verify the mountain garden, and, from +some passage in the Zohar, the great birds among the boughs; while a young +girl, on being sent to the same garden, heard "the music of heaven" from a +tree, and on listening with her ear against the trunk, found that it was +made by the "continual clashing of swords." Whence came that fine thought +of music-making swords, that image of the garden, and many like images and +thoughts? I had as yet no clear answer, but knew myself face to face with +the Anima Mundi described by Platonic philosophers, and more especially in +modern times by Henry More, which has a memory independent of individual +memories, though they constantly enrich it with their images and their +thoughts. + + +III + +At Sligo we walked twice every day, once after lunch and once after +dinner, to the same gate on the road to Knocknarea; and at Rosses Point, +to the same rock upon the shore; and as we walked we exchanged those +thoughts that never rise before me now without bringing some sight of +mountain or of shore. Considering that Mary Battle received our thoughts +in sleep, though coarsened or turned to caricature, do not the thoughts of +the scholar or the hermit, though they speak no word, or something of +their shape and impulse, pass into the general mind? Does not the emotion +of some woman of fashion, caught in the subtle torture of self-analysing +passion, pass down, although she speak no word, to Joan with her Pot, Jill +with her Pail and, it may be, with one knows not what nightmare melancholy +to Tom the Fool? + +Seeing that a vision could divide itself in divers complementary portions, +might not the thought of philosopher or poet or mathematician depend at +every moment of its progress upon some complementary thought in minds +perhaps at a great distance? Is there nation-wide multiform reverie, every +mind passing through a stream of suggestion, and all streams acting and +reacting upon one another, no matter how distant the minds, how dumb the +lips? A man walked, as it were, casting a shadow, and yet one could never +say which was man and which was shadow, or how many the shadows that he +cast. Was not a nation, as distinguished from a crowd of chance comers, +bound together by these parallel streams or shadows; that Unity of Image, +which I sought in national literature, being but an originating symbol? + +From the moment when these speculations grew vivid, I had created for +myself an intellectual solitude, most arguments that could influence +action had lost something of their meaning. How could I judge any scheme +of education, or of social reform, when I could not measure what the +different classes and occupations contributed to that invisible commerce +of reverie and of sleep; and what is luxury and what necessity when a +fragment of gold braid, or a flower in the wallpaper may be an originating +impulse to revolution or to philosophy? I began to feel myself not only +solitary but helpless. + + +IV + +I had not taken up these subjects wilfully, nor through love of +strangeness, nor love of excitement, nor because I found myself in some +experimental circle, but because unaccountable things had happened even in +my childhood, and because of an ungovernable craving. When supernatural +events begin, a man first doubts his own testimony, but when they repeat +themselves again and again, he doubts all human testimony. At least he +knows his own bias, and may perhaps allow for it, but how trust historian +and psychologist that have for two hundred years ignored in writing of the +history of the world, or of the human mind, so momentous a part of human +experience? What else had they ignored and distorted? When Mesmerists +first travelled about as public entertainers, a favourite trick was to +tell a mesmerised man that some letter of the alphabet had ceased to +exist, and after that to make him write his name upon the blackboard. +Brown, or Jones, or Robinson would become upon the instant, and without +any surprise or hesitation, Rown, or Ones, or Obinson. + +Was modern civilisation a conspiracy of the sub-conscious? Did we turn +away from certain thoughts and things because the Middle Ages lived in +terror of the dark, or had some seminal illusion been imposed upon us by +beings greater than ourselves for an unknown purpose? Even when no facts +of experience were denied, might not what had seemed logical proof be but +a mechanism of change, an automatic impulse? Once in London, at a dinner +party, where all the guests were intimate friends, I had written upon a +piece of paper, "In five minutes York Powell will talk of a burning +house," thrust the paper under my neighbour's plate, and imagined my fire +symbol, and waited in silence. Powell shifted conversation from topic to +topic and within the five minutes was describing a fire he had seen as a +young man. When Locke's French translator Coste asked him how, if there +were no "innate ideas," he could explain the skill shown by a bird in +making its nest, Locke replied, "I did not write to explain the actions of +dumb creatures," and his translator thought the answer "very good, seeing +that he had named his book _A Philosophical Essay upon Human +Understanding_." Henry More, upon the other hand, considered that the +bird's instinct proved the existence of the Anima Mundi, with its ideas +and memories. Did modern enlightenment think with Coste that Locke had the +better logic, because it was not free to think otherwise? + + +V + +I ceased to read modern books that were not books of belief older than any +European Church, and founded that interested me, I tried to trace it back +to its earliest use, believing that there must be a tradition of belief +older than any European Church, and founded upon the experience of the +world before the modern bias. It was this search for a tradition that +urged George Pollexfen and myself to study the visions and thoughts of the +country people, and some country conversation repeated by one or the other +often gave us a day's discussion. These visions, we soon discovered, were +very like those we called up by symbol. Mary Battle, looking out of the +window at Rosses Point, saw coming from Knocknarea, where Queen Maeve, +according to local folklore, is buried under a great heap of stones, "the +finest woman you ever saw travelling right across from the mountains and +straight to here."--I quote a record written at the time. "She looked very +strong, but not wicked" (that is to say, not cruel). "I have seen the +Irish Giant" (some big man shown at a fair). "And though he was a fine man +he was nothing to her, for he was round and could not have stepped out so +soldierly ... she had no stomach on her but was slight and broad in the +shoulders, and was handsomer than any one you ever saw; she looked about +thirty." And when I asked if she had seen others like her, she said, "Some +of them have their hair down, but they look quite different, more like the +sleepy-looking ladies one sees in the papers. Those with their hair up are +like this one. The others have long white dresses, but those with their +hair up have short dresses, so that you can see their legs right up to +the calf." And when I questioned her, I found that they wore what might +well be some kind of buskin. "They are fine and dashing-looking, like the +men one sees riding their horses in twos and threes on the slopes of the +mountains with their swords swinging. There is no such race living now, +none so finely proportioned ... When I think of her and the ladies now +they are like little children running about not knowing how to put their +clothes on right ... why, I would not call them women at all." + +Not at this time, but some three or four years later, when the visions +came without any conscious use of symbol for a short time, and with much +greater vividness, I saw two or three forms of this incredible beauty, one +especially that must always haunt my memory. Then, too, the Master Pilot +told us of meeting at night close to the Pilot House a procession of women +in what seemed the costume of another age. Were they really people of the +past, revisiting, perhaps, the places where they lived, or must I explain +them, as I explained that vision of Eden as a mountain garden, by some +memory of the race, as distinct from individual memory? Certainly these +Spirits, as the country people called them, seemed full of personality; +were they not capricious, generous, spiteful, anxious, angry, and yet did +that prove them more than images and symbols? When I used a combined earth +and fire and lunar symbol, my seer, a girl of twenty-five, saw an obvious +Diana and her dogs, about a fire in a cavern. Presently, judging from her +closed eyes, and from the tone of her voice, that she was in trance, not +in reverie, I wished to lighten the trance a little, and made through +carelessness or hasty thinking a symbol of dismissal; and at once she +started and cried out, "She says you are driving her away too quickly. You +have made her angry." Then, too, if my visions had a subjective element, +so had Mary Battle's, for her fairies had but one tune, _The Distant +Waterfall_, and she never heard anything described in a sermon at the +Cathedral that she did not "see it after," and spoke of seeing in this way +the gates of Purgatory. + +Furthermore, if my images could affect her dreams, the folk-images could +affect mine in turn, for one night I saw between sleeping and waking a +strange long bodied pair of dogs, one black and one white, that I found +presently in some country tale. How, too, could one separate the dogs of +the country tale from those my uncle heard bay in his pillow? In order to +keep myself from nightmare, I had formed the habit of imagining four +watch-dogs, one at each corner of my room, and, though I had not told him +or anybody, he said, "Here is a very curious thing; most nights now, when +I lay my head upon the pillow, I hear a sound of dogs baying--the sound +seems to come up out of the pillow." A friend of Strindberg's, in +_delirium tremens_, was haunted by mice, and a friend in the next room +heard the squealing of the mice. + + +VI + +To that multiplicity of interest and opinion, of arts and sciences, which +had driven me to conceive a Unity of Culture defined and evoked by Unity +of Image, I had but added a multiplicity of images, and I was the more +troubled because, the first excitement over, I had done nothing to rouse +George Pollexfen from the gloom and hypochondria always thickening about +him. I asked no help of books, for I believed that the truth I sought +would come to me like the subject of a poem, from some moment of +passionate experience, and that if I filled my exposition with other men's +thought, other men's investigation, I would sink into all that +multiplicity of interest and opinion. That passionate experience could +never come--of that I was certain--until I had found the right image or +right images. From what but the image of Apollo, fixed always in memory +and passion, did his priesthood get that occasional power, a classical +historian has described, of lifting great stones and snapping great +branches; and did not Gemma Galgani, like many others that had gone +before, in 1889 cause deep wounds to appear in her body by contemplating +her crucifix? In the essay that Wilde read to me one Christmas Day, +occurred these words--"What does not the world owe to the imitation of +Christ, what to the imitation of Caesar?" and I had seen Macgregor Mathers +paint little pictures combining the forms of men, animals, and birds, +according to a rule which provided a form for every possible mental +condition, and I had heard him describing, upon what authority I do not +remember, how citizens of ancient Egypt assumed, when in contemplation, +the images of their gods. + +But now image called up image in an endless procession, and I could not +always choose among them with any confidence; and when I did choose, the +image lost its intensity, or changed into some other image. I had but +exchanged the Temptation of Flaubert's _Bouvard et Pecuchet_ for that of +his _St. Anthony_, and I was lost in that region a cabalistic manuscript, +shown me by Macgregor Mathers, had warned me of; astray upon the Path of +the Cameleon, upon _Hodos Camelionis_. + + +VII + +Now that I am a settled man and have many birds--the canaries have just +hatched out four nestlings--I have before me the problem that Locke waved +aside. As I gave them an artificial nest, a hollow vessel like a saucer, +they had no need of that skill the wild bird shows, each species having +its own preference among the lichen, or moss; but they could sort out wool +and hair and a certain soft white down that I found under a big tree. They +would twist a stem of grass till it was limber, and would wind it all +about the centre of the nest, and when the four grey eggs were laid, the +mother bird knew how to turn them over from time to time, that they might +be warmed evenly; and how long she must leave them uncovered, that the +white might not be dried up, and when to return that the growing bird +might not take cold. Then the young birds, even when they had all their +feathers, were very still as compared with the older birds, as though any +habit of movement would disturb the nest or make them tumble out. One of +them would now and again pass on the food that he had received from his +mother's beak to some other nestling. The father had often pecked the +mother bird before the eggs were laid, but now, until the last nestling +was decently feathered, he took his share in the feeding, and was very +peaceable, and it was only when the young could be left to feed themselves +that he grew jealous and had to be put into another cage. + +When I watch my child, who is not yet three years old, I can see so many +signs of knowledge from beyond her own mind; why else should she be so +excited when a little boy passes outside the window, and take so little +interest in a girl; why should she put a cloak about her, and look over +her shoulder to see it trailing upon the stairs, as she will some day +trail a dress; and why, above all, as she lay against her mother's side, +and felt the unborn child moving within, did she murmur, "Baby, baby?" + +When a man writes any work of genius, or invents some creative action, is +it not because some knowledge or power has come into his mind from beyond +his mind? It is called up by an image, as I think; all my birds' +adventures started when I hung a little saucer at one side of the cage, +and at the other a bundle of hair and grass; but our images must be given +to us, we cannot choose them deliberately. + + +VIII + +I know now that revelation is from the self, but from that age-long +memoried self, that shapes the elaborate shell of the mollusc and the +child in the womb, that teaches the birds to make their nest; and that +genius is a crisis that joins that buried self for certain moments to our +trivial daily mind. There are, indeed, personifying spirits that we had +best call but Gates and Gate-keepers, because through their dramatic power +they bring our souls to crisis, to Mask and Image, caring not a straw +whether we be Juliet going to her wedding, or Cleopatra to her death; for +in their eyes nothing has weight but passion. We have dreamed a foolish +dream these many centuries in thinking that they value a life of +contemplation, for they scorn that more than any possible life, unless it +be but a name for the worst crisis of all. They have but one purpose, to +bring their chosen man to the greatest obstacle he may confront without +despair. They contrived Dante's banishment, and snatched away his +Beatrice, and thrust Villon into the arms of harlots, and sent him to +gather cronies at the foot of the gallows, that Dante and Villon might +through passion become conjoint to their buried selves, turn all to Mask +and Image, and so be phantoms in their own eyes. In great lesser writers +like Landor and like Keats we are shown that Image and that Mask as +something set apart; Andromeda and her Perseus--though not the +sea-dragon--but in a few in whom we recognise supreme masters of tragedy, +the whole contest is brought into the circle of their beauty. Such +masters, Villon and Dante, let us say, would not, when they speak through +their art, change their luck; yet they are mirrored in all the suffering +of desire. The two halves of their nature are so completely joined that +they seem to labour for their objects, and yet to desire whatever happens, +being at the same instant predestinate and free, creation's very self. We +gaze at such men in awe, because we gaze not at a work of art, but at the +re-creation of the man through that art, the birth of a new species of +man, and, it may even seem that the hairs of our heads stand up, because +that birth, that re-creation, is from terror. Had not Dante and Villon +understood that their fate wrecked what life could not rebuild, had they +lacked their Vision of Evil, had they cherished any species of optimism, +they could but have found a false beauty, or some momentary instinctive +beauty, and suffered no change at all, or but changed as do the wild +creatures, or from devil well to devil sick, and so round the clock. + +They and their sort alone earn contemplation, for it is only when the +intellect has wrought the whole of life to drama, to crisis, that we may +live for contemplation, and yet keep our intensity. + +And these things are true also of nations, but the Gate-keepers who drive +the nation to war or anarchy that it may find its Image are different from +those who drive individual men, though I think at times they work +together. And as I look backward upon my own writing, I take pleasure +alone in those verses where it seems to me I have found something hard, +cold, some articulation of the Image, which is the opposite of all that I +am in my daily life, and all that my country is; yet man or nation can no +more make Mask or Image than the seed can be made by the soil into which +it is cast. + + Ille. + + "What portion in the world can the artist have, + Who has awakened from the common dream, + But dissipation and despair? + + Hic. + + And yet + No one denies to Keats, love of the world. + Remember his deliberate happiness. + + Ille. + + His art is happy, but who knows his mind? + I see a schoolboy, when I think of him, + With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window. + For certainly he sank into his grave + His senses and his heart unsatisfied, + And made, being poor, ailing, and ignorant.... + Shut out from all the luxury of the world, + Luxuriant song." + + + + +BOOK IV + +THE TRAGIC GENERATION + + + + +_THE TRAGIC GENERATION_ + + +I + +Two or three years after our return to Bedford Park _The Doll's House_ had +been played at the Royalty Theatre in Dean Street, the first Ibsen play to +be played in England, and somebody had given me a seat for the gallery. In +the middle of the first act, while the heroine was asking for macaroons, a +middle-aged washerwoman who sat in front of me, stood up and said to the +little boy at her side, "Tommy, if you promise to go home straight, we +will go now;" and at the end of the play, as I wandered through the +entrance hall, I heard an elderly critic murmur, "A series of +conversations terminated by an accident." I was divided in mind, I hated +the play; what was it but Carolus Durand, Bastien-Lepage, Huxley and +Tyndall, all over again; I resented being invited to admire dialogue so +close to modern educated speech that music and style were impossible. + +"Art is art because it is not nature," I kept repeating to myself, but how +could I take the same side with critic and washerwoman? As time passed +Ibsen became in my eyes the chosen author of very clever young +journalists, who, condemned to their treadmill of abstraction, hated music +and style; and yet neither I nor my generation could escape him because, +though we and he had not the same friends, we had the same enemies. I +bought his collected works in Mr. Archer's translation out of my thirty +shillings a week and carried them to and fro upon my journeys to Ireland +and Sligo, and Florence Farr, who had but one great gift, the most perfect +poetical elocution, became prominent as an Ibsen actress and had almost a +success in _Rosmersholm_, where there is symbolism and a stale odour of +spoilt poetry. She and I and half our friends found ourselves involved in +a quarrel with the supporters of old fashioned melodrama, and conventional +romance, and in the support of the new dramatists who wrote in what the +Daily Press chose to consider the manner of Ibsen. In 1894 she became +manageress of the Avenue Theatre with a play of Dr. Todhunter's, called +_The Comedy of Sighs_, and Mr Bernard Shaw's _Arms and the Man_. She asked +me to write a one act play for her niece, Miss Dorothy Paget, a girl of +eight or nine, to make her first stage appearance in; and I, with my Irish +Theatre in mind, wrote _The Land of Heart's Desire_, in some discomfort +when the child was theme, as I knew nothing of children, but with an +abundant mind when Mary Bruin was for I knew an Irish woman whose unrest +troubled me and lay beyond my comprehension. When she opened her theatre +she had to meet a hostile audience, almost as violent as that Synge met in +January, 1907, and certainly more brutal, for the Abbey audience had no +hatred for the players, and I think but little for Synge himself. Nor had +she the certainty of final victory to give her courage, for _The Comedy of +Sighs_ was a rambling story told with a little paradoxical wit. She had +brought the trouble upon herself perhaps, for always in revolt against her +own poetical gift, which now seemed obsolete, and against her own +Demeter-like face in the mirror, she had tried when interviewed by the +Press to shock and startle--to seem to desire enemies; and yet, unsure of +her own judgment being out of her own trade, had feared to begin with +Shaw's athletic wit, and now outraged convention saw its chance. For two +hours and a half, pit and gallery drowned the voices of the players with +boos and jeers that were meant to be bitter to the author who sat visible +to all in his box surrounded by his family, and to the actress struggling +bravely through her weary part; and then pit and gallery went home to +spread their lying story that the actress had a fit of hysterics in her +dressing-room. + +Todhunter had sat on to the end, and there were, I think, four acts of it, +listening to the howling of his enemies, while his friends slipped out one +by one, till one saw everywhere their empty seats, but nothing could +arouse the fighting instincts of that melancholy man. Next day I tried to +get him to publish his book of words with satirical designs and +illustrations, by Beardsley, who was just rising into fame, and an +introduction attacking the public, but though petulant and irascible he +was incapable of any emotion that could give life to a cause. He shared +the superstition still current in the theatre, that the public wants +sincere drama, but is kept from it by some conspiracy of managers or +newspapers, and could not get out of his head that the actors were to +blame. Shaw, whose turn came next, had foreseen all months before, and had +planned an opening that would confound his enemies. For the first few +minutes _Arms and the Man_ is crude melodrama and then just when the +audience are thinking how crude it is, it turns into excellent farce. At +the dress rehearsal, a dramatist who had his own quarrel with the public, +was taken in the noose; for at the first laugh he stood up, turned his +back on the stage, scowled at the audience, and even when everybody else +knew what turn the play had taken, continued to scowl, and order those +nearest to be silent. + +On the first night the whole pit and gallery, except certain members of +the Fabian Society, started to laugh at the author and then, discovering +that they themselves were being laughed at, sat there not converted--their +hatred was too bitter for that--but dumbfounded, while the rest of the +house cheered and laughed. In the silence that greeted the author after +the cry for a speech one man did indeed get his courage and boo loudly. "I +assure the gentleman in the gallery," was Shaw's answer, "that he and I +are of exactly the same opinion, but what can we do against a whole house +who are of the contrary opinion?" And from that moment Bernard Shaw became +the most formidable man in modern letters, and even the most drunken of +medical students knew it. My own play, which had been played with _The +Comedy of Sighs_, had roused no passions, but had pleased a sufficient +minority for Florence Farr to keep it upon the stage with _Arms and the +Man_, and I was in the theatre almost every night for some weeks. "Oh, +yes, the people seem to like _Arms and the Man_," said one of Mr Shaw's +players to me, "but we have just found out that we are all wrong. Mr Shaw +did really mean it quite seriously, for he has written a letter to say so, +and we must not play for laughs any more." Another night I found the +manager, triumphant and excited, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of +Edinburgh had been there, and the Duke of Edinburgh had spoken his dislike +out loud so that the whole stalls could hear, but the Prince of Wales had +been "very pleasant" and "got the Duke of Edinburgh away as soon as +possible." "They asked for me," he went on, "and the Duke of Edinburgh +kept on repeating, 'The man is mad,' meaning Mr Shaw, and the Prince of +Wales asked who Mr Shaw was, and what he meant by it." I myself was almost +as bewildered for though I came mainly to see how my own play went, and +for the first fortnight to vex my most patient actors with new lines, I +listened with excitement to see how the audience would like certain +passages of _Arms and the Man_. I hated it; it seemed to me inorganic, +logical straightness and not the crooked road of life and I stood aghast +before its energy as to-day before that of the Stone Drill by Mr. Epstein +or of some design by Mr Wyndham Lewis. He was right to claim Samuel Butler +for his master, for Butler was the first Englishman to make the discovery, +that it is possible to write with great effect without music, without +style, either good or bad, to eliminate from the mind all emotional +implication and to prefer plain water to every vintage, so much +metropolitan lead and solder to any tendril of the vine. Presently I had a +nightmare that I was haunted by a sewing machine, that clicked and shone, +but the incredible thing was that the machine smiled, smiled perpetually. +Yet I delighted in Shaw the formidable man. He could hit my enemies and +the enemies of all I loved, as I could never hit, as no living author that +was dear to me could ever hit. + +Florence Farr's way home was mine also for a part of the way, and it was +often of this that we talked, and sometimes, though not always, she would +share my hesitations, and for years to come I was to wonder whenever Shaw +became my topic, whether the cock crowed for my blame or for my praise. + + +II + +Shaw and Wilde, had no catastrophe come, would have long divided the stage +between them, though they were most unlike--for Wilde believed himself to +value nothing but words in their emotional associations, and he had turned +his style to a parade as though it were his show, and he Lord Mayor. + +I was at Sligo again and I saw the announcement of his action against Lord +Queensberry, when starting from my uncle's house to walk to Knocknarea to +dine with Cochrane of the Glen, as he was called, to distinguish him from +others of that name, an able old man. He had a relation, a poor mad girl, +who shared our meals, and at whom I shuddered. She would take a flower +from the vase in front of her and push it along the tablecloth towards any +male guest who sat near. The old man himself had strange opinions, born +not from any mental eccentricity, but from the solitude of his life; and a +freedom from all prejudice that was not of his own discovery. "The world +is getting more manly," he would say, "it has begun to drink port again," +or "Ireland is going to become prosperous. Divorced couples now choose +Ireland for a retreat, just as before Scotland became prosperous they +began to go there. There are a divorced wife and her lover living at the +other side of the mountain." I remember that I spoke that night of Wilde's +kindness to myself, said I did not believe him guilty, quoted the +psychologist Bain, who has attributed to every sensualist "a voluminous +tenderness," and described Wilde's hard brilliance, his dominating +self-possession. I considered him essentially a man of action, that he was +a writer by perversity and accident, and would have been more important as +soldier or politician; and I was certain that, guilty or not guilty, he +would prove himself a man. I was probably excited, and did most of the +talking, for if Cochrane had talked, I would have remembered an amusing +sentence or two; but he was certainly sympathetic. A couple of days later +I received a letter from Lionel Johnson, denouncing Wilde with great +bitterness. He had "a cold scientific intellect;" he got a "sense of +triumph and power; at every dinner-table he dominated, from the knowledge +that he was guilty of that sin which, more than any other possible to man, +would turn all those people against him if they but knew." He wrote in the +mood of his poem, _To the Destroyer of a Soul_, addressed to Wilde, as I +have always believed, though I know nothing of the circumstance that made +him write it. + +I might have known that Wilde's phantasy had taken some tragic turn, and +that he was meditating upon possible disaster, but one took all his words +for play--had he not called insincerity "a mere multiplication of the +personality" or some such words? I had met a man who had found him in a +barber's shop in Venice, and heard him explain, "I am having my hair +curled that I may resemble Nero;" and when, as editor of an Irish +anthology, I had asked leave to quote "Tread gently, she is near under the +snow," he had written that I might do so if I pleased, but his most +characteristic poem was that sonnet with the lines + + "Lo! with a little rod + I did but touch the honey's romance-- + And must I lose a soul's inheritance." + +When in London for my play I had asked news from an actor who had seen him +constantly. "He is in deep melancholy," was the answer. "He says that he +tries to sleep away as much of life as possible, only leaving his bed at +two or three in the afternoon, and spending the rest of the day at the +Cafe Royal. He has written what he calls the best short story in the +world, and will have it that he repeats to himself on getting out of bed +and before every meal. 'Christ came from a white plain to a purple city, +and as he passed through the first street, he heard voices overhead, and +saw a young man lying drunk upon a window sill, "Why do you waste your +soul in drunkenness?" He said. "Lord, I was a leper and You healed me, +what else can I do?" A little further through the town he saw a young man +following a harlot, and said, "Why do you dissolve your soul in +debauchery?" and the young man answered, "Lord, I was blind, and You +healed me, what else can I do?" At last in the middle of the city He saw +an old man crouching, weeping upon the ground, and when He asked why he +wept, the old man answered, "Lord, I was dead and You raised me into life, +what else can I do but weep?"'" + +Wilde published that story a little later, but spoiled it with the verbal +decoration of his epoch, and I have to repeat it to myself as I first +heard it, before I can see its terrible beauty. I no more doubt its +sincerity than I doubt that his parade of gloom, all that late rising, and +sleeping away his life, that elaborate playing with tragedy, was an +attempt to escape from an emotion by its exaggeration. He had three +successful plays running at once; he had been almost poor, and now, his +head full of Flaubert, found himself with ten thousand a year:--"Lord, I +was dead, and You raised me into life, what else can I do but weep." A +comedian, he was in the hands of those dramatists who understand nothing +but tragedy. + +A few days after the first production of my _Land of Heart's Desire_, I +had my last conversation with him. He had come into the theatre as the +curtain fell upon my play, and I knew that it was to ask my pardon that he +overwhelmed me with compliments; and yet I wonder if he would have chosen +those precise compliments, or spoken so extravagantly, but for the turn +his thoughts had taken: "Your story in _The National Observer_, _The +Crucifixion of the Outcast_, is sublime, wonderful, wonderful." + +Some business or other brought me to London once more and I asked various +Irish writers for letters of sympathy, and I was refused by none but +Edward Dowden, who gave me what I considered an irrelevant excuse--his +dislike for everything that Wilde had written. I heard that Wilde was at +his mother's house in Oakley Street, and I called there, but the Irish +servant told me, her face drawn and tragic as in the presence of death, +that he was not there, but that I could see his brother. Willie Wilde +received me with, "Who are you; what do you want?" but became all +friendship when I told him that I had brought letters of sympathy. He took +the bundle of letters in his hand, but said, "Do these letters urge him to +run away? Every friend he has is urging him to, but we have made up our +minds that he must stay and take his chance." "No," I said, "I certainly +do not think that he should run away, nor do those letters advise it." +"Letters from Ireland," he said. "Thank you, thank you. He will be glad to +get those letters, but I would keep them from him if they advised him to +run away." Then he threw himself back in his chair and began to talk with +incoherent emotion, and in phrases that echoed now and again his brother's +style at its worst; there were tear in his eyes, and he was, I think, +slightly intoxicated. "He could escape, oh, yes, he could escape--there is +a yacht in the Thames, and five thousand pounds to pay his bail--well, not +exactly in the Thames, but there is a yacht--oh, yes, he could escape, +even if I had to inflate a balloon in the back yard with my own hand, but +he has resolved to stay, to face it out, to stand the music like Christ. +You must have heard--it is not necessary to go into detail--but he and I, +we have not been friends; but he came to me like a wounded stag, and I +took him in." "After his release"--after the failure of his action against +Lord Queensberry, I think--"Stewart Headlam engaged a room at an hotel and +brought him there under another name, but the manager came up and said, +'Are you Mr. Wilde?' You know what my brother is, you know how he would +answer that. He said, 'Yes, I am Oscar Wilde,' and the manager said he +must not stay. The same thing happened in hotel after hotel, and at last +he made up his mind to come here. It is his vanity that has brought all +this disgrace upon him; they swung incense before him." He dwelt upon the +rhythm of the words as his brother would have done--"They swung it before +his heart." His first emotion at the thought of the letters over, he +became more simple, and explained that his brother considered that his +crime was not the vice itself, but that he should have brought such misery +upon his wife and children, and that he was bound to accept any chance, +however slight, that might reestablish his position. "If he is acquitted," +he said, "he will stay out of England for a few years, and can then gather +his friends about him once more--even if he is condemned he will purge his +offence--but if he runs away he will lose every friend that he has." I +heard later, from whom I forget now, that Lady Wilde had said, "If you +stay, even if you go to prison, you will always be my son, it will make no +difference to my affection, but if you go, I will never speak to you +again." While I was there, some woman who had just seen him--Willie +Wilde's wife, I think--came in, and threw herself in a chair, and said in +an exhausted voice, "It is all right now, he has made up his mind to go to +prison if necessary." Before his release, two years later, his brother and +mother were dead, and a little later his wife, struck by paralysis during +his imprisonment, I think, was dead, too; and he himself, his constitution +ruined by prison life, followed quickly; but I have never doubted, even +for an instant, that he made the right decision, and that he owes to that +decision half of his renown. + +Cultivated London, that before the action against Lord Queensberry had +mocked his pose and affected style, and refused to acknowledge his wit, +was now full of his advocates, though I did not meet a single man who +considered him innocent. One old enemy of his overtook me in the street +and began to praise his audacity, his self-possession. "He has made," he +said, "of infamy a new Thermopylae." I had written in reply to Lionel +Johnson's letter that I regretted Wilde's downfall but not that of his +imitators, but Johnson had changed with the rest. "Why do you not regret +the fall of Wilde's imitators"--I had but tried to share what I thought +his opinion--"They were worthless, but should have been left to +criticism." Wilde himself was a martyr in his eyes, and when I said that +tragedy might give his art a greater depth, he would not even grant a +martyr's enemies that poor merit, and thought Wilde would produce, when +it was all over, some comedy exactly like the others, writing from an art +where events could leave no trace. Everywhere one met writers and artists +who praised his wit and eloquence in the witness box, or repeated some +private saying. Willie Redmond told of finding him, to his astonishment, +at the conversazione of some theatrical society, standing amid an +infuriated crowd, mocking with more than all his old satirical wit the +actors and their country. He had said to a well-known painter during one +or other of the trials, "My poor brother writes to me that he is defending +me all over London; my poor, dear brother, he could compromise a steam +engine." His brother, too, had suffered a change, for, if rumour did not +wrong him, "the wounded stag" had not been at all graciously received. +"Thank God my vices were decent," had been his comment, and refusing to +sit at the same table, he had dined at some neighbouring hotel at his +brother's expense. His successful brother who had scorned him for a +drunken ne'er-do-well was now at his mercy, and besides, he probably +shared, until tragedy awoke another self, the rage and contempt that +filled the crowds in the street, and all men and women who had an +over-abundant normal sexual instinct. "Wilde will never lift his head +again," said the art critic, Gleeson White, "for he has against him all +men of infamous life." When the verdict was announced the harlots in the +street outside danced upon the pavement. + + +III + +Somewhere about 1450, though later in some parts of Europe by a hundred +years or so, and in some earlier, men attained to personality in great +numbers, "Unity of Being," and became like a "perfectly proportioned human +body," and as men so fashioned held places of power, their nations had it +too, prince and ploughman sharing that thought and feeling. What +afterwards showed for rifts and cracks were there already, but imperious +impulse held all together. Then the scattering came, the seeding of the +poppy, bursting of pea-pod, and for a time personality seemed but the +stronger for it. Shakespeare's people make all things serve their passion, +and that passion is for the moment the whole energy of their being--birds, +beasts, men, women, landscape, society, are but symbols and metaphors, +nothing is studied in itself, the mind is a dark well, no surface, depth +only. The men that Titian painted, the men that Jongsen painted, even the +men of Van Dyck, seemed at moments like great hawks at rest. In the Dublin +National Gallery there hung, perhaps there still hangs, upon the same +wall, a portrait of some Venetian gentleman by Strozzi, and Mr. Sargent's +painting of President Wilson. Whatever thought broods in the dark eyes of +that Venetian gentleman, has drawn its life from his whole body; it feeds +upon it as the flame feeds upon the candle--and should that thought be +changed, his pose would change, his very cloak would rustle for his whole +body thinks. President Wilson lives only in the eyes, which are steady and +intent; the flesh about the mouth is dead, and the hands are dead, and the +clothes suggest no movement of his body, nor any movement but that of the +valet, who has brushed and folded in mechanical routine. There, all was an +energy flowing outward from the nature itself; here, all is the anxious +study and slight deflection of external force; there man's mind and body +were predominantly subjective; here all is objective, using those words +not as philosophy uses them, but as we use them in conversation. + +The bright part of the moon's disk, to adopt the symbolism of a certain +poem, is subjective mind, and the dark, objective mind, and we have eight +and twenty Phases for our classification of mankind, and of the movement +of his thought. At the first Phase--the night where there is no +moonlight--all is objective, while when, upon the fifteenth night, the +moon comes to the full, there is only subjective mind. The mid-renaissance +could but approximate to the full moon "For there is no human life at the +full or the dark," but we may attribute to the next three nights of the +moon the men of Shakespeare, of Titian, of Strozzi, and of Van Dyck, and +watch them grow more reasonable, more orderly, less turbulent, as the +nights pass; and it is well to find before the fourth--the nineteenth moon +counting from the start--a sudden change, as when a cloud becomes rain, or +water freezes, for the great transitions are sudden; popular, typical men +have grown more ugly and more argumentative; the face that Van Dyck called +a fatal face has faded before Cromwell's warty opinionated head. +Henceforth no mind made like "a perfectly proportioned human body" shall +sway the public, for great men must live in a portion of themselves, +become professional and abstract; but seeing that the moon's third quarter +is scarce passed, that abstraction has attained but not passed its climax, +that a half, as I affirm it, of the twenty-second night still lingers, +they may subdue and conquer; cherish, even, some Utopian dream; spread +abstraction ever further till thought is but a film, and there is no dark +depth any more, surface only. But men who belong by nature to the nights +near to the full are still born, a tragic minority, and how shall they do +their work when too ambitious for a private station, except as Wilde of +the nineteenth Phase, as my symbolism has it, did his work. He understood +his weakness, true personality was impossible, for that is born in +solitude, and at his moon one is not solitary; he must project himself +before the eyes of others, and, having great ambition, before some great +crowd of eyes; but there is no longer any great crowd that cares for his +true thought. He must humour and cajole and pose, take worn-out stage +situations, for he knows that he may be as romantic as he please, so long +as he does not believe in his romance, and all that he may get their ears +for a few strokes of contemptuous wit in which he does believe. + +We Rhymers did not humour and cajole; but it was not wholly from demerit, +it was in part because of different merit, that he refused our exile. +Shaw, as I understand him, has no true quarrel with his time, its moon and +his almost exactly coincide. He is quite content to exchange Narcissus and +his Pool for the signal box at a railway junction, where goods and +travellers pass perpetually upon their logical glittering road. Wilde was +a monarchist, though content that monarchy should turn demagogue for its +own safety, and he held a theatre by the means whereby he held a London +dinner table. "He who can dominate a London dinner table," he had boasted, +"can dominate the world." While Shaw has but carried his street-corner +socialist eloquence on to the stage, and in him one discovers, in his +writing and his public speech, as once--before their outline had been +softened by prosperity or the passage of the years--in his clothes and in +his stiff joints, the civilization that Sargent's picture has explored. +Neither his crowd nor he have yet made that discovery that brought +President Wilson so near his death, that the moon draws to its fourth +quarter. But what happens to the individual man whose moon has come to +that fourth quarter, and what to the civilization...? + +I can but remember pipe music to-night, though I can half hear beyond it +in the memory a weightier music, but this much at any rate is certain--the +dream of my early manhood, that a modern nation can return to Unity of +Culture, is false; though it may be we can achieve it for some small +circle of men and women, and there leave it till the moon bring round its +century. + + "The cat went here and there + And the moon spun round like a top, + And the nearest kin of the moon + The creeping cat looked up. + + * * * * + + Minnaloushe creeps through the grass + From moonlit place to place; + The sacred moon overhead + Has taken a new phase. + Does Minnaloushe know that her pupils + Will pass from change to change, + And that from round to crescent + From crescent to round they range? + Minnaloushe creeps through the grass + Alone, important and wise, + And lifts to the changing moon + Her changing eyes." + + +IV + +Henley's troubles and infirmities were growing upon him. He, too, an +ambitious, formidable man, who showed alike in his practice and in his +theory, in his lack of sympathy for Rossetti and Landor, for instance, +that he never understood how small a fragment of our own nature can be +brought to perfect expression, nor that even but with great toil, in a +much divided civilization; though, doubtless, if our own Phase be right, a +fragment may be an image of the whole, the moon's still scarce crumbled +image, as it were, in a glass of wine. He would be, and have all poets be, +a true epitome of the whole mass, a Herrick and Dr. Johnson in the same +body and because this--not so difficult before the Mermaid closed its +door--is no longer possible, his work lacks music, is abstract, as even an +actor's movement can be when the thought of doing is plainer to his mind +than the doing itself: the straight line from cup to lip, let us say, more +plain than the hand's own sensation weighed down by that heavy spillable +cup. I think he was content, when he had called before our eyes--before +the too understanding eyes of his chosen crowd--the violent burly man that +he had dreamed, content with the mere suggestion, and so did not work long +enough at his verses. He disliked Victor Hugo as much as he did Rossetti, +and yet Rossetti's translation from _Les Burgraves_, because of its mere +technical mastery, out-sings Henley in his own song-- + + "My mother is dead; God's patience wears; + It seems my Chaplain will not have done. + Love on: who cares? + Who cares? Love on." + +I can read his poetry with emotion, but I read it for some glimpse of what +he might have been as Border balladist, or Cavalier, or of what he +actually was, not as poet but as man. He had what Wilde lacked, even in +his ruin, passion, was maybe as passionate as some great man of action, as +Parnell, let us say. When he and Stevenson quarrelled, he cried over it +with some woman or other, and his notorious article was but for vengeance +upon Mrs. Stevenson, who had arranged for the public eye, what he +considered an imaginary figure, with no resemblance to the gay companion +who had founded his life, to that life's injury, upon "The august, the +immortal musketeers." She had caused the quarrel, as he believed, and now +she had robbed him over again, by blotting from the world's memory the +friend of his youth; and because he believed it I read those angry +paragraphs with but deeper sympathy for the writer; and I think that the +man who has left them out of Henley's collected writings has wronged his +memory, as Mrs. Stevenson wronged the memory of Stevenson. + +He was no contemplative man, no pleased possessor of wooden models and +paper patterns, but a great passionate man, and no friend of his would +have him pictured otherwise. I saw little of him in later years, but I +doubt if he was ever the same after the death of his six-year old +daughter. Few passages of his verse touch me as do those few mentions of +her though they lack precision of word and sound. When she is but a hope, +he prays that she may have his 'gift of life' and his wife's 'gift of +love,' and when she is but a few months old he murmurs over her sleep-- + + When you wake in your crib, + You an inch of experience-- + Vaulted about + With the wonder of darkness; + Wailing and striving + To reach from your feebleness + Something you feel + Will be good to and cherish you. + +And now he commends some friend "boyish and kind, and shy," who greeted +him, and greeted his wife, "that day we brought our beautiful one to lie +in the green peace" and who is now dead himself, and after that he speaks +of love "turned by death to longing" and so, to an enemy. + +When I spoke to him of his child's death he said, "she was a person of +genius; she had the genius of the mind, and the genius of the body." And +later I heard him talk of her as a man talks of something he cannot keep +silence over because it is in all his thoughts. I can remember, too, his +talking of some book of natural history he had read, that he might be able +to answer her questions. + +He had a house now at Mortlake on the Thames with a great ivy tod +shadowing door and window, and one night there he shocked and startled a +roomful of men by showing how far he could be swept beyond our reach in +reveries of affection. The dull man, who had tried to put Wilde out of +countenance, suddenly said to the whole room, roused by I cannot remember +what incautious remark of mine made to some man at my side: "Yeats +believes in magic; what nonsense." Henley said, "No, it may not be +nonsense; black magic is all the go in Paris now." And then turning +towards me with a changed sound in his voice, "It is just a game, isn't +it." I replied, not noticing till too late his serious tone, and wishing +to avoid discussion in the dull man's company, "One has had a vision; one +wants to have another, that is all." Then Henley said, speaking in a very +low voice, "I want to know how I am to get to my daughter. I was sitting +here the other night when she came into the room and played round the +table and went out again. Then I saw that the door was shut and I knew +that I had seen a vision." There was an embarrassed silence, and then +somebody spoke of something else and we began to discuss it hurriedly and +eagerly. + + +V + +I came now to be more in London, never missing the meetings of the +Rhymers' Club, nor those of the council of the Irish Literary Society, +where I constantly fought out our Irish quarrels and pressed upon the +unwilling Gavan Duffy the books of our new movement. The Irish members of +Parliament looked upon us with some hostility because we had made it a +matter of principle never to put a politician in the chair, and upon other +grounds. One day, some old Irish member of Parliament made perhaps his +only appearance at a gathering of members. He recited with great emotion a +ballad of his own composition in the manner of Young Ireland, repeating +over his sacred names, Wolfe Tone, Emmet, and Owen Roe, and mourning that +new poets and new movements should have taken something of their +sacredness away. The ballad had no literary merit, but I went home with a +troubled conscience; and for a dozen years perhaps, till I began to see +the result of our work in a deepened perception of all those things that +strengthen race, that trouble remained. I had in mind that old politician +as I wrote but the other day-- + + "Our part + To murmur name upon name + As a mother names her child." + +The Rhymers had begun to break up in tragedy, though we did not know that +till the play had finished. I have never found a full explanation of that +tragedy; sometimes I have remembered that, unlike the Victorian poets, +almost all were poor men, and had made it a matter of conscience to turn +from every kind of money-making that prevented good writing, and that +poverty meant strain, and for the most part, a refusal of domestic life. +Then I have remembered that Johnson had private means, and that others who +came to tragic ends, had wives and families. Another day I think that +perhaps our form of lyric, our insistence upon emotion which has no +relation to any public interest, gathered together, overwrought, unstable +men; and remember the moment after that the first to go out of his mind +had no lyrical gift, and that we valued him mainly because he seemed a +witty man of the world; and that a little later another who seemed, alike +as man and writer, dull and formless, went out of his mind, first burning +poems which I cannot believe would have proved him as the one man who saw +them claims, a man of genius. The meetings were always decorous and often +dull; some one would read out a poem and we would comment, too politely +for the criticism to have great value; and yet that we read out our poems, +and thought that they could be so tested, was a definition of our aims. +_Love's Nocturne_ is one of the most beautiful poems in the world, but no +one can find out its beauty, so intricate its thought and metaphor, till +he has read it over several times, or often stopped his reading to think +out the meaning of some passage, and the _Faustine_ of Swinburne, where +many separate verses are powerful and musical, could not, were it read +out, be understood with pleasure, however clearly it were read, because it +has no more logical structure than a bag of shot. I shall, however, +remember all my life that evening when Lionel Johnson read or spoke aloud +in his musical monotone, where meaning and cadence found the most precise +elocution, his poem suggested "by the Statue of King Charles at Charing +Cross." It was as though I listened to a great speech. Nor will that poem +be to me again what it was that first night. For long I only knew Dowson's +_O Mors_, to quote but the first words of its long title, and his +_Villanelle of Sunset_ from his reading, and it was because of the desire +to hold them in my hand that I suggested the first _Book of The Rhymers' +Club_. They were not speech but perfect song, though song for the speaking +voice. It was perhaps our delight in poetry that was, before all else, +speech or song, and could hold the attention of a fitting audience like a +good play or good conversation, that made Francis Thompson, whom we +admired so much--before the publication of his first poem I had brought to +the Cheshire Cheese the proof sheets of his _Ode to the Setting Sun_, his +first published poem--come but once and refuse to contribute to our book. +Preoccupied with his elaborate verse, he may have seen only that which we +renounced, and thought what seemed to us simplicity, mere emptiness. To +some members this simplicity was perhaps created by their tumultuous +lives, they praised a desired woman and hoped that she would find amid +their praise her very self, or at worst, their very passion; and knew that +she, ignoramus that she was, would have slept in the middle of _Love's +Nocturne_, lofty and tender though it be. Woman herself was still in our +eyes, for all that, romantic and mysterious, still the priestess of her +shrine, our emotions remembering the _Lilith_ and the _Sybilla Palmifera_ +of Rossetti; for as yet that sense of comedy, which was soon to mould the +very fashion plates, and, in the eyes of men of my generation, to destroy +at last the sense of beauty itself, had scarce begun to show here and +there, in slight subordinate touches among the designs of great painters +and craftsmen. It could not be otherwise, for Johnson's favourite phrase, +that life is ritual, expressed something that was in some degree in all +our thoughts, and how could life be ritual if woman had not her symbolical +place? + +If Rossetti was a sub-conscious influence, and perhaps the most powerful +of all, we looked consciously to Pater for our philosophy. Three or four +years ago I re-read _Marius the Epicurean_, expecting to find I cared for +it no longer, but it still seemed to me, as I think it seemed to us all, +the only great prose in modern English, and yet I began to wonder if it, +or the attitude of mind of which it was the noblest expression, had not +caused the disaster of my friends. It taught us to walk upon a rope, +tightly stretched through serene air, and we were left to keep our feet +upon a swaying rope in a storm. Pater had made us learned; and, whatever +we might be elsewhere, ceremonious and polite, and distant in our +relations to one another, and I think none knew as yet that Dowson, who +seemed to drink so little and had so much dignity and reserve, was +breaking his heart for the daughter of the keeper of an Italian eating +house, in dissipation and drink; and that he might that very night sleep +upon a sixpenny bed in a doss house. It seems to me that even yet, and I +am speaking of 1894 and 1895, we knew nothing of one another, but the +poems that we read and criticised; perhaps I have forgotten or was too +much in Ireland for knowledge, but of this I am certain, we shared nothing +but the artistic life. Sometimes Johnson and Symons would visit our sage +at Oxford, and I remember Johnson, whose reports however were not always +to be trusted, returning with a sentence that long ran in my head. He had +noticed books on political economy among Pater's books, and Pater had +said, "Everything that has occupied man, for any length of time, is worthy +of our study." Perhaps it was because of Pater's influence that we, with +an affectation of learning, claimed the whole past of literature for our +authority, instead of finding it like the young men in the age of comedy +that followed us, in some new, and so still unrefuted authority; that we +preferred what seemed still uncrumbled rock, to the still unspotted foam; +that we were traditional alike in our dress, in our manner, in our +opinions, and in our style. + +Why should men, who spoke their opinions in low voices, as though they +feared to disturb the readers in some ancient library, and timidly as +though they knew that all subjects had long since been explored, all +questions long since decided in books whereon the dust settled--live lives +of such disorder and seek to rediscover in verse the syntax of impulsive +common life? Was it that we lived in what is called "an age of transition" +and so lacked coherence, or did we but pursue antithesis? + + +VI + +All things, apart from love and melancholy, were a study to us; Horne +already learned in Botticelli had begun to boast that when he wrote of him +there would be no literature, all would be but learning; Symons, as I +wrote when I first met him, studied the music halls, as he might have +studied the age of Chaucer; while I gave much time to what is called the +Christian Cabala; nor was there any branch of knowledge Johnson did not +claim for his own. When I had first gone to see him in 1888 or 1889, at +the Charlotte Street house, I had called about five in the afternoon, but +the man servant that he shared with Horne and Image, told me that he was +not yet up, adding with effusion "he is always up for dinner at seven." +This habit of breakfasting when others dined had been started by insomnia, +but he came to defend it for its own sake. When I asked if it did not +separate him from men and women he replied, "In my library I have all the +knowledge of the world that I need." He had certainly a considerable +library, far larger than that of any young man of my acquaintance, so +large that he wondered if it might not be possible to find some way of +hanging new shelves from the ceiling like chandeliers. That room was +always a pleasure to me, with its curtains of grey corduroy over door and +window and book case, and its walls covered with brown paper, a fashion +invented, I think, by Horne, that was soon to spread. There was a portrait +of Cardinal Newman, looking a little like Johnson himself, some religious +picture by Simeon Solomon, and works upon theology in Greek and Latin and +a general air of neatness and severity; and talking there by candle light +it never seemed very difficult to murmur Villiers de L'isle Adam's proud +words, "As for living--our servants will do that for us." Yet I can now +see that Johnson himself in some hidden, half-conscious part of him +desired the world he had renounced, desired it as an object of study. I +was often puzzled as to when and where he could have met the famous men or +beautiful women, whose conversation, often wise, and always appropriate, +he quoted so often, and it was not till a little before his death that I +discovered that these conversations were imaginary. He never altered a +detail of speech, and would quote what he had invented for Gladstone or +Newman for years without amplification or amendment, with what seemed a +scholar's accuracy. His favourite quotations were from Newman, whom, I +believe, he had never met, though I can remember nothing now but Newman's +greeting to Johnson, "I have always considered the profession of a man of +letters a third order of the priesthood!" and these quotations became so +well known that at Newman's death, the editor of _The Nineteenth Century_ +asked them for publication. Because of his delight in all that was formal +and arranged he objected to the public quotation of private conversation +even after death, and this scruple helped his refusal. Perhaps this +dreaming was made a necessity by his artificial life, yet before that life +began he wrote from Oxford to his Tory but flattered family, that as he +stood mounted upon a library ladder in his rooms taking a book from a +shelf, Gladstone, about to pass the open door on his way upstairs to some +college authority, had stopped, hesitated, come into the room and there +spent an hour of talk. Presently it was discovered that Gladstone had not +been near Oxford on the date given; yet he quoted that conversation +without variation of a word until the end of his life, and I think +believed in it as firmly as did his friends. These conversations were +always admirable in their drama, but never too dramatic or even too +polished to lose their casual accidental character; they were the +phantasmagoria through which his philosophy of life found its expression. +If he made his knowledge of the world out of his phantasy, his knowledge +of tongues and books was certainly very great; and yet was that knowledge +as great as he would have us believe? Did he really know Welsh, for +instance, had he really as he told me, made his only love song, his +incomparable _Morfydd_ out of three lines in Welsh, heard sung by a woman +at her door on a walking tour in Wales, or did he but wish to hide that he +shared in their emotion? + + "O, what are the winds? + And what are the waters? + Mine are your eyes." + +He wanted us to believe that all things, his poetry with its Latin weight, +his religion with its constant reference to the Fathers of the Church, or +to the philosophers of the Church, almost his very courtesy were a study +and achievement of the intellect. Arthur Symons' poetry made him angry, +because it would substitute for that achievement, Parisian impressionism, +"a London fog, the blurred tawny lamplight, the red omnibus, the dreary +rain, the depressing mud, the glaring gin shop, the slatternly shivering +women, three dexterous stanzas telling you that and nothing more." I, on +the other hand, angered him by talking as if art existed for emotion only, +and for refutation he would quote the close of the Aeschylean Trilogy, +the trial of Orestes on the Acropolis. Yet at moments the thought came to +him that intellect, as he conceived it, was too much a thing of many +books, that it lacked lively experience. "Yeats," he has said to me, "You +need ten years in a library, but I have need of ten years in the +wilderness." When he said "Wilderness" I am certain, however, that he +thought of some historical, some bookish desert, the Thebaid, or the lands +about the Mareotic sea. His best poetry is natural and impassioned, but he +spoke little of it, but much about his prose, and would contend that I had +no right to consider words made to read, less natural than words made to +be spoken; and he delighted in a sentence in his book on Thomas Hardy, +that kept its vitality, as he contended, though two pages long. He +punctuated after the manner of the seventeenth century and was always +ready to spend an hour discussing the exact use of the colon. "One should +use a colon where other people use a semi-colon, a semi-colon where other +people use a comma," was, I think, but a condescension to my ignorance for +the matter was plainly beset with many subtleties. + + +VII + +Not till some time in 1895 did I think he could ever drink too much for +his sobriety--though what he drank would certainly be too much for that of +most of the men whom I knew--I no more doubted his self-control, though we +were very intimate friends, than I doubted his memories of Cardinal +Newman. The discovery that he did was a great shock to me, and, I think, +altered my general view of the world. I had, by my friendship with +O'Leary, by my fight against Gavan Duffy, drawn the attention of a group +of men, who at that time controlled what remained of the old Fenian +movement in England and Scotland; and at a moment when an attempt, that +came to nothing, was being made to combine once more our constitutional +and unconstitutional politics, I had been asked to represent them at some +convention in the United States. I went to consult Johnson, whom I found +sitting at a table with books about him. I was greatly tempted, because I +was promised complete freedom of speech; and I was at the time enraged by +some wild articles published by some Irish American newspaper, suggesting +the burning down of the houses of Irish landlords. Nine years later I was +lecturing in America, and a charming old Irishman came to see me with an +interview to write, and we spent, and as I think in entire neglect of his +interview, one of the happiest hours I have ever spent, comparing our +tales of the Irish fairies, in which he very firmly believed. When he had +gone I looked at his card, to discover that he was the writer of that +criminal incitement. I told Johnson that if I had a week to decide in I +would probably decide to go, but as they had only given me three days, I +had refused. He would not hear of my refusal with so much awaiting my +condemnation; and that condemnation would be effective with Catholics, for +he would find me passages in the Fathers, condemning every kind of +political crime, that of the dynamiter and the incendiary especially. I +asked how could the Fathers have condemned weapons they had never heard +of, but those weapons, he contended, were merely developments of old +methods and weapons; they had decided all in principle; but I need not +trouble myself about the matter, for he would put into my hands before I +sailed the typewritten statement of their doctrine, dealing with the +present situation in the utmost detail. He seemed perfectly logical, but a +little more confident and impassioned than usual, and I had, I think, +promised to accept--when he rose from his chair, took a step towards me in +his eagerness, and fell on to the floor; and I saw that he was drunk. From +that on, he began to lose control of his life; he shifted from Charlotte +Street, where, I think, there was fear that he would overset lamp or +candle and burn the house, to Gray's Inn, and from Gray's Inn to old +rambling rooms in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and at last one called to find his +outer door shut, the milk on the doorstep sour. Sometimes I would urge him +to put himself, as Jack Nettleship had done, into an Institute. One day +when I had been very urgent, he spoke of "a craving that made every atom +of his body cry out" and said the moment after, "I do not want to be +cured," and a moment after that, "In ten years I shall be penniless and +shabby, and borrow half-crowns from friends." He seemed to contemplate a +vision that gave him pleasure, and now that I look back, I remember that +he once said to me that Wilde got, perhaps, an increase of pleasure and +excitement from the degradation of that group of beggars and blackmailers +where he sought his pathics, and I remember, too, his smile at my +surprise, as though he spoke of psychological depths I could never enter. +Did the austerity, the melancholy of his thoughts, that spiritual ecstasy +which he touched at times, heighten, as complementary colours heighten one +another, not only the Vision of Evil, but its fascination? Was it only +Villon, or did Dante also feel the fascination of evil, when shown in its +horror, and, as it were, judged and lost; and what proud man does not +feel temptation strengthened from the certainty that his intellect is not +deceived? + + +VIII + +I began now to hear stories of Dowson, whom I knew only at the Rhymers, or +through some chance meeting at Johnson's. I was indolent and +procrastinating, and when I thought of asking him to dine, or taking some +other step towards better knowledge, he seemed to be in Paris, or at +Dieppe. He was drinking, but, unlike Johnson, who, at the autopsy after +his death, was discovered never to have grown, except in the brain, after +his fifteenth year, he was full of sexual desire. Johnson and he were +close friends, and Johnson lectured him out of the Fathers upon chastity, +and boasted of the great good done him thereby. But the rest of us counted +the glasses emptied in their talk. I began to hear now in some detail of +the restaurant-keeper's daughter, and of her marriage to the waiter, and +of that weekly game of cards with her that filled so great a share of +Dowson's emotional life. Sober, he would look at no other woman, it was +said, but, drunk, would desire whatever woman chance brought, clean or +dirty. + +Johnson was stern by nature, strong by intellect, and always, I think, +deliberately picked his company, but Dowson seemed gentle, affectionate, +drifting. His poetry shows how sincerely he felt the fascination of +religion, but his religion had certainly no dogmatic outline, being but a +desire for a condition of virginal ecstasy. If it is true, as Arthur +Symons, his very close friend, has written, that he loved the +restaurant-keeper's daughter for her youth, one may be almost certain +that he sought from religion some similar quality, something of that which +the angels find who move perpetually, as Swedenborg has said, towards "the +dayspring of their youth." Johnson's poetry, like Johnson himself before +his last decay, conveys an emotion of joy, of intellectual clearness, of +hard energy; he gave us of his triumph; while Dowson's poetry is sad, as +he himself seemed, and pictures his life of temptation and defeat, + + "Unto us they belong + Us the bitter and gay, + Wine and women and song." + +Their way of looking at their intoxication showed their characters. +Johnson, who could not have written _Dark Angel_ if he did not suffer from +remorse, showed to his friends an impenitent face, and defeated me when I +tried to prevent the foundation of an Irish convivial club--it was brought +to an end after one meeting by the indignation of the members' +wives--whereas the last time I saw Dowson he was pouring out a glass of +whiskey for himself in an empty corner of my room and murmuring over and +over in what seemed automatic apology "The first to-day." + + +IX + +Two men are always at my side, Lionel Johnson and John Synge whom I was to +meet a little later; but Johnson is to me the more vivid in memory, +possibly because of the external finish, the clearly-marked lineaments of +his body, which seemed but to express the clarity of his mind. I think +Dowson's best verse immortal, bound, that is, to outlive famous novels +and plays and learned histories and other discursive things, but he was +too vague and gentle for my affections. I understood him too well, for I +had been like him but for the appetite that made me search out strong +condiments. Though I cannot explain what brought others of my generation +to such misfortune, I think that (falling backward upon my parable of the +moon) I can explain some part of Dowson's and Johnson's dissipation-- + + "What portion in the world can the artist have, + Who has awaked from the common dream, + But dissipation and despair?" + +When Edmund Spencer described the islands of Phaedria and of Acrasia he +aroused the indignation of Lord Burleigh, "that rugged forehead" and Lord +Burleigh was in the right if morality were our only object. + +In those islands certain qualities of beauty, certain forms of sensuous +loveliness were separated from all the general purposes of life, as they +had not been hitherto in European literature--and would not be again, for +even the historical process has its ebb and flow, till Keats wrote his +_Endymion_. I think that the movement of our thought has more and more so +separated certain images and regions of the mind, and that these images +grow in beauty as they grow in sterility. Shakespeare leaned, as it were, +even as craftsman, upon the general fate of men and nations, had about him +the excitement of the playhouse; and all poets, including Spencer in all +but a few pages, until our age came, and when it came almost all, have had +some propaganda or traditional doctrine to give companionship with their +fellows. Had not Matthew Arnold his faith in what he described as the +best thought of his generation? Browning his psychological curiosity, +Tennyson, as before him Shelley and Wordsworth, moral values that were not +aesthetic values? But Coleridge of the _Ancient Mariner_, and _Kubla +Khan_, and Rossetti in all his writings made what Arnold has called that +"morbid effort," that search for "perfection of thought and feeling, and +to unite this to perfection of form," sought this new, pure beauty, and +suffered in their lives because of it. The typical men of the classical +age (I think of Commodus, with his half-animal beauty, his cruelty, and +his caprice), lived public lives, pursuing curiosities of appetite, and so +found in Christianity, with its Thebaid and its Mariotic Sea the needed +curb. But what can the Christian confessor say to those who more and more +must make all out of the privacy of their thought, calling up perpetual +images of desire, for he cannot say "Cease to be artist, cease to be +poet," where the whole life is art and poetry, nor can he bid men leave +the world, who suffer from the terrors that pass before shut-eyes. +Coleridge, and Rossetti though his dull brother did once persuade him that +he was an agnostic, were devout Christians, and Steinbock and Beardsley +were so towards their lives' end, and Dowson and Johnson always, and yet I +think it but deepened despair and multiplied temptation. + + "Dark Angel, with thine aching lust, + To rid the world of penitence: + Malicious angel, who still dost + My soul such subtil violence! + + When music sounds, then changest thou + A silvery to a sultry fire: + Nor will thine envious heart allow + Delight untortured by desire. + + Through thee, the gracious Muses turn + To Furies, O mine Enemy! + And all the things of beauty burn + With flames of evil ecstasy. + + Because of thee, the land of dreams + Becomes a gathering place of fears: + Until tormented slumber seems + One vehemence of useless tears." + +Why are these strange souls born everywhere to-day? with hearts that +Christianity, as shaped by history, cannot satisfy. Our love letters wear +out our love; no school of painting outlasts its founders, every stroke of +the brush exhausts the impulse, Pre-Raphaelitism had some twenty years; +impressionism thirty perhaps. Why should we believe that religion can +never bring round its antithesis? Is it true that our air is disturbed, as +Malarme said, by "the trembling of the veil of the temple," or "that our +whole age is seeking to bring forth a sacred book?" Some of us thought +that book near towards the end of last century, but the tide sank again. + + +X + +I do not know whether John Davidson, whose life also was tragic, made that +"morbid effort," that search for "perfection of thought and feeling," for +he is hidden behind failure, to unite it "to perfection of form." At +eleven one morning I met him in the British Museum reading room, probably +in 1894, when I was in London for the production of _The Land of Heart's +Desire_, but certainly after some long absence from London. "Are you +working here?" I said; "No," he said, "I am loafing, for I have finished +my day's work." "What, already?" "I work an hour a day--I cannot work +longer without exhaustion, and even as it is, if I meet anybody and get +into talk, I cannot write the next day; that is why I loaf when my work is +finished." No one had ever doubted his industry; he had supported his wife +and family for years by "devilling" many hours a day for some popular +novelist. "What work is it?" I said. "I am writing verse," he answered. "I +had been writing prose for a long time, and then one day I thought I might +just as well write what I liked, as I must starve in any case. It was the +luckiest thought I ever had, for my agent now gets me forty pounds for a +ballad, and I made three hundred out of my last book of verse." + +He was older by ten years than his fellow Rhymers; a national schoolmaster +from Scotland, he had been dismissed, he told us, for asking for a rise in +his salary, and had come to London with his wife and children. He looked +older than his years. "Ellis," he had said, "how old are you?" "Fifty," +Edwin Ellis replied, or whatever his age was. "Then I will take off my +wig. I never take off my wig when there is a man under thirty in the +room." He had endured and was to endure again, a life of tragic penury, +which was made much harder by the conviction that the world was against +him, that he was refused for some reason his rightful position. Ellis +thought that he pined even for social success, and I that his Scots +jealousy kept him provincial and but half articulate. + +During the quarrel over Parnell's grave a quotation from Goethe ran +through the papers, describing our Irish jealousy: "The Irish seem to me +like a pack of hounds, always dragging down some noble stag." But I do not +think we object to distinction for its own sake; if we kill the stag, it +is that we may carry off his head and antlers. "The Irish people," O'Leary +used to say, "do not know good from bad in any art, but they do not hate +the good once it is pointed out to them because it is good." An infallible +Church, with its Mass in Latin, and its mediaeval philosophy, and our +Protestant social prejudice, have kept our ablest men from levelling +passions; but Davidson with a jealousy, which may be Scottish, seeing that +Carlyle had it, was quick to discover sour grapes. He saw in delicate, +laborious, discriminating taste, an effeminate pedantry, and would, when +that mood was on him, delight in all that seemed healthy, popular, and +bustling. Once when I had praised Herbert Horne for his knowledge and his +taste, he burst out, "If a man must be a connoisseur, let him be a +connoisseur in women." He, indeed, was accustomed, in the most +characteristic phrase of his type, to describe the Rhymers as lacking in +"blood and guts," and very nearly brought us to an end by attempting to +supply the deficiency by the addition of four Scotsmen. He brought all +four upon the same evening, and one read out a poem upon the Life Boat, +evidently intended for a recitation; another described how, when +gold-digging in Australia, he had fought and knocked down another miner +for doubting the rotundity of the earth; while of the remainder I can +remember nothing except that they excelled in argument. He insisted upon +their immediate election, and the Rhymers, through that complacency of +good manners whereby educated Englishmen so often surprise me, obeyed, +though secretly resolved never to meet again; and it cost me seven hours' +work to get another meeting, and vote the Scotsmen out. A few days later I +chanced upon Davidson at some restaurant; he was full of amiability, and +when we parted shook my hand, and proclaimed enthusiastically that I had +"blood and guts." I think he might have grown to be a successful man had +he been enthusiastic instead about Dowson or Johnson, or Horne or Symons, +for they had what I still lacked, conscious deliberate craft, and what I +must lack always, scholarship. They had taught me that violent energy, +which is like a fire of straw, consumes in a few minutes the nervous +vitality, and is useless in the arts. Our fire must burn slowly, and we +must constantly turn away to think, constantly analyse what we have done, +be content even to have little life outside our work, to show, perhaps, to +other men, as little as the watch-mender shows, his magnifying glass +caught in his screwed-up eye. Only then do we learn to conserve our +vitality, to keep our mind enough under control and to make our technique +sufficiently flexible for expression of the emotions of life as they +arise. A few months after our meeting in the Museum, Davidson had spent +his inspiration. "The fires are out," he said, "and I must hammer the cold +iron." When I heard a few years ago that he had drowned himself, I knew +that I had always expected some such end. With enough passion to make a +great poet, through meeting no man of culture in early life, he lacked +intellectual receptivity, and, anarchic and indefinite, lacked pose and +gesture, and now no verse of his clings to my memory. + + +XI + +Gradually Arthur Symons came to replace in my intimate friendship, Lionel +Johnson from whom I was slowly separated by a scruple of conscience. If +he came to see me he sat tongue-tied unless I gave him the drink that +seemed necessary to bring his vitality to but its normal pitch, and if I +called upon him he drank so much that I became his confederate. Once, when +a friend and I had sat long after our proper bed-time at his constantly +repeated and most earnest entreaty, knowing what black melancholy would +descend upon him at our departure, and with the unexpressed hope of +getting him to his bed, he fixed upon us a laughing and whimsical look, +and said:--"I want you two men to understand that you are merely two men +that I am drinking with." That was the only time that I was to hear from +him an imaginary conversation that had not an air of the most scrupulous +accuracy. He gave two accounts of a conversation with Wilde in prison; in +one Wilde wore his hair long, and in the other it had been cropped by the +prison barber. He was gradually losing, too, the faculty of experience, +and in his prose and verse repeated the old ideas and emotions, but +faintly, as though with fading interest. I am certain that he prayed much, +and on those rare days that I came upon him dressed and active before +midday or but little after, I concluded that he had been to morning Mass +at Farm Street. + +When with Johnson I had tuned myself to his mood, but Arthur Symons, more +than any man I have ever known, could slip as it were into the mind of +another, and my thoughts gained in richness and in clearness from his +sympathy, nor shall I ever know how much my practice and my theory owe to +the passages that he read me from Catullus and from Verlaine and Mallarme. +I had read _Axel_ to myself or was still reading it, so slowly, and with +so much difficulty, that certain passages had an exaggerated importance, +while all remained so obscure that I could without much effort imagine +that here at last was the Sacred Book I longed for. An Irish friend of +mine lives in a house where beside a little old tower rises a great new +Gothic hall and stair, and I have sometimes got him to extinguish all +light but a little Roman lamp, and in that faint light and among great +vague shadows, blotting away the unmeaning ornament, have imagined myself +partaking in some incredible romance. Half-a-dozen times, beginning in +boyhood with Shelley's _Prometheus Unbound_, I have in that mood possessed +for certain hours or months the book that I long for; and Symons, without +ever being false to his own impressionist view of art and of life, +deepened as I think my longing. + +It seems to me, looking backward, that we always discussed life at its +most intense moment, that moment which gives a common sacredness to the +Song of Songs, and to the Sermon on the Mount, and in which one discovers +something supernatural, a stirring as it were of the roots of the hair. He +was making those translations from Mallarme and from Verlaine, from +Calderon, from St. John of the Cross, which are the most accomplished +metrical translations of our time, and I think that those from Mallarme +may have given elaborate form to my verses of those years, to the latter +poems of _The Wind Among the Reeds_, to _The Shadowy Waters_, while +Villiers de L'Isle Adam had shaped whatever in my _Rosa Alchemica_ Pater +had not shaped. I can remember the day in Fountain Court when he first +read me Herodiade's address to some Sibyl who is her nurse and it may be +the moon also: + + "The horror of my virginity + Delights me, and I would envelope me + In the terror of my tresses, that, by night, + Inviolate reptile, I might feel the white + And glimmering radiance of thy frozen fire, + Thou that art chaste and diest of desire, + White night of ice and of the cruel snow! + Eternal sister, my lone sister, lo + My dreams uplifted before thee! now, apart, + So rare a crystal is my dreaming heart, + And all about me lives but in mine own + Image, the idolatrous mirror of my pride, + Mirroring this Herodiade diamond-eyed." + +Yet I am certain that there was something in myself compelling me to +attempt creation of an art as separate from everything heterogenous and +casual, from all character and circumstance, as some Herodiade of our +theatre, dancing seemingly alone in her narrow moving luminous circle. +Certainly I had gone a great distance from my first poems, from all that I +had copied from the folk-art of Ireland, as from the statue of Mausolus +and his Queen, where the luminous circle is motionless and contains the +entire popular life; and yet why am I so certain? I can imagine an Aran +Islander who had strayed into the Luxembourg Gallery, turning bewildered +from Impressionist or Post-Impressionist, but lingering at Moreau's +"Jason," to study in minute astonishment the elaborate background, where +there are so many jewels, so much wrought stone and moulded bronze. Had +not lover promised mistress in his own island song, "A ship with a gold +and silver mast, gloves of the skin of a fish, and shoes of the skin of a +bird, and a suit of the dearest silk in Ireland?" + + +XII + +Hitherto when in London I had stayed with my family in Bedford Park, but +now I was to live for some twelve months in chambers in the Temple that +opened through a little passage into those of Arthur Symons. If anybody +rang at either door, one or other would look through a window in the +connecting passage, and report. We would then decide whether one or both +should receive the visitor, whether his door or mine should be opened, or +whether both doors were to remain closed. I have never liked London, but +London seemed less disagreeable when one could walk in quiet, empty places +after dark, and upon a Sunday morning sit upon the margin of a fountain +almost as alone as if in the country. I was already settled there, I +imagine, when a publisher called and proposed that Symons should edit a +Review or Magazine, and Symons consented on the condition that Beardsley +were Art Editor--and I was delighted at his condition, as I think were all +his other proposed contributors. Aubrey Beardsley had been dismissed from +the Art editorship of _The Yellow Book_ under circumstances that had made +us indignant. He had illustrated Wilde's _Salome_, his strange satiric art +had raised the popular press to fury, and at the height of the excitement +aroused by Wilde's condemnation, a popular novelist, a woman who had great +influence among the most conventional part of the British public, had +written demanding his dismissal. "She owed it to her position before the +British people," she had said. Beardsley was not even a friend of +Wilde's--they even disliked each other--he had no sexual abnormality, but +he was certainly unpopular, and the moment had come to get rid of +unpopular persons. The public at once concluded--they could hardly +conclude otherwise, he was dismissed by telegram--that there was evidence +against him, and Beardsley, who was some twenty-three years old, being +embittered and miserable, plunged into dissipation. We knew that we must +face an infuriated press and public, but being all young we delighted in +enemies and in everything that had an heroic air. + + +XIII + +We might have survived but for our association with Beardsley, perhaps, +but for his _Under the Hill_, a Rabelaisian fragment promising a literary +genius as great maybe as his artistic genius, and for the refusal of the +bookseller who controlled the railway bookstalls to display our wares. The +bookseller's manager, no doubt looking for a design of Beardsley's, +pitched upon Blake's _Anteus setting Virgil and Dante upon the verge of +Cocytus_ as the ground of refusal, and when Arthur Symons pointed out that +Blake was considered "a very spiritual artist" replied, "O, Mr Symons, you +must remember that we have an audience of young ladies as well as an +audience of agnostics." However, he called Arthur Symons back from the +door to say, "If contrary to our expectations _The Savoy_ should have a +large sale, we should be very glad to see you again." As Blake's design +illustrated an article of mine, I wrote a letter upon that remarkable +saying to a principal daily newspaper. But I had mentioned Beardsley, and +I was told that the editor had made it a rule that his paper was never to +mention Beardsley's name. I said upon meeting him later, "Would you have +made the same rule in the case of Hogarth?" against whom much the same +objection could be taken, and he replied with what seemed to me a dreamy +look, as though suddenly reminded of a lost opportunity--"Ah, there was no +popular press in Hogarth's day." We were not allowed to forget that in our +own day there was a popular press, and its opinions began to affect our +casual acquaintance, and even our comfort in public places. At some +well-known house, an elderly man to whom I had just been introduced, got +up from my side and walked to the other end of the room; but it was as +much my reputation as an Irish rebel as the evil company that I was +supposed to keep, that excited some young men in a railway carriage to +comment upon my general career in voices raised that they might catch my +attention. I discovered, however, one evening that we were perhaps envied +as well as despised. I was in the pit at some theatre, and had just +noticed Arthur Symons a little in front of me, when I heard a young man, +who looked like a shop-assistant or clerk, say, "There is Arthur Symons. +If he can't get an order, why can't he pay for a stall." Clearly we were +supposed to prosper upon iniquity, and to go to the pit added a sordid +parsimony. At another theatre I caught sight of a woman that I once liked, +the widow of some friend of my father's youth, and tried to attract her +attention, but she had no eyes for anything but the stage curtain; and at +some house where I met no hostility to myself, a popular novelist snatched +out of my hand a copy of _The Savoy_, and opening it at Beardsley's +drawing, called _The Barber_, began to expound its bad drawing and wound +up with, "Now if you want to admire really great black and white art, +admire the Punch Cartoons of Mr Lindley Sambourne," and our hostess, after +making peace between us, said, "O, Mr Yeats, why do you not send your +poems to _The Spectator_ instead of to _The Savoy_." The answer, "My +friends read the _Savoy_ and they do not read _The Spectator_," brought a +look of deeper disapproval. + +Yet, even apart from Beardsley, we were a sufficiently distinguished body: +Max Beerbohm, Bernard Shaw, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Symons, +Charles Conder, Charles Shannon, Havelock Ellis, Selwyn Image, Joseph +Conrad; but nothing counted but the one hated name. I think that had we +been challenged we might have argued something after this +fashion:--"Science through much ridicule and some persecution has won its +right to explore whatever passes before its corporeal eye, and merely +because it passes: to set as it were upon an equality the beetle and the +whale though Ben Jonson could find no justification for the entomologist +in _The New Inn_, but that he had been crossed in love. Literature now +demands the same right of exploration of all that passes before the mind's +eyes, and merely because it passes." Not a complete defence, for it +substitutes a spiritual for a physical objective, but sufficient it may be +for the moment, and to settle our place in the historical process. + +The critic might well reply that certain of my generation delighted in +writing with an unscientific partiality for subjects long forbidden. Yet +is it not most important to explore especially what has been long +forbidden, and to do this not only "with the highest moral purpose," like +the followers of Ibsen, but gaily, out of sheer mischief, or sheer delight +in that play of the mind. Donne could be as metaphysical as he pleased, +and yet never seemed unhuman and hysterical as Shelley often does, because +he could be as physical as he pleased; and besides who will thirst for the +metaphysical, who have a parched tongue, if we cannot recover the Vision +of Evil? + +I have felt in certain early works of my own which I have long abandoned, +and here and there in the work of others of my generation, a slight, +sentimental sensuality which is disagreeable, and doesn't exist in the +work of Donne, let us say, because he, being permitted to say what he +pleased, was never tempted to linger, or rather to pretend that we can +linger, between spirit and sense. How often had I heard men of my time +talk of the meeting of spirit and sense, yet there is no meeting but only +change upon the instant, and it is by the perception of a change like the +sudden "blacking out" of the lights of the stage, that passion creates its +most violent sensation. + + +XIV + +Dowson was now at Dieppe, now at a Normandy village. Wilde, too, was at +Dieppe; and Symons, Beardsley, and others would cross and recross, +returning with many tales, and there were letters and telegrams. Dowson +wrote a protest against some friend's too vivid essay upon the disorder of +his life, and explained that in reality he was living a life of industry +in a little country village; but before the letter arrived that friend +received a wire, "arrested, sell watch and send proceeds." Dowson's watch +had been left in London--and then another wire, "Am free." Dowson, ran the +tale as I heard it ten years after, had got drunk and fought the baker, +and a deputation of villagers had gone to the magistrate and pointed out +that Monsieur Dowson was one of the most illustrious of English poets. +"Quite right to remind me," said the magistrate, "I will imprison the +baker." + +A Rhymer had seen Dowson at some cafe in Dieppe with a particularly common +harlot, and as he passed, Dowson, who was half drunk, caught him by the +sleeve and whispered, "She writes poetry--it is like Browning and Mrs +Browning." Then there came a wonderful tale, repeated by Dowson himself, +whether by word of mouth or by letter I do not remember. Wilde has arrived +in Dieppe, and Dowson presses upon him the necessity of acquiring "a more +wholesome taste." They empty their pockets on to the cafe table, and +though there is not much, there is enough if both heaps are put into one. +Meanwhile the news has spread, and they set out accompanied by a cheering +crowd. Arrived at their destination, Dowson and the crowd remain outside, +and presently Wilde returns. He says in a low voice to Dowson, "The first +these ten years, and it will be the last. It was like cold +mutton"--always, as Henley had said, "a scholar and a gentleman," he no +doubt remembered the sense in which the Elizabethan dramatists used the +words "Cold mutton"--and then aloud so that the crowd may hear him, "But +tell it in England, for it will entirely restore my character." + + +XV + +When the first few numbers of _The Savoy_ had been published, the +contributors and the publisher gave themselves a supper, and Symons +explained that certain among us were invited afterwards to the +publisher's house, and if I went there that once I need never go again. I +considered the publisher a scandalous person, and had refused to meet him; +we were all agreed as to his character, and only differed as to the +distance that should lie between him and us. I had just received two +letters, one from T. W. Rolleston protesting with all the conventional +moral earnestness of an article in _The Spectator_ newspaper, against my +writing for such a magazine; and one from A. E. denouncing that magazine, +which he called the "Organ of the Incubi and the Succubi," with the +intensity of a personal conviction. I had forgotten that Arthur Symons had +borrowed the letters until as we stood about the supper table waiting for +the signal to be seated, I heard the infuriated voice of the publisher +shouting, "Give me the letter, give me the letter, I will prosecute that +man," and I saw Symons waving Rolleston's letter just out of reach. Then +Symons folded it up and put it in his pocket, and began to read out A. E. +and the publisher was silent, and I saw Beardsley listening. Presently +Beardsley came to me and said, "Yeats, I am going to surprise you very +much. I think your friend is right. All my life I have been fascinated by +the spiritual life--when a child I saw a vision of a Bleeding Christ over +the mantelpiece--but after all to do one's work when there are other +things one wants to do so much more, is a kind of religion." + +Something, I forget what, delayed me a few minutes after the supper was +over, and when I arrived at our publisher's I found Beardsley propped up +on a chair in the middle of the room, grey and exhausted, and as I came in +he left the chair and went into another room to spit blood, but returned +immediately. Our publisher, perspiration pouring from his face, was +turning the handle of a hurdy gurdy piano--it worked by electricity, I was +told, when the company did not cut off the supply--and very plainly had +had enough of it, but Beardsley pressed him to labour on, "The tone is so +beautiful," "It gives me such deep pleasure," etc., etc. It was his method +of keeping our publisher at a distance. + +Another image competes with that image in my memory. Beardsley has arrived +at Fountain Court a little after breakfast with a young woman who belongs +to our publisher's circle and certainly not to ours, and is called +"twopence coloured," or is it "penny plain." He is a little drunk and his +mind has been running upon his dismissal from _The Yellow Book_, for he +puts his hand upon the wall and stares into a mirror. He mutters, "Yes, +yes. I look like a Sodomite," which he certainly did not. "But no, I am +not that," and then begins railing, against his ancestors, accusing them +of that and this, back to and including the great Pitt, from whom he +declares himself descended. + + +XVI + +I can no more justify my convictions in these brief chapters, where I +touch on fundamental things, than Shakespeare could justify within the +limits of a sonnet, his conviction that the soul of the wide world dreams +of things to come; and yet as I have set out to describe nature as I see +it, I must not only describe events but those patterns into which they +fall, when I am the looker-on. A French miracle-working priest once said +to Maud Gonne and myself and to an English Catholic who had come with us, +that a certain holy woman had been the "victim" for his village, and that +another holy woman who had been "victim" for all France, had given him her +Crucifix, because he, too, was doomed to become a "victim." + +French psychical research has offered evidence to support the historical +proofs that such saints as Lydwine of Schiedam, whose life suggested to +Paul Claudel his _L'Annonce faite a Marie_, did really cure disease by +taking it upon themselves. As disease was considered the consequence of +sin, to take it upon themselves was to copy Christ. All my proof that mind +flows into mind, and that we cannot separate mind and body, drives me to +accept the thought of victimage in many complex forms, and I ask myself if +I cannot so explain the strange, precocious genius of Beardsley. He was in +my Lunar metaphor a man of the thirteenth Phase, his nature on the edge of +Unity of Being, the understanding of that Unity by the intellect his one +overmastering purpose; whereas Lydwine de Schiedam and her like, being of +the saints, are at the seven and twentieth Phase, and seek a unity with a +life beyond individual being; and so being all subjective he would take +upon himself not the consequences, but the knowledge of sin. I surrender +myself to the wild thought that by so doing he enabled persons who had +never heard his name, to recover innocence. I have so often, too, +practised meditations, or experienced dreams, where the meditations or +dreams of two or three persons contrast and complement one another, in so +far as those persons are in themselves complementary or contrasting, that +I am convinced that it is precisely from the saint or potential saint that +he would gather this knowledge. I see in his fat women and shadowy, +pathetic girls, his horrible children, half child, half embryo, in all +the lascivious monstrous imagery of the privately published designs, the +phantasms that from the beginning have defied the scourge and the hair +shirt. I once said to him half seriously, "Beardsley, I was defending you +last night in the only way in which it is possible to defend you, by +saying that all you draw is inspired by rage against iniquity," and he +answered, "If it were so inspired the work would be in no way different," +meaning, as I think, that he drew with such sincerity that no change of +motive could change the image. + +I know that some turn of disease had begun to parade erotic images before +his eyes, and I do not doubt that he drew these images. "I make a blot +upon the paper," he said to me; "And I begin to shove the ink about and +something comes." But I was wrong to say that he drew these things in rage +against iniquity, for to know that rage he must needs be objective, +concerned with other people, with the Church or the Divinity, with +something outside his own head, and responsible not for the knowledge but +for the consequence of sin. His preparation had been the exhaustion of sin +in act, while the preparation of the Saint is the exhaustion of his pride, +and instead of the Saint's humility, he had come to see the images of the +mind in a kind of frozen passion, the virginity of the intellect. + +Does not all art come when a nature, that never ceases to judge itself, +exhausts personal emotion in action or desire so completely that something +impersonal, something that has nothing to do with action or desire, +suddenly starts into its place, something which is as unforeseen, as +completely organized, even as unique, as the images that pass before the +mind between sleeping and waking. + +But all art is not victimage; and much of the hatred of the art of +Beardsley came from the fact that victimage, though familiar under another +name to French criticism since the time of Baudelaire, was not known in +England. He pictures almost always disillusion, and apart from those +privately published drawings which he tried upon his deathbed to have +destroyed, there is no representation of desire. Even the beautiful women +are exaggerated into doll-like prettiness by a spirit of irony, or are +poignant with a thwarted or corrupted innocence. I see his art with more +understanding now, than when he lived, for in 1895 or 1896, I was in +despair at the new breath of comedy that had begun to wither the beauty +that I loved, just when that beauty seemed about to unite itself to +mystery. I said to him once, "You have never done anything to equal your +Salome with the head of John the Baptist." I think, that for the moment he +was sincere when he replied, "Yes, yes; but beauty is so difficult." It +was for the moment only, for as the popular rage increased and his own +disease increased, he became more and more violent in his satire, or +created out of a spirit of mockery a form of beauty where his powerful +logical intellect eliminated every outline that suggested meditation or +even satisfied passion. + +The distinction between the Image, between the apparition as it were, and +the personal action and desire, took a new form at the approach of death. +He made two or three charming and blasphemous designs; I think especially +of a Madonna and Child, where the Child has a foolish, doll-like face, and +an elaborate modern baby's dress; and of a St. Rose of Lima in an +expensive gown decorated with roses, ascending to Heaven upon the bosom of +the Madonna, her face enraptured with love, but with that form of it +which is least associated with sanctity. I think that his conversion to +Catholicism was sincere, but that so much of impulse as could exhaust +itself in prayer and ceremony, in formal action and desire, found itself +mocked by the antithetical image; and yet I am perhaps mistaken, perhaps +it was merely his recognition that historical Christianity had dwindled to +a box of toys, and that it might be amusing to empty the whole box on to +the counterpane. + + +XVII + +I had been a good deal in Paris, though never very long at any time, my +later visits with a member of the Rhymer's Club whose curiosity or emotion +was roused by every pretty girl. He treated me with a now admiring, now +mocking wonder, because being in love, and in no way lucky in that love, I +had grown exceedingly puritanical so far as my immediate neighbourhood was +concerned. One night, close to the Luxembourg, a strange young woman in +bicycling costume, came out of a side street, threw one arm about his +neck, walked beside us in perfect silence for a hundred yards or so, and +then darted up another side street. He had a red and white complexion and +fair hair, but how she discovered that in the dark I could not understand. +I became angry and reproachful, but he defended himself by saying, "You +never meet a stray cat without caressing it: I have similar instincts." +Presently we found ourselves at some Cafe--the Cafe D'Harcourt, I +think--and when I looked up from my English newspaper, I found myself +surrounded with painted ladies and saw that he was taking vengeance. I +could not have carried on a conversation in French, but I was able to say, +"That gentleman over there has never refused wine or coffee to any lady," +and in a little they had all settled about him like greedy pigeons. + +I had put my ideal of those years, an ideal that passed away with youth, +into my description of _Proud Costello_. "He was of those ascetics of +passion, who keep their hearts pure for love or for hatred, as other men +for God, for Mary and for the Saints." My friend was not interested in +passion. A woman drew him to her by some romantic singularity in her +beauty or her circumstance, and drew him the more if the curiosity she +aroused were half intellectual. A little after the time I write of, +throwing himself into my chair after some visit to a music-hall or +hippodrome, he began, "O, Yeats, I was never in love with a +serpent-charmer before." He was objective. For him "the visible world +existed" as he was fond of quoting, and I suspect him of a Moon that had +entered its fourth quarter. + + +XVIII + +At first I used to stay with Macgregor Mathers and his gracious young wife +near the Champ de Mars, or in the Rue Mozart, but later by myself in a +student's hotel in the Latin quarter, and I cannot remember always where I +stayed when this or that event took place. Macgregor Mathers, or +Macgregor, for he had now shed the "Mathers," would come down to breakfast +one day with his Horace, the next day with his Macpherson's Ossian, and +read out fragments during breakfast, considering both books of equal +authenticity. Once when I questioned that of Ossian, he got into a +rage--what right had I to take sides with the English enemy--and I found +that for him the eighteenth century controversy still raged. At night he +would dress himself in Highland dress, and dance the sword dance, and his +mind brooded upon the ramifications of clans and tartans. Yet I have at +moments doubted whether he had seen the Highlands, or even, until invited +there by some White Rose Society, Scotland itself. Every Sunday he gave to +the evocation of Spirits, and I noted that upon that day he would spit +blood. That did not matter, he said, because it came from his head, not +his lungs; what ailed him I do not know, but I think that he lived under +some great strain, and presently I noted that he was drinking neat brandy, +not to drunkenness, but to detriment of mind and body. + +He began to foresee changes in the world, announcing in 1893 or 1894, the +imminence of immense wars, and was it in 1895 or 1896 that he learned +ambulance work, and made others learn it? He had a sabre wound on his +wrist--or perhaps his forehead, for my memory is not clear--got in some +student riot that he had mistaken for the beginning of war. It may have +been some talk of his that made me write the poem that begins: + + "The dews drop slowly and dreams gather; + unknown spears + Suddenly hurtle before my dream awakened eyes, + And then the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries + Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears." + +War was to bring, or be brought by, anarchy, but that would be a passing +stage, he declared, for his dreams were all Napoleonic. He certainly +foresaw some great role that he could play, had made himself an +acknowledged master of the war-game, and for a time taught it to French +officers for his living. He was to die of melancholia, and was perhaps +already mad at certain moments or upon certain topics, though he did not +make upon me that impression in those early days, being generous, gay, and +affable. I have seen none that lacked philosophy and trod _Hodos +Camelionis_ come to good there; and he lacked it but for a vague +affirmation, that he would have his friends affirm also, each for himself, +"There is no part of me that is not of the Gods." Once, when he had told +me that he met his Teachers in some great crowd, and only knew that they +were phantoms by a shock that was like an electric shock to his heart, I +asked him how he knew that he was not deceived or hallucinated. He said, +"I had been visited by one of them the other night, and I followed him +out, and followed him down that little lane to the right. Presently I fell +over the milk boy, and the milk boy got in a rage because he said that not +only I but the man in front had fallen over him." He like all that I have +known, who have given themselves up to images, and to the murmuring of +images, thought that when he had proved that an image could act +independently of his mind, he had proved also that neither it, nor what it +had murmured, had originated there. Yet had I need of proof to the +contrary, I had it while under his roof. I was eager for news of the +Spanish-American war, and went to the Rue Mozart before breakfast to buy a +_New York Herald_. As I went out past the young Normandy servant who was +laying breakfast, I was telling myself some schoolboy romance, and had +just reached a place where I carried my arm in a sling after some +remarkable escape. I bought my paper and returned, to find Macgregor on +the doorstep. "Why, you are all right," he said, "What did the Bonne mean +by telling me that you had hurt your arm and carried it in a sling." + +Once when I met him in the street in his Highland clothes, with several +knives in his stocking, he said, "When I am dressed like this I feel like +a walking flame," and I think that everything he did was but an attempt to +feel like a walking flame. Yet at heart he was, I think, gentle, and +perhaps even a little timid. He had some impediment in his nose that gave +him a great deal of trouble, and it could have been removed had he not +shrunk from the slight operation; and once when he was left in a +mouse-infested flat with some live traps, he collected his captives into a +large birdcage, and to avoid the necessity of their drowning, fed them +there for weeks. Being a self-educated, un-scholarly, though learned man, +he was bound to express the fundamental antithesis in the most crude form, +and being arrogant, to prevent as far as possible that alternation between +the two natures which is, it may be, necessary to sanity. When the nature +turns to its spiritual opposite alone there can be no alternation, but +what nature is pure enough for that. + +I see Paris in the Eighteen-nineties as a number of events separated from +one another, and without cause or consequence, without lot or part in the +logical structure of my life; I can often as little find their dates as I +can those of events in my early childhood. William Sharp, who came to see +me there, may have come in 1895, or on some visit four or five years +later, but certainly I was in an hotel in the Boulevard Raspail. When he +stood up to go he said, "What is that?" pointing to a geometrical form +painted upon a little piece of cardboard that lay upon my window sill. And +then before I could answer, looked out of the window saying, "There is a +funeral passing." I said, "That is curious, as the Death symbol is painted +upon the card." I did not look, but I am sure there was no funeral. A few +days later he came back and said, "I have been very ill; you must never +allow me to see that symbol again." He did not seem anxious to be +questioned, but years later he said, "I will now tell you what happened in +Paris. I had two rooms at my hotel, a front sitting-room and a bedroom +leading out of it. As I passed the threshold of the sitting-room, I saw a +woman standing at the bureau writing, and presently she went into my +bedroom. I thought somebody had got into the wrong room by mistake, but +when I went to the bureau I saw the sheet of paper she had seemed to write +upon, and there was no writing upon it. I went into my bed-room and I +found nobody, but as there was a door from the bedroom on to the stairs I +went down the stairs to see if she had gone that way. When I got out into +the street I saw her just turning a corner, but when I turned the corner +there was nobody there, and then I saw her at another corner. Constantly +seeing her and losing her like that I followed till I came to the Seine, +and there I saw her standing at an opening in the wall, looking down into +the river. Then she vanished, and I cannot tell why, but I went to the +opening in the wall and stood there, just as she had stood, taking just +the same attitude. Then I thought I was in Scotland, and that I heard a +sheep bell. After that I must have lost consciousness, for I knew nothing +till I found myself lying on my back, dripping wet, and people standing +all round. I had thrown myself into the Seine." + +I did not believe him, and not because I thought the story impossible, for +I knew he had a susceptibility beyond that of any one I had ever known, to +symbolic or telepathic influence, but because he never told one anything +that was true; the facts of life disturbed him and were forgotten. The +story had been created by the influence but it had remained a reverie, +though he may in the course of years have come to believe that it happened +as an event. The affectionate husband of his admiring and devoted wife, he +had created an imaginary beloved, had attributed to her the authorship of +all his books that had any talent, and though habitually a sober man, I +have known him to get drunk, and at the height of his intoxication when +most men speak the truth, to attribute his state to remorse for having +been unfaithful to Fiona Macleod. + +Paul Verlaine alternated between the two halves of his nature with so +little apparent resistance that he seemed like a bad child, though to read +his sacred poems is to remember perhaps that the Holy Infant shared His +first home with the beasts. In what month was it that I received a note +inviting me to "coffee and cigarettes plentifully," and signed "Yours +quite cheerfully, Paul Verlaine?" I found him at the top of a tenement +house in the Rue St. Jacques, sitting in an easy chair, his bad leg +swaddled in many bandages. He asked me, speaking in English, if I knew +Paris well, and added, pointing to his leg, that it had scorched his leg +for he know it "well, too well" and "lived in it like a fly in a pot of +marmalade." He took up an English dictionary, one of the few books in the +room, and began searching for the name of his disease, selecting after a +long search and with, as I understood, only comparative accuracy +"Erysipelas." Meanwhile his homely, middle-aged mistress made the coffee +and found the cigarettes; it was obviously she who had given the room its +character; her canaries in several cages hanging in the window, and her +sentimental lithographs nailed here and there among the nude drawings and +newspaper caricatures of her lover as various kinds of monkey, which he +had pinned upon the wall. A slovenly, ragged man came in, his trousers +belted with a piece of rope and an opera hat upon his head. She drew a box +over to the fire, and he sat down, now holding the opera hat upon his +knees, and I think he must have acquired it very lately for he kept +constantly closing and opening it. Verlaine introduced him by saying, "He +is a poor man, but a good fellow, and is so like Louis XI to look at that +we call him Louis the XIth." I remember that Verlaine talked of Victor +Hugo who was "a supreme poet, but a volcano of mud as well as of flame," +and of Villiers de L'Isle Adam who was "exalte" and wrote excellent +French; and of _In Memoriam_, which he had tried to translate and could +not. "Tennyson is too noble, too Anglais; when he should have been +brokenhearted, he had many reminiscences." + +At Verlaine's burial, but a few months after, his mistress quarrelled with +a publisher at the graveside as to who owned the sheet by which the body +had been covered, and Louis XI stole fourteen umbrellas that he found +leaning against a tree in the Cemetery. + + +XIX + +I am certain of one date, for I have gone to much trouble to get it right. +I met John Synge for the first time in the Autumn of 1896, when I was one +and thirty, and he four and twenty. I was at the Hotel Corneille instead +of my usual lodging, and why I cannot remember for I thought it expensive. +Synge's biographer says that you boarded there for a pound a week, but I +was accustomed to cook my own breakfast, and dine at an anarchist +restaurant in the Boulevard S. Jacques for little over a shilling. Some +one, whose name I forget, told me there was a poor Irishman at the top of +the house, and presently introduced us. Synge had come lately from Italy, +and had played his fiddle to peasants in the Black Forest; six months of +travel upon fifty pounds; and was now reading French literature and +writing morbid and melancholy verse. He told me that he had learned Irish +at Trinity College, so I urged him to go to the Aran Islands and find a +life that had never been expressed in literature, instead of a life where +all had been expressed. I did not divine his genius, but I felt he needed +something to take him out of his morbidity and melancholy. Perhaps I would +have given the same advice to any young Irish writer who knew Irish, for I +had been that summer upon Inishmaan and Inishmore, and was full of the +subject. My friends and I had landed from a fishing boat to find ourselves +among a group of islanders, one of whom said he would bring us to the +oldest man upon Inishmaan. This old man, speaking very slowly, but with +laughing eyes, had said, "If any gentleman has done a crime, we'll hide +him. There was a gentleman that killed his father, and I had him in my +own house six months till he got away to America." + +From that on I saw much of Synge, and brought him to Maude Gonne's, under +whose persuasion perhaps, he joined the "Young Ireland Society of Paris," +the name we gave to half a dozen Parisian Irish, signed, but resigned +after a few months because "it wanted to stir up Continental nations +against England, and England will never give us freedom until she feels +she is safe," the one political sentence I ever heard him speak. Over a +year was to pass before he took my advice and settled for a while in an +Aran cottage, and became happy, having escaped at last, as he wrote, "from +the squalor of the poor and the nullity of the rich." I almost forget the +prose and verse he showed me in Paris, though I read it all through again +when after his death I decided, at his written request, what was to be +published and what not. Indeed, I have but a vague impression, as of a man +trying to look out of a window and blurring all that he sees by breathing +upon the window. According to my Lunar parable, he was a man of the +twenty-third Phase, a man whose subjective lives--for a constant return to +our life is a part of my dream--were over, who must not pursue an image, +but fly from it, all that subjective dreaming, that had once been power +and joy, now corrupting within him. He had to take the first plunge into +the world beyond himself, the first plunge away from himself that is +always pure technique, the delight in doing, not because one would or +should, but merely because one can do. + +He once said to me, "a man has to bring up his family and be as virtuous +as is compatible with so doing, and if he does more than that he is a +puritan; a dramatist has to express his subject and to find as much +beauty as is compatible with that, and if he does more he is an aesthete," +that is to say, he was consciously objective. Whenever he tried to write +drama without dialect he wrote badly, and he made several attempts, +because only through dialect could he escape self-expression, see all that +he did from without, allow his intellect to judge the images of his mind +as if they had been created by some other mind. His objectivity was, +however, technical only, for in those images paraded all the desires of +his heart. He was timid, too shy for general conversation, an invalid and +full of moral scruple, and he was to create now some ranting braggadocio, +now some tipsy hag full of poetical speech, and now some young man or girl +full of the most abounding health. He never spoke an unkind word, had +admirable manners, and yet his art was to fill the streets with rioters, +and to bring upon his dearest friends enemies that may last their +lifetime. + +No mind can engender till divided into two, but that of a Keats or a +Shelley falls into an intellectual part that follows, and a hidden +emotional flying image, whereas in a mind like that of Synge the emotional +part is dreaded and stagnant, while the intellectual part is a clear +mirror-like technical achievement. + +But in writing of Synge I have run far ahead, for in 1896 he was but one +picture among many. I am often astonished when I think that we can meet +unmoved some person, or pass some house, that in later years is to bear a +chief part in our life. Should there not be some flutter of the nerve or +stopping of the heart like that Macgregor experienced at the first meeting +with a phantom? + + +XX + +Many pictures come before me without date or order. I am walking somewhere +near the Luxembourg Gardens when Synge, who seldom generalises and only +after much thought, says, "There are three things any two of which have +often come together but never all three; ecstasy, asceticism, austerity; I +wish to bring all three together." + + * * * * * + +I notice that Macgregor considers William Sharp vague and sentimental, +while Sharp is repelled by Macgregor's hardness and arrogance. William +Sharp met Macgregor in the Louvre, and said, "No doubt considering your +studies you live upon milk and fruit." And Macgregor replied, "No, not +exactly milk and fruit, but very nearly so;" and now Sharp has lunched +with Macgregor and been given nothing but brandy and radishes. + + * * * * * + +Macgregor is much troubled by ladies who seek spiritual advice, and one +has called to ask his help against phantoms who have the appearance of +decayed corpses, and try to get into bed with her at night. He has driven +her away with one furious sentence, "Very bad taste on both sides." + + * * * * * + +I am sitting in a Cafe with two French Americans, one in the morning, +while we are talking wildly, and some are dancing, there is a tap at the +shuttered window; we open it and three ladies enter, the wife of a man of +letters, who thought to find no one but a confederate, and her husband's +two young sisters whom she has brought secretly to some disreputable +dance. She is very confused at seeing us, but as she looks from one to +another understands that we have taken some drug and laughs; caught in our +dream we know vaguely that she is scandalous according to our code and to +all codes, but smile at her benevolently and laugh. + + * * * * * + +I am at Stuart Merrill's, and I meet there a young Jewish Persian scholar. +He has a large gold ring, seemingly very rough, made by some amateur, and +he shows me that it has shaped itself to his finger, and says, "That is +because it contains no alloy--it is alchemical gold." I ask who made the +gold, and he says a certain Rabbi, and begins to talk of the Rabbi's +miracles. We do not question him--perhaps it is true--perhaps he has +imagined at all--we are inclined to accept every historical belief once +more. + + * * * * * + +I am sitting in a Cafe with two French Americans, a German poet +Douchenday, and a silent man whom I discover to be Strindberg, and who is +looking for the Philosopher's Stone. The French American reads out a +manifesto he is about to issue to the Latin Quarter; it proposes to +establish a communistic colony of artists in Virginia, and there is a +footnote to explain why he selects Virginia, "Art has never flourished +twice in the same place. Art has never flourished in Virginia." + +Douchenday, who has some reputation as a poet, explains that his poems are +without verbs, as the verb is the root of all evil in the world. He wishes +for an art where all things are immoveable, as though the clouds should be +made of marble. I turn over the page of one of his books which he shows +me, and find there a poem in dramatic form, but when I ask if he hopes to +have it played he says:--"It could only be played by actors before a black +marble wall, with masks in their hands. They must not wear the masks for +that would not express my scorn for reality." + + * * * * * + +I go to the first performance of Alfred Jarry's _Ubu Roi_, at the Theatre +de L'Oeuvre, with the Rhymer who had been so attractive to the girl in the +bicycling costume. The audience shake their fists at one another, and the +Rhymer whispers to me, "There are often duels after these performances," +and he explains to me what is happening on the stage. The players are +supposed to be dolls, toys, marionettes, and now they are all hopping like +wooden frogs, and I can see for myself that the chief personage, who is +some kind of King, carries for Sceptre a brush of the kind that we use to +clean a closet. Feeling bound to support the most spirited party, we have +shouted for the play, but that night at the Hotel Corneille I am very sad, +for comedy, objectivity, has displayed its growing power once more. I say, +"After Stephane Mallarme, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after +Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our subtle colour and +nervous rhythm, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is +possible? After us the Savage God." + + + + +BOOK V + +THE STIRRING OF THE BONES + + + + +_THE STIRRING OF THE BONES_ + + +I + +It may have been the Spring of 1897 that Maud Gonne, who was passing +through London, told me that for some reason unknown to her, she had +failed to get a Dublin authorization for an American lecturing tour. The +young Dublin Nationalists planned a monument to Wolfe Tone which, it was +hoped, might exceed in bulk and in height that of the too compromised and +compromising Daniel O'Connell, and she proposed to raise money for it by +these lectures. I had left the Temple and taken two rooms in Bloomsbury, +and in Bloomsbury lived important London Nationalists, elderly doctors, +who had been medical students during the Fenian movement. So I was able to +gather a sufficient committee to pass the necessary resolution. She had no +sooner sailed than I found out why the Dublin committee had refused it, or +rather put it off by delay and vague promises. A prominent Irish American +had been murdered for political reasons, and another Irish American had +been tried and acquitted, but was still accused by his political +opponents, and the dispute had spread to London and to Ireland, and had +there intermixed itself with current politics and gathered new bitterness. +My committee, and the majority of the Nationalist Irish Societies +throughout England were upon one side, and the Dublin committee and the +majority of the Nationalist Societies in Ireland upon the other, and +feeling ran high. Maud Gonne had the same friends that I had, and the +Dublin committee could not be made to understand that whatever money she +collected would go to the movement, and not to her friends and their +opponents. It seemed to me that if I accepted the Presidency of the '98 +Commemoration Association of Great Britain, I might be able to prevent a +public quarrel, and so make a great central council possible; and a public +quarrel I did prevent, though with little gain perhaps to anybody, for at +least one active man assured me that I had taken the heart out of his +work, and no gain at all perhaps to the movement, for our central council +had commonly to send two organizers or to print two pamphlets, that both +parties might be represented when one pamphlet or one organizer had +served. + + +II + +It was no business of mine, and that was precisely why I could not keep +out of it. Every enterprise that offered, allured just in so far as it was +not my business. I still think that in a species of man, wherein I count +myself, nothing so much matters as Unity of Being, but if I seek it as +Goethe sought, who was not of that species, I but combine in myself, and +perhaps as it now seems, looking backward, in others also, incompatibles. +Goethe, in whom objectivity and subjectivity were intermixed I hold, as +the dark is mixed with the light at the eighteenth Lunar Phase, could but +seek it as Wilhelm Meister seeks it intellectually, critically, and +through a multitude of deliberately chosen experiences; events and forms +of skill gathered as if for a collector's cabinet; whereas true Unity of +Being, where all the nature murmurs in response if but a single note be +touched, is found emotionally, instinctively, by the rejection of all +experience not of the right quality, and by the limitation of its +quantity. Of all this I knew nothing, for I saw the world by the light of +what my father had said, speaking about some Frenchman who frequented the +dissecting rooms to overcome his dread in the interest of that Unity. My +father had mocked, but had not explained why he had mocked, and I, for my +unhappiness had felt a shuddering fascination. Nor did I understand as yet +how little that Unity, however wisely sought, is possible without a Unity +of Culture in class or people that is no longer possible at all. + + "The fascination of what's difficult + Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent + Spontaneous joy and natural content + Out of my heart." + + +III + +I went hither and thither speaking at meetings in England and Scotland and +occasionally at tumultuous Dublin conventions, and endured some of the +worst months of my life. I had felt years before that I had made a great +achievement when the man who trained my uncle's horses invited me to share +his Xmas dinner, which we roasted in front of his harness room fire; and +now I took an almost equal pride in an evening spent with some small +organizer into whose spitoon I secretly poured my third glass of whiskey. +I constantly hoped for some gain in self-possession, in rapidity of +decision, in capacity for disguise, and am at this moment, I dare say, no +different for it all, having but burgeoned and withered like a tree. + +When Maud Gonne returned she became our directing mind both in England and +in Ireland, and it was mainly at her bidding that our movement become a +protest against the dissensions, the lack of dignity, of the Parnellite +and Anti-Parnellite parties, who had fought one another for seven or eight +years, till busy men passed them by, as they did those performing cats +that in my childhood I used to see, pretending to spit at one another on a +table, outside Charing Cross station. Both parliamentary parties seeing +that all young Ireland, and a good part of old, were in the movement, +tried to join us, the Anti-Parnellite without abandoning its separate +identity. They were admitted I think, but upon what terms I do not +remember. I and two or three others had to meet Michael Davitt, and a +member of parliament called F. X. O'Brien to talk out the question of +separate identity, and I remember nothing of what passed but the manner +and image of Michael Davitt. He seemed hardly more unfitted for such +negotiation, perhaps even for any possible present politics, than I +myself, and I watched him with sympathy. One knows by the way a man sits +in his chair if he have emotional intensity, and Davitt's suggested to me +a writer, a painter, an artist of some kind, rather than a man of action. +Then, too, F. X. O'Brien did not care whether he used a good or a bad +argument, whether he seemed a fool or a clever man, so that he carried his +point, but if he used a bad argument Davitt would bring our thought back +to it though he had to wait several minutes and re-state it. One felt +that he had lived always with small unimaginative, effective men whom he +despised; and that perhaps through some lack of early education, perhaps +because nine years' imprisonment at the most plastic period of his life +had jarred or broken his contact with reality, he had failed, except +during the first months of the Land League, to dominate those men. He told +me that if the split in the Irish Party had not come he would have carried +the Land League into the Highlands, and recovered for Ireland as much of +Scotland as was still Gaelic in blood or in language. Our negotiations, +which interested so much F. X. O'Brien and my two negotiators, a barrister +and a doctor, bored him I thought, even more than they did me, to whom +they were a novelty; but the Highland plan with its historical foundation +and its vague possibilities excited him, and it seemed to me that what we +said or did stirred him, at other moments also, to some similar remote +thought and emotion. I think he returned my sympathy, for a little before +his death he replied to some words of congratulation I sent him after the +speech in which he resigned his seat in the House of Commons, with an +account of some project of his for improving the quality of the Irish +representation there. + + +IV + +I think that he shared with poet and philosopher the necessity of speaking +the whole mind or remaining silent or ineffective, and he had been for +years in a movement, where, to adapt certain words of a friend of mine, it +was as essential to carry the heart upon the sleeve as the tongue in the +cheek. The founders of the Irish Agrarian movement had acted upon the +doctrine, contradicted by religious history, that ignorant men will not +work for an idea, or feel a political passion for its own sake, and that +you must find "a lever" as it was called, some practical grievance; and I +do not think that I am fantastic in believing that this faith in "levers," +universal among revolutionaries, is but a result of that mechanical +philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, which has, as Coleridge said, turned +the human mind into the quicksilver at the back of a mirror, though it +still permits a work of art to seem "a mirror dawdling along a road." + +O'Leary had told me the story, not I think hitherto published. A prominent +Irish American, not long released from the prison where Fenianism had sent +him, cabled to Parnell:--"Take up Land Reform side by side with the +National Question and we will support you. See Kickham." What had Parnell, +a landowner and a haughty man, to do with the peasant or the peasant's +grievance? And he was indeed so ignorant of both that he asked Kickham, +novelist and Fenian leader, if he thought the people would take up a land +agitation, and Kickham answered:--"I am only afraid they would go to the +Gates of Hell for it;" and O'Leary's comment was, "and so they have." + +And so was founded an agitation where some men pretended to national +passion for the land's sake; some men to agrarian passion for the nation's +sake; some men to both for their own advancement, and this agitation at +the time I write of had but old men to serve it, who found themselves +after years of labour, some after years of imprisonment, derided for +unscrupulous rascals. Unscrupulous they certainly were, for they had +grown up amid make-believe, and now because their practical grievance was +too near settlement to blind and to excite, their make-believe was visible +to all. They were as eloquent as ever, they had never indeed shared +anything in common but the sentimental imagery, the poetical allusions +inherited from a still earlier generation, but were faced by a generation +that had turned against all oratory. I recall to my memory a member of +Parliament who had fought for Parnell's policy after Parnell's death, and +much against his own interest, who refused to attend a meeting my friends +had summoned at the declaration of the Boer War, because he thought +"England was in the right," and yet a week later when the Dublin mob had +taken the matter up, advised Irish soldiers to shoot their officers and +join President Kruger. I recall another and more distinguished politician +who supported the Anti-Parnellite Party in his declining years, and in his +vigorous years had raked up some scandal about some Colonial Governor. A +friend of mine, after advising that Governor's son to write his father's +life, had remembered the scandal and called in her alarm upon the +politician; "I do beseech you," he had said and with the greatest +earnestness, "to pay no attention whatever to anything I may have said +during an election." + +Certain of these men, all public prepossessions laid aside, were excellent +talkers, genial and friendly men, with memories enriched by country +humour, and much half sentimental, half practical philosophy, and at +moments by poetical feeling that was not all an affectation, found very +moving by English sympathisers, of the tear and the smile in Erin's eye. +They may even have had more sincerity than their sort elsewhere, but they +had inherited a cause that men had died for, and they themselves had gone +to jail for it, and had so worn their hereditary martyrdom that they had +seemed for a time no common men, and now must pay the penalty. "I have +just told Mahaffy," Wilde had said to me, "that it is a party of men of +genius," and now John O'Leary, Taylor, and many obscure sincere men had +pulled them down; and yet, should what followed, judged by an eye that +thinks most of the individual soul, be counted as more clearly out of the +common? A movement first of poetry, then of sentimentality, and land +hunger, had struggled with, and as the nation passed into the second +period of all revolutions, had given way before a movement of abstraction +and hatred; and after some twenty years of the second period, though +abstraction and hatred have won their victory, there is no clear sign, of +a third, a _tertium quid_, and a reasonable frame of mind. + +Seeing that only the individual soul can attain to its spiritual opposite, +a nation in tumult must needs pass to and fro between mechanical +opposites, but one hopes always that those opposites may acquire sex and +engender. At moments when I have thought of the results of political +subjection upon Ireland I have remembered a story told me by Oscar Wilde +who professed to have found it in a book of magic, "if you carve a +Cerberus upon an emerald," he said, "and put it in the oil of a lamp and +carry it into a room where your enemy is, two heads will come upon his +shoulders and devour one another." + +Instead of sharing our traditional sentimental rhetoric with every man who +had found a practical grievance, whether one care a button for the +grievance or not, most of us were prosecuting heretics. Nationality was +like religion, few could be saved, and meditation had but one theme--the +perfect nation and its perfect service. "Public opinion," said an +anonymous postcard sent to a friend of mine, "will compel you to learn +Irish," and it certainly did compel many persons of settled habits to +change tailor and cloth. I believed myself dressed according to public +opinion, until a letter of apology from my tailor informed me that "It +takes such a long time getting Connemara cloth as it has to come all the +way from Scotland." + +The Ireland of men's affections must be, as it were, self-moving, +self-creating, though as yet (avoiding a conclusion that seemed hopeless) +but few added altogether separate from England politically. Men for the +moment were less concerned with the final achievement than with +independence from English parties and influence during the struggle for +it. We had no longer any leaders, abstractions were in their place; and +our Conventions, where O'Leary presided interrupting discussion without +the least consideration for rules of procedure when the moment came for +his cup of coffee, were dominated by little groups, the Gaelic +propagandists, though still very few, being the most impassioned, which +had the intensity and narrowness of theological sects. + +I had in my head a project to reconcile old and new that gave Maud Gonne +and myself many stirring conversations upon journeys by rail to meetings +in Scotland, in Dublin, or in the Midlands. Should we not persuade the +organizations in Dublin and in London, when the time drew near for the +unveiling of our statue, or even perhaps for the laying of its foundation +stone, to invite the leaders of Parnellite or Anti-Parnellite, of the new +group of Unionists who had almost changed sides in their indignation at +the over-taxation of Ireland, to lay their policy before our +Convention--could we not then propose and carry that the Convention sit +permanently, or appoint some Executive Committee to direct Irish policy +and report from time to time. The total withdrawal from Westminster had +been proposed in the 'Seventies, before the two devouring heads were of +equal strength, and now that the abstract head seemed the strongest, would +be proposed again, but the Convention could send them thither, not as an +independent power, but as its delegation, and only when, and for what +purpose the Convention might decide. I dreaded some wild Fenian movement, +and with literature perhaps more in my mind than politics, dreamed of that +Unity of Culture which might begin with some few men controlling some form +of administration. I began to talk my project over with various +organizers, who often interrupted their attention which was perhaps only +politeness, with some new jibe at Mr. Dillon or Mr. Redmond. I thought I +had Maud Gonne's support, but when I overheard her conversation, she +commonly urged the entire withdrawal of the Irish Members, or if she did +refer to my scheme, it was to suggest the sending to England of eighty +ragged and drunken Dublin beggars or eighty pugilists "to be paid by +results." + +She was the first who spoke publicly or semi-publicly of the withdrawal of +the Irish Members as a practical policy for our time, so far as I know, +but others may have been considering it. A nation in crisis becomes almost +like a single mind, or rather like those minds I have described that +become channels for parallel streams of thought, each stream taking the +colour of the mind it flows through. These streams are not set moving, as +I think, through conversation or publication, but through "telepathic +contact" at some depth below that of normal consciousness, and it is only +years afterwards, when future events have shown the themes' importance, +that we discover that they are different expressions of a common theme. +That self-moving, self-creating nation necessitated an Irish centre of +policy, and I planned a premature impossible peace between those two +devouring heads because I was sedentary and thoughtful; but Maud Gonne was +not sedentary, and I noticed that before some great event she did not +think but became exceedingly superstitous. Are not such as she aware, at +moments of great crisis, of some power beyond their own minds; or are they +like some good portrait painter of my father's generation and only think +when the model is under their eye? Once upon the eve of some +demonstration, I found her with many caged larks and finches which she was +about to set free for the luck's sake. + +I abandoned my plans on discovering that our young men, not yet educated +by Mr. Birrell's university, would certainly shout down everyone they +disagreed with, and that their finance was so extravagant that we must +content ourselves with a foundation stone and an iron rail to protect it, +for there could never be a statue; while she carried out every plan she +made. + +Her power over crowds was at its height, and some portion of the power +came because she could still, even when pushing an abstract principle to +what seemed to me an absurdity, keep her own mind free, and so when men +and women did her bidding they did it not only because she was beautiful, +but because that beauty suggested joy and freedom. Besides there was an +element in her beauty that moved minds full of old Gaelic stories and +poems, for she looked as though she lived in an ancient civilization where +all superiorities whether of the mind or the body were a part of public +ceremonial, were in some way the crowd's creation, as the Pope entering +the Vatican is the crowd's creation. Her beauty, backed by her great +stature, could instantly affect an assembly, and not as often with our +stage beauties because obvious and florid, for it was incredibly +distinguished, and if--as must be that it might seem that assembly's very +self, fused, unified, and solitary--her face, like the face of some Greek +statue, showed little thought, her whole body seemed a master work of long +labouring thought, as though a Scopas had measured and calculated, +consorted with Egyptian sages, and mathematicians out of Babylon, that he +might outface even Artemisia's sepulchral image with a living norm. + +But in that ancient civilization abstract thought scarce existed, while +she but rose partially and for a moment out of raging abstraction; and for +that reason, as I have known another woman do, she hated her own beauty, +not its effect upon others, but its image in the mirror. Beauty is from +the antithetical self, and a woman can scarce but hate it, for not only +does it demand a painful daily service, but it calls for the denial or the +dissolution of the self. + + "How many centuries spent + The sedentary soul, + In toil of measurement + Beyond eagle or mole + Beyond hearing and seeing + Or Archimedes' guess, + To raise into being + That loveliness?" + + +V + +On the morning of the great procession, the greatest in living memory, the +Parnellite and Anti-Parnellite members of Parliament, huddled together +like cows in a storm, gather behind our carriage, and I hear John Redmond +say to certain of his late enemies, "I went up nearer the head of the +Procession, but one of the Marshals said, 'This is not your place, Mr +Redmond; your place is further back.' 'No,' I said, 'I will stay here.' +'In that case,' he said, 'I will lead you back.'" Later on I can see by +the pushing and shouldering of a delegate from South Africa how important +place and procedure is; and noticing that Maud Gonne is cheered +everywhere, and that the Irish Members march through street after street +without welcome, I wonder if their enemies have not intended their +humiliation. + + * * * * * + +We are at the Mansion House Banquet, and John Dillon is making the first +speech he has made before a popular Dublin audience since the death of +Parnell; and I have several times to keep my London delegates from +interrupting. Dillon is very nervous, and as I watch him the abstract +passion begins to rise within me, and I am almost overpowered by an +instinct of cruelty; I long to cry out, "Had Zimri peace who slew his +master?" + + * * * * * + +Is our Foundation Stone still unlaid when the more important streets are +decorated for Queen Victoria's Jubilee? + +I find Maud Gonne at her hotel talking to a young working-man who looks +very melancholy. She had offered to speak at one of the regular meetings +of his socialist society about Queen Victoria, and he has summoned what +will be a great meeting in the open air. She has refused to speak, and he +says that her refusal means his ruin, as nobody will ever believe that he +had any promise at all. When he has left without complaint or anger, she +gives me very cogent reasons against the open air meeting, but I can think +of nothing but the young man and his look of melancholy. He has left his +address, and presently at my persuasion, she drives to his tenement, where +she finds him and his wife and children crowded into a very small +space--perhaps there was only one room--and, moved by the sight, promises +to speak. The young man is James Connolly who, with Padraic Pearce, is to +make the Insurrection of 1916 and to be executed. + + * * * * * + +The meeting is held in College Green and is very crowded, and Maud Gonne +speaks, I think, standing upon a chair. In front of her is an old woman +with a miniature of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, which she waves in her +excitement, crying out, "I was in it before she was born." Maud Gonne +tells how that morning she had gone to lay a wreath upon a martyr's tomb +at St. Michael's Church, for it is the one day in the year when such +wreaths are laid, but has been refused admission because it is the +Jubilee. Then she pauses, and after that her voice rises to a cry, "Must +the graves of our dead go undecorated because Victoria has her Jubilee?" + + * * * * * + +It is eight or nine at night, and she and I have come from the City Hall, +where the Convention has been sitting, that we may walk to the National +Club in Rutland Square, and we find a great crowd in the street, who +surround us and accompany us. Presently I hear a sound of breaking glass, +the crowd has begun to stone the windows of decorated houses, and when I +try to speak that I may restore order, I discover that I have lost my +voice through much speaking at the Convention. I can only whisper and +gesticulate, and as I am thus freed from responsibility, I share the +emotion of the crowd, and perhaps even feel as they feel when the glass +crashes. Maud Gonne has a look of exultation as she walks with her +laughing head thrown back. + +Later that night Connolly carries in procession a coffin with the words +"British Empire" upon it, and police and mob fight for its ownership, and +at last that the police may not capture, it is thrown into the Liffey. And +there are fights between police and window-breakers, and I read in the +morning papers that many have been wounded; some two hundred heads have +been dressed at the hospitals; an old woman killed by baton blows, or +perhaps trampled under the feet of the crowd; and that two thousand pounds +worth of decorated plate glass windows have been broken. I count the links +in the chain of responsibility, run them across my fingers, and wonder if +any link there is from my workshop. + + * * * * * + +Queen Victoria visits the city, and Dublin Unionists have gathered +together from all Ireland some twelve thousand children and built for them +a grandstand, and bought them sweets and buns that they may cheer. A week +later Maud Gonne marches forty thousand children through the streets of +Dublin, and in a field beyond Drumcondra, and in the presence of a Priest +of their Church, they swear to cherish towards England until the freedom +of Ireland has been won, an undying enmity. + +How many of these children will carry bomb or rifle when a little under or +a little over thirty? + + * * * * * + +Feeling is still running high between the Dublin and London organizations, +for a London doctor, my fellow-delegate, has called a little after +breakfast to say he was condemned to death by a certain secret society the +night before. He is very angry, though it does not seem that his life is +in danger, for the insult is beyond endurance. + + * * * * * + +We arrive at Chancery Lane for our Committee meeting, but it is Derby Day, +and certain men who have arranged a boxing match are in possession of our +rooms. We adjourn to a neighbouring public-house where there are little +pannelled cubicles as in an old-fashioned eating house, that we may direct +the secretary how to answer that week's letters. We are much interrupted +by a committee man who has been to the Derby, and now, half lying on the +table, keeps repeating, "I know what you all think. Let us hand on the +torch, you think, let us hand it on to our children, but I say no! I say, +let us order an immediate rising." + +Presently one of the boxers arrives, sent up to apologise it seems, and to +explain that we had not been recognized. He begins his apology but stops, +and for a moment fixes upon us a meditative critical eye. "No, I will +not," he cries. "What do I care for anyone now but Venus and Adonis and +the other Planets of Heaven." + + * * * * * + +French sympathisers have been brought to see the old buildings in Galway, +and with the towns of Southern France in their mind's eye, are not in the +least moved. The greater number are in a small crowded hotel. Presently an +acquaintance of mine, peeping, while it is still broad day, from his +bedroom window, sees the proprietress of the hotel near the hall door, and +in the road a serious-minded, quixotic Dublin barrister, with a little boy +who carries from a stick over his shoulder twelve chamber pots. He hears +one angry, and one soft pleading explanatory voice, "But, Madam, I feel +certain that at the unexpected arrival of so many guests, so many guests +of the Nation, I may say, you must have found yourself unprepared." "Never +have I been so insulted." "Madam, I am thinking of the honour of my +country." + + * * * * * + +I am at Maud Gonne's hotel, and an Italian sympathiser Cipriani, the +friend of Garibaldi, is there, and though an old man now, he is the +handsomest man I have ever seen. I am telling a ghost story in English at +one end of the room, and he is talking politics in French at the other. +Somebody says, "Yeats believes in ghosts," and Cipriani interrupts for a +moment his impassioned declamation to say in English, and with a +magnificent movement and intonation, "As for me, I believe in nothing but +cannon." + + * * * * * + +I call at the office of the Dublin organization in Westmoreland Street, +and find the front door open, and the office door open, and though the +office is empty the cupboard door open and eighteen pounds in gold upon +the shelf. + + * * * * * + +At a London Committee meeting I notice a middle-aged man who slips into +the room for a moment, whispers something to the secretary, lays three or +four shillings on a table, and slips out. I am told that he is an Irish +board-school teacher who, in early life, took an oath neither to drink nor +smoke, but to contribute the amount so saved weekly to the Irish Cause. + + * * * * * + + +VI + +A few months before I was drawn into politics, I made a friendship that +was to make possible that old project of an Irish Theatre. Arthur Symons +and I were staying at Tillyra Castle in County Galway with Mr. Edward +Martyn, when Lady Gregory, whom I had met once in London for a few minutes +drove over, and after Symon's return to London I stayed at her house, +which is some four miles from Tillyra. I was in poor health, the strain +of youth had been greater than it commonly is, even with imaginative men, +who must always, I think, find youth bitter, and I had lost myself besides +as I had done periodically for years, upon _Hodos Camelionis_. The first +time was in my eighteenth or nineteenth years, when I tried to create a +more multitudinous dramatic form, and now I had got there through a novel +that I could neither write nor cease to write which had _Hodos Camelionis_ +for its theme. My chief person was to see all the modern visionary sects +pass before his bewildered eyes, as Flaubert's St. Anthony saw the +Christian sects, and I was as helpless to create artistic, as my chief +person to create philosophic order. It was not that I do not love order, +or that I lack capacity for it, but that--and not in the arts and in +thought only--I outrun my strength. It is not so much that I choose too +many elements, as that the possible unities themselves seem without +number, like those angels, that in Henry More's paraphrase of the +Schoolman's problem, dance spurred and booted upon the point of a needle. +Perhaps fifty years ago I had been in less trouble, but what can one do +when the age itself has come to _Hodos Camelionis_? + +Lady Gregory seeing that I was ill brought me from cottage to cottage to +gather folk-belief, tales of the fairies, and the like, and wrote down +herself what we had gathered, considering that this work, in which one let +others talk, and walked about the fields so much, would lie, to use a +country phrase, "Very light upon the mind." She asked me to return there +the next year, and for years to come I was to spend my summers at her +house. When I was in good health again, I found myself indolent, partly +perhaps because I was affrighted by that impossible novel, and asked her +to send me to my work every day at eleven, and at some other hour to my +letters, rating me with idleness if need be, and I doubt if I should have +done much with my life but for her firmness and her care. After a time, +though not very quickly, I recovered tolerable industry, though it has +only been of late years that I have found it possible to face an hour's +verse without a preliminary struggle and much putting off. + +Certain woods at Sligo, the woods above Dooney Rock and those above the +waterfall at Ben Bulben, though I shall never perhaps walk there again, +are so deep in my affections that I dream about them at night; and yet the +woods at Coole, though they do not come into my dream are so much more +knitted to my thought, that when I am dead they will have, I am persuaded, +my longest visit. When we are dead, according to my belief, we live our +lives backward for a certain number of years, treading the paths that we +have trodden, growing young again, even childish again, till some attain +an innocence that is no longer a mere accident of nature, but the human +intellect's crowning achievement. It was at Coole that the first few +simple thoughts that now, grown complex, through their contact with other +thoughts, explain the world, came to me from beyond my own mind. I +practised meditations, and these, as I think, so affected my sleep that I +began to have dreams that differed from ordinary dreams in seeming to take +place amid brilliant light, and by their invariable coherence, and certain +half-dreams, if I can call them so, between sleep and waking. I have +noticed that such experiences come to me most often amid distraction, at +some time that seems of all times the least fitting, as though it were +necessary for the exterior mind to be engaged elsewhere, and it was +during 1897 and 1898, when I was always just arriving from or just setting +out to some political meeting, that the first dreams came. I was crossing +a little stream near Inchy Wood and actually in the middle of a stride +from bank to bank, when an emotion never experienced before swept down +upon me. I said, "That is what the devout Christian feels, that is how he +surrenders his will to the will of God." I felt an extreme surprise for my +whole imagination was preoccupied with the pagan mythology of ancient +Ireland, I was marking in red ink upon a large map, every sacred mountain. +The next morning I awoke near dawn, to hear a voice saying, "The love of +God is infinite for every human soul because every human soul is unique, +no other can satisfy the same need in God." + +Lady Gregory and I had heard many tales of changelings, grown men and +women as well as children, who as the people believe are taken by the +fairies, some spirit or inanimate object bewitched into their likeness +remaining in their stead, and I constantly asked myself what reality there +could be in these tales, often supported by so much testimony. I woke one +night to find myself lying upon my back with all my limbs rigid, and to +hear a ceremonial measured voice which did not seem to be mine speaking +through my lips, "We make an image of him who sleeps," it said, "and it is +not him who sleeps, and we call it Emmanuel." After many years that +thought, others often found as strangely being added to it, became the +thought of the Mask, which I have used in these memoirs to explain men's +characters. A few months ago at Oxford I was asking myself why it should +be "An image of him who sleeps," and took down from the shelf not knowing +why I was doing so, a book which I had never read, Burkitt's _Early +Eastern Christianity_, and opened it at random. My eyes lit upon a passage +from a Gnostic Hymn telling how a certain King's son being exiled, slept +in Egypt, a symbol of the natural state, and while he slept an Angel +brought him a royal mantle; and at the bottom of the page I found a +footnote saying that the word mantle did not represent the meaning +properly for that which the Angel gave had the exile's own form and +likeness. I did not, however, find in the Gnostic Hymn my other thought +that Egypt and that which the Mask represents are antithetical. That, I +think, became clear, though I had had some premonitions when a countryman +told Lady Gregory and myself that he had heard the crying of new-dropped +lambs in November--Spring in the world of Fairy, being November with us. + + * * * * * + +On the sea coast at Duras, a few miles from Coole, an old French Count, +Florimond de Bastero, lived for certain months in every year. Lady Gregory +and I talked over my project of an Irish Theatre looking out upon the lawn +of his house, watching a large flock of ducks that was always gathered for +his arrival from Paris, and that would be a very small flock, if indeed it +were a flock at all, when he set out for Rome in the autumn. I told her +that I had given up my project because it was impossible to get the few +pounds necessary for a start in little halls, and she promised to collect +or give the money necessary. That was her first great service to the Irish +intellectual movement. She reminded me the other day that when she first +asked me what she could do to help our movement I suggested nothing; and, +certainly, no more foresaw her genius that I foresaw that of John Synge, +nor had she herself foreseen it. Our theatre had been established before +she wrote or had any ambition to write, and yet her little comedies have +merriment and beauty, an unusual combination, and those two volumes where +the Irish heroic tales are arranged and translated in an English so simple +and so noble, may do more than other books to deepen Irish imagination. +They contain our ancient literature, are something better than our +_Mabinogion_, are almost our _Morte D'Arthur_. It is more fitting, +however, that in a book of memoirs I should speak of her personal +influence, and especially as no witness is likely to arise better +qualified to speak. If that influence were lacking, Ireland would be +greatly impoverished, so much has been planned out in the library, or +among the woods at Coole; for it was there that John Shawe Taylor found +the independence from class and family that made him summon the conference +between landlord and tenant, that brought land purchase, and it was there +that Hugh Lane formed those Irish ambitions that led to his scattering +many thousands, and gathering much ingratitude; and where, but for that +conversation at Florimond de Bastero's, had been the genius of Synge? + +I have written these words instead of leaving all to posterity, and though +my friend's ear seems indifferent to praise or blame, that young men to +whom recent events are often more obscure than those long past, may learn +what debts they owe and to what creditor. + + +END. + + +PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE DUNEDIN PRESS LIMITED, EDINBURGH + + + + +Transcriber's Notes: + +Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_. + +Periods after "Mr" and "Mrs" are used inconsistently in the original. + +The following misprints have been corrected: + "philospohy" corrected to "philosophy" (page 51) + "unkown" corrected to "unknown" (page 87) + "have have" corrected to "have" (page 92) + "comparson" corrected to "comparison" (page 117) + "politicion" corrected to "politician" (page 128) + "spendid" corrected to "splendid" (page 137) + "mother'" corrected to "mother's" (page 151) + "discoverey" corrected to "discovery" (page 161) + "Shakesspeare's" corrected to "Shakespeare's" (page 169) + "knowlege" corrected to "knowledge" (page 183) + "mechnical" corrected to "mechanical" (page 230) + "delgation" corrected to "delegation" (page 234) + "precedure" corrected to "procedure" (page 237) + +Other than the corrections listed above, inconsistencies in spelling and +hyphenation have been retained from the original. + + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's The Trembling of the Veil, by William Butler Yeats + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL *** + +***** This file should be named 33505.txt or 33505.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/3/3/5/0/33505/ + +Produced by Brian Foley and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was +produced from images generously made available by The +Internet Archive/American Libraries.) + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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