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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/6865-h.zip b/6865-h.zip Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..1b9537d --- /dev/null +++ b/6865-h.zip diff --git a/6865-h/6865-h.htm b/6865-h/6865-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2b0e145 --- /dev/null +++ b/6865-h/6865-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,2768 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" + "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> + +<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en"> + +<head> + +<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" /> + +<title> +The Project Gutenberg E-text of Four Years, by William Butler Yeats +</title> + +<style type="text/css"> +body { color: black; + background: white; + margin-right: 10%; + margin-left: 10%; + font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; + text-align: justify } + +p {text-indent: 4% } + +p.noindent {text-indent: 0% } + +p.t1 {text-indent: 0% ; + font-size: 200%; + text-align: center } + +p.t2 {text-indent: 0% ; + font-size: 150%; + text-align: center } + +p.t3 {text-indent: 0% ; + font-size: 100%; + text-align: center } + +p.t3b {text-indent: 0% ; + font-size: 100%; + font-weight: bold; + text-align: center } + +p.t4 {text-indent: 0% ; + font-size: 80%; + text-align: center } + +p.t4b {text-indent: 0% ; + font-size: 80%; + font-weight: bold; + text-align: center } + +p.t5 {text-indent: 0% ; + font-size: 60%; + text-align: center } + +h1 { text-align: center } +h2 { text-align: center } +h3 { text-align: center } +h4 { text-align: center } +h5 { text-align: center } + +p.poem {text-indent: 0%; + margin-left: 10%; } + +p.contents {text-indent: -3%; + margin-left: 5% } + +p.thought {text-indent: 0% ; + letter-spacing: 4em ; + text-align: center } + +p.letter {text-indent: 0%; + margin-left: 10% ; + margin-right: 10% } + +p.footnote {text-indent: 0% ; + font-size: 80%; + margin-left: 10% ; + margin-right: 10% } + +p.transnote {text-indent: 0% ; + margin-left: 0% ; + margin-right: 0% } + +p.intro {font-size: 90% ; + text-indent: -5% ; + margin-left: 5% ; + margin-right: 0% } + +p.quote {text-indent: 4% ; + margin-left: 0% ; + margin-right: 0% } + +p.finis { font-size: larger ; + text-align: center ; + text-indent: 0% ; + margin-left: 0% ; + margin-right: 0% } + +</style> + +</head> + +<body> + + +<pre> + +The Project Gutenberg EBook of Four Years, 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: Four Years + +Author: William Butler Yeats + +Posting Date: March 13, 2014 [EBook #6865] +Release Date: November, 2004 +First Posted: February 2, 2003 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOUR YEARS *** + + + + +Produced by David Starner, Joshua Hutchinson, and the +Online Distributed Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al +Haines. + + + + + + +</pre> + + +<h1> +<br /><br /><br /> +FOUR YEARS +</h1> + +<p class="t2"> +BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS. +</p> + +<p><br /><br /><br /></p> + +<p class="t2"> +FOUR YEARS 1887-1891. +</p> + +<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 wood mantlepieces +copied from marble mantlepieces 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 anew 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, & 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, were so like any +common shop; 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. +</p> + +<p><br /><br /><br /></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. 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; & once in 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 offish upon her +head, and that when, moved perhaps by 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, a bundle of images and of masks passed on from +generation to generation by poets & 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 kept me from going off but a doubt as to +my capacity to shoot straight. +</p> + +<p><br /><br /><br /></p> + +<h3> +III +</h3> + +<p> +I was not an industrious student and knew only what I had found by +accident, and I had found "nothing I cared for after Titian—and +Titian I knew chiefly from a copy of 'the 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 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 & 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, in-formed 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 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, & 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><br /><br /><br /></p> + +<h3> +IV +</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 mantlepiece 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 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 <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, and metrical forms that seemed +old enough to be sung by men half-asleep or riding upon a journey. +Furthermore, Pre-Raphaelitism 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. +</p> + +<p><br /><br /><br /></p> + +<h3> +V +</h3> + +<p> +We gathered on Sunday evenings in two rooms, with folding doors +between, & 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. +</p> + +<p> +He cried: 'Young A... 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 +Guinevere, '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, & 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. +</p> + +<p> +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 Oscar Wilde, who was some eight years or ten older +than the rest. 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 & 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 re-wrote Kipling then in the +first flood of popularity. At first, indeed, I was ashamed of +being re-written 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 out-dome 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.' +</p> + +<p><br /><br /><br /></p> + +<h3> +VI +</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 dullness, 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, helps a writer, 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 cadence, modulated with so great precision, +sounded natural to my ears. That first night he praised Walter +Pater's 'Essays on 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 & 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><br /><br /><br /></p> + +<h3> +VII +</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 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 systematised, +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-Raphaelitism +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><br /><br /><br /></p> + +<h3> +VIII +</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 '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 had talked about it, and now he +asked me to eat my Xmas dinner with him, believing, I imagine, +that I was alone in London. +</p> + +<p> +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, mantlepiece, 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, & 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 fairytale, 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 story-telling +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 understood their extravagence when +I saw his eyes fixed upon them; an 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 darkened his fame, his fame as a talker was growing +among his equals, & 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. +</p> + +<p><br /><br /><br /></p> + +<h3> +VIII +</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 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, 'Catslove 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 school-master 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." +</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 assassinate the man who broke +Michael Angelo's nose. +</p> + +<p><br /><br /><br /></p> + +<h3> +IX +</h3> + +<p> +I cannot remember who first brought me to the old stable beside +Kelmscott House, William Morris' house at Hammersmith, & 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 presently, 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 Krapotkin. +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 Guinevere,' +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 mantlepiece +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 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. 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 Xmas 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 & 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 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 on making and +doing, he had little self-knowledge. He imagined instead new +conditions of making and doing; and, in the teeth of those +scientific generalisations that cowed my boyhood, I can see some +like imagining in every great change, believing that the first +flying fish leaped, not because it sought 'adaptation' to the air, +but out of horror of the sea. +</p> + +<p><br /><br /><br /></p> + +<h3> +X +</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 dramatization 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' thoughts from an attack of gout by leading the +conversation delicately to the hated name of Milton. He began at +Swinburne. 'Oh, 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. +</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 & 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, & 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 of a certainty 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 '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 +Socialist 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. 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 universal +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 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 I think 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 +battleship of Nelson's day, had said: 'Oh, 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 near +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><br /><br /><br /></p> + +<h3> +XI +</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 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 +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 +enquiry, 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 riding behind +his Maunciple and his Pardoner. Wolfram von Eschenbach, singing his +German Parsival, 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's +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><br /><br /><br /></p> + +<h3> +XII +</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 & 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 any thing 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 +<i>Poggio's Liber Facetiarum</i> or the <i>Hypneroto-machia</i> of <i>Poliphili</i> +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 diligent 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.' +</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 too much +meat. In Dublin I had often seen old women walking with erect +heads and gaunt bodies, talking to themselves in loud voices, mad +with drink and poverty, but they were different, they belonged to +romance: Da Vinci has drawn women who looked so and so carried +their bodies. +</p> + +<p><br /><br /><br /></p> + +<h3> +XIII +</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 may be 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 broken his arm and, because it had been +badly set, suffered great pain for along time. A little whiskey +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 treetops. 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 arms +to the canvases, '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'etre</i>' was one of his phrases. 'Mrs ——'s articles +are not good but they are her <i>raison d'etre</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 +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 with a moral courage peculiar +to himself, 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 stories I had heard 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><br /><br /><br /></p> + +<h3> +XIV +</h3> + +<p> +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: +</p> + +<p class="poem"> + O mother of the hills, forgive our towers;<br /> + O mother of the clouds, forgive our dreams<br /> +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 of '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.' +</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 note +paper 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 /> + To Primrose Hill and St. John's Wood<br /> + Were builded over with pillars of gold<br /> + And there Jerusalem's pillars stood.<br /> +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 Cabala, of which Ellis +had never heard, and with this proof that his interpretation was +more than phantasy, 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 & at Red Hill, where the +descendants of Blake's friend and patron, the landscape painter, +John Linnell, had many manuscripts. The Linnellswere narrow in +their religious ideas & 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 men in London, they had done so +already.' Ellis had gone through a no doubt 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 +subtilty, 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; & 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 I find I am in the dark and +lying down.' I had seen a flicker of light over the ceiling, but +had thought it a reflection from some light outside the house, +which may have been the case. +</p> + +<p><br /><br /><br /></p> + +<h3> +XV +</h3> + +<p> +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 seven +or eight 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 and +two men of an older generation, 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.' +</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, they 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 recognised 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 Horne, who imposed their personalities upon us, was an +opposition to all ideas, all generalisations 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 +generalisation 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 knew—now ashamed that I +thought '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 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 & 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 hand-writing, 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 harkened 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"> + That taught a school<br /> + Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit<br /> + Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit,<br /> + Their verses tallied.<br /> +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +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. +</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 & abroad,' and all because he had regular +features; and when all is said, Alexander the Great & 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> +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 +personalities 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><br /><br /><br /></p> + +<h3> +XVI +</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 images. 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— +</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 /> +</p> + +<p class="poem"> + MAHMUD<br /> + I would talk<br /> + With this old Jew.<br /> +</p> + +<p class="poem"> + HASSAN<br /> + Thy will is even now<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.<br /> +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +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? +</p> + +<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.' 'It often 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 applied, 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 +vegetarian 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 & many nicknames: 'O you are a +flapdoodle, 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 phantasy 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 phantasy. 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,' she said, '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 recognised 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 medium ship but +it is only clairvoyance.' 'What is the difference?' 'If it had +been medium ship, it would have stayed in spite of you. Beware of +medium ship; 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,' she said. 'What! A Bible and not even +anointed!' 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 to run 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 window pole, but cut +him down in the nick of time. I said to the man who cut him down, +'What did you say to one another?' 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 low silvery sound it made the whole house shake. Another night I +found him waiting in the hall to show in those who had the 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, but 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 for one night, in every week, a trance medium, +or in some similar state?' In the other mood she was full of +phantasy 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 arid that is Protestantism.' And +so it was, night after night, always varied and unforseen. I have +observed a like sudden extreme change in others, half whose +thought was supernatural, and Laurence Oliphant records some where +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 of 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 sides,' 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.' +</p> + +<p><br /><br /><br /></p> + +<h3> +XVII +</h3> + +<p> +Meanwhile I had not got any nearer to proving that 'Ahasuerus +dwells in a sea-cavern 'mid the Demonesi,' but one conclusion I +certainly did come to, which I find written out in an old diary +and dated 1887. Madame Blavatsky's 'masters' were 'trance' +personalities, but by 'trance personalities' I meant something +almost as exciting as 'Ahasuerus' himself. Years before I had +found, 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 stepped down +after and trampled the neighbouring fields of rice. Somebody had +come to the temple in the early morning, been startled by a shower +of water drops, looked up and seen a painted horse, still wet from +the dew-covered fields, but now 'trembling into stillness.' I +thought that her masters were imaginary forms created by +suggestion, but whether that suggestion came from Madame +Blavatsky's own mind or from some mind, perhaps at a great +distance, I did not know; and I believed that these forms could +pass from Madame Blavatsky's mind to the minds of others, and even +acquire external reality, and that it was even possible that they +talked and wrote. They were born in the imagination, where Blake +had declared that all men live after death, and where 'every man +is king or priest in his own house.' Certainly the house at +Holland Park was a romantic place, where one heard of constant +apparitions and exchanged speculations like those of the middle +ages, and I did not separate myself from it by my own will. The +Secretary, an intelligent and friendly 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, & it was quite plain that I was not in full +agreement with their method or their philosophy. 'I know,' he +said, 'that all these people become dogmatic and fanatical because +they believe what they can never prove; that their withdrawal from +family life is to 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 through the world.' I +knew the doctrine and it had made me wonder why that old woman, or +rather 'the trance personalities' who directed her and were her +genius, insisted upon it, for influx of some kind there must +always be. Did they dread heresy after the death of Madame +Blavatsky, or had they no purpose but the greatest possible +immediate effort? +</p> + +<p><br /><br /><br /></p> + +<h3> +XVIII +</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 Macgregor Mathers, the author of the 'Kabbalas Unveiled,' & +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 Macgregor was the stronger +man, and only knew long after that during those weeks Macgregor +starved. With him I met an old white-haired Oxfordshire clergyman, +the most panic-stricken person I have ever known, though +Macgregor's 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 & 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. Oh no, I would not do that.' 'Why not?' I said. 'Oh, +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 Elephas Levi, who visited +England in the sixties, & 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><br /><br /><br /></p> + +<h3> +XIX +</h3> + +<p> +I generalized a great deal and was ashamed of it. I thought that +it was my business in life to bean 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, +but 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 become as pre-occupied 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 as 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 phantasy. As +life goes on we discover that certain thoughts sustain us in +defeat, or give us victory, whether over ourselves or others, & 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 a tragedy. +</p> + +<p><br /><br /><br /></p> + +<h3> +XX +</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 & 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 a comparison to a musical instrument +so strong 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.'<br /> +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +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 Artemisa, 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 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 long elaborated 'Troilus and +Cressida;' painting parted from religion in the later Renaissance +that it might study effects of tangibility undisturbed; while, +that it might characterise, 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 but 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 even 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. +</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.<br /> +</p> + +<p><br /><br /><br /></p> + +<h3> +XXI +</h3> + +<p> +The Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage coven asserted +that an artist or a poet must paint or write in the style of his +own day, and this with 'The Fairy Queen,' and 'Lyrical Ballads,' +and Blake's early poems in its ears, and plain to the eyes, in +book or gallery, those great masterpieces of later Egypt, founded +upon that work of the Ancient Kingdom already further in time from +later Egypt than later Egypt is from us. I knew that I could +choose my style where I pleased, that no man can deny to the human +mind any power, that power once achieved; and yet I did not wish +to recover the first simplicity. If I must be but a shepherd +building his hut among the ruins of some fallen city, I might take +porphyry or shaped marble, if it lay ready to my hand, instead of +the baked clay of the first builders. If Chaucer's personages had +disengaged themselves from Chaucer's crowd, forgotten their common +goal and shrine, and after sundry magnifications become, each in +his turn, the centre of some Elizabethan play, and a few years +later split into their elements, and so given birth to romantic +poetry, I need not reverse the cinematograph. I could take those +separated elements, all that abstract love and melancholy, and +give them a symbolical or mythological coherence. Not Chaucer's +rough-tongued riders, but some procession of the Gods! a +pilgrimage no more but perhaps a shrine! Might I not, with health +and good luck to aid me, create some new 'Prometheus Unbound,' +Patrick or Columbcille, Oisin or Fion, in Prometheus's stead, and, +instead of Caucasus, Croagh-Patrick 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, re-discovering 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><br /><br /><br /></p> + +<h3> +XXII +</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 civilisation, its elements multiplying by divisions 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 organised 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 epitomise all human knowledge, but find it we well might, could +we first find philosophy and a little passion. +</p> + +<p><br /><br /><br /></p> + +<h3> +XXIII +</h3> + +<p> +It was the death of Parnell that convinced me that the moment had +come for work in Ireland, for I knew that for a time the +imagination of young men would turn from politics. There was a +little Irish patriotic society of young people, clerks, shop-boys, +shop-girls, and the like, called the Southwark Irish Literary +Society. It had ceased to meet because each member of the +committee had lectured so many times that the girls got the +giggles whenever he stood up. I invited the committee to my +father's house at Bedford Park and there proposed a new +organisation. After a few months spent in founding, with the help +of T. W. Rolleston, who came to that first meeting and had a +knowledge of committee work I lacked, the Irish Literary Society, +which soon included every London Irish author and journalist, I +went to Dublin and founded there a similar society. +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +W. B. Yeats. +</p> + +<p class="poem"> + Here ends 'Four Years,' written by<br /> + William Butler Yeats. Four hundred<br /> + copies of this book have been<br /> + printed and published by Elizabeth<br /> + C. Yeats on paper made in Ireland,<br /> + at the Cuala Press, Churchtown,<br /> + Dundrum, in the County of Dublin,<br /> + Ireland. Finished on All Hallows'<br /> + Eve, in the year nineteen hundred<br /> + and twenty one.<br /> +</p> + +<p><br /><br /><br /><br /></p> + + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Four Years, by William Butler Yeats + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOUR YEARS *** + +***** This file should be named 6865-h.htm or 6865-h.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/6/8/6/6865/ + +Produced by David Starner, Joshua Hutchinson, and the +Online Distributed Proofreading Team. 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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: Four Years + +Author: William Butler Yeats + +Posting Date: March 13, 2014 [EBook #6865] +Release Date: November, 2004 +First Posted: February 2, 2003 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOUR YEARS *** + + + + +Produced by David Starner, Joshua Hutchinson, and the +Online Distributed Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al +Haines. + + + + + + + + + + +FOUR YEARS + +BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS. + + + + +FOUR YEARS 1887-1891. + +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 wood mantlepieces +copied from marble mantlepieces 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 anew 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, & 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, were so like any +common shop; 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; & once in 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 offish upon her +head, and that when, moved perhaps by 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, a bundle of images and of masks passed on from +generation to generation by poets & 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 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 had found "nothing I cared for after Titian--and +Titian I knew chiefly from a copy of 'the 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 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 & 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, in-formed 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 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, & 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 + + +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 mantlepiece 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 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 _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, and metrical forms that seemed +old enough to be sung by men half-asleep or riding upon a journey. +Furthermore, Pre-Raphaelitism 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. + + + + +V + + +We gathered on Sunday evenings in two rooms, with folding doors +between, & 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. + +He cried: 'Young A... 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 +Guinevere, '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, & 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 Oscar Wilde, who was some eight years or ten older +than the rest. 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 & 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 re-wrote Kipling then in the +first flood of popularity. At first, indeed, I was ashamed of +being re-written 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 out-dome 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.' + + + + +VI + + +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 dullness, 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, helps a writer, 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 cadence, modulated with so great precision, +sounded natural to my ears. That first night he praised Walter +Pater's 'Essays on 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 & 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.' + + + + +VII + + +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 systematised, +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-Raphaelitism +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. + + + + +VIII + + +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 had talked about it, and now he +asked me to eat my Xmas 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, mantlepiece, 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, & 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 fairytale, 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 story-telling +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 understood their extravagence when +I saw his eyes fixed upon them; an 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 darkened his fame, his fame as a talker was growing +among his equals, & 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. + + + + +VIII + + +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, 'Catslove 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 school-master 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 assassinate the man who broke +Michael Angelo's nose. + + + + +IX + + +I cannot remember who first brought me to the old stable beside +Kelmscott House, William Morris' house at Hammersmith, & 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 presently, 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 Krapotkin. +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 Guinevere,' +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 mantlepiece +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 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 Xmas 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 & 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 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 on making and +doing, he had little self-knowledge. He imagined instead new +conditions of making and doing; and, in the teeth of those +scientific generalisations that cowed my boyhood, I can see some +like imagining in every great change, believing that the first +flying fish leaped, not because it sought 'adaptation' to the air, +but out of horror of the sea. + + + + +X + + +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 dramatization 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' thoughts from an attack of gout by leading the +conversation delicately to the hated name of Milton. He began at +Swinburne. 'Oh, 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 & 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, & 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 of a certainty 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 +Socialist 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. 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 universal +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 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 I think 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 +battleship of Nelson's day, had said: 'Oh, 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 near +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. + + + + +XI + + +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 +enquiry, 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 riding behind +his Maunciple and his Pardoner. Wolfram von Eschenbach, singing his +German Parsival, 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's +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. + + + + +XII + + +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 & 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 any thing 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 diligent 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 too much +meat. In Dublin I had often seen old women walking with erect +heads and gaunt bodies, talking to themselves in loud voices, mad +with drink and poverty, but they were different, they belonged to +romance: Da Vinci has drawn women who looked so and so carried +their bodies. + + + + +XIII + + +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 may be 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 broken his arm and, because it had been +badly set, suffered great pain for along time. A little whiskey +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 treetops. 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 arms +to the canvases, '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 with a moral courage peculiar +to himself, 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 stories I had heard 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.' + + + + +XIV + + +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 of '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 note +paper 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 Cabala, of which Ellis +had never heard, and with this proof that his interpretation was +more than phantasy, 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 & at Red Hill, where the +descendants of Blake's friend and patron, the landscape painter, +John Linnell, had many manuscripts. The Linnellswere narrow in +their religious ideas & 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 men in London, they had done so +already.' Ellis had gone through a no doubt 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 +subtilty, 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; & 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 I find I am in the dark and +lying down.' I had seen a flicker of light over the ceiling, but +had thought it a reflection from some light outside the house, +which may have been the case. + + + + +XV + + +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 seven +or eight 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 and +two men of an older generation, 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, they 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 recognised 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 Horne, who imposed their personalities upon us, was an +opposition to all ideas, all generalisations 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 +generalisation 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 knew--now ashamed that I +thought '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 & 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 hand-writing, 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 harkened 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 & abroad,' and all because he had regular +features; and when all is said, Alexander the Great & 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 +personalities 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.' + + + + +XVI + + +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 images. 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? + +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 often 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 applied, 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 +vegetarian 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 & many nicknames: 'O you are a +flapdoodle, 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 phantasy 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 phantasy. 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,' she said, '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 recognised 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 medium ship but +it is only clairvoyance.' 'What is the difference?' 'If it had +been medium ship, it would have stayed in spite of you. Beware of +medium ship; 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 +anointed!' 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 to run 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 window pole, but cut +him down in the nick of time. I said to the man who cut him down, +'What did you say to one another?' 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 low silvery sound it made the whole house shake. Another night I +found him waiting in the hall to show in those who had the 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, but 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 for one night, in every week, a trance medium, +or in some similar state?' In the other mood she was full of +phantasy 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 arid that is Protestantism.' And +so it was, night after night, always varied and unforseen. I have +observed a like sudden extreme change in others, half whose +thought was supernatural, and Laurence Oliphant records some where +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 of 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 sides,' 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.' + + + + +XVII + + +Meanwhile I had not got any nearer to proving that 'Ahasuerus +dwells in a sea-cavern 'mid the Demonesi,' but one conclusion I +certainly did come to, which I find written out in an old diary +and dated 1887. Madame Blavatsky's 'masters' were 'trance' +personalities, but by 'trance personalities' I meant something +almost as exciting as 'Ahasuerus' himself. Years before I had +found, 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 stepped down +after and trampled the neighbouring fields of rice. Somebody had +come to the temple in the early morning, been startled by a shower +of water drops, looked up and seen a painted horse, still wet from +the dew-covered fields, but now 'trembling into stillness.' I +thought that her masters were imaginary forms created by +suggestion, but whether that suggestion came from Madame +Blavatsky's own mind or from some mind, perhaps at a great +distance, I did not know; and I believed that these forms could +pass from Madame Blavatsky's mind to the minds of others, and even +acquire external reality, and that it was even possible that they +talked and wrote. They were born in the imagination, where Blake +had declared that all men live after death, and where 'every man +is king or priest in his own house.' Certainly the house at +Holland Park was a romantic place, where one heard of constant +apparitions and exchanged speculations like those of the middle +ages, and I did not separate myself from it by my own will. The +Secretary, an intelligent and friendly 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, & it was quite plain that I was not in full +agreement with their method or their philosophy. 'I know,' he +said, 'that all these people become dogmatic and fanatical because +they believe what they can never prove; that their withdrawal from +family life is to 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 through the world.' I +knew the doctrine and it had made me wonder why that old woman, or +rather 'the trance personalities' who directed her and were her +genius, insisted upon it, for influx of some kind there must +always be. Did they dread heresy after the death of Madame +Blavatsky, or had they no purpose but the greatest possible +immediate effort? + + + + +XVIII + + +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 Macgregor Mathers, the author of the 'Kabbalas Unveiled,' & +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 Macgregor was the stronger +man, and only knew long after that during those weeks Macgregor +starved. With him I met an old white-haired Oxfordshire clergyman, +the most panic-stricken person I have ever known, though +Macgregor's 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 & 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. Oh no, I would not do that.' 'Why not?' I said. 'Oh, +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 Elephas Levi, who visited +England in the sixties, & 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.' + + + + +XIX + + +I generalized a great deal and was ashamed of it. I thought that +it was my business in life to bean 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, +but 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 become as pre-occupied 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 as 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 phantasy. As +life goes on we discover that certain thoughts sustain us in +defeat, or give us victory, whether over ourselves or others, & 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 a tragedy. + + + + +XX + + +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 & 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 strong 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 Artemisa, 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 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 long elaborated 'Troilus and +Cressida;' painting parted from religion in the later Renaissance +that it might study effects of tangibility undisturbed; while, +that it might characterise, 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 but 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 even 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. + + + + +XXI + + +The Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage coven asserted +that an artist or a poet must paint or write in the style of his +own day, and this with 'The Fairy Queen,' and 'Lyrical Ballads,' +and Blake's early poems in its ears, and plain to the eyes, in +book or gallery, those great masterpieces of later Egypt, founded +upon that work of the Ancient Kingdom already further in time from +later Egypt than later Egypt is from us. I knew that I could +choose my style where I pleased, that no man can deny to the human +mind any power, that power once achieved; and yet I did not wish +to recover the first simplicity. If I must be but a shepherd +building his hut among the ruins of some fallen city, I might take +porphyry or shaped marble, if it lay ready to my hand, instead of +the baked clay of the first builders. If Chaucer's personages had +disengaged themselves from Chaucer's crowd, forgotten their common +goal and shrine, and after sundry magnifications become, each in +his turn, the centre of some Elizabethan play, and a few years +later split into their elements, and so given birth to romantic +poetry, I need not reverse the cinematograph. I could take those +separated elements, all that abstract love and melancholy, and +give them a symbolical or mythological coherence. Not Chaucer's +rough-tongued riders, but some procession of the Gods! a +pilgrimage no more but perhaps a shrine! Might I not, with health +and good luck to aid me, create some new 'Prometheus Unbound,' +Patrick or Columbcille, Oisin or Fion, in Prometheus's stead, and, +instead of Caucasus, Croagh-Patrick 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, re-discovering 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. + + + + +XXII + + +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 civilisation, its elements multiplying by divisions 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 organised 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 epitomise all human knowledge, but find it we well might, could +we first find philosophy and a little passion. + + + + +XXIII + + +It was the death of Parnell that convinced me that the moment had +come for work in Ireland, for I knew that for a time the +imagination of young men would turn from politics. There was a +little Irish patriotic society of young people, clerks, shop-boys, +shop-girls, and the like, called the Southwark Irish Literary +Society. It had ceased to meet because each member of the +committee had lectured so many times that the girls got the +giggles whenever he stood up. I invited the committee to my +father's house at Bedford Park and there proposed a new +organisation. After a few months spent in founding, with the help +of T. W. Rolleston, who came to that first meeting and had a +knowledge of committee work I lacked, the Irish Literary Society, +which soon included every London Irish author and journalist, I +went to Dublin and founded there a similar society. + +W. B. Yeats. + + Here ends 'Four Years,' written by + William Butler Yeats. Four hundred + copies of this book have been + printed and published by Elizabeth + C. Yeats on paper made in Ireland, + at the Cuala Press, Churchtown, + Dundrum, in the County of Dublin, + Ireland. Finished on All Hallows' + Eve, in the year nineteen hundred + and twenty one. + + + + + + + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Four Years, by William Butler Yeats + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOUR YEARS *** + +***** This file should be named 6865.txt or 6865.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/6/8/6/6865/ + +Produced by David Starner, Joshua Hutchinson, and the +Online Distributed Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al +Haines. + + +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 can also find out about how to make a +donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved. + + +**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** + +**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** + +*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!***** + + +Title: Four Years + +Author: William Butler Yeats + +Release Date: November, 2004 [EBook #6865] +[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] +[This file was first posted on February 2, 2003] + +Edition: 10 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOUR YEARS *** + + + + +Produced by David Starner, Joshua Hutchinson, +and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team. + + + + +FOUR YEARS + +BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS. + + + + +FOUR YEARS 1887-1891. + +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 wood mantlepieces +copied from marble mantlepieces 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 anew 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, & 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, were so like any +common shop; 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; & once in 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 offish upon her +head, and that when, moved perhaps by 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, a bundle of images and of masks passed on from +generation to generation by poets & 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 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 had found "nothing I cared for after Titian--and +Titian I knew chiefly from a copy of 'the 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 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 & 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, in-formed 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 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, & 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 + + +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 mantlepiece 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 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 _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, and metrical forms that seemed +old enough to be sung by men half-asleep or riding upon a journey. +Furthermore, Pre-Raphaelitism 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. + + + + +V + + +We gathered on Sunday evenings in two rooms, with folding doors +between, & 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. + +He cried: 'Young A... 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 +Guinevere, '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, & 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 Oscar Wilde, who was some eight years or ten older +than the rest. 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 & 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 Obsever' 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 re-wrote Kipling then in the +first flood of popularity. At first, indeed, I was ashamed of +being re-written 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 out-dome 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.' + + + + +VI + + +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 dullness, 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, helps a writer, 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 cadence, modulated with so great precision, +sounded natural to my ears. That first night he praised Walter +Pater's 'Essays on 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 & 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.' + + + + +VII + + +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 systematised, +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-Raphaelitism +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. + + + + +VIII + + +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 had talked about it, and now he +asked me to eat my Xmas 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, mantlepiece, 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, & 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 fairytale, 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 story-telling +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 understood their extravagence when +I saw his eyes fixed upon them; an 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 darkened his fame, his fame as a talker was growing +among his equals, & 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. + + + + +VIII + + +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, 'Catslove 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 school-master 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 assassinate the man who broke +Michael Angelo's nose. + + + + +IX + + +I cannot remember who first brought me to the old stable beside +Kelmscott House, William Morris' house at Hammersmith, & 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 presently, 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 Krapotkin. +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 Guinevere,' +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 mantlepiece +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 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 Xmas 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 & 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 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 on making and +doing, he had little self-knowledge. He imagined instead new +conditions of making and doing; and, in the teeth of those +scientific generalisations that cowed my boyhood, I can see some +like imagining in every great change, believing that the first +flying fish leaped, not because it sought 'adaptation' to the air, +but out of horror of the sea. + + + + +X + + +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 dramatization 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' thoughts from an attack of gout by leading the +conversation delicately to the hated name of Milton. He began at +Swinburne. 'Oh, 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 & 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, & 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 of a certainty 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 +Socialist 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. 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 universal +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 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 I think 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 +battleship of Nelson's day, had said: 'Oh, 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 near +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. + + + + +XI + + +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 +enquiry, 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 riding behind +his Maunciple and his Pardoner. Wolfram von Eschenbach, singing his +German Parsival, 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's +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. + + + + +XII + + +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 & 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 any thing 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 diligent 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 too much +meat. In Dublin I had often seen old women walking with erect +heads and gaunt bodies, talking to themselves in loud voices, mad +with drink and poverty, but they were different, they belonged to +romance: Da Vinci has drawn women who looked so and so carried +their bodies. + + + + +XIII + + +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 may be 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 broken his arm and, because it had been +badly set, suffered great pain for along time. A little whiskey +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 treetops. 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 arms +to the canvases, '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 with a moral courage peculiar +to himself, 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 stories I had heard 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.' + + + + +XIV + + +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 of '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 note +paper 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 Cabala, of which Ellis +had never heard, and with this proof that his interpretation was +more than phantasy, 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 & at Red Hill, where the +descendants of Blake's friend and patron, the landscape painter, +John Linnell, had many manuscripts. The Linnellswere narrow in +their religious ideas & 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 men in London, they had done so +already.' Ellis had gone through a no doubt 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 +subtilty, 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; & 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 I find I am in the dark and +lying down.' I had seen a flicker of light over the ceiling, but +had thought it a reflection from some light outside the house, +which may have been the case. + + + + +XV + + +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 seven +or eight 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 and +two men of an older generation, 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, they 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 recognised 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 Horne, who imposed their personalities upon us, was an +opposition to all ideas, all generalisations 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 +generalisation 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 knew--now ashamed that I +thought '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 & 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 hand-writing, 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 harkened 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 & abroad,' and all because he had regular +features; and when all is said, Alexander the Great & 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 +personalities 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.' + + + + +XVI + + +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 images. 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? + +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 often 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 applied, 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 +vegetarian 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 inrailing & many nicknames: 'O you are a +flapdoodle, 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 phantasy 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 phantasy. 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,' she said, '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 recognised 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 medium ship but +it is only clairvoyance.' 'What is the difference?' 'If it had +been medium ship, it would have stayed in spite of you. Beware of +medium ship; 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 +anointed!' 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 to run 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 window pole, but cut +him down in the nick of time. I said to the man who cut him down, +'What did you say to one another?' 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 low silvery sound it made the whole house shake. Another night I +found him waiting in the hall to show in those who had the 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, but 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 for one night, in every week, a trance medium, +or in some similar state?' In the other mood she was full of +phantasy 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 arid that is Protestantism.' And +so it was, night after night, always varied and unforseen. I have +observed a like sudden extreme change in others, half whose +thought was supernatural, and Laurence Oliphant records some where +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 of 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 sides,' 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.' + + + + +XVII + + +Meanwhile I had not got any nearer to proving that 'Ahasuerus +dwells in a sea-cavern 'mid the Demonesi,' but one conclusion I +certainly did come to, which I find written out in an old diary +and dated 1887. Madame Blavatsky's 'masters' were 'trance' +personalities, but by 'trance personalities' I meant something +almost as exciting as 'Ahasuerus' himself. Years before I had +found, 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 stepped down +after and trampled the neighbouring fields of rice. Somebody had +come to the temple in the early morning, been startled by a shower +of water drops, looked up and seen a painted horse, still wet from +the dew-covered fields, but now 'trembling into stillness.' I +thought that her masters were imaginary forms created by +suggestion, but whether that suggestion came from Madame +Blavatsky's own mind or from some mind, perhaps at a great +distance, I did not know; and I believed that these forms could +pass from Madame Blavatsky's mind to the minds of others, and even +acquire external reality, and that it was even possible that they +talked and wrote. They were born in the imagination, where Blake +had declared that all men live after death, and where 'every man +is king or priest in his own house.' Certainly the house at +Holland Park was a romantic place, where one heard of constant +apparitions and exchanged speculations like those of the middle +ages, and I did not separate myself from it by my own will. The +Secretary, an intelligent and friendly 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, & it was quite plain that I was not in full +agreement with their method or their philosophy. 'I know,' he +said, 'that all these people become dogmatic and fanatical because +they believe what they can never prove; that their withdrawal from +family life is to 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 through the world.' I +knew the doctrine and it had made me wonder why that old woman, or +rather 'the trance personalities' who directed her and were her +genius, insisted upon it, for influx of some kind there must +always be. Did they dread heresy after the death of Madame +Blavatsky, or had they no purpose but the greatest possible +immediate effort? + + + + +XVIII + + +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 Macgregor Mathers, the author of the 'Kabbalas Unveiled,' & +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 Macgregor was the stronger +man, and only knew long after that during those weeks Macgregor +starved. With him I met an old white-haired Oxfordshire clergyman, +the most panic-stricken person I have ever known, though +Macgregor's 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 & 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. Oh no, I would not do that.' 'Why not?' I said. 'Oh, +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 Elephas Levi, who visited +England in the sixties, & 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.' + + + + +XIX + + +I generalized a great deal and was ashamed of it. I thought that +it was my business in life to bean 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, +but 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 become as pre-occupied 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 as 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 phantasy. As +life goes on we discover that certain thoughts sustain us in +defeat, or give us victory, whether over ourselves or others, & 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 a tragedy. + + + + +XX + + +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 & 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 strong 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 Artemisa, 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 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 long elaborated 'Troilus and +Cressida;' painting parted from religion in the later Renaissance +that it might study effects of tangibility undisturbed; while, +that it might characterise, 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 but 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 even 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. + + + + +XXI + + +The Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage coven asserted +that an artist or a poet must paint or write in the style of his +own day, and this with 'The Fairy Queen,' and 'Lyrical Ballads,' +and Blake's early poems in its ears, and plain to the eyes, in +book or gallery, those great masterpieces of later Egypt, founded +upon that work of the Ancient Kingdom already further in time from +later Egypt than later Egypt is from us. I knew that I could +choose my style where I pleased, that no man can deny to the human +mind any power, that power once achieved; and yet I did not wish +to recover the first simplicity. If I must be but a shepherd +building his hut among the ruins of some fallen city, I might take +porphyry or shaped marble, if it lay ready to my hand, instead of +the baked clay of the first builders. If Chaucer's personages had +disengaged themselves from Chaucer's crowd, forgotten their common +goal and shrine, and after sundry magnifications become, each in +his turn, the centre of some Elizabethan play, and a few years +later split into their elements, and so given birth to romantic +poetry, I need not reverse the cinematograph. I could take those +separated elements, all that abstract love and melancholy, and +give them a symbolical or mythological coherence. Not Chaucer's +rough-tongued riders, but some procession of the Gods! a +pilgrimage no more but perhaps a shrine! Might I not, with health +and good luck to aid me, create some new 'Prometheus Unbound,' +Patrick or Columbcille, Oisin or Fion, in Prometheus's stead, and, +instead of Caucasus, Croagh-Patrick 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, re-discovering 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. + + + + +XXII + + +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 civilisation, its elements multiplying by divisions 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 organised 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 epitomise all human knowledge, but find it we well might, could +we first find philosophy and a little passion. + + + + +XXIII + + +It was the death of Parnell that convinced me that the moment had +come for work in Ireland, for I knew that for a time the +imagination of young men would turn from politics. There was a +little Irish patriotic society of young people, clerks, shop-boys, +shop-girls, and the like, called the Southwark Irish Literary +Society. It had ceased to meet because each member of the +committee had lectured so many times that the girls got the +giggles whenever he stood up. I invited the committee to my +father's house at Bedford Park and there proposed a new +organisation. After a few months spent in founding, with the help +of T. W. Rolleston, who came to that first meeting and had a +knowledge of committee work I lacked, the Irish Literary Society, +which soon included every London Irish author and journalist, I +went to Dublin and founded there a similar society. + +W. B. Yeats. + + Here ends 'Four Years,' written by + William Butler Yeats. Four hundred + copies of this book have been + printed and published by Elizabeth + C. Yeats on paper made in Ireland, + at the Cuala Press, Churchtown, + Dundrum, in the County of Dublin, + Ireland. 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