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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Four Years, by William Butler Yeats
+#6 in our series by William Butler Yeats
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+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]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+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. 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 THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOUR YEARS ***
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+This file should be named fryrs10.txt or fryrs10.zip
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