EARLY MEMORIES; SOME CHAPTERS
OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY
BY JOHN BUTLER YEATS.
THE CUALA PRESS
CHURCHTOWN
DUNDRUM
MCMXXIII
PREFACE
My father died in New York on February 2nd, 1922, at the end of his
eighty second year. He died after a few hours illness brought on, as it
seemed, by a long walk in the cold of a New York winter. He awoke in the
middle of the night to find his friends Mrs Foster and Mr John Quinn
sitting beside his bed and after a few words of pleasure at the sight
said to Mrs Foster 'Remember you have promised me a sitting in the
morning.' These were his last words for he dropped off to sleep and died
in his sleep. He had gone to America some ten or twelve years before to
be near my eldest sister who had an exhibition of embroidery there, and
though she left after a few months he stayed on. 'At last' he said 'I
have found a place where people do not eat too much at dinner to talk
afterwards'. As he grew infirm his family & his friends constantly
begged him to return, but, though he promised as constantly and would
even fix the day of sailing, he would always ask for a few weeks more.
He lived in a little French hotel in 29th Street where there is a café
and night after night sat there, sketch book in hand, surrounded by his
friends, painters and writers for the most part, who came to hear his
conversation. He seemed to work as hard as in his early days, and drew
with pen or pencil innumerable portraits with vigour, and subtlety. He
painted a certain number in oils, & worked for several years at a large
portrait of himself, commissioned by Mr John Quinn. I have not seen this
portrait, but expect to find that he had worked too long upon it and, as
often happened in his middle life when, in a vacillation prolonged
through many months it may be, he would scrape out every morning what he
had painted the day before, that the form is blurred, the composition
confused, and the colour muddy. Yet in his letters he constantly spoke
of this picture as his masterpiece, insisted again and again, as I had
heard him insist when I was a boy, that he had found what he had been
seeking all his life. This growing skill had been his chief argument
against return to Ireland, for the portrait that displayed it must not
be endangered by a change of light. The most natural among the fine
minds that I have known he had been preoccupied all his life with the
immediate present and what he thought his growing skill, but began
towards its end, as I suppose we all do, to compare the present to the
remote past. When I noticed how often his letters referred to long dead
relations and friends, 'those lost people' as he called them in one
letter, I persuaded him to begin his autobiography. He wrote, though
with difficulty and a little against the grain, the biographical
fragment in this book. When his account of friends and relations had
come to an end the difficulty increased, and finding it more amusing to
put the present into letters, or conversation, he put off the next
chapter from day to day. Everything that happened, the death or marriage
of an acquaintance, the discovery of a new friend, stirred his
imagination; and his letters, now that his conversation can be heard no
more, are indeed the fullest expression of a wisdom where there is
always beauty. Yet this biographical fragment has its measure of wisdom
and beauty, and I am pleased to think that when my son has reached his
eighteenth birthday he will be able to say 'Though my grandfather was
born a hundred years ago, and I have never seen his face, I know him
from his book and think of him with affection'.
W. B. Yeats.
June, 1923.
EARLY MEMORIES
SOME CHAPTERS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY
BY JOHN BUTLER YEATS.
Why I became an artist is a question which every artist must sometimes
put to himself. It was my father who made me an artist, though his
intention was that I should become a barrister, and I did become a
barrister, but soon left it to follow my destiny and be an artist. Had I
remained a barrister, in all probability both my sons would have taken
to the law and would not now be one a poet and the other a painter.
When I was a little child, like other children I took to drawing, and my
father being very appreciative of his children admired what I drew. In
those days there was a heavy tax on paper as a defence against cheap
journalism, & the radical movements which it was bound to foster, and my
mother, being, as are most mothers, careful of expenditure, and not very
sympathetic toward my artistic strivings, was always reluctant to give
me paper on which I could draw. However, my father was an Irish
gentleman of the old school and not at all thrifty; from him I could
always get as much paper as I wanted. At that time there were no
illustrated magazines and only one illustrated paper which I saw very
occasionally at a friend's house. The only newspaper which came into my
father's house was the London 'Times' and it had a picture of a clock.
It was I think a rough wood-block. There is no child who will not really
subscribe to Aristotle's doctrine that art is imitation, and in this
case the imitation was roughly rendered so that it might be described as
imitation with selection.
I was the eldest of the family and my brothers were much younger, for
which reason my childhood was without companionship. Ah, the loneliness
of such a childhood and the blessedness of it! Whether inside the house
or out in the grounds I was always by myself, therefore I early learned
to sustain myself by revery and dream. Years afterwards I suffered a
good deal from the reproofs of my elders, for my habit of
absentmindedness. Of course I was absentminded and am so still. In those
childhood days I discovered the world of fantasy, and I still spend all
my spare moments in that land of endearing enchantment.
I think as a child I was perfectly happy; my father my friend and
counsellor, my mother my conscience. My father theorized about things
and explained things and that delighted me, not because I had any mental
conceit but because I delighted then as I still do in reasoning. My
mother never explained anything, she hadn't a theoretical faculty; but
she had away of saying 'Yes darling' or 'No darling,' which, when put
out, she would change into a hasty 'Yes dear' or 'No dear' that was
sufficient for all purposes. There was a servant in the house whose name
was Sam Matchett. As is the way in the country, he was butler and
coachman, land steward and gardener. He had been in the army and he
several times told me that he had been the strongest man in the
regiment. I admired him more than I did anybody else, and he enjoyed my
admiration as much as Achilles did that of Patroclus. I think he did
very much as he liked with my father, but my mother was made of firmer
material. My mother had a great belief in exercise in the open air, and
when Sam wanted to do a little shooting on his own account, he would
approach her artfully and say that he knew where there was a pheasant or
a hare and that he thought of going to get it, and that he would like to
take 'Master Johnny' with him; and off we two would go. My father, was
six feet two inches in his stocking feet and well-built, famous in his
college days as an athlete and racket player, and Sam Matchett to excite
the admiration of the women servants would induce my father to stand on
the palm of his hand, and he would raise him with arms outstretched to
the level of the kitchen table. It was no wonder that I admired Sam, and
it helped no doubt in my artistic education and started an appreciation,
which still exists, for muscular well-made men. Of course I picked up
all Sam's words and modes of expression, and my mother didn't quite like
it; but as these referred to horses and cattle and fields and game, in
my own mind I was convinced that Sam knew a good deal more about it than
she did. I remember he used to wonder that I did not prefer my father to
my mother. I think he was an exceedingly good influence upon my life. He
bestowed a great deal of care on my manners, which is not surprising
when one remembers that however it be with the upper classes, the Irish
peasant has the instincts of a gentleman. My father was a Rector of a
very large parish in County Down, Ireland, & there were no boys' schools
anywhere within reach. A village school-master taught me to read, after
which I read Robinson Crusoe diligently. In the evening after dinner my
father would sit beside his candle reading, and my mother would sit by
her candle sewing, and I would nestle beside her reading Robinson
Crusoe, and I can remember that at certain critical passages in this
history I would tremble with anxiety, and that I was most careful lest
my elders should discover my excitement and laugh at me. These candles
needed to be snuffed incessantly, and it was my ambition to be allowed
to snuff them; but when I tried I snuffed the candle out, and never
again got the chance, my mother was inexorable. We were a large family,
boisterous, full of animal spirits & health, sometimes very friendly
together while at other times we would quarrel. Yet I never remember a
single instance of corporal punishment or indeed any kind of punishment
but once, and then I was the victim. My mother induced my father to
commence my education, and he began by something in arithmetic, and I
failed miserably as I would at the present moment. Up to that moment I
had been the pride of my father: not only was I his eldest son and the
heir to the family property, but he was convinced I was exceedingly like
his brother Tom, who in his course at Trinity College, Dublin, had never
been beaten in mathematics. When therefore I failed in arithmetic the
blow was too much for his fond hopes, and he gave me a box on my ear. He
had no sooner done so than he shook hands with me and hoped I was not
offended, and then glided out of the room. I was not offended but very
much astounded. I wonder if he told my mother. At any rate, years
afterwards when I was a full grown man, I heard her regretting that she
could never induce my father to teach any of us. He said he had no
patience.
At last I went to school. It was a boarding-school at Seaforth,
Liverpool, and was kept by three maiden ladies: it was a very
fashionable school. We were nice little boys with short jackets and wide
white collars. Never was any boy so happy as I was in the prospect of
that school. My uncle took me to Liverpool; and when he suggested that I
stay with him a day longer I would not, I wanted to get into that
school. I was not ten minutes inside the walls when I think I was about
the most miserable boy in all England, and believed the cloud would
never, never lift. I looked at all the other boys and wondered again and
again how they could be so cheerful.
My father was evangelical as was then fashionable in the best
intellectual circles. He must have said something about hell in my
hearing, yet, I did not make any real acquaintance with that dismal and
absurd doctrine till I went to Miss Davenport's school. The school was
managed upon the highest principles of duty, no prizes were ever given
for all must work from sake of duty, and we slept with our Bibles under
our pillows with directions to read them as soon as we awoke in the
morning; but hell was the driving force. Miss Emma Davenport, who was
the chief of the school, often spoke of it.
In the early mornings I read my Bible with assiduity, but only the Old
Testament never the New. It was the age of faith; I believed every word
to be the word of God, of that mighty God of whom our school-mistress
was always speaking. I had always believed also that Robinson Crusoe was
an equally veracious history; and when the nurses and servants told me
ghost stories and fairy tales, I accepted all they said with an
unfaltering credulity. There were certain cabins in our neighbours said
to be haunted one in particular covered with ivy which I never passed
without a shiver of fear and curiosity. I did not tell my elders, I was
too wise: instinctively I knew that they would have robbed me of my
ghostly thrills. Now-a-days people are brought up in a world of reason
and science: is it any wonder that intricate and delicate and difficult
verse should give way to the poetry of rhetoric and a moral uplift?
People used to amuse themselves by bracing or relaxing their souls in
the vast and shadowy world of solitary fantasy: now we do better--at any
rate it is easier--we set about reforming our neighbours. When I first
arrived at that English School I was greatly surprised by English
mispronunciation. Emma, the Christian name of our headmistress was
invariably called 'Emmer,' just as to this day in London clergymen of
all denominations pronounce the name of our late Gracious Majesty as
'Victorier,' whereas every Irishman knows that her name is 'Victoria.'
Among the trio of ladies governing the school Emma was the ruling
spirit, but she had a sister Betsy who if she could do nothing else
could apply the cane with sharpness and decision. One day the only other
Irish boy in the school and myself climbed for a few feet on one of the
trees. There was a sharp tap at the schoolroom window: it was Betsy. She
told us to stand in the dining-room until the boys came in for tea. We
stood there and waited and would have been dull but for my friend. He
produced out of the recesses of his pocket a piece of wax kept for the
purpose and diligently applied it to the palm of his hand, & I followed
his example. Afterwards we rubbed our hands as hard as we could along
the iron top of the fire-screen. Thus we prepared for what was coming.
When the boys entered for tea, Betsy came with them and sat down at the
head of the table, we standing in the centre of the room. After a moment
or two she arose and I still hear her voice as she said, 'Tandy, (Tandy
was my friend's name) fetch me the cane.' Tandy had been longer in the
school than I and knew all about that cane and found it easily. We
received three strokes on each of our hands; it was very painful and I
was very much astonished, and when I went home for the holidays I was
glad to find that the blood blisters were still there, and I very
eagerly showed them to my father who to my surprise only laughed, being
neither sympathetic nor impressed. Years afterwards when I saw the
portraits of Queen Elizabeth I recognized the resemblance to Betsy. She
dressed elaborately with a high collar that reached over her ears and
was very tall & meagre, and was, as I remember, like the Queen in that
she was a faded beauty. Lonely spinsters sometime suffer from the
thought that they've lived wasted lives. It must have soothed Betsy's
last moments to remember how she could raise blood blisters on little
boys' hands.
My conscience once played me a very nasty trick. As you may suppose the
greatest crime next to setting the school on fire, or running away, or
something of that sort, was to tell a lie. If a little boy told a lie he
was birched for it, and possibly went to hell hereafter. Telling a lie
is sometimes a little boy's greatest temptation, and the elders have
decided that it is the greatest crime. I was reading a novel called 'The
Children of the New Forest,' and had got far on into the second volume
and was so interested that I insisted upon telling all about it to the
drawing-master, and he told me novels were lies, and was so emphatic
that my conscience compelled me to shut that book. I still remember that
I had just reached page 224 in the second volume. Yet that master who
was such a fanatic for truth always touched up our water-colour
drawings, and made them look like master-pieces, for the edification of
our parents and for their deception. To my non-puritan eyes man's
inconsistency is always a charm and it has often been his safe-guard.
The great Queen Elizabeth used to spit and swear when the foreign
ambassadors crossed her temper, yet I doubt whether she had
distinguished nerves. Cecil said of her that she was sometimes greater
than a man and sometimes less than a woman.
At twelve years old I left that school and I think I left happiness
behind me: ever since I've lived under cloudy skies. I went to a school
in the Isle of Man kept by a Scotchman. That Scotchman brushed the sun
out of my sky. I remember, as yesterday, how my father talked about him.
He had never been to school himself, having been educated by his father
who was a scholar; and it was his conviction that if he had only gone to
school and had been efficiently flogged he would have risen to the
highest eminence; therefore, he talked of this Scotch school-master with
an enthusiasm that was infectious: so that I who shared all his ideas
went to my second school, my mind alive with the most pleasant
anticipations. When we reached the Island and Athol Academy we were
ushered into the library, and I saw my school-master. My father had
already tactfully interrogated him about his flogging propensities, so
that when he brought into our presence a class of small boys in order
that my father and uncle, who was of the party, might test their
proficiency, he suddenly asked each boy how many times he had been
flogged. As I remember not a boy had escaped. What my uncle thought I
don't know, but I know that my courage oozed out at the end of my
fingers. My mother had arranged that we three boys should sleep in a
room by ourselves. That night when we were going to bed, the
housekeeper, a very nice woman who came from Ireland, & I daresay felt a
little sorry for her compatriots, by way of distracting our thoughts
pulled up the blind and we looked out and there, quite close to the
front of the house, we saw the wild waves tumbling under a stormy moon.
The next morning between nine o'clock & twelve I saw three boys receive
what the master called 'Three capital drubbings.' That night as we lay
in our little room we three brothers had become very sober boys.
Among the Beatitudes is one which is not in the Bible, but nevertheless
is in every Scotchman's bones: 'Blessed are they who expect not, for
they shall not be disappointed.'
Among the boys was one from the County Limerick who saw the grotesque in
everything, and my brother who was the leader in all the games and the
handsomest and merriest boy in the school, who lived to be the success
of the family and who had never known illness until he died when fifty
six years of age. Fortune seemed to have showered on him every kind of
good luck except that of growing old. Another boy was my dear friend,
George Pollexfen, whose sister I afterwards married. Unlike my brother,
George was the most melancholy of men. He was melancholy as a boy and as
a man. I think it was his melancholy that attracted me, who am a
cheerful & perennially hopeful man. It always mortifies me to think how
cheerful I am, for I am convinced it is a gift which I share with all
the villains: it is their unsinkable buoyancy that enables these
unfortunates to go on from disaster to disaster and remain impenitent.
My old friend and school-mate always saw the worst side of things. On a
summer day he would remember that winter was coming, and if prosperity
came to him, as it did all his life, he made elaborate preparations for
the arrival of misfortune. He was very tender-hearted and humane, & so
out of his prognostications of evil he would extract a kind of sad
humour that made him infinitely tender and pitiful. Out of sorrow he
would extract mirthfulness as the scaffold echoes with a jest. In the
vehemence of good spirits and hopefulness we grow careless of other
people's feelings, as do the rich of the poor men at their gates: not so
my sad-hearted and much-burdened old friend. He had also great gifts of
expression. What he felt and thought and what he smiled at, for he never
laughed, he could tell you in long detailed narratives of men and
things. Although slow and tedious in all his movements--and in
conversation that tedium was delightful--he afterwards became famous as
a steeplechase rider. He was exceedingly well made, and of proved nerve
and courage. Sometimes both as boy and man he would throw off some of
his melancholy and then his gaiety had the charm of the unexpected, like
rare sunshine on a gloomy mountain. The head-master disliked him because
of his irresponsiveness which is always trying to the autocratic temper.
He said that he looked at him with the face of a horse, which indeed was
not an inaccurate description. Had it been possible for our head-master
to conceal himself for one night in the large dormitory, where George
slept with nine or ten other boys, he would have been wiser. Night after
night he would keep these boys wide awake & perfectly still while he
told them stories, made impromptu as he went along. Silence was
commanded in all the bedrooms, therefore these had to be told in
smothered whispers. I did all I could--and my father helped me--to
persuade him to come to Trinity College. Had he done so, he would
doubtless have been a writer of extraordinary spontaneity & force, and I
should not be writing now these boyish recollections. My friend was
because of his family and their traditions puritanic, but his puritanism
was of a peculiar sort; he wasn't in the least aggressive like the
Belfast man, nor was he conceited nor inquisitorial as the Scotch are;
it was merely that he saw human nature sorrowfully, and with little
hope. It only enhanced his tenderness, which was like that of a nurse by
the bedside of a sick man, and veritably there were times when thinking
about this benighted and lost human nature he was like a tender mother
with a fractious child: yet never did he lose his sense of proportion,
or his sense of fact, or his mirthfulness. At first in any company he
would be a perfect wet blanket, and an embarrassment, so that
conversation would flag; presently he would begin to talk and then
people would discover that he knew more about the subject than, as it
seemed to them, anybody else that had ever existed, and that he knew it
all as a man of feeling and imagination. They would also discover that
he was a listener, whose attention you would woo as that of a king on
his throne. He died possessed of a good deal of money: but as he himself
told me, with characteristic veracity, the money was made for him by a
clerk whom he kept from drink. It never entered into his head to give
any of the money to the clerk; it was his by the law, and by the law he
kept it. Why puritans are thus tied up and bound and handcuffed and
padlocked in the prisons of the law is not for me to say. I have always
distrusted puritanism, in that respect I am a genuine Irish Protestant
and believe with Christ that the law was made for man and not man for
the law. So did not believe my melancholy friend. At the command of the
law he would have given you everything he owned and not harboured a
regret. What he was ready to give he would exact of others. His life was
a long imprisonment. Yet human nature is never more interesting than
when undergoing this kind of ordeal. To meet a man in the pleasant ways
of acquaintanceship is interesting and exciting, to visit him in prison
may be painful, but it is enthralling; for which reason, though I hate
puritanism, I don't think I would like it to be entirely removed from
the world, unless it be the Belfast variety, which like the east wind is
good for neither man nor beast. There was a phrase sometimes on my
father's lips, forced from him by sudden annoyance: 'Nothing can exceed
the vulgar assumption of a Belfast man.' The root of my old friend's
puritanism was self-immolation, the other sort is the glorification of
self-assertion. When I think of my friend and others like him, I say to
myself that the prison pallor on a fine face is more interesting than
the ruddy cheeks of the warden or turnkey or the Governor of the gaol,
who all live in the open air.
George Pollexfen was not popular at school nor was he popular as a man.
He never talked except upon some subject which long meditation had made
his very own, and though a good listener, it was with a perfectly
impassive face. Yet though never popular he came to be loved by a few,
and as the years went by these few who had discovered him for themselves
talked about him to others. There are people who come to us and there
are people to whom we go: he was of the latter kind. There are people
who go out into the streets, along the roads and gather in their friends
in armfuls. These are the popular people, they are irresistible, they
are as stimulating as the winds of Spring, wherever they appear opinions
are formed and conceit grows. My friend had no conceit and no opinions,
and therefore could impart none, but he was as rich in natural fertility
as a virgin forest: and though logicians and theoretical people could
make nothing of him, poets--my son, for instance--were at ease in his
company. The question arises, did he himself love anybody? Though I have
known him all his life, I am not sure. He leaned upon my daughter, and
perhaps he had some affection for her. He constantly came up from Sligo
to Dublin, though the exertion was irksome, to consult her. He would say
'She has a head! she has a head!' and then he would shake his own. His
feeling for my son was a kind of enthusiasm; for your genuine puritan
has a profound respect for worldly success, in that respect being a Jew
of the Old Testament rather than a Disciple of the New. I have already
said that if he knew anything about a subject he knew everything: and
one of his subjects was racing. Sligo was full of racing men, they are
swarming all along the West of Ireland. If a party of these came to see
him, they would find him wrapped in his habitual gloom, and they would
rouse him by asking some adroit questions about his nephew; and then
they would talk about the horses. He himself, I know for a certainty
never risked more than ten shillings on any race, but he knew all about
the horses. Many years ago I went to Punchestown Races with him: he knew
not only everything that was to be known about the horses, but all about
the jockeys and their curious histories, & what he knew he presented
without philosophy, without theories, without ideas, in a language that
recalled the vision of Chaucer and the early poets. On that occasion as
always he talked poetry though he did not know it.
George on a race-course, above all if mounted on a wild and splendid
race-horse, was a transformed being. Puritanism was shattered, torn
away, a mere rag of antediluvianism. Then he loved all men, he loved
humanity, he loved even himself: a natural man, such as he was meant to
be, a pleasant self-esteem, without aggressiveness, smiling from every
gesture. I never saw any man on horseback to compare with him, horse and
man made a unity of grace and strength. Yes, at such times he was a
lovable man, and you never forgot it. I've heard old jockeys talk with
enthusiasm of his skill as a steeplechase rider, especially when it came
to the 'finish.' These old warriors of the race-course didn't care much
about poets and artists, or even successful men of business, but they
knew what they were saying when they talked about steeplechasing. I
speak of the old days, when the jumps were so high on an Irish
race-course that every time a jockey rode he took his life in his hands,
and when after every race we were pretty sure to hear the crack of a
policeman's rifle sending some gallant steed to his doom because of a
broken leg or some such accident, and when a celebrated surgeon would
come down from Dublin prepared with all his instruments--at any rate it
was so at Punchestown.
From time immemorial the Irish have had a passion for horses. A friend
of mine once said to an old man past his work 'Tom what are you always
thinking about?' 'Sor,' said he, 'I do be thinkin' of horses.' Six weeks
before George died my daughter arrived in Sligo for her annual visit;
and to her surprise found him in bed. He said to her 'Lily, I think I'm
going,' and made no further allusion until two days before his death,
when he gave her elaborate directions as to where she would find, in
various pockets of his coat, certain sums of money, for the distribution
of which he gave her further directions. While awaiting the inevitable
event he read diligently during those last weeks, my daughter hunting
everywhere among neighbours' houses for novels of a kind to interest
him. He died just as dawn was breaking, while the Banshee was crying
around the house. As soon as this crying began one of the nurses came
and awakened my daughter because another nurse, who had arrived the day
before from Dublin, was very much alarmed. The three women heard that
crying. At first the nurses had thought it an old woman in distress: at
least the new nurse thought so. Then they knew, and one of them went for
my daughter. In his solitary musings, and he was always solitary, he had
discovered for himself some kind of religious faith neither Protestant
nor Catholic which enabled him to look on Death and Eternity with a
tranquil mind. As he never went to church and had no sociable impulses
and never dealt in opinion his religion remained inarticulate,
incommunicable. This curious solitariness was characteristic of the
whole family. I myself am eagerly communicative, and when my son first
revealed to me his gift of verse 'Ah!' I said, 'Behold I have given a
tongue to the sea-cliffs.' It should never be forgotten that poetry is
the Voice of the Solitary Spirit, prose the language of the
sociable-minded. Solitary feeling is the substance of poetry. Facile
emotion, persuasion, opinion and argument and moral purpose are the
substance of prose, and belong to the sympathetic side of our nature,
reaching out for companionship.
This portrait of my old friend would be incomplete if I did not mention
his skill as an astrologer. Through my son's influence, astrology became
one of his subjects. In his horoscopes he never failed. He was eager for
them. At all times he had an unsleeping industry. A horoscope cost him
two days of continued effort. Give him the date and place of anyone's
birth and in two days' time he would present you with a paper
written out in a most attractive archaic language telling you
everything--everything at any rate that was essential, past, present and
to come in the life of the unknown 'native.' I say unknown, because he
did not care to draw the horoscope of any person whom he knew.
Still the question occurs, why did some men love this man without asking
his love in return? The answer is simple: he had an interesting mind and
revealed it to us. For one thing, in the matter of what I call opinions
his mind was a blank, he had no opinions. A man richly endowed with
instincts as countless as the threads in a piece of embroidery, each
with its own intelligence as true as the instinct of a nesting bird, and
yet no opinions, no more than if he were a visitant come from a distant
star! And oh, the blessedness of it! It was like the peace of early
morning after a night of sorrow. Sometimes here in New York I have
wandered into apartments and among people where they were running some
great factory for the production of opinion, anarchist, socialist,
pacifist, I know not what. The din seems that of the trenches, only that
instead of heroism and the sobering effect of great issues on which men
stand face to face with death itself, we have small antagonism and
vanity and temper, always temper; and instead of intensity, vehemence;
and the pitiful mental and moral squalor of men trying to dominate, and
with that end in view quite content to be shallow in feeling as in
thought; quite willing, also, to insult with ugliness and to make
themselves ugly--in fact, anything for effect! To be with my old friend
was like entering a shaded parlour, its quiet only broken by the
rustling noise of a fire burning briskly on the hearthstone.
You see, he knew so much that no opinion and no theory could cover what
he knew. Doubtless, had he liked he might have denied what he knew and
rushed into the fray and been as clamorous and vulgar as anybody. This
did not tempt the solitary man, nourishing himself on the indwelling
spirit of brooding truth. When I think of him and others of his sort I
have known in Ireland, Synge, for one, I am reminded of the great
Russian writers. In old age Tolstoi made strange incursions into the
world of opinion, and found what he wanted in the New Testament, and
Dostoïevsky, if I remember rightly, fell back on the Orthodox Greek
Church. For this kind of futile industry neither had any aptitude. I
suppose their sensitive minds heard the call of the spirit of the age.
Had George taken to opinions he would have been just as credulous and
unskilful as these mighty men. Living all his days in the West of
Ireland, far from books and from leaders of thought, the spirit of the
age did not come his way. And how does Shakespeare figure in the world
of opinion? Did he ever take lance in hand to fight on behalf of any of
the opinions of his day? I fancy that like Hamlet he had too much mind
to make up! Is it not a fact attested over and over again that poets
always know too much to give entertainment to any system of opinion,
however loudly it clamours for admittance.
These men have to live in the hermitage of their own minds. The poet
always is solitary and never more solitary than when most sociable, and
it is because it lacks the fervour of heated opinion that good
literature avoids emphasis. I am perfectly alive to the value of the
fighting man when in the ranks and under strong discipline, or
self-appointed, as he often is, to subordinate tasks, as when an artist
produces the hideous to excite the crowd and to interest them in some
good cause that without the stimulus of hatred would not appeal to them.
Hatred so difficult to a full mind is so easy to an empty one. I don't
believe there was ever a great man that was a fighting man--not
Cromwell, he lived surrounded by fighting men but was himself
conciliatory to a degree; not Napoleon, of him a contemporary wrote, 'A
larger soul hath seldom dwelt in a house of clay:' his gift was that of
vision and purpose and an amazing talent for organisation. Had the
French demanded peace his genius would have devoted itself to organising
'the victories of peace.' Luther struggled hard to remain within the
Church, it was the fighting men inside its fold who drove him out. These
great men had purposes and had visions and were never fighting men,
though these were the tools with which they worked.
Poets must not meddle with opinions. The poet who becomes a fighting man
circumscribes his activity and coarsens his mind. Milton's poetical
genius never recovered the six political pamphlets he wrote. When I
think of the poetical mind I think of an oak tree that all night and all
day is drawing nourishment from the earth about its roots. A tree not so
nourished, and with its roots not pressed deep down into the earth,
would soon be overthrown soon laid prostrate by the storms of the upper
air. Had his attachments sunk deeper, pushing their intricate &
sensitive roots into kindly Mother Nature, Shelley, being kindly as well
as fine, would not so easily have been overthrown by Godwin's stale
philosophy--that man with a large head full of cold thought--and the
Harriet episode would have been more human.
I sometimes think that all of us mortal men, are companionable, but that
commerce and progress and a false civilization have put weapons into our
hands and taught us subterfuge and evasion, flight or attack. The poets
and artists are in revolt and would have none of this, at least in their
poetry, whatever they may do in their foolish logic. This is the unique
charm of poetry and the inspiration of what, from time immemorial,
people have agreed to call love, which is the true bond between man and
man that will survive all others. Its perfect and complete expression is
beauty, as ugliness is the expression of hatred or contempt or fear.
Goethe said of himself that he could not hate, and was ill-advised
enough to think it a blemish. If a poet hates, as sometime happens, love
is not far away. We have the invention of the Sirens, who, though they
have fish tails, are beautiful women; I think Homer was sorry for
Thersites.
Poets, being all compact of imagination and dream, are attached to the
quiet of the soul; and ugliness is exhausting, while love and beauty
replenish the wells. I think that but for some accident every great poet
would have attained to length of years, and every minor poet also, while
artists and poets of hate died young. My old school fellow, though
delicate both as a boy and a man, lived to be long past seventy. He
steered his course clear of opinion, hating no one and without
contention. One never knew what he thought. One did know abundantly what
he felt. Does anyone know what was Shakespeare's opinion of Juliet? Did
he know himself? Milton would not have kept silent.
Such people are a continual novelty. Had intellect been the dominating
thing in this personality, I should soon have grown tired. Intellect is
always the same. There are not two ways of doing the fifth proposition
of Euclid or of stating the theory of rent. You just know it or you
don't know it. But when it comes to a matter of feeling and of the
instincts and desires and the multitudinous sensibilities, no two men
are alike. They differ as a leaf on the tree differs from every other
leaf. In each is concealed a lovely surprise, if only someone would draw
the curtain. Change is the law of life; we desire it as we desire the
morning and sniff the morning air, a desire that will get us into
strange scrapes sometimes and be a pitfall to the innocent. A friend of
mine found Rossetti doing a study of a woman model, and painting the
nostrils with ultramarine. 'Well' said he wearily, 'I am so tired of
painting them always with madder brown.'
Search for novelty was quickening his imagination when he created the
Rossetti woman--I would that he had created many--it is like the lamp
set in the cap of the miner when he works underground. At that time
those of us young artists who aspired after imaginative and poetic art
were all agog about Rossetti. His poems had not then been published, nor
had any one seen his pictures outside his immediate friends. But by all
accounts he was a man of wonderful presence, keeping open mind and open
house for kindred spirits. Swinburne was one of the circle; I was told
Rossetti would not admit him without Whistler who knew how to keep him
from drinking too much. Rossetti seldom went to picture exhibitions; by
rare chance he did go to the Dudley, and saw there a picture of mine
which he liked so much that he sent to me by three messengers, one of
whom was his brother, an invitation to come and see him. I did not come.
I regret it very much. I think I was afraid of the great man; diffident
about myself and my work. To be afraid of anything is to listen to the
counsels of your evil angel. I used to hear a great deal about Rossetti.
I think that he exercised so much ascendancy because of a personality
which was naked and unashamed. A personality encased in the armour of
opinion arouses or calls for adherents & followers. Thoughts, fancies,
surmises, the whole army of guesses, which are the airy children of hope
and affection, present themselves to be liked or disliked without any
power of argument. Opinion challenges assent and submission as of right,
and is quite indifferent as to whether or no it is hideous in all men's
sight. Rossetti would not go to his brother's wedding because he said he
would meet all the bores of London. These bores were the men with
opinions and contentions. I sometimes meet a man all cased in the armour
of opinion, even as was John Knox--but raise his visor, let me see his
personality shining in his eyes, and how fascinating it is! Rossetti
never wore this kind of armour and did not need to raise his visor. He
was neither conventional nor unconventional. He immersed himself in art
and poetry, letting opinion go by the wind. How often I regret that I
did not go to him. Perhaps at a single bound I should have escaped
forever from this entangling web of grey theory in which I have spent my
life. There was another great poet that I missed. Browning had seen a
design that I made for a picture of Job's wife bidding him curse God and
die, and he came to see me. Unfortunately I was not in my studio when he
called.
I am sometimes asked what is it that artists & poets aim at. I answer,
it is the birth, the growth, and expansion of ever living personalities.
That is the value or the charm of a picture or poem. I read a poem or I
look at a picture; these, if they be works of art embody a personality.
A personality is a man brought into unity by a mood, not a static unity,
(that is character) but alive and glowing like a star, all in harmony
with himself. Conscience at peace yet vigilant; spiritual and sensual
desires at one; all of them in intense movement. In contact with such
picture or poem, the mood enters into my mind, pervading soul and body,
so that for the moment I become a living personality, with, for dominant
note, joy or sorrow, or hope or love. I become the personality I create.
When I read Rossetti's poems or look at his pictures, I fall under the
spell of his art. Had I met Rossetti in the flesh I think I should have
cast out forever this questioning intellect which has haunted me all my
life like a bad conscience--as indeed it does most men in these uneasy
days--and lived the imaginative life.
Going to see Rossetti must have been like a visit to the tropics. A
friend often asked me to go with him to see George Meredith. I threw
away also that chance but by no means with so keen a regret. In George
Meredith is no wild luxuriance, no risk of self-abandonment. He is
pervaded through and through with the conventions of upper middle-class
English society. The other stood aside from all conventions, even from
those of unconventionality. Naked we come into the world, and naked we
should remain if we retain personality and have the wizard's spell.
That school was in many things an image of life. All the nicknames and
jokes and daring comments sprang from the obscurity of the lower forms
and were anonymous. We elder and upper boys had a certain sobriety that
preserved us in staid decorum. If one of us in class was laboriously
translating an indecent passage in Lucian's Fables; from the lower end
of the class, which never even tried to translate anything, would come a
suppressed chuckle that would make our form teacher very uneasy. I fancy
it is these idle boys, with their preternatural acuteness for life and
reality, and the confidence that results, who afterwards become the
successful men. Most of their jokes were innocent enough. One morning
before breakfast in the playground when it was very cold, I found a
little gathering of them round a big burly boy in an aggressively thick
overcoat, and all were busy ostentatiously spreading out their hands and
rubbing them as if before a good fire, the big boy looking very sheepish
and helpless. An impudent Irish boy called out 'Heat by radiation,
Yeats.' The day before the head-master had given us a chemical lesson on
the properties of heat. And the nicknames! One boy was known as 'King.'
He had red hair and at first was called the 'Prairie on fire.' That was
too long and it became 'King Rufus' and finally 'King,' and he went by
no other name. Another was called 'Sin' which changed to 'Satan,' and
'Satan' he remained: a quiet dull boy, ugly and kindly, hulking in all
his ways and movements. It arose in this way. Every week the
neighbouring clergyman came to spend an hour in teaching us religion,
and when he asked what Judas carried in his bag this boy answered 'Sin.'
There may have been mines of sensibility in that boy. It was a bold idea
for a schoolboy to suppose Judas had carried Sin in his bag; but he
belonged to the commercial side of the school where they learned nothing
and had an easy time. We who worked at Latin and Greek went through much
suffering. In those days the classics were taught after the crudest
methods. Having learned some grammar, the declensions, and verbs, and
done a few sentences in Delectus, the Life of Hannibal by Cornelius
Nepos was thrust into our hands and the tribulation began. Without the
constant menace of the cane no healthy minded boy would have faced the
difficulties of our task. To fit the verb to the noun, and the
adjectives to the noun, and worry through all the participles, and
prepositions, and concords, and these through a long sentence in which
every word seemed to be wrongly placed, without any help, all alone by
yourself, under a rule of silence, so that you could not consult your
neighbour, was no end of a puzzle. Henry James' sentences are difficult,
but the difficulty is nothing to the difficulty of a young boy with a
Latin sentence. And we were all young boys not in the least interested
in the fortune of Hannibal, the Latin mind being as strange to us as the
mental processes of a futurist poet; but there stood our head-master
cane in hand, watchful to strike if a single mistake was made. Just as
in life, time and fate wait for human error! I can tell you we
worked--those of us at any rate who feared the cane. At the lower end of
the class were boys who never learned anything, and had, as it seemed to
me, grown habituated to the cane.
Novels were strictly forbidden. A very handsome boy of eighteen from the
Highlands was one day sitting in front of the school-room fire, basking
in its heat and comfortably reading a novel called 'The Romance of War.'
Our head-master stole in with cat-like tread in his noiseless slippers
and looked over his shoulder. I was nearby at the time, and saw that
book being slowly consumed in the red centre of the fire. We watched it
till it was in ashes the head-master, myself, and the boy who owned it!
Within twelvemonths that boy was fighting in the Crimea. He was one of
five or six boys being prepared for the military entrance examination.
None of them ever worked or were expected to work. They did, indeed, do
some mysterious things with solid cubes, which meant, I suppose,
instruction in methods of fortification. They always kept together and
were considered wild and wicked.
In those far off days, travelling was expensive. My parents lived deep
in the country, only to be reached by a four-horse coach, and Christmas
holidays were short at all schools, at ours only ten days. Therefore we
saw our families only once a year, during the summer holidays which
lasted six weeks. My father, mother, sisters and all the countryside
would exert themselves to give us a good time. The first week of that
holiday was enjoyment without alloy. Such sudden happiness would admit
companionship only with itself. After that came, like a creeping shadow,
growing darker and denser, the ever-nearer approach of the day when we
should have to return to school. Until the last week came, we brothers
scattered, each bent upon his own particular enjoyment. When that week
came, we went about together, made good companions by an identical
mournfulness; and our mother was as sad as we were.
Is a boarding-school a good institution for any boy? Certainly it is a
complete antidote to home influence, and is that desirable? A
boarding-school develops selfishness. Every boy for himself. Does one
acquire self-control? In such a school as mine the discipline from
without was too searching and too constant for that other discipline
from within to have a chance. When I left that school for good, I felt
myself to be empty of morals. There was avoid within. The outer control
had gone and it was a long time before the inner control grew up to take
its place. My legacy from that school was a vivid and perfectly
unconscious selfishness. From my short, far separated, loving holidays I
carried away memories of affection and what it might be for me. And I
think my history ever since has been the conflict between these two
principles. But I was not self-indulgent.