crowded together in so small a space. All his spare time was given to
that oasis among the rocks and heather. He was tall and spare & for
hours together would work very quietly, making deliberate movements lest
he should break a stem or petal. Mrs. Hart told me that more than once
she had seen a robin alight on his head, and she insisted that, perched
on that eminence, one of them sang its thin little song. Every thing
that Hart knew he knew accurately, so that whether it was flowers or law
or practical business his judgement was infallible. What he did not
know, or could not know accurately and thoroughly, he put away from him,
and for that reason was a rigid conservative. A buoyant American full of
courage with the key of the future in his pocket was to him only another
absurdity in an amazing world. My own politics, which are akin to those
of American hopefulness, I never uncovered. I was afraid of that ironic
smile. Hart called his house Woodside, since it was close to a little
wood. Doctor Mahaffy, the late Provost of Trinity College, renamed it
'Heart's Ease' and so addressed his letters. Probably he did not quite
approve of that easy unambitious life. Adam in the Garden in the age of
Innocence, before Care had entered, would not have seemed an impressive
figure to a modern advocate of the strenuous and the progressive. My
friend ought to have been gardener and botanist always, but care entered
& drove him out into a world of malodorous Law Courts down beside the
river Liffey.
When I left school I entered Trinity College, and for the next four or
five years the man most dominant in my life was my uncle Robert Corbet.
I think of my poor uncle as a man of generous impulses who lived up to
his creed of being a gentleman, a worldling and a club man, nor did he
forget that he was a citizen of Dublin, of the type that flourished in
the eighteenth century. If he suspected his Catholic neighbours, all the
same he liked them; and if he had a certain respect for Englishmen, no
less he disliked them. Before I was born, he bought or leased, I never
knew which it was, Sandymount Castle, and then began creating all around
him beautiful gardens. Of business he knew little or nothing, and
probably neglected it, but he did not neglect his gardens. Every morning
he rose early, and would wander all over the grounds, sometimes with a
small saw and hatchet, making among the trees what he called 'vistas.'
He employed four or five gardeners, and as long as I knew Sandymount
Castle, none of these men ever left him and no one ever interfered with
them. So treated, they were gentle, pleasant and diligent, and the
gardens were lovely. There was a piece of water called the 'pond' on
which we boys did much boating, and there were plenty of wild ducks and
swans, and there was also an island on which was a one-roomed thatched
cottage, in which was a collection of souvenirs and relics brought back
from India and the Colonies by my uncle's brothers who had all been
soldiers. Outside the cottage were two chained eagles. As a child I
feared these eagles, and when I was a man they were there still, and
when my uncle, an old man, left Sandymount for good, they were sent to
the Zoological gardens, where for all I know they may still shriek and
flap their wings as was their habit on the Island. In and about
Sandymount Castle were various relics of departed worthies, among them a
wicked looking sword with a very long handle which my uncle Pat had
wrested from an enemy when leading the Forlorn Hope at the taking of
Rangoon. This uncle became Governor of Penang. All these things have
disappeared and no one remembers them but myself, and I mention them
now, not because I think they're likely to interest anybody, but because
I think it will please my old uncle to know that I have done so.
My father because of ill-health had retired from active work in his
parish and lived in a pretty house (it is at present the Presbyterian
College) surrounded by a high wall and separated from the Castle grounds
by a wicket-gate. All through my College days I lived the Sandymount
Castle life. It was my Capua and only too welcome after my school life.
I had been braced too tight, now I was braced too lightly:
self-abandoned to a complete relaxation. I left that school, weakened
morally by its constant discipline and vigilance, to live all my College
days in that pleasant Capua. I did not think, I did not work, I had no
ambition, I dreamed. Week after week went by, and no one criticised. As
far as the demands of that sympathetic circle went, I satisfied
everybody, and was well-behaved. The only thing that ever troubled my
uncle was my habit of going long walks in the mountains, all by myself.
His old-fashioned, eighteenth century gregarious worldliness was shocked
that I should walk all by myself, it seemed to him abnormal and he
distrusted the abnormal.
At school I had been well grounded as regards Latin and Greek, therefore
the ordinary college examinations gave me no trouble. In my last year I
read for honours in metaphysics and logic, but on the days of the
examination I was ill with rheumatic fever. Possibly had I read sternly
for these courses I should have turned away to the abstract side of life
and deserted, for good and all, the concrete world of colour and of
images. After taking my degree I won a prize in political economy, and
became acquainted with the works of J. S. Mill, and I began to think;
but though Capua vanished, I do not think that I thereby became a better
man. Certainly I was more disagreeable, for I wanted to quarrel with
everyone, making the mistake, common among polemical minded people, of
thinking that when I was severe to other people and the world generally,
I was severe to myself, although in reality I was acquiring the most
disagreeable of qualities, picking up the habits of dictatorial emphasis
& dogmatism, which I shall now never get rid of. This was not due to
Mill's teaching. Mill must have been the most persuasive man, while I in
my crudeness must have been the most dissuasive. Never would he have
allowed any authoritative self-conceit to come between him and the
truth. I once had the good fortune to hear him make a speech to
workingmen, and I thought that both as a speaker and a man he was of all
men the most winning. His audience did not cheer, they laughed as with
an intensity of enjoyment. At the time I compared the laughter in my own
mind to the sound made by the stringing of Ulysses' bow when he was
about to shoot the suitors, which Homer likened to the singing of
swallows. My own excuse for myself is that I lived for six years under
that severe Scotch school-master, who was all authority and
self-assertion, and that man is essentially an imitative animal. When I
began to think for myself I walked in the footsteps of my school-master.
With my uncle lived three old ladies, his mother who died when ninety
three, and her two sisters who lived to be over eighty. After the death
of these old people he continued to live alone in Sandymount and hoped
to die, as they did, in the odours of a well approved and well-tested
worldliness, but fickle and cruel fortune ruled otherwise. He lost his
money. How it went I don't know, I don't believe he himself knew, and
when he died an old man broken by creeping paralysis, there were some
debts whereof his assets sufficed to pay fifteen shillings in the pound,
his assets consisting of a collection of pictures, china and silver,
very valuable had Dublin only known it.
A sort of incrustation of legend had gathered about my uncle. One was
that he was an old Peninsular officer who had seen battles and sieges.
As a fact, his nearest approach to actual war was that, when quartered
in Hastings, he had had living with him a prisoner of war, a French
officer. Very pleasantly they lived together, going to a great many
parties and picnics, neither knowing the other's language, so there was
no possibility of disputes. Of that friendship the only trace remaining
was that my uncle always pronounced the word 'presentiment' with a
French accent.
Perhaps in the councils of the Eternal, or whatever you call the
Providence who shapes our ends, no time is lost and nothing whatever
wasted. Looking back on my uncle's long and pleasant life, ending in a
close so sombre, I will pass no judgement on the ways of Providence,
beyond saying that he was by nature a good man and deserved to be happy
to the end. He was fond of his friends, and wished to be only good to
them, and with his money he benefited hundreds. There are people who if
they do anything for you do thereby fix a hook in your jaws which you
can never get rid of. I think when he did you a kindness he forgot about
it and wished you to forget it. Of course his sympathies were extremely
narrow and did not extend beyond his relations and friends.
Humanitarism, which I had learned from Mill's philosophy, I would not
have dared speak of in his presence. Theory was my uncle's aversion; an
old Tory, he regarded theory as the Enemy. He was extraordinarily fond
of children. When we lived in the North of Ireland, his advent among us
was a radiant event. I can remember that one late winter's evening, when
with my mother and father he had just left for the mail coach that was
to take him to Dublin, out of pure affection and loneliness I went over
to the table and drank out of his tea-cup.
Having now spoken of the master of Sandymount Castle, let me now speak
of one whom my eldest sister called the Deputy Master, old Michael, who
for more than forty years was my uncle's butler. It was my mother who
hired him when he was a young man with black hair and blue eyes. Some
weeks afterwards he was found drunk. He at once, at my uncle's demand,
took the pledge, and never after broke it, even though we youngsters,
out of pure mischief, often tried to tempt him. I remember him as a man
of white hair with an amusing resemblance to John Stuart Mill--I say
amusing because Michael was short in stature and sturdily built, whereas
we all know J. S. M. was tall and slender. Before coming to my uncle he
had been butler to an English general whom he left because 'the Mistress
had insulted his religion,' which so distressed the general that he had
insisted on Michael driving from the house in the family carriage.
Michael himself told me this, and that when he had got to some distance
from the house, he transferred himself to a Dublin jaunting-car. He was
a perfect servant, yet I never knew a man of greater self-respect. The
Irish make good servants and their gentry make good masters, because
both are still mediævalists, and belong to an age when it was accepted
by everybody from the king to the peasant that to serve is honourable.
My uncle's manner with all his servants was brief and authoritative, as
though he could still send them to the guardroom, and these relations
with Michael never relaxed during all the forty years. All the same
Michael was Deputy Master. Sometimes when we were at dinner and Michael
attending us, he would say 'Mr. So-and-So called to day' & my uncle
would invariably reply 'Did you ask him to dinner?' 'Yes Sir'. My Uncle
came to see me in London, a few years before his death, and after he had
left Sandymount, and said 'When I told Michael of my intention, I
declare to God I don't know which of us should have been most pitied.'
When last I saw Michael he was ill and visibly failing. He came from his
bed-room with a blanket around his shoulders but his bright blue eyes
were the same as ever and he told me one of the old stories.
'Did I ever tell you, Mr. Johnnie, the story of Mr. O'Connell and the
officer?'
I had heard it at least fifty times, but I said it was new to me. The
officer was a witness called in some law case in which O'Connell was
employed.
'Mr. Soldier' said O'Connell, 'what do you know of this matter?'
'I am not a soldier, I am an officer' said the witness. 'Then' said Mr.
O'Connell 'Mr. Officer and no soldier, what do you know of this matter?'
Shortly before I left Ireland and law, to go to London and study art,
and while my uncle was still at Sandymount, Michael told me a
conversation he had with Butt. He said he was standing at the side door
when he saw Butt at a distance, and that Butt came over to him and shook
hands with him, and that he brought Butt into the oak room, and gave him
luncheon and wine, and that Butt talked to him of many things and that
finally Michael had said 'Now Sir, Mr. Johnnie is a Barrister, and you
ought to do something for him,' and Butt answered 'Michael, I will.' And
he did, in a way that, because of my resolution to go to England, was
vain, but it would have been a substantial help to me.
At that time my uncle and Butt had not been on speaking terms for some
years. In Butt's magnanimous mind and imagination were tides of feeling
and of old memory connected with Sandymount and with those that had been
its inmates that no quarrel could stand against. That was Butt all over.
In the old days he and his family constantly came to Sandymount, and
while his wife & children would scatter over the gardens and ground, he
would stay inside talking to the old ladies. They liked especially
playing backgammon with him. His reckless way of leaving blots
stimulated their imagination and made them feel that he really was a man
of genius. At this time he was the opponent of O'Connell and the hope of
the Tories, and Disraeli had walked in the lobby of the House of Commons
with his arm through his and said, 'Butt we must get you into the
Cabinet.' Afterwards, when Butt had gone over to the Nationalists, my
grandmother would say, 'I have a sneaking regard for Isaac Butt,' and
her sister would say, 'Indeed I know you have.'
There was a something in Butt, was it poetical genius or intellectual
power, was it the head or the heart, or was it merely primeval goodness,
that no one could resist. It followed him everywhere, and it followed
him into Court. I have seen a jury listening in constrained attitude of
painful attention, with the air of men resolved to do their duty at any
cost. Then the other Lawyer would cease to speak, and Butt would rise,
and every man of them would smile, like watchers by a sick bed who at
last saw arrive a great doctor who could work miracles, and Butt would
explain things in a language so simple that the dullest brain among them
would understand. It was part of his genius that he understood simple
people. It was well-known among solicitors that in a case in which his
feelings were not concerned he was no better than any other barrister,
but that where they were concerned he was irresistible. My father was
present at a dinner where there were assembled all the magnates of the
Irish Bar, and one and all declared that they never knew how a case
would go until they had heard Butt's speech, and, if I remember rightly.
Butt at this time was not over thirty years of age. There had been a
murder in County Donegal of which Butt was a native, and the family did
not wish him to take a part in the defence. Friends of the accused
called on him and, to put them off, he asked what he thought was an
impossible fee. They went away disappointed. Butt's imagination caught
fire from what they told him, and all night he walked his library
thinking about it, and when, contrary to his expectations, the men
called in the morning with the money, he had convinced himself and
undertook the defence, and so moving was his speech, that the jury, all
of them Presbyterians, when they left the Court and entered the Jury
Room, fell on their knees and prayed for guidance and help. The man was
acquitted. A friend of mine living in London, who had been a Dublin
solicitor in large practice, told me the following story. The Dublin
Corporation at the time he spoke of was composed of Protestants, and in
a very important case, for which my friend was solicitor, wanted to
employ Butt. He and his clients sought him everywhere and could not find
him. There was Sir This and Sir That--men whose names he spoke with a
kind of awe, yet neither he nor they could find Butt. Then, receiving
certain hints and rumours, they took cars and cabs and drove many miles
out of Dublin into the country & did at last find Butt, down on his
hands and knees in a field, studying a water-course, all on the behalf
of the poor ragged man who was standing beside him--a case, said my
friend, for which he wouldn't get five pounds, and at this time Butt was
a Tory politician, pledged to the service of the rich and powerful. My
friend was a big, heavily-built man, with a wheezy voice and irritable
eyes, punctiliously honest and truthful. He hated Home Rule and he
loathed the Catholic Church, a bitter Protestant of the Cromwellian
type, yet he liked to talk about Butt, and would rail against the people
who deserted him. I have often heard him say 'Of all the men I've ever
known. Butt had the best qualities.' The relation between these two men
was like that between Timon of Athens and his steward. With Flavius my
friend might have said:
'O Monument
And wonder of good deeds evilly bestowed'
Archer Butler, in his day a famous Platonist, once said in my father's
hearing, 'Butt, I leave you to the God who made you.' And so said all
men, the reason being, I think, that in Butt himself was such a fountain
of naturalness and humanity that people said 'This is the thing itself,
compared to which our moral codes are only the scaffolding.'
Archer Butler had just been appointed, by the Board of Trinity College,
Professor of Moral Philosophy. Butt knew that he had written an erotic
poem, very mild for these days but very terrible in those Victorian
days, and he went to congratulate him, bringing a copy of the Dublin
University Review with this identical poem inserted. Butt said to him
'Why on earth did you do such a thing as publish this poem?' Butler was
in consternation and believed himself lost. At this time the magazine
was very famous and widely read, publishing, as it did, the stories of
Lever and Carleton. It was of course a joke, for the copy showed to
Butler was the only one that contained the poem, and all contrived by
Butt who at that time was editor of the magazine. When Butt was Member
for Harwich, and the hope of the Tories, being as yet untouched by any
Irish heresies, Mrs. Butt, my father and mother, uncle Robert Corbet, a
cousin and I, all went in a body to visit Madame Tussaud's Wax-work
Exhibition. As we passed along among these figures, ghastly by an
imitation of life which seemed to be its sad mockery, Butt constituted
himself our guide, telling strange histories, partly true but mostly
imaginary. At all times Butt shone in this kind of inventions. A crowd
of strangers drew near, among them a little Clergyman particularly
active and vociferous in his applause and encouragement, and Butt was in
his element. Mrs. Butt at this time was young, as were all the party,
and the situation amused her so much that she sat down on a chair, the
better to enjoy her laughter. Seeing this Butt made pointed and
appealing allusions, and the crowd gave her black looks, which only
increased her merriment. My matter of fact cousin did not know that a
joke was in progress, and when the little Clergyman approached him and
said 'What a remarkable guide they keep in this establishment' he was
shocked and said 'He's not a guide, he is the member for Harwich.' The
crowd melted away, and Butt was indignant. 'Why' he said 'I meant to
have got sixpence apiece all round.'
The Irish spurn convention and are called cynical, and the English make
of it a religion and for their pains are called hypocrites. The fact
being that, while the English like the beaten way, we prefer the
untrodden way that leads to the surprising.
Trinity College Dublin did very little for me, which is entirely my own
fault, neither did Trinity College Dublin inspire me with affection, and
that was the fault of Trinity College Dublin. One night, in the College
park, walking under the stars with that brilliant scientist George
Fitzgerald, I saw him look round at some new buildings just erected and
with a snap of satisfaction he said, 'No ornament, that is one good
thing.' I made the obvious retort 'How is Trinity College Dublin to
inspire affection, if it is not made beautiful in its buildings, its
quadrangle, its trees and its park.' He gave a grunting assent. Had he
not been in a controversial mood, and ascetic for severe science, he
would have responded generously; for he was a true scientist, that is, a
poet as well. Trinity College inspires no love; outside what it has done
for learning and mathematics and things purely intellectual it has a
lean history. Still youth is youth, and the time of youth is pleasant to
look back upon. Fitzgerald, I have said, had a poetical mind, and that
means among other things that he took humanity in the lump. Indeed I
never knew any of that distinguished family that did not love the sinner
as much as they deplored the sin, & in this surely they showed
themselves to be Irish of the Irish. I leave it to others to explain,
for it is a quality which is not English or Scotch. Think of it, to love
the sinner! What a reach of mind it demands and what patience and long
practice in the right kind of sensibilities; remember Thomas Carlyle and
how he hated the sinner, being a sort of Public Executioner everywhere
and anywhere. I recall that when he died in the fullness of his glory
and success, and we all praised him, it was old Baron Fitzgerald, the
uncle of George Fitzgerald, who shocked us by calling out at his
dinner-table. 'The great Sham is dead, what is to be done with the great
Sham?' Yet Carlyle's hatred for the sinner was not sham but an active
quality of fierce anger for the encouragement of which and its
sustenance he had ransacked history and philosophy. I once saw him in
the flesh in London, in the Chelsea district, an old man, tottering
along very rapidly, wearing a blue frock coat with a large red rose in
his buttonhole. Instantly I saw who it was and stopped and turned round
to watch him as he receded, and he also turned round and looked at me,
and I saw his face, his ruddy cheeks and blue eyes, charged I thought
with a smouldering irascibility, and yet I could see the benevolence
that, had it not been Scotch and further infected by Prussian rigours,
would have brought pity and tenderness to drown that wrath. Yet it was
wrath, and bore no resemblance to the cold and treacherous cruelty of
Froude, in whose long horse-face was neither irascibility nor pity.
While I stood there watching the old sage, a British workman passed, his
bag of tools over his shoulder, and said in an aside--'A rare old file
that!'
There was a man named Thomas Allingham, a brother to the poet who
mentions him somewhere, as a man who had won a great reputation in
Trinity College Dublin but who was without any creative ability. If he
could not create he could write imitations of his brother's poems and
publish them with the poet's initials in the country newspaper of
Ballyshannon where these brothers were born. The poet was extraordinary
fastidious and exacting in all matters of style, never satisfied with
anything he wrote, and he was much the elder brother, claiming all the
rights of an elder brother who is fastidious about style. I knew Thomas
and was often in his rooms and very soon became aware of the spirit of
mischief that dwelt behind his gray eyes and half-closed heavy eyelids.
A Ballyshannon paper was declining, and its editor was a friend of
Allingham's. Allingham returning to College sought out a congenial
spirit named Green, and together they started to revive the paper by an
acrimonious controversy over the words 'telegram' and 'telegraph.' One
wrote a letter to that paper saying it should be 'telegraph' & the other
that it should be 'telegram.' I've seen them sitting together over
Allingham's fire, concocting lying paragraphs and offensive epithets to
be used against each other. Returning to Ballyshannon for his vacation
Allingham sowed in the general ear whispers and rumours as to impending
law suits. His next transformation was to become evangelical and pious.
He was a man of extraordinary mental power and this was all that he made
of it. Perhaps too much education is as bad as none at all. The poet
probably had none but what he picked up for himself. A well-stored
memory is something like too much orthodoxy. It captures the whole man
and arrests the dreaming faculty and inhibits initiative.