middle-class England, but the good side is that the puritan belongs to
himself, whereas the votary of the religion of social enjoyment belongs
to his neighbours and to society, so that not even on his death-bed can
he return to himself. The Pollexfen charm was in their entire sincerity,
John Pollexfen the seaman once told me, he was greatly troubled because
it took him so long to make up his mind. Napoleon might have made a
similar admission. This slow vacillation is always characteristic of
entire sincerity. The man of society possesses a quick facility in
making up his mind. He does not belong to himself, and the rules of
society are written on his heart and brain. He is what is called
well-bred. The individual man of entire sincerity has to wrestle with
himself, unless transported by rage or passion; he has so much mind to
make up, with none to help him and no guide except his conscience; and
conscience after all, is but a feeble glimmer in a labyrinthine cavern
of darkness.
I think it was Shakespeare the poet, and not the thinking Shakespeare or
the wise Shakespeare, who made that discovery about the importance of
self-loyalty, for it is the root of every kind of poetical distinction,
and without distinction poetry is of little avail. It is reported that
Swinburne in some fit of petulance said that he and Shelley were better
poets than anybody else because they were gentlemen. My criticism is
that both these poets are lacking in the entire sincerity of the
greatest poets, that because Keats has this entire sincerity he is
better than either. I find, indeed, in Shelley and Swinburne activity,
animation, eloquence. I find in Keats force as of mother nature. 'What
man,' says the Bible, 'by taking thought can add one cubit to his
stature?'
Yet let any young poet stay for a while among the puritans and practise
all the restraints of self-loyalty, and he will turn his sociable
activity and animated sympathy into something which is much better,
namely force. It is a foolish question, yet I wonder did Shakespeare
undergo that kind of discipline?
It is evident from what I have written that to live amongst my people
was pleasanter, but that to live amongst the Pollexfens was good
training. Which of these two civilizations was best for the human
product I have never, in my own mind, been able to decide. What we all
seek is neither happiness nor pleasure but to be ourselves through and
through. The man born or made sorrowful would go on being sorrowful, and
the man who is joyous would be more joyous, & the spiritually minded man
more spiritual, and the materialistic more materialistic. Thus like the
plants & the animals we would grow, each after its own kind. It is
obvious that the puritan doctrine of self-loyalty is serviceable to this
kind of growth. Yet the puritan doctrine would cut off the sunshine of
enjoyment and pleasure and easy relaxation, and the poet or artist,
though self-loyalty be the condition of every excellence, must have
enjoyment. He must have tears and laughter & romance and vision and
relaxation and ease, otherwise his soul for poetry and beauty withers
and dies away. Among my friends and in their type of civilization we
made enjoyment of first importance, and for that reason we were eager
for art and poetry, which are all made of enjoyment. Yet it was bound to
come to nothing, because we had not that deep sincerity, which is
another name for what may be indifferently called human force or, better
still, genius. Inarticulate as the sea cliffs were the Pollexfen heart
and brain, lying buried under mountains of silence. They were released
from bondage by contact with the joyous amiability of my family, and of
my bringing up, and so all my four children are articulate, and yet with
the Pollexfen force.
Commerce is war, each man watching to take the bread out of his
neighbour's mouth, and puritanism with the doctrine of the inherent
badness of human nature is well calculated to hearten the fighters.
My old friend George, as full of human nature as an egg is of meat, held
the puritan doctrine. He condemned all his neighbours impartially; he
had not however like the ordinary man any self-complacent acrimony, no,
that was not his way. He was an indulgent and compassionate puritan,
because a consistent puritan. If he condemned others he condemned
himself also, and he sadly saw himself in those predestined sinners and
transgressors and backsliders. Now he was a chief of story tellers. I
remember the late York Powell, that Savant who by some strange accident
was also a man of genius, praising one of his stories, saying it was the
best he had ever listened to. He would tell a story that would take at
least two hours in the telling and it would be about nothing at all, yet
as it grew and developed, the mere nothing became everything, because he
would mass together such richness of significant detail. Long ago at
school he slept in a room known as number twelve, and in it slept all
the bigger boys of the school. There was a rule that every boy should
keep perfectly silent once in bed and the gas turned out. George would
keep all that room awake--sleepy schoolboys though they were--telling
them in a whisper long stories made in the fashion of Dumas & Fenimore
Cooper. All his life he delighted compassionately in the foibles of
dandies from the time of Dumas down to our own times, especially if they
were military. He had a gift for every kind of indulgence. He never
showed capacity for any religions or poetic ecstasy. I could not
conceive his reading Shelley with understanding, yet Keats would have
pleased him. He was pitiful for men and women and animals and the very
plants in the garden. He was as pitiful as St. Francis of Assisi. In
this I do not in the least exaggerate. A convinced puritan, holding the
doctrine as profoundly as he held all his beliefs, he was naturally a
melancholy man. His doctor said of him after his death that he was by no
means a delicate man, 'but very low spirited.' The ordinary puritan, in
the buoyant strength of high animal spirits, reacts against every kind
of depression. He is pessimist as regards other men, as regards himself
a confirmed optimist. My old friend, because of his uncheered solitary
existence in a small town under a rainy sky beside the sad sea wave,
suffered in some degree from what I have called the puritan malady
self-exaggeration. He was full of himself and that self all doubt and
dreariness, yet among genial friends who loved him it soon passed away.
When he came to my house he would invariably dedicate the first evening,
or part of it, to this kind of sorrowful personal preoccupation, sighing
and shaking his head, complaining aloud of everything, and we who knew
him would wait, and be outwardly sympathetic, while inwardly we smiled.
At hand grips with hard times we were naturally a little incredulous of
the sorrows of an old bachelor who was exceedingly well off and knew how
to take care of his money. He had small eyes, very blue, and straight
eyebrows and a long skull stretching far back such as I have always
found in conjunction with a marked capacity for detail. He was at the
same time an exceedingly good listener, and well as he talked I think he
preferred listening. Had the destinies permitted he might have become a
great student and a recluse and buried himself in a university. His
expression was strangely wistful, his eyes seemed to peep at you like
stars in the early twilight. Although a successful trader he said that
his success and I believe him--_was_ due entirely to his chief clerk and
an elder brother's advice. He did not look as if he belonged to the
actual world. Indeed he had become the denizen of another world. My
stammering uncle tried to comfort his latter years with Bible
Christianity and an occasional prayer meeting. George chose better, he
studied books on magic and he practised in the ancient science of
astrology. It was my son W. B. Yeats who put him on the track of these
wonders, and what was in some degree only occasional with my son was to
my friend the passion of his life. I think my son looks a poet; I know
George looked an astrologer. His eyes were the eyes of second sight. I
think indeed he knew the future better than he knew the present and the
past. He had a scared look, as if he saw ghosts that no one else could
see, & his horoscopes as many can testify were verified. He foresaw and
predicted almost to the day, and certainly to the week, when my friend
York Powell would die, and he did this more than a year before, when
York Powell was in perfect health. When the London 'Times' announced
that York Powell was making good recovery, 'No' said George 'the stars
are still there.' The last weeks of his life were characteristic. My
eldest daughter always spent her summer holidays with him. Arriving one
evening she was surprised to find him in bed and he at once said to her,
'Lily I think I am going'. He lived on for six weeks spending his time
calmly reading novels for which she searched the country. He would read
only what is called serious fiction, and not once again did he speak of
death till two days before the end, when he gave her minute directions
as to certain things she was to do after his death, how she was to
distribute certain small sums of money which she would find in his
pockets. He died at day-break while the Banshee, heard by my daughter
and two nurses, was wailing around the house. Business men cried when
told of his death; they said he had an attractive personality.
Puritans claim to be fervent Christians who draw all their wisdom from
the Bible. In my mind they have no Christianity at all. They cling to
their creed of the badness of human nature, because it helps them in
their unnatural war of commercial selfishness. As you would get the
better of your opponents, and to the commercial mind all the neighbours
are opponents except here and there a fellow conspirator, it is a mighty
encouragement to be able religiously to believe the worst of them; that
is why puritanism flourishes among traders. This combination of
selfishness and religion results in the belief, implied rather than
expressed, that a successful man is a sort of a secular saint, and it
lay like a heavy stone on George's conscience. He tried to cast it from
him; he expressed his scorn of it; I've heard him do so again and again;
yet he could not altogether get rid of the obstruction. At any rate I
cannot otherwise account for the fact that I myself, who was his oldest
and indeed his only friend, was in the latter years of his life an exile
from his affections. But my son was the pride of his life. (Ah, if he
had only been called Pollexfen instead of Yeats.) An applauded poet is
better after all than a rich trader, a more conspicuous success. He
would have liked to have kept him always with him, that he might watch
over him as he did over his race-horses. My son tells me that dining
with him was like taking a doctor's prescription, so careful was George
that he should eat the right food and chew it properly. The racing men
of Sligo, when in the evening they visited the old bachelor to benefit
by his knowledge of the racing world, always opened operations by
inquiring about the nephew, & when he had exhausted this subject which
took some time and must have bored them terribly, those poor fellows who
cared as much for poetry as they did for Sanscrit, would artfully lead
him to the other subject of his affections. After which they would
depart and make their bets. He himself never made a bet. I think indeed
he once lost or won, I forget which, ten shillings. He has told me with
perfect sincerity, indeed with shame and contrition of spirit, that he
disliked making money because it put him to so much trouble, and yet he
was most careful of it, and though he would lend money to a friend and
ask no security, he had to be perfectly satisfied in the most meticulous
way as to the nature of the demand so that he might lend on some
ascertained principle. The same sense of order, the same physical moral
and mental neatness kept him a lonely bachelor. In his eyes marriage and
domestic entanglements were things disorderly, all chance and change, a
sort of wild experiment. More than once he had expressed to me his
wonder, that sensible men would incur such risks.
Now what would have happened had this man been born into conditions that
were not puritanical? It is my belief that he would have become a writer
of note and power. At school his education was backward. His commercial
family and he himself had attached no importance to things of the mind.
When I entered the university I implored him to remain on at school, and
prepare himself for Trinity College, and I remember that my father
became greatly interested, but _Dis aliter visum_--he entered his
father's office and began his dreary and uncongenial pilgrimage remote
from books & intellectual companionship.
Here ends 'EARLY MEMORIES: SOME CHAPTERS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY BY JOHN BUTLER
YEATS.' Five hundred copies of this book have been printed and published
by Elizabeth C. Yeats at the Cuala Press, Churchtown, Dundrum, in the
County of Dublin Ireland. Finished in the last week of July nineteen
hundred and twenty three, the second year of THE IRISH FREE STATE.