My memories of those days when I first knew him begin to be
disconnected, and I find myself putting down things which happened
after other things which I have still to relate; but I have never found
a consecutive narrative very interesting, which, perhaps, is why I
cannot read Pepys' Diary or Evelyn's Diary. I like to take things out
of their turn, to go forward to one thing and then back to an earlier
thing. I can only connect one incident or memory with another by taking
them out of their order and doing violence to the natural sequence of
things. Life is not so interesting when all the factors between 1 and
100 are in sequence as it is when 26 and 60 are taken out of their
place and put into coherence, temporary or permanent, with each other.
He said to me one evening that a man does not make firm friendships
after the age of twenty-five. There is a good deal of truth in that
statement, but I doubt whether it is generally true. It is true of
him, for his mind turns back continually to the men who were his
contemporaries twenty-five years ago, but it was not true of Dr.
Johnson, who shed his friends as he grew in stature of mind. And
perhaps what Dr. Johnson said to Sir Joshua Reynolds is more generally
true than what Mr. Yeats said to me. "If a man does not make new
acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself
alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair." I
do not think that anything is so remarkable about Mr. Yeats as his
aloofness from the life of these times. He has very little knowledge of
contemporary writing. I doubt whether he has read much or even anything
by Mr. H. G. Wells or Mr. Arnold Bennett or Mr. John Galsworthy or Mr.
Joseph Conrad. He said to me one night that after thirty a man ought
to read only a few books and read them continually. Some one had said
this to him--I have forgotten who said it--and he passed on the advice
to me; but he added, after a while, that "perhaps the age of thirty is
too young," and suggested that the age should be raised to forty. It
seemed very wrong advice to me.
An active mind will surely keep itself acquainted with new books
and familiar with old books. I have heard many men, particularly
schoolmasters and classical scholars, say with pride that they never
read modern books. Such people boast that when a new book is published,
they read an old one. They are, in my experience, dull people,
sluggardly in mind, and pompous and set in manner. In many cases,
particularly if they are schoolmasters, they neither read new books
nor old ones. Dr. Johnson and his friends, however, appear to have
been familiar with all the current literature of their time: history,
fiction, poetry, drama, philosophy and theology; as well as with the
ancient writings. They would not have _boasted_ of their ignorance of
the work of their contemporaries. In Mr. Yeats's case, however, this
unfamiliarity with the work of men writing to-day is explainable when
one remembers that he cannot read easily because of his sight. When I
first knew him, a friend came several times a week to read to him out
of a copy of the Kelmscott Press edition to William Morris's "Earthly
Paradise."
He had, like most young men of his time, been much influenced by
William Morris, the only man for whom I ever heard him profess anything
like affection, but I remember hearing him say once that he no longer
got pleasure from reading or listening to Morris's poetry.