Essays Irish and American
_First Edition, May, 1918._
_Reprinted, December, 1918._
[Illustration: JOHN BUTLER YEATS]
Essays
Irish and American
By
JOHN BUTLER YEATS, R.H.A.
With an Appreciation by Æ
[Illustration]
DUBLIN LONDON
The Talbot Press Ltd. T. Fisher Unwin Ltd.
89 Talbot Street 1 Adelphi Terrace
1918
“_Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto._”
Contents
Page
An Appreciation 5
Recollections of Samuel Butler 9
Back to the Home 23
Why the Englishman is Happy 37
Synge and the Irish 51
The Modern Woman 63
Watts and the Method of Art 75
Four of the following Essays have appeared in _Harper’s Weekly_
and one in _The Seven Arts_. The thanks of The Talbot Press,
Limited, are due to the proprietors and editors of both Journals,
for permission to reprint.
AN APPRECIATION
We admire some because of their accomplishment, others because
of what they are. I admire Mr. John Yeats as an artist as much
as any, but I feel that nature’s best gift to him was a humanity
which delights in the humanity of others. Few artists I think
found it more easy to be interested in the people they met or
painted. All his portraits, whether of men or women, seem touched
with affection. Rarely has he pourtrayed any, young or old, where
something like a soul does not look at us through the eyes. I
have liked people after seeing Mr. Yeats’ portraits of them, and
I am sure I would not have liked them so much if I had not first
looked at them with his vision. In his delightful letters, of
which extracts have been already published, and in his essays he
lets us unconsciously into the secret of his meditation about his
sitters. He is always discriminating between themselves and their
ideas, searching for some lovable natural life. He complains in
one of his essays that the American women whom he admires cannot
be easily natural. They want so much to be the ideal daughter or
the ideal wife or the ideal friend that poor ordinary human nature
is not good enough for them. He perhaps never heard of Laotze--how
few people know of that fount of wisdom--but Mr. Yeats, who is,
I fancy, unhappy in the society of metaphysicians, economists or
theorists, would, I believe, have loved the Chinese sage who made
a religion with this law, “Be ye natural.” All the other religions
draw us away from hearth and home and love and dominate us by an
overlaw, but Laotze alone among religious teachers heaves a sigh
when he hears of someone setting out to reform the world because
he knows there will be no end to it. When Laotze says in his
ideal state people would be contented in themselves, think their
poor clothes beautiful and their plain food sweet, I think of
Mr. Yeats and his fear that the reformer will improve the Irish
peasant off the face of the earth. He delights in him as he is.
Why should anybody want to alter what is already natural, wild
and eloquent? To be primitive is to be unspoiled. Mr. Yeats seems
to be seeking everywhere in art and letters for the contours and
emotions which are the natural mould of face or mind. Mr. Orpen
can astonish us with technical accomplishment and Mr. John with
masterly drawing, but if we look at the face of a woman painted
by Mr. Yeats we will be attracted, not by the transient interest
of novelty in treatment, but because of some ancient and sweet
tradition of womanhood in the face, the eyes, the lips. We find the
eyes so kind that it is so we imagine mothers or wives from the
beginning of time have looked upon their children or have bewitched
men to build about them the shelter of home and civilisation.
Mr. Yeats in his art had this intimacy with the heart’s desire,
which is not external beauty, as those who have degenerated art
into the pourtrayal of prettiness suppose, but beauty of spirit.
Those who knew Mr. Yeats will remember that enchanting flow of
conversation which lightened the burden of sitting; and nature
was wise in uniting the gift of conversation with the gift of
portrait painting, because the artist was so happy in his art and
so reluctant to finish his work; without that grace of speech
few sitters could have endured to the end with an artist always
following up some new light of the soul, obliterating what already
seemed beautiful to substitute some other expression which seemed
more natural or characteristic. To those who knew Mr. Yeats these
essays will recall that conversation with which we did not always
agree but which always excited us and started us thinking on our
own account. The reader will find here thoughts which are profound,
said so simply that their wisdom might be overlooked, and also
much delightful folly uttered with such vivacity and gaiety that
it seems to have the glow of truth. Perhaps these fantasies and
freaks of judgment are as good as if they were true. One of the
most delightful inventions of nature is the kitten chasing its own
tail, and this and many other inventions of nature seem to indicate
that a beautiful folly is one of the many aspects of wisdom. What
is it but mere delight in life for its own sake, in invention for
its own sake, or, as Mr. Yeats puts it elsewhere, a disinterested
love of mischief for its own dear sake. How dear that is to us
Irish who have often had nothing but love of mischief to console
us when all the substantial virtues and prizes of life had been
amassed by our neighbours. How witty Mr. Yeats is those who read
these essays will discover. “When a belief rests on nothing you
cannot knock away its foundations,” he says, perhaps half slyly
thinking how secure were some of his own best sayings from attack.
I refuse to argue over or criticise the philosophy of the man who
wrote that, for I do not know how to get at him. I am content to
enjoy, as I am sure his friends will, and new friends also who will
be made by a reading of this book, and who will be grateful to
Mrs. Bellinger of New York, who cut out and preserved from various
papers these essays as they appeared; for the writer, unlike the
kitten, had no interest in chasing his own tail, and had forgotten
what he had written or where it had appeared. Gathered in one book
these essays reflect a light upon each other and recreate for us
a personality which has deserted Dublin, but which none who knew
would wish to forget.
A. E.
RECOLLECTIONS OF SAMUEL BUTLER
I knew Butler. In the year 1867-68 I was a pupil at Heatherleigh’s
Art School, Newman Street, London, and Butler was there also. It is
not true that Butler had talent. To be a painter after the manner
of John Bellini was for years the passion of his life. It was vain;
he had no talent. At the time I knew him he was beginning to see
this and it was pathetic! We tried to comfort him and would have
cheered him with false hopes. All the intellect in the world won’t
make a painter if it is not the right kind of intellect.
A Scotch friend of mine and his, whom Butler loved because of his
knowledge of music, would sometimes say, “Yes, Mr. Butler, you are
a dominie”--and he would chuckle slowly in his Scotch manner. Like
a dominie he kept us all in order. We called each other briefly
by our surnames without the prefix of the Mr.--Butler was always
_Mr._ Butler. Once a daring citizen of London ventured, “Have you
been to the Alhambra, Butler?” He pronounced it “Al’ambra”--that
gave Butler his opportunity. The Englishman in possession of all
his aitches can always hold the many in check because of their
deficiency in aitches. “Is there an aitch in the word?” said
Butler. Never again did my poor friend venture, or for that matter
any of us.
The Irishman likes his equal and is, as every one admits, the best
of comrades; the German likes his superior; but the Englishman
likes to be with his inferior and is not comfortable in any other
relation. He is sent to the public school and the university by
his anxious parents and guardians that he may acquire the superior
manner. There are two sneers in England, the cockney variety which
no one respects, and the university and public school sneer which
compels respect, even among foreigners. It impressed Goethe. The
footman puts it on but overdoes it, so that at a glance we know it
to be counterfeit. Butler was the politest, the most ceremonious of
men, but the sneer was there and all the more palpable because so
carefully veiled.
We were art students and tried to be Bohemian, or would have done
so had not Butler been one of us. There was a student whom he much
liked; one day he took him in hand and in his most paternal manner
admonished him that he must not use the word “chap.” Butler was
an Englishman through and through and an Englishman of “class.”
The Englishman of class will part with his faith, with his wife
and children, with his money, even, or his reputation and be
cheerful about it, but closer than his skin sticks to him his class
conceit; and in his accent, his voice, his gestures, his phrases he
carefully preserves all its insignia. Possessed of these he knows
he may go anywhere and associate with anyone; it is a passport
entitling him to a nobleman’s freedom. Every Englishman, gentle
or simple, either by force or by patient groping will try for a
sheltered spot where he may have his own thoughts and his own ways
hampered by none. But the Englishman of class is freest of all; a
policeman, even he, will hesitate to interfere with you if he knows
that you are a gentleman.
In his “Way of All Flesh,” Butler describes English home life and
he enables us to see that affection and sympathy do not form part
of it. Butler, the product of that life, sets little importance
on either affection or sympathy; and yet there never was a kinder
man. Good nature was fundamental in his character and was, I think,
the source of most of his writings and opinions. The English going
about life in an intensely selfish way and doing this on principle
are obliged to have strict laws strictly enforced; yet outside
these laws they claim and allow the utmost license of action and
thought. It is their distinction among nations that they love
personal liberty so much,--that is for themselves, for they are
quite ready to enslave other people. With this love for personal
freedom has grown up, side by side with it and as part and parcel
of it, an immense appreciation of human nature itself. Against this
appreciation Puritanism has vainly and indeed dolorously struggled.
Butler’s good nature was due to his liking for human nature itself;
hence his zeal against all the conventions and illusions and
veiling “respectabilities” that would snatch from human nature its
proper food.
The continental nations may hate human nature and produce their
Goyas, but such art among Englishmen excites only a lazy contempt.
Notwithstanding their passion for law and rule, a necessary thing
among people so selfishly bent on their own gains, the Englishman
does not actually hate his neighbour, even though he keeps aloof
from him. He has indeed a genial relish for the selfishness in his
neighbour which is so strong in himself. Edmund Burke has some
such sentence as “the _good nature_ and integrity of this ancient
people.” The Dutch, being a freedom-loving people, have a similar
good nature. Rembrandt and Shakespeare get artistic pleasure out
of the ugly but with laughter, not as in Goya with a grin of
hatred. Indeed, looking at some of Goya’s work, one is forced to
believe that he hated even the people who looked at his pictures
and wished through them to insult and offend all his friends,--a
kind of disorderly impulse which in him and others prompts to the
disgusting and obscene in art. Butler’s emancipated intellect had
won for his soul and senses a freedom which he wished to share
with others; he had as it were acquired a freedom to be on good
terms with himself. To be sure, a Scotchman is on good terms with
himself when he is conceited. Butler wanted people to be on good
terms with their senses and appetites and everything else that goes
into our make-up as men, to all of which Scotch conceit is the
enemy. For this he was always fighting, and he began to fight at
Heatherleigh’s Art School. He found us, as he thought, enslaved by
this or that convention or illusion and by his mockeries and his
wit worked for our liberation.
He always occupied one place in the school chosen so that he
could be as close as possible to the model and might paint with
small brushes his kind of John Bellini art. There he would stand
very intent and mostly quite silent, intent also on our casual
conversation, watchful for the moment when he could make some sally
of wit that would crush his victim. He had thick eyebrows and grey
eyes,--or were they light hazel? These eyes would sometimes look
tired as he plied his hopeless task of learning how to paint. But
the discovery of any mental slavery or insincerity among our band
of students would bring a dangerous light into them, and he would
say things that perhaps hurt very much men who were absolutely
sincere, however mistaken. Then Butler, who respected, as he often
told me, every kind of sincerity, would humble himself and make
apologies that were not always accepted, and in the grey eyes, like
a little fire on a cold hearth, I would see a melting kindness that
it must have been hard to resist. The virtuous are not always the
generous, neither are they always as wise as Solomon.
At that time I was a very busy student working from morning to
night, otherwise I should have tried to see more of Butler.
There is nothing so winning as a look of helpful kindness in a
mocking face. Besides, he was a good deal my senior and seniority
is attractive to ingenuous youth; and I was then ingenuous. I
sometimes think I have lost all my opportunities; the chance
of knowing Butler well was one of these. Slowly I have come to
feel that affection for human nature which is at the root of all
poetry and art, whether the poet be pessimist or optimist. Had I
stayed much with Butler I should have learned my lesson almost at
once. Matthew Arnold’s “sweetness and light” was not much to his
taste, and he cared nothing for the high ethics of Wordsworth. An
affectionate mother, such as we have among the peasants of Ireland,
where mother-love is a passion, does not want her children to be
good half as much as she wants them to be happy. It was so Butler
regarded poor, struggling and deceived human nature. _There_ was
the source of his “good nature” and of his influence. In this
he was pre-eminently English of the English, and in this there
was nothing of the system maker or the philanthropist. Nor was
he a philosopher or anything else except a mere man touching and
handling the concrete matters of everyday life. With tenderness of
humour and a most real poetry he touched, healingly, all the sores
of ailing humanity.
Butler liked women but disapproved of marriage. He liked women
because, as I heard him say, they are so good natured. They would
laugh with him but never at him. Then they are obedient and
teachable and the dominie within him liked pupils. His attitude
towards them was a smiling indulgence. The charming women of those
backward days were still in the Middle Ages, apologetic, almost
penitential, as if they asked pardon for being so beautiful or so
merry and engaging, and did not a bit mind if Butler regarded them
as inferior, especially as towards them he was always kindly and
fatherly and innocent. It is quite easy to see why Butler disliked
marriage; it would have curtailed his freedom to follow out all
his queer vagaries of Butlerian thought and inclination. This
consideration does not affect the ordinary Englishman of coarser
grain, tenacious of his ancient right to do what he likes with his
own, his own being his wife and children and servants and “all that
he possesses.” The ordinary Englishman lives alone in his English
home, lord and master of it, with his wife second in command.
Butler, of course, could not so live; therefore to keep his liberty
he dismissed forever the thought of a married home. Had he married
I have no doubt he would have chosen a helpmate not likely to
dispute his supremacy. I knew Miss Savage, the model for his good
woman in “The Way of All Flesh.” She was a student at the art
school and not very young, and she was lame; life had disciplined
her. She was fair, with a roundish face and light blue eyes that
were very sensitive and full of light; a small head, her features
charmingly mobile and harmonious. She radiated goodness and sense.
She kept herself very much to herself, yet all liked her, even
though we never spoke to her. Butler soon discovered that she
laughed easily; but as usual he was cautious. One day he consulted
me as to whether he could with safety ask her a school-boy riddle
he had picked up somewhere, a school-boy riddle in that, though
quite innocent, it was not altogether nice. I don’t remember how I
advised, only that they became fast friends.
Though he avoided marriage, his flesh was weak. “I have a little
needle-woman, a good little thing. I have given her a sewing
machine. I go to see her.” As he made his confession he retired
backwards, bowing his head several times as in mockery of himself
and acknowledgment of a sad necessity from which even he was not
exempt. For it was given to him also to tread “The Way of All
Flesh.” It was always part of his philosophy that he should confess
his sins, besides being a necessity to his social nature and one of
his most engaging qualities.
Though he professed to despise Greek plays he was a good classical
scholar. Outside the classics he had read nothing except
Shakespeare and “The Origin of Species” and the Bible. For him “The
Origin of Species” was the book of books. If he took a fancy to a
student he would watch him for a few days and then approach him
with cautious ceremony--he was always ceremonious--and ask him if
he had read _the book_ and perhaps offer to lend it to him. I am
proud to remember that he lent it to me. “The Origin of Species”
had, as he told me, completely destroyed his belief in a personal
God; so occasionally instead of the usual question he would ask the
student if he believed in God. In this he did not confine himself
to students. There was a nude model named Moseley who often sat
to us at Heatherleigh’s. He liked this model, in whom he found a
whimsical uprightness that appealed to his sense of things. Once
in the deep silence of the class I heard him asking, “Moseley,
do you believe in God?” Without altering a muscle or a change
of expression, Moseley replied, “No, sir, don’t believe in old
Bogey.” The form of the answer was unexpected; its cheerful cockney
impudence was beyond even Butler’s reach of courage. He retired in
confusion, and we laughed. We liked a laugh at Butler’s expense.
Besides, in those days most of us were orthodox; in fact had never
given a thought to the question of Deity. But that fear kept them
quiet, there were some valiant spirits who would have cried out
against him, since then as well as now, in America as well as in
England, an orthodox inertia was characteristic of artists. They
do not go to church, they never give a thought to religion, but
they are profoundly orthodox in a deep, untroubled somnolency. I
remember that one man, a very successful student, did engage in
controversy and was highly sentimental in a dandified, affected
way. Butler’s reply was one word repeated several times--“Pooh!”
that ended it. I have no doubt that that gentleman still retains
his orthodoxy. When a belief rests on nothing you cannot knock away
its foundations.
Butler’s father was a wealthy dean of the Church of England, and, I
fancy, pompous and authoritative. He told me that his father never
became excited unless the dinner was late. When he broke away from
orthodoxy and announced his intention of becoming an artist instead
of a clergyman, his family refused him all assistance. Nor is it
true that his father helped him in his New Zealand venture. He
himself told me that he managed to borrow from friends £10,000, and
that he was more proud of that than of anything else in his life.
He stayed in New Zealand four years, after which a lucky turn on
the market enabled him to return to England and repay the money,
while keeping enough to support himself in his pursuit of art. He
liked to tell of his New Zealand life and of his hatred of sheep.
They were always getting lost, so that he said the word “sheep”
would be found engraved on his heart. He did not know one of his
horses from another or from anybody else’s horse, and said he was
like the Lord, whose delight is not in the strength of a horse.
Sam Butler’s desire for truth and his stripping away from life
and belief all the veils of illusion was the characteristic of a
man truly poetic. He and his pupil, G. B. Shaw, by their passion
for sincerity, help the imaginative life. When Michael Angelo
maintained that only the Italians understood art, Vittoria Colonna
pointed out that the German pictures touched the feelings. “Yes,”
he replied, “because of the weakness of our sensibilities.”
Poetry and the imaginative life can only flourish where truth
is of supreme moment; an education which contents itself with
half-knowledge and half-thought will inevitably produce a crowd
of sentimentalists and false poets and rhetoricians. The great
artist and the great poet have rigorous minds. Michael Angelo
said of those German pictures that they were only fit for “women,
ecclesiastics and people of quality.” After all a poet must
believe, and without rigorous thinking there is no sense of belief.
To know things thoroughly, or not at all,--this was the habit of
Butler’s mind, derived from his classical education, in which the
whole stress is on the minutiæ of scholarship. For instance, he
told me that he never studied music till he was twenty-one years
of age, after which he gave to it every moment he could spare. Yet
he only cared for Händel, content that all the rest should be to
him an unknown world. What he could not study thoroughly he would
not study at all. In his eyes superficial knowledge was superficial
ignorance and the mental habits engendered by it disastrous. Among
painters he valued chiefly those who, like John Bellini, are
thorough to minuteness. Though he professed to despise style he was
a precisian in words. At a restaurant which he and I frequented
for our midday meal he met a man who said he never “used” hasty
pudding. This application of the verb “use” was to him a source of
endless amusement. I have heard him tell the story many times.
I think he read Shakespeare continually. I know he read no other
poetry, although he did glance once a little wistfully at
Whitman,--“the catalogue man,” he called him. All the same he was
a genuine Englishman and brooded in the imaginative mood of a
self-centred solitude which could not be shared with anyone, as the
sympathetic Frenchman lives in the imaginative mood of an expansive
existence which he would share with everyone.
I remember the last time I saw Butler. I was sitting at breakfast,
alone, in a lodging in an out of the way part of London, having
come from Ireland the night before after an absence of seven or
eight years. I saw him passing and in glad surprise at once raised
the window, meaning to hail him. But I reflected sadly and changed
my mind, closing the window and returning to my breakfast, as I
thought: “God forbid that I should intrude myself uninvited on any
Englishman.”
BACK TO THE HOME
Everywhere or almost everywhere among English-speaking peoples the
monarchical principle is under notice to quit. In the school it is
the boy and not the master who rules; even in the courts the judges
interpreting the law go cautiously, in fear of public disfavour;
finally, change has reached the home and the family, which were
wont to be a dual monarchy--the mother ruling within the house and
the father his own world outside. Just as business is a matter of
committees and syndicates and corporations--the individual man a
mere wheel or pulley in some immense machine which is controlled by
a cold-blooded arithmetician--so, inside the home, the mother is
superseded by an expert, some specialist in up-to-date science or
quackery who occupies her place and asks to sit where she sat. Can
we wonder that she sometimes leaves vacant her chair and goes in
pursuit of distraction?
It is a curious change and means much; for one thing, the world
has lost its two most picturesque figures--the master of the house
and its mistress. When hospitality was hospitality, it meant that
you were admitted for a brief while to bask in the smiles of two
gracious sovereigns--the lord and the lady of the house that
entertained you--their good-will, radiating forth to warm you, the
real attraction, to which the wine and the food and the guests were
only secondary, so much heart on their side creating a heart within
your own narrow ribs. Now all is changed, and the entertainment
is more important than the entertainers. We come to be pleased,
we no longer come to please; the old delicious autocracy with its
smiling court of sympathetic and affectionate guests has tumbled
into the dust, the feelings of host and hostess, the home cookery
and the old-fashioned house with its gathered associations are
nothing to us; we demand to dine where the food and drink are up
to date, so we dine at a restaurant, where are noise, distraction
and confusion. I myself would sooner dine in a good man’s kitchen.
Personal rule is at an end. The host used authoritatively to lead
the talking and the hostess controlled it, for, though too busy
to talk, she was never too busy to listen, and the guests took
care that the conversation flowed in her direction and sought her
approval. In my youth, after the dinner-things were removed, we
sat around an ancient mahogany table, on which there was not, as
in later times, any garish white cloth. It would have been gloomy
but for the many-coloured reflections cast into its polished depths
from wine-filled glasses and decanters and from the faces and
dresses of the guests. Overhead were candelabra, the sole light in
the room; outside the circle of diners such deep shadows that the
faces looked like portraits by Rembrandt; and when, at the proper
moment, the hostess and her ladies swept out of the room, leaving
us to our men-talk, how lean would fall the entertainment! And it
was our hostess we missed, so much divinity did hedge her.
The monarchical principle is extinct in the home, it is likewise
extinct in the schools. I was educated at a school where the master
ruled by terror. He was a Scotchman and knew no other method,
and we were not in the least bit democratic. But if we trembled
before him we did not fear one another. There were between fifty
and sixty of us, a curious collection of diversities; not a boy in
the place who had not something marked in him, either by his own
strength or because of his home individuality. It was a time when
parents had little money and travelling expenses were heavy, so
that holidays were scanty and far apart. For instance, we never
went home at Christmas. The cheap railway had not yet everywhere
supplanted the mail coach. Yet we lived haunted by the thought of
our homes,--it possessed us, it obsessed us, it was our food and
drink with which we fed our imaginations and spiritually nourished
ourselves. We would talk incessantly to one another of our homes;
and friendships, our only solace in that abode of sternness, were
made up of similarities of taste and experience in the matter of
homes. The methods of education were, if you like, brutal; but
the brutality made our homes all the dearer. We leaned heavily
on the thought of our homes; while in our happiness, as in our
misery, we possessed a faculty of concentration unknown to boys
educated in the latitudinarian methods of the modern schools.
Whether it was our first Latin author, Cornelius Nepos, or our
Latin exercises, or the horrible Latin grammar of that period, or
the big Latin dictionary or Greek lexicon--implements of education
whose repulsiveness was supposed to add to their efficiency--or
our letters from home, or our long talks of home and yearnings for
home--no matter what the subject, we brought to it an intensity
that would have been foreign to the careless boys of this
effeminate age. I remember a boy under twelve who talked to me in
whispers of his father and mother not being friendly, and of his
mother preferring to him his younger brother. There was another boy
whose trouble was that there was so little money at home. There was
yet another very little boy, who would take me aside and read long
letters from a beautiful sister married to a military officer in
India. Depend upon it, there is nothing that concentrates the mind
like having for schoolmaster a conscientious Scotchman teaching
Greek and Latin in the old clumsy methods.
A young boy is mostly regarded as something quite outside the pale
of sympathy and understanding. Only his mother can endure him,
and she because, as many think, love has made her blind. Yet in
himself he is of all beings the most ingenuously and ingeniously
human, and a veritable fountain of imaginative desire, who, if
he do but retain his spontaneity, may become a Charles Lamb or a
Coleridge or a Shelley; or, if he be built on the grand scale, a
Dante or a Michael Angelo. The mission of the modern school is for
the boys themselves to take in hand this little boy and, by force
of their own rude animalism and with joyous pressure, strip him of
everything exceptional and compel him to take on another likeness.
I remember an English lady telling me that she had been to visit a
great public school to see her son, a little boy. She told me that
at a distance she could not distinguish him from any other boy;
and she smiled helplessly as she added that it was the ambition of
every little boy in that famous school to be exactly like the other
little boys. And yet we wonder that the world no longer produces
distinguished individualities. This mother knew that her boy would
come back to her the average boy, to grow into the average man,
like his father, like his uncle, like everybody else. A friend of
mine, a most interesting man, very happy in his hobbies and in his
dreams and visions and beliefs, a poet though without learning, and
without the sweet accomplishment of verse, lamented that he had not
been kept longer at school, where, as he said, he might have had
all the “nonsense knocked out of him.” The poor fellow does not
know how happy and interesting he is; he only knows that his wife
and all his friends find him different from other people and on
this account disapprove of him. Yet there was an old French artist
in 1830 who advised his friends to cultivate their faults carefully.
The old methods were brutal and made the boys brutal, yet they, at
any rate, did not break down and insidiously destroy singularity
of character as is being done every day by the democratic methods
of modern schools. A celebrated master of Eton in the eighteenth
century said, “My business is to teach Greek, not morality.” In
that robust century people did not take much thought about one
another. You might be unhappy and all astray, but they let you
alone; provided you did your Greek right, your morals were your own
affair. Chatham may have left Eton a “cowed” boy, as he implied
he did, yet he brought with him an individuality of a quality
so angular and so challenging that it is impossible to believe
it could have survived had it been ground between the upper and
nether millstones of modern school-boy life. These schools, both in
America and in England, with their great prestige and with the boys
in full control, have become so powerful in moulding character that
it is no longer accurate to say “the boy is father of the man,” but
rather, “the school-boy is father of the man.” In Ireland things
are different. The old brutal methods being discarded, the boys
do not fear the master, neither do they fear each other, and the
explanation is that the Irishman, man and boy, gentle and simple,
is much more of an aristocrat than a democrat. He belongs to his
home and to his family; he has the passion for home and family, he
passes through school or college without really belonging to either
of them.
For that reason the home among the Irish remains stronger than
any school or college, exactly the reverse of what has happened
in England and may happen in America. When I say an Irishman,
gentle or simple, is an aristocrat, I do not mean that he is a
person of class or wants to be one, or that he bears the slightest
resemblance to the modern English nobleman, but I do mean that he
likes to think that he is a person of distinction, and that he
differs from all other men, and values himself accordingly. Nature
herself would, if we did not thwart her, evolve each man on a
different plan; as she makes every leaf and every twig and every
tree in the forest different from all its fellows. She has an Irish
delight in diversity, and smiles to see her sturdy children each
fighting for its own hand.
The typical Irish family is poor, ambitious, and intellectual; and
all have the national habit, once indigenous in “Merry England,”
of much conversation. In modern England they like a dull man and
so they like a dull boy. We like bright men and bright boys.
When there is a dull boy we send him to England and put him into
business where he may sink or swim; but a bright boy is a different
story. Quickly he becomes the family confidant, learning all about
the family necessities; with so much frank conversation it cannot
be otherwise. He knows every detail in the school bills and what it
will cost to put him through the university, and how that cost can
be reduced by winning scholarships and prizes. As he grows older
he watches, like an expert, the younger brothers coming on, and
is eager to advise in his young wisdom as to their prospects. He
studies constantly, perhaps overworks himself while his mother and
sisters keep watch; and yet he is too serious, and they on their
side are too anxious for compliments. It is indeed characteristic
of the Irish mother that, unlike the flattering mothers of
England, she loves too anxiously to admire her children; with her
intimate knowledge there goes a cautious judgment. The family
habit of conversation into which he enters with the arrogance of
his tender years gives him the chance of vitalizing his newly
acquired knowledge. Father, mother, brothers and sisters are all
on his mind; and the family fortunes are a responsibility. He is
not dull-witted, as are those who go into business to exercise
the will in plodding along some prescribed path; on the contrary,
his intellect is in constant exercise. He is full of intellectual
curiosity, so much conversation keeping it alive, and therein is
unlike the English or the American boy. Indeed, he experiences
a constant temptation to spend in varied reading the time that
should be given to restricted study. He is at once sceptical and
credulous, but, provided his opinions are expressed gaily and
frankly, no one minds. With us intellect takes the place which
in the English home is occupied by the business faculty. We love
the valour of the free intellect; so that, the more audacious his
opinion, the higher rise the family hopes. He and all his family
approve of amusement--to do so is an Irish tradition unbroken from
the days before St. Patrick; but they have none. They are too poor
and too busy; or rather they have a great deal, but it is found
in boyish friendships and in the bonds of the strongest family
affection, inevitable because they are Irish and because they have
hopes that make them dependent upon one another. The long family
talks over the fire, the long talks between clever boys on country
walks--these are not the least exciting amusements--even though
they bear no resemblance to what is called “sport.”
These are the gifts of the Irish home; among the poor, affection
infinite as the sea, which, because of an idleness which is not
their fault, has had full scope to grow into an intensity of
longing that makes it sometimes hungry as the sea; among the
better-off, ambition also and a free intellect; and in everybody an
ancient philosophy of human nature which warms rather than chills
human relations.
The English boy has an entirely different history. He enters some
famous historical school, anxious, like his parents and all his
aunts and cousins, that he be stamped and sealed with its approval.
His desire is to be an Eton, Harrow, or Rugby boy, after which
he will become an Oxford or Cambridge man, marked in his accent,
clothes, and manner with the sign-manual of his university. For
the Irish boy this is as impossible as it is repugnant. His home
is stronger than his school and his college. In the great English
schools the boys manage one another; a system of rules and of
etiquette has democratically grown up which all must obey; this
kind of docility is English and not Irish. Our boys cannot thus
surrender themselves, for behind the Irish boy is the drama of a
full home life. There is no such drama in English home life--it is
prosperous, uneventful, and lies icily cold in the lap of law.
The Irish home, in which so much happens, awaits its novelist;
but, alas! English readers won’t read novels about Ireland, and
Irish readers are too few to make their custom worth anybody’s
attention. All we know is that the Irishman is, boy and man, a
detached personality. He is often the gayest and most sociable of
beings, and a true comrade, and he may be able to adapt himself to
every situation, yet he remains apart; even with his friends he
is inscrutable, he cannot be read. And this to my mind is right,
for no one should be able to read another’s secret, except the
mother who bore him, and sometimes a sweetheart. The ordinary
well-to-do Englishman has no secrets, for you can read them all
in his bank-book, in his Catechism, in the rules of his club and
the laws of his country. He is an admirable citizen on whom you
can calculate as on a railway time-table. The English mother when
she parts from her boy at the school doors may sigh to think that
she has lost her boy, yet be proud to think that he will return
remodelled into the smart Eton or Harrow boy. The Irish mother
has no such hopes and no such fears; her boy will come back what
he was when he left her side, and though he go to India, and rule
provinces, with many well-trained public-school Englishmen working
under him, he will still remain the passionate Irish boy of her
heart’s desire.
The great factor in the Irish education is not the school, but the
Irish home, unique in its combination of small means, intellect,
and ambition with conversation. Without this conversation the home
would not be Irish. From every manor-house and cabin ascends the
incense of pleasant talk; it is that in which we most excel. With
us all journeys end in talkers’ meeting; “we are the greatest
talkers since the Greeks,” said Oscar Wilde. When any Irish reform
is proposed--and they are innumerable--I always ask, how will it
affect our conversation? France has her art and literature, England
her House of Lords, and America her vast initiative; we have our
conversation. We watch impatiently for the meals, because we are
hungry and thirsty for conversation; not for argument’s sake or to
improve ourselves, but because we spontaneously like one another.
We like human voices and faces and the smiles and gestures and all
the little drama of household colloquy, varying every moment from
serious to gay, with skill, with finesse; we like human nature
for its own sake, and we like it vocal--that is why we talk; we
even like our enemies, on the Irish principle that it is “better
to be quarrelling than to be lonesome.” Arthur Symons, staying in
a pilot’s cottage on the west of Ireland, said to my daughter: “I
don’t believe these people ever go to bed.” No, they have so much
to say to one another.
“England,” said Bernard Shaw, “cannot do without its Irish and
Scots to-day because it cannot do without at least a little
sanity.” Both these nations are conversational.
The home must play its part vigorously if the race is to be saved
for affection and happiness, and if we would bring back the
conditions from which spring art and poetry.
WHY THE ENGLISHMAN IS HAPPY
AN IRISHMAN’S NOTES ON THE SAXON TEMPERAMENT
In the long quest for self-knowledge and self-fulfilment there are
two types of men and two methods. There are some who would have the
individual man care only for himself morning, noon, and night, for
his spirit, his mind, his body, his temporal and eternal welfare.
There are others who would say he should forget himself and lose
himself in great ideas, great causes, great enthusiasms, in
passionate love or humanitarianism, or even in the anger of battle.
Of these two methods the second is found in France while the first
is the Englishman’s creed.
The English are a fortunate people, or seemed so in the happy past,
their primal good fortune being that they lived and grew up on an
island surrounded by stormy seas and fenced in by high cliffs.
Their second good fortune sprang out of the first; they never
submitted themselves to a strong central government. Of all people
in the known world, they were the least governed; of all men the
Englishman was the freest, little more being required of him than
that he should live on good terms with his neighbours. Doubtless
one of these neighbours was the brutal Norman noble who regarded
him as an inferior being of an inferior race, and as a landlord
oppressed him. Outside this relation of landlord and tenant, and
of superior and inferior, he lived a free man among his fellows
without, indeed, the dignity and honour of being a soldier, but
also without his constant subjection and unrelaxing discipline. He
was a boor, but his thoughts were his own; and his language, being
different from that of his oppressor, afforded him an additional
protection. He lived in his own world--he lived apart among his own
race and kindred.
The other nations on the continent of Europe, notably France, lay
open to one another’s ravages; and for that reason had always to
remain under arms, every man a soldier, martial law superseding all
other laws. However England might war with other nations, however
she might despoil them, pursuit and revenge were impossible;
behind her cliffs she was safe. No matter how great the cloud of
hatred or what it threatened, she lived in security and laughed
at her enemies. The peasant returned in peace to his village and
his plough, the merchant to his shop, and the noble to his castle;
while crimes that could not be punished left no visitings of
remorse. The English grew in liberty and in the arts of peace while
other nations grew in the arts of war and lost their liberty. The
English poor man was never taught his military dignity, but he
was taught his social inferiority; yet, while he bowed down, as
he still does, before his social superior, his thoughts remained
free; the better part of liberty remained to him. Froissart was
astonished at the squalor in which the English peasant lived; yet,
had he looked a little closer, he would have seen that under the
smouldering ashes on his hearth a fire was burning that had long
been extinct in his own country.
The French government was a military despotism, and since tyranny
begets tyranny and seeks to extend itself, it speedily drew to
itself the forces of religion, art and education, and allied
them in one vast conspiracy against the forces of freedom; so
that from the first the people were trained in submission to
power, authority and tradition. It was an eager and spontaneous
submission, the soldier proud to follow his captain, the student
eager to listen to his teacher, and the Catholic anxious to obey
the command of his priest. The people were accomplices in their own
enthralment; the more so since there was this discretion reserved
in the exercise of dominion: all were free to think out and draw
their own conclusions, provided that the State, the Church, and
the academies furnished the premises. Deductive logic was free;
inductive logic, the higher order, the kings, soldiers, magistrates
and statesmen kept in their own hands. As time advanced the French
became a nation of teachers and orators as well as soldiers, while
the creative impulse was everywhere arrested and hampered Welded
together and bound and clamped into a nation by their military
and ecclesiastical organizations, the French rapidly acquired the
instinct of solidarity; and the individual dwindled until he became
a mere unit of the state. This feeling of solidarity combined with
the free exercise of deductive logic, resulting in a fertility of
beautiful ideas--beautiful as rainbows on a stormy sky--and the
missionary habit. Of all men the Frenchman is the most picturesque
and the most attractive, as he is also the most eloquent and the
most persuasive. In literature, in life, in everything, the French
genius is social and sympathetic and propagandist.
The Englishman is the contrary of all this. He has a passion for
liberty and cares little for equality, fraternity, or any of the
ideals which are the glory of the French intellect. He is, indeed,
so entirely without the faculty of ideas that even his feeling
for liberty has never become an idea or a doctrine; he has no
intellectual cognizance of it; it is merely his habit. A something
which from long use has grown into him and become part almost of
his physiology, it is in his blood and in his bones and remains
by him always, keeping vigilant watch and ward. But it is for
himself alone; it is not for universal application; it is not his
philosophy. So that when he robs another nation, as in the case
of India or Ireland, and, in order to facilitate the theft, first
takes away that nation’s liberty, his conscience does not smite
him, for by liberty he always means English liberty, which includes
the privilege of robbing any nation that is weak enough to stand
it. To me a Frenchman is always like a student; either as he is
when he works diligently at his studies or as he is when he plays
truant, breaks away from discipline, and defies his teachers. An
Englishman, on the other hand, is a person untutored, who has
never been either to school or to college; he has neither the
attractiveness of the diligent student nor the excesses of the
rebel student. He is still almost what he was when he came first
from his Maker’s hands.
Besides his exemption from military organization and a central
government, there is yet another fact to be noted in the
Englishman’s history. A peaceful immigration into his country
has been as difficult as a warlike invasion. In other countries,
when the population was reduced by plague and pestilence, the
void was quickly filled up by an inrush of hungry foreigners; in
England this was impossible. There a sudden fall in population
meant a sudden rise in the abundance of food, because there was
no one to come from outside to take the food out of men’s mouths.
The population of mediæval England remained always small. The
Englishman’s native joviality and ease of heart were his song of
triumph over a condition in which, if he managed to survive, he
lived easily and fed well and clothed himself warmly. If other
people died, so much the worse for them and the better for him. To
this day the Englishman takes extraordinary care of his health. The
French and Irish contempt for death is to him a continual and a
shocking surprise. He never needed to work hard; he faced no great
struggles; he merely took care of his health.