Some six miles off towards Ben Bulben and beyond the Channel, as we call
the tidal river between Sligo and the Rosses, and on top of a hill there
was a little square two-storeyed house covered with creepers and looking
out upon a garden where the box borders were larger than any I had ever
seen, and where I saw for the first time the crimson streak of the
gladiolus and awaited its blossom with excitement. Under one gable a dark
thicket of small trees made a shut-in mysterious place, where one played
and believed that something was going to happen. My great-aunt Micky lived
there. Micky was not her right name for she was Mary Yeats and her father
had been my great-grandfather, John Yeats, who had been Rector of
Drumcliffe, a few miles further off, and died in 1847. She was a spare,
high-coloured, elderly woman and had the oldest looking cat I had ever
seen, for its hair had grown into matted locks of yellowy white. She
farmed and had one old man-servant, but could not have farmed at all, had
not neighbouring farmers helped to gather in the crops, in return for the
loan of her farm implements and "out of respect for the family," for as
Johnny MacGurk, the Sligo barber said to me, "the Yeats's were always very
respectable." She was full of family history; all her dinner knives were
pointed like daggers through much cleaning, and there was a little James
the First cream-jug with the Yeats motto and crest, and on her dining-room
mantle-piece a beautiful silver cup that had belonged to my
great-great-grandfather, who had married a certain Mary Butler. It had
upon it the Butler crest and had been already old at the date 1534, when
the initials of some bride and bridegroom were engraved under the lip. All
its history for generations was rolled up inside it upon a piece of paper
yellow with age, until some caller took the paper to light his pipe.
Another family of Yeats, a widow and her two children on whom I called
sometimes with my grandmother, lived near in a long low cottage, and owned
a very fierce turkeycock that did battle with their visitors; and some
miles away lived the secretary to the Grand Jury and Land Agent, my
great-uncle Mat Yeats and his big family of boys and girls; but I think
it was only in later years that I came to know them well. I do not think
any of these liked the Pollexfens, who were well off and seemed to them
purse-proud, whereas they themselves had come down in the world. I
remember them as very well-bred and very religious in the Evangelical way
and thinking a good deal of Aunt Micky's old histories. There had been
among our ancestors a Kings County soldier, one of Marlborough's generals,
and when his nephew came to dine he gave him boiled pork, and when the
nephew said he disliked boiled pork he had asked him to dine again and
promised him something he would like better. However, he gave him boiled
pork again and the nephew took the hint in silence. The other day as I was
coming home from America, I met one of his descendants whose family has
not another discoverable link with ours, and he too knew the boiled pork
story and nothing else. We have the General's portrait, and he looks very
fine in his armour and his long curly wig, and underneath it, after his
name, are many honours that have left no tradition among us. Were we
country people, we could have summarised his life in a legend.
Another ancestor or great-uncle had chased the United Irishmen for a
fortnight, fallen into their hands and been hanged, and the notorious
Major Sirr who betrayed the brothers Shears, taking their children upon
his knees to question them, if the tale does not lie, had been god-father
to several of my great-great-grandfather's children; while to make a
balance, my great-grandfather had been Robert Emmett's friend and been
suspected and imprisoned though but for a few hours. A great-uncle had
been Governor of Penang, and led the forlorn hope at the taking of
Rangoon, and an uncle of a still older generation had fallen at New
Orleans in 1813, and even in the last generation there had been lives of
some power and pleasure. An old man who had entertained many famous
people, in his 18th century house, where battlement and tower showed the
influence of Horace Walpole, had but lately, after losing all his money,
drowned himself, first taking off his rings and chain and watch as became
a collector of many beautiful things; and once to remind us of more
passionate life, a gun-boat put into Rosses, commanded by the illegitimate
son of some great-uncle or other. Now that I can look at their miniatures,
turning them over to find the name of soldier, or lawyer, or Castle
official, and wondering if they cared for good books or good music, I am
delighted with all that joins my life to those who had power in Ireland or
with those anywhere that were good servants and poor bargainers, but I
cared nothing as a child for Micky's tales. I could see my grandfather's
ships come up the bay or the river, and his sailors treated me with
deference, and a ship's carpenter made and mended my toy boats and I
thought that nobody could be so important as my grandfather. Perhaps, too,
it is only now that I can value those more gentle natures so unlike his
passion and violence. An old Sligo priest has told me how my
great-grandfather John Yeats always went into his kitchen rattling the
keys, so much did he fear finding some one doing wrong, and how when the
agent of the great landowner of his parish brought him from cottage to
cottage to bid the women send their children to the Protestant school and
all had promised till they came to one who cried, "child of mine will
never darken your door," he had said "thank you, my woman, you are the
first honest woman I have met to-day." My uncle, Mat Yeats, the Land
Agent, had once waited up every night for a week to catch some boys who
stole his apples and when he caught them had given them sixpence and told
them not to do it again. Perhaps it is only fancy or the softening touch
of the miniaturist that makes me discover in their faces some courtesy and
much gentleness. Two 18th century faces interest me the most, one that of
a great-great-grandfather, for both have under their powdered curling wigs
a half-feminine charm, and as I look at them I discover a something clumsy
and heavy in myself. Yet it was a Yeats who spoke the only eulogy that
turns my head. "We have ideas and no passions, but by marriage with a
Pollexfen we have given a tongue to the sea cliffs."
Among the miniatures there is a larger picture, an admirable drawing by I
know not what master, that is too harsh and merry for its company. He was
a connection and close friend of my great-grandmother Corbet, and though
we spoke of him as "Uncle Beattie" in our childhood, no blood relation. My
great-grandmother who died at ninety-three had many memories of him. He
was the friend of Goldsmith & was accustomed to boast, clergyman though he
was, that he belonged to a hunt-club of which every member but himself had
been hanged or transported for treason, and that it was not possible to
ask him a question he could not reply to with a perfectly appropriate
blasphemy or indecency.