Because I had found it hard to attend to anything less interesting than my
thoughts, I was difficult to teach. Several of my uncles and aunts had
tried to teach me to read, and because they could not, and because I was
much older than children who read easily, had come to think, as I have
learnt since, that I had not all my faculties. But for an accident they
might have thought it for a long time. My father was staying in the house
and never went to church, and that gave me the courage to refuse to set
out one Sunday morning. I was often devout, my eyes filling with tears at
the thought of God and of my own sins, but I hated church. My grandmother
tried to teach me to put my toes first to the ground because I suppose I
stumped on my heels and that took my pleasure out of the way there. Later
on when I had learnt to read I took pleasure in the words of the hymn, but
never understood why the choir took three times as long as I did in
getting to the end; and the part of the service I liked, the sermon and
passages of the Apocalypse and Ecclesiastes, were no compensation for all
the repetitions and for the fatigue of so much standing. My father said if
I would not go to church he would teach me to read. I think now that he
wanted to make me go for my grandmother's sake and could think of no other
way. He was an angry and impatient teacher and flung the reading book at
my head, and next Sunday I decided to go to church. My father had,
however, got interested in teaching me, and only shifted the lesson to a
week-day till he had conquered my wandering mind. My first clear image of
him was fixed on my imagination, I believe, but a few days before the
first lesson. He had just arrived from London and was walking up and down
the nursery floor. He had a very black beard and hair, and one cheek
bulged out with a fig that was there to draw the pain out of a bad tooth.
One of the nurses (a nurse had come from London with my brothers and
sisters) said to the other that a live frog, she had heard, was best of
all. Then I was sent to a dame school kept by an old woman who stood us in
rows and had a long stick like a billiard cue to get at the back rows. My
father was still at Sligo when I came back from my first lesson and asked
me what I had been taught. I said I had been taught to sing, and he said,
"sing then" and I sang
"Little drops of water,
Little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean,
And the pleasant land"
high up in my head. So my father wrote to the old woman that I was never
to be taught to sing again, and afterwards other teachers were told the
same thing. Presently my eldest sister came on a long visit and she and I
went to a little two-storeyed house in a poor street where an old
gentlewoman taught us spelling and grammar. When we had learned our lesson
well, we were allowed to look at a sword presented to her father who had
led troops in India or China and to spell out a long complimentary
inscription on the silver scabbard. As we walked to her house or home
again we held a large umbrella before us, both gripping the handle and
guiding ourselves by looking out of a round hole gnawed in the cover by a
mouse. When I had got beyond books of one syllable, I began to spend my
time in a room called the Library, though there were no books in it that I
can remember except some old novels I never opened and a many volumed
encyclopaedia published towards the end of the 18th century. I read this
encyclopaedia a great deal and can remember a long passage considering
whether fossil wood despite its appearance might not be only a curiously
shaped stone.
My father's unbelief had set me thinking about the evidences of religion
and I weighed the matter perpetually with great anxiety, for I did not
think I could live without religion. All my religious emotions were, I
think, connected with clouds and cloudy glimpses of luminous sky, perhaps
because of some bible picture of God's speaking to Abraham or the like.
At least I can remember the sight moving me to tears. One day I got a
decisive argument for belief. A cow was about to calve, and I went to the
field where the cow was with some farm-hands who carried a lantern, and
next day I heard that the cow had calved in the early morning. I asked
everybody how calves were born, and because nobody would tell me, made up
my mind that nobody knew. They were the gift of God, that much was
certain, but it was plain that nobody had ever dared to see them come, and
children must come in the same way. I made up my mind that when I was a
man I would wait up till calf or child had come. I was certain there would
be a cloud and a burst of light and God would bring the calf in the cloud
out of the light. That thought made me content until a boy of twelve or
thirteen, who had come on a visit for the day, sat beside me in a hay-loft
and explained all the mechanism of sex. He had learnt all about it from an
elder boy whose pathic he was (to use a term he would not have understood)
and his description, given, as I can see now, as if he were telling of any
other fact of physical life, made me miserable for weeks. After the first
impression wore off, I began to doubt if he had spoken truth, but one day
I discovered a passage in the encyclopaedia, though I only partly
understood its long words, that confirmed what he had said. I did not know
enough to be shocked at his relation to the elder boy, but it was the
first breaking of the dream of childhood.
My realization of death came when my father and mother and my two brothers
and my two sisters were on a visit. I was in the Library when I heard feet
running past and heard somebody say in the passage that my younger
brother, Robert, had died. He had been ill for some days. A little later
my sister and I sat at the table, very happy, drawing ships with their
flags half-mast high. We must have heard or seen that the ships in the
harbour had their flags at half-mast. Next day at breakfast I heard people
telling how my mother and the servant had heard the banshee crying the
night before he died. It must have been after this that I told my
grandmother I did not want to go with her when she went to see old
bed-ridden people because they would soon die.
V
At length when I was eight or nine an aunt said to me, "you are going to
London. Here you are somebody. There you will be nobody at all." I knew at
the time that her words were a blow at my father, not at me, but it was
some years before I knew her reason. She thought so able a man as my
father could have found out some way of painting more popular pictures if
he had set his mind to it and that it was wrong of him "to spend every
evening at his club." She had mistaken, for what she would have considered
a place of wantonness, Heatherley's Art School.
My mother and brother and sister were at Sligo perhaps when I was sent to
England, for my father and I and a group of landscape painters lodged at
Burnham Beeches with an old Mr. and Mrs. Earle. My father was painting the
first big pond you come to if you have driven from Slough through Farnham
Royal. He began it in spring and painted all through the year, the picture
changing with the seasons, and gave it up unfinished when he had painted
the snow upon the heath-covered banks. He is never satisfied and can never
make himself say that any picture is finished. In the evening he heard me
my lessons or read me some novel of Fenimore Cooper's. I found delightful
adventures in the woods--one day a blind worm and an adder fighting in a
green hollow, and sometimes Mrs. Earle would be afraid to tidy the room
because I had put a bottle full of newts on the mantle-piece. Now and then
a boy from a farm on the other side of the road threw a pebble at my
window at daybreak, and he and I went fishing in the big second pond. Now
and then another farmer's boy and I shot sparrows with an old pepper box
revolver and the boy would roast them on a string. There was an old horse
one of the painters called the scaffolding, and sometimes a son of old
Earle's drove with me to Slough and once to Windsor, and at Windsor we
made our lunch of cold sausages bought from a public house. I did not know
what it was to be alone, for I could wander in pleasant alarm through the
enclosed parts, then very large, or round some pond imagining ships going
in and out among the reeds and thinking of Sligo or of strange seafaring
adventures in the fine ship I should launch when I grew up. I had always a
lesson to learn before night and that was a continual misery, for I could
very rarely, with so much to remember, set my thoughts upon it and then
only in fear. One day my father told me that a painter had said I was very
thick-skinned and did not mind what was said to me, and I could not
understand how anybody could be so unjust. It made me wretched to be idle
but one could not help it. I was once surprised and shocked. All but my
father and myself had been to London, and Kennedy and Farrar and Page, I
remember the names vaguely, arrived laughing and talking. One of them had
carried off a card of texts from the waiting room of the station and hung
it up on the wall. I thought "he has stolen it," but my father and all
made it a theme of merry conversation.
Then I returned to Sligo for a few weeks as I was to do once or twice in
every year for years, and after that we settled in London. Perhaps my
mother and the other children had been there all the time, for I remember
my father now and again going to London. The first house we lived in was
close to Burne Jones's house at North End, but we moved after a year or
two to Bedford Park. At North End we had a pear tree in the garden and
plenty of pears, but the pears used to be full of maggots, and almost
opposite lived a school-master called O'Neill, and when a little boy told
me that the school-master's great-grandfather had been a king I did not
doubt it. I was sitting against the hedge and iron railing of some
villa-garden there, when I heard one boy say to another it was something
wrong with my liver that gave me such a dark complexion and that I could
not live more than a year. I said to myself a year is a very long time,
one can do such a lot of things in a year, and put it out of my head. When
my father gave me a holiday and later when I had a holiday from school I
took my schooner boat to the round pond, sailing it very commonly against
the two cutter yachts of an old naval officer. He would sometimes look at
the ducks and say, "I would like to take that fellow home for my dinner,"
and he sang me a sailor's song about a coffin ship which left Sligo after
the great famine, that made me feel very important. The servants at Sligo
had told me the story. When she was moved from the berth she had lain in,
an unknown dead man's body had floated up, a very evil omen; and my
grandfather, who was Lloyds' agent, had condemned her, but she slipped out
in the night. The pond had its own legends; and a boy who had seen a
certain model steamer "burned to the water's edge" was greatly valued as a
friend. There was a little boy I was kind to because I knew his father had
done something disgraceful, though I did not know what. It was years
before I discovered that his father was but the maker of certain popular
statues, many of which are now in public places. I had heard my father's
friends speak of him. Sometimes my sister came with me, and we would look
into all the sweet shops & toy shops on our way home, especially into one
opposite Holland House because there was a cutter yacht made of sugar in
the window, and we drank at all the fountains. Once a stranger spoke to us
and bought us sweets and came with us almost to our door. We asked him to
come in and told him our father's name. He would not come in, but laughed
and said, "Oh, that is the painter who scrapes out every day what he
painted the day before." A poignant memory came upon me the other day
while I was passing the drinking-fountain near Holland Park, for there I
and my sister had spoken together of our longing for Sligo and our hatred
of London. I know we were both very close to tears and remember with
wonder, for I had never known anyone that cared for such momentoes, that I
longed for a sod of earth from some field I knew, something of Sligo to
hold in my hand. It was some old race instinct like that of a savage, for
we had been brought up to laugh at all display of emotion. Yet it was our
mother, who would have thought its display a vulgarity, who kept alive
that love. She would spend hours listening to stories or telling stories
of the pilots and fishing people of Rosses Point, or of her own Sligo
girlhood, and it was always assumed between her and us that Sligo was more
beautiful than other places. I can see now that she had great depth of
feeling, that she was her father's daughter. My memory of what she was
like in those days has grown very dim, but I think her sense of
personality, her desire of any life of her own, had disappeared in her
care for us and in much anxiety about money. I always see her sewing or
knitting in spectacles and wearing some plain dress. Yet ten years ago
when I was in San Francisco, an old cripple came to see me who had left
Sligo before her marriage; he came to tell me, he said, that my mother
"had been the most beautiful girl in Sligo."
[Illustration: _Mrs. Yeats from a drawing by J. B. Yeats made in 1867_]
The only lessons I had ever learned were those my father taught me, for he
terrified me by descriptions of my moral degradation and he humiliated me
by my likeness to disagreeable people; but presently I was sent to school
at Hammersmith. It was a Gothic building of yellow brick: a large hall
full of desks, some small class-rooms and a separate house for boarders,
all built perhaps in 1840 or 1850. I thought it an ancient building and
that it had belonged to the founder of the school, Lord Godolphin, who was
romantic to me because there was a novel about him. I never read the
novel, but I thought only romantic people were put in books. On one side,
there was a piano factory of yellow brick, upon two sides half finished
rows of little shops and villas all yellow brick, and on the fourth side,
outside the wall of our playing field, a brickfield of cinders and piles
of half-burned yellow bricks. All the names and faces of my school-fellows
have faded from me except one name without a face and the face and name of
one friend, mainly no doubt because it was all so long ago, but partly
because I only seem to remember things that have mixed themselves up with
scenes that have some quality to bring them again and again before the
memory. For some days, as I walked homeward along the Hammersmith Road, I
told myself that whatever I most cared for had been taken away. I had
found a small, green-covered book given to my father by a Dublin man of
science; it gave an account of the strange sea creatures the man of
science had discovered among the rocks at Howth or dredged out of Dublin
Bay. It had long been my favourite book; and when I read it I believed
that I was growing very wise, but now I should have no time for it nor for
my own thoughts. Every moment would be taken up learning or saying lessons
or walking between school and home four times a day, for I came home in
the middle of the day for dinner. But presently I forgot my trouble,
absorbed in two things I had never known, companionship and enmity. After
my first day's lesson, a circle of boys had got around me in a playing
field and asked me questions, "who's your father?" "what does he do?" "how
much money has he?" Presently a boy said something insulting. I had never
struck anybody or been struck, and now all in a minute, without any
intention upon my side, but as if I had been a doll moved by a string, I
was hitting at the boys within reach and being hit. After that I was
called names for being Irish, and had many fights and never, for years,
got the better of any one of them; for I was delicate and had no muscles.
Sometimes, however, I found means of retaliation, even of aggression.
There was a boy with a big stride, much feared by little boys, and finding
him alone in the playing field, I went up to him and said, "rise upon
Sugaun and sink upon Gad." "What does that mean?" he said. "Rise upon
hay-leg and sink upon straw," I answered and told him that in Ireland the
sergeant tied straw and hay to the ankles of a stupid recruit to show him
the difference between his legs. My ears were boxed, and when I complained
to my friends, they said I had brought it upon myself; and that I deserved
all I got. I probably dared myself to other feats of a like sort, for I
did not think English people intelligent or well-behaved unless they were
artists. Everyone I knew well in Sligo despised Nationalists and
Catholics, but all disliked England with a prejudice that had come down
perhaps from the days of the Irish Parliament. I knew stories to the
discredit of England, and took them all seriously. My mother had met some
English woman who did not like Dublin because the legs of the men were too
straight, and at Sligo, as everybody knew, an Englishman had once said to
a car-driver, "if you people were not so lazy, you would pull down the
mountain and spread it out over the sand and that would give you acres of
good fields." At Sligo there is a wide river mouth and at ebb tide most of
it is dry sand, but all Sligo knew that in some way I cannot remember it
was the spreading of the tide over the sand that left the narrow channel
fit for shipping. At any rate the carman had gone chuckling all over Sligo
with his tale. People would tell it to prove that Englishmen were always
grumbling. "They grumble about their dinners and everything--there was an
Englishman who wanted to pull down Knock-na-Rea" and so on. My mother had
shown them to me kissing at railway stations, and taught me to feel
disgust at their lack of reserve, and my father told how my grandfather,
William Yeats, who had died before I was born, when he came home to his
Rectory in County Down from an English visit, spoke of some man he had met
on a coach road who "Englishman-like" told him all his affairs. My father
explained that an Englishman generally believed that his private affairs
did him credit, while an Irishman, being poor and probably in debt, had no
such confidence. I, however, did not believe in this explanation. My Sligo
nurses, who had in all likelihood the Irish Catholic political hatred, had
never spoken well of any Englishman.
Once when walking in the town of Sligo I had turned to look after an
English man and woman whose clothes attracted me. The man I remember had
gray clothes and knee-breeches and the woman a gray dress, and my nurse
had said contemptuously, "towrows." Perhaps before my time, there had been
some English song with the burden "tow row row," and everybody had told me
that English people ate skates and even dog-fish, and I myself had only
just arrived in England when I saw an old man put marmalade in his
porridge. I was divided from all those boys, not merely by the anecdotes
that are everywhere perhaps a chief expression of the distrust of races,
but because our mental images were different. I read their boys' books and
they excited me, but if I read of some English victory, I did not believe
that I read of my own people. They thought of Cressy and Agincourt and the
Union Jack and were all very patriotic, and I, without those memories of
Limerick and the Yellow Ford that would have strengthened an Irish
Catholic, thought of mountain and lake, of my grandfather and of ships.
Anti-Irish feeling was running high, for the Land League had been founded
and landlords had been shot, and I, who had no politics, was yet full of
pride, for it is romantic to live in a dangerous country.
I daresay I thought the rough manners of a cheap school, as my grandfather
Yeats had those of a chance companion, typical of all England. At any rate
I had a harassed life & got many a black eye and had many outbursts of
grief and rage. Once a boy, the son of a great Bohemian glass-maker, and
who was older than the rest of us, and had been sent out of his country
because of a love affair, beat a boy for me because we were "both
foreigners." And a boy, who grew to be the school athlete and my chief
friend, beat a great many. His are the face and name that I remember--his
name was of Huguenot origin and his face like his gaunt and lithe body had
something of the American Indian in colour and lineament.
I was very much afraid of the other boys, and that made me doubt myself
for the first time. When I had gathered pieces of wood in the corner for
my great ship, I was confident that I could keep calm among the storms and
die fighting when the great battle came. But now I was ashamed of my lack
of courage; for I wanted to be like my grandfather who thought so little
of danger that he had jumped overboard in the Bay of Biscay after an old
hat. I was very much afraid of physical pain, and one day when I had made
some noise in class, my friend the athlete was accused and I allowed him
to get two strokes of the cane before I gave myself up. He had held out
his hands without flinching and had not rubbed them on his sides
afterwards. I was not caned, but was made to stand up for the rest of the
lesson. I suffered very much afterwards when the thought came to me, but
he did not reproach me.
I had been some years at school before I had my last fight. My friend, the
athlete, had given me many months of peace, but at last refused to beat
any more and said I must learn to box, and not go near the other boys till
I knew how. I went home with him every day and boxed in his room, and the
bouts had always the same ending. My excitability gave me an advantage at
first and I would drive him across the room, and then he would drive me
across and it would end very commonly with my nose bleeding. One day his
father, an elderly banker, brought us out into the garden and tried to
make us box in a cold-blooded, courteous way, but it was no use. At last
he said I might go near the boys again and I was no sooner inside the gate
of the playing field than a boy flung a handful of mud and cried out "mad
Irishman." I hit him several times on the face without being hit, till the
boys round said we should make friends. I held out my hand in fear; for I
knew if we went on I should be beaten, and he took it sullenly. I had so
poor a reputation as a fighter that it was a great disgrace to him, and
even the masters made fun of his swollen face; and though some little boys
came in a deputation to ask me to lick a boy they named, I had never
another fight with a school-fellow. We had a great many fights with the
street boys and the boys of a neighbouring charity school. We had always
the better because we were not allowed to fling stones, and that compelled
us to close or do our best to close. The monitors had been told to report
any boy who fought in the street, but they only reported those who flung
stones. I always ran at the athlete's heels, but I never hit anyone. My
father considered these fights absurd, and even that they were an English
absurdity, and so I could not get angry enough to like hitting and being
hit; and then too my friend drove the enemy before him. He had no doubts
or speculations to lighten his fist upon an enemy, that, being of low
behaviour, should be beaten as often as possible, and there were real
wrongs to avenge: one of our boys had been killed by the blow of a stone
hid in a snowball. Sometimes we on our side got into trouble with the
parents of boys. There was a quarrel between the athlete and an old German
who had a barber's shop we passed every day on our way home, and one day
he spat through the window and hit the German on his bald head--the
monitors had not forbidden spitting. The German ran after us, but when the
athlete squared up he went away. Now, though I knew it was not right to
spit at people, my admiration for my friend arose to a great height. I
spread his fame over the school, and next day there was a fine stir when
somebody saw the old German going up the gravel walk to the head-master's
room. Presently there was such a noise in the passage that even the master
had to listen. It was the head-master's red-haired brother turning the old
German out and shouting to the man-servant "see that he doesn't steal the
top-coats." We heard afterwards that he had asked the names of the two
boys who passed his window every day and been told the names of the two
head boys who passed also but were notoriously gentlemanly in their
manners. Yet my friend was timid also and that restored my confidence in
myself. He would often ask me to buy the sweets or the ginger-beer because
he was afraid sometimes when speaking to a stranger.
I had one reputation that I valued. At first when I went to the
Hammersmith swimming-baths with the other boys, I was afraid to plunge in
until I had gone so far down the ladder that the water came up to my
thighs; but one day when I was alone I fell from the spring-board which
was five or six feet above the water. After that I would dive from a
greater height than the others and I practised swimming under water and
pretending not to be out of breath when I came up. And then if I ran a
race, I took care not to pant or show any sign of strain. And in this I
had an advantage even over the athlete; for though he could run faster and
was harder to tire than anybody else, he grew very pale and I was often
paid compliments. I used to run with my friend when he was training to
keep him in company. He would give me a long start and soon overtake me.
I followed the career of a certain professional runner for months, buying
papers that would tell me if he had won or lost. I had seen him described
as "the bright particular star of American athletics," and the wonderful
phrase had thrown enchantment over him. Had he been called the particular
bright star, I should have cared nothing for him. I did not understand the
symptom for years after. I was nursing my own dream, my form of the common
school-boy dream, though I was no longer gathering the little pieces of
broken and rotting wood. Often, instead of learning my lesson, I covered
the white squares of the chessboard on my little table with pen and ink
pictures of myself, doing all kinds of courageous things. One day my
father said "there was a man in Nelson's ship at the battle of Trafalgar,
a ship's purser, whose hair turned white; what a sensitive temperament;
that man should have achieved something!" I was vexed and bewildered, and
am still bewildered and still vexed, finding it a poor and crazy thing
that we who have imagined so many noble persons cannot bring our flesh to
heel.