My father's influence upon my thoughts was at its height. We went to
Dublin by train every morning, breakfasting in his studio. He had taken a
large room with a beautiful 18th century mantle-piece in a York Street
tenement house, and at breakfast he read passages from the poets, and
always from the play or poem at its most passionate moment. He never read
me a passage because of its speculative interest, and indeed did not care
at all for poetry where there was generalisation or abstraction however
impassioned. He would read out the first speeches of the Prometheus
Unbound, but never the ecstatic lyricism of that famous fourth act; and
another day the scene where Coriolanus comes to the house of Aufidius and
tells the impudent servants that his home is under the canopy. I have seen
Coriolanus played a number of times since then, and read it more than
once, but that scene is more vivid than the rest, and it is my father's
voice that I hear and not Irving's or Benson's. He did not care even for a
fine lyric passage unless one felt some actual man behind its elaboration
of beauty, and he was always looking for the lineaments of some desirable,
familiar life. When the spirits sang their scorn of Manfred I was to judge
by Manfred's answer "O sweet and melancholy voices" that they could not,
even in anger, put off their spiritual sweetness. He thought Keats a
greater poet than Shelley, because less abstract, but did not read him,
caring little, I think, for any of that most beautiful poetry which has
come in modern times from the influence of painting. All must be an
idealisation of speech, and at some moment of passionate action or
somnambulistic reverie. I remember his saying that all contemplative men
were in a conspiracy to overrate their state of life, and that all writers
were of them, excepting the great poets. Looking backwards, it seems to me
that I saw his mind in fragments, which had always hidden connections I
only now begin to discover. He disliked the Victorian poetry of ideas, and
Wordsworth but for certain passages or whole poems. He described one
morning over his breakfast how in the shape of the head of a Wordsworthian
scholar, an old and greatly respected clergyman whose portrait he was
painting, he had discovered all the animal instincts of a prizefighter. He
despised the formal beauty of Raphael, that calm which is not an ordered
passion but an hypocrisy, and attacked Raphael's life for its love of
pleasure and its self-indulgence. In literature he was always
pre-Raphaelite, and carried into literature principles that, while the
Academy was still unbroken, had made the first attack upon academic form.
He no longer read me anything for its story, and all our discussion was of
style.