I no longer went to the Harcourt Street school and we had moved from Howth
to Rathgar. I was at the Arts schools in Kildare Street, but my father,
who came to the school now and then, was my teacher. The masters left me
alone, for they liked a very smooth surface and a very neat outline, and
indeed understood nothing but neatness and smoothness. A drawing of the
Discobolus, after my father had touched it, making the shoulder stand out
with swift and broken lines, had no meaning for them; and for the most
part I exaggerated all that my father did. Sometimes indeed, out of
rivalry to some student near, I too would try to be smooth and neat. One
day I helped the student next me, who certainly had no artistic gifts, to
make a drawing of some plaster fruit. In his gratitude he told me his
history. "I don't care for art," he said. "I am a good billiard player,
one of the best in Dublin; but my guardian said I must take a profession,
so I asked my friends to tell me where I would not have to pass an
examination, and here I am." It may be that I myself was there for no
better reason. My father had wanted me to go to Trinity College and, when
I would not, had said, "my father and grandfather and great-grandfather
have been there." I did not tell him my reason was that I did not believe
my classics or my mathematics good enough for any examination.
I had for fellow-student an unhappy "village genius" sent to Dublin by
some charitable Connaught landlord. He painted religious pictures upon
sheets nailed to the wall of his bedroom, a "Last Judgment" among the
rest. Then there was a wild young man who would come to school of a
morning with a daisy-chain hung round his neck; and George Russel, "AE,"
the poet, and mystic. He did not paint the model as we tried to, for some
other image rose always before his eyes (a St. John in the Desert I
remember,) and already he spoke to us of his visions. His conversation, so
lucid and vehement to-day, was all but incomprehensible, though now and
again some phrase would be understood and repeated. One day he announced
that he was leaving the Art schools because his will was weak and the arts
or any other emotional pursuit could but weaken it further.
Presently I went to the modelling class to be with certain elder students
who had authority among us. Among these were John Hughes and Oliver
Sheppard, well-known now as Irish sculptors. The day I first went into the
studio where they worked, I stood still upon the threshold in amazement. A
pretty gentle-looking girl was modelling in the middle of the room, and
all the men were swearing at her for getting in their light with the most
violent and fantastic oaths, and calling her every sort of name, and
through it all she worked in undisturbed diligence. Presently the man
nearest me saw my face and called out, "she is stone deaf, so we always
swear at her and call her names when she gets in our light." In reality I
soon found that everyone was kind to her, carrying her drawing-boards and
the like, and putting her into the tram at the day's end. We had no
scholarship, no critical knowledge of the history of painting, and no
settled standards. A student would show his fellows some French
illustrated paper that we might all admire, now some statue by Rodin or
Dalou and now some declamatory Parisian monument, and if I did not happen
to have discussed the matter with my father I would admire with no more
discrimination than the rest. That pretentious monument to Gambetta made a
great stir among us. No influence touched us but that of France, where one
or two of the older students had been already and all hoped to go. Of
England I alone knew anything. Our ablest student had learnt Italian to
read Dante, but had never heard of Tennyson or Browning, and it was I who
carried into the school some knowledge of English poetry, especially of
Browning who had begun to move me by his air of wisdom. I do not believe
that I worked well, for I wrote a great deal and that tired me, and the
work I was set to bored me. When alone and uninfluenced, I longed for
pattern, for pre-Raphaelitism, for an art allied to poetry, and returned
again and again to our National Gallery to gaze at Turner's Golden Bough.
Yet I was too timid, had I known how, to break away from my father's style
and the style of those about me. I was always hoping that my father would
return to the style of his youth, and make pictures out of certain
designs now lost, that one could still find in his portfolios. There was
one of an old hunchback in vague medieval dress, going through some
underground place where there are beds with people in the beds; a girl
half rising from one has seized his hand and is kissing it. I have
forgotten its story, but the strange old man and the intensity in the
girl's figure are vivid as in my childhood. There is some passage, I
believe in the Bible, about a man who saved a city and went away and was
never heard of again and here he was in another design, an old ragged
beggar in the market-place laughing at his own statue. But my father would
say: "I must paint what I see in front of me. Of course I shall really
paint something different because my nature will come in unconsciously."
Sometimes I would try to argue with him, for I had come to think the
philosophy of his fellow-artists and himself a misunderstanding created by
Victorian science, and science I had grown to hate with a monkish hate;
but no good came of it, and in a moment I would unsay what I had said and
pretend that I did not really believe it. My father was painting many fine
portraits, Dublin leaders of the bar, college notabilities, or chance
comers whom he would paint for nothing if he liked their heads; but all
displeased me. In my heart I thought that only beautiful things should be
painted, and that only ancient things and the stuff of dreams were
beautiful. And I almost quarrelled with my father when he made a large
water-colour, one of his finest pictures and now lost, of a consumptive
beggar girl. And a picture at the Hibernian Academy of cocottes with
yellow faces sitting before a cafe by some follower of Manet's made me
miserable for days, but I was happy when partly through my father's
planning some Whistlers were brought over and exhibited, and did not agree
when my father said: "imagine making your old mother an arrangement in
gray!" I did not care for mere reality and believed that creation should
be conscious, and yet I could only imitate my father. I could not compose
anything but a portrait and even to-day I constantly see people as a
portrait painter, posing them in the mind's eye before such and such a
background. Meanwhile I was still very much of a child, sometimes drawing
with an elaborate frenzy, simulating what I believed of inspiration and
sometimes walking with an artificial stride in memory of Hamlet and
stopping at shop windows to look at my tie gathered into a loose
sailor-knot and to regret that it could not be always blown out by the
wind like Byron's tie in the picture. I had as many ideas as I have now,
only I did not know how to choose from among them those that belonged to
my life.