From our first arrival in Dublin, my father had brought me from time to
time to see Edward Dowden. He and my father had been college friends and
were trying, perhaps, to take up again their old friendship. Sometimes we
were asked to breakfast, and afterwards my father would tell me to read
out one of my poems. Dowden was wise in his encouragement, never
overpraising and never unsympathetic, and he would sometimes lend me
books. The orderly, prosperous house where all was in good taste, where
poetry was rightly valued, made Dublin tolerable for a while, and for
perhaps a couple of years he was an image of romance. My father would not
share my enthusiasm and soon, I noticed, grew impatient at these meetings.
He would sometimes say that he had wanted Dowden when they were young to
give himself to creative art, and would talk of what he considered
Dowden's failure in life. I know now that he was finding in his friend
what he himself had been saved from by the conversation of the
pre-Raphaelites. "He will not trust his nature," he would say, or "he is
too much influenced by his inferiors," or he would praise "Renunciants,"
one of Dowden's poems, to prove what Dowden might have written. I was not
influenced for I had imagined a past worthy of that dark, romantic face. I
took literally his verses, touched here and there with Swinburnian
rhetoric, and believed that he had loved, unhappily and illicitly; and
when through the practice of my art I discovered that certain images about
the love of woman were the properties of a school, I but changed my fancy
and thought of him as very wise.
I was constantly troubled about philosophic questions. I would say to my
fellow students at the Art school, "poetry and sculpture exist to keep our
passions alive;" and somebody would say, "we would be much better without
our passions." Or I would have a week's anxiety over the problem: do the
arts make us happier, or more sensitive and therefore more unhappy. And I
would say to Hughes or Sheppard, "if I cannot be certain they make us
happier I will never write again." If I spoke of these things to Dowden he
would put the question away with good-humoured irony: he seemed to
condescend to everybody and everything and was now my sage. I was about to
learn that if a man is to write lyric poetry he must be shaped by nature
and art to some one out of half-a-dozen traditional poses, and be lover or
saint, sage or sensualist, or mere mocker of all life; and that none but
that stroke of luckless luck can open before him the accumulated
expression of the world. And this thought before it could be knowledge was
an instinct.
I was vexed when my father called Dowden's irony timidity, but after many
years his impression has not changed for he wrote to me but a few months
ago, "it was like talking to a priest. One had to be careful not to remind
him of his sacrifice." Once after breakfast Dowden read us some chapters
of the unpublished "Life of Shelley," and I who had made the "Prometheus
Unbound" my sacred book was delighted with all he read. I was chilled,
however, when he explained that he had lost his liking for Shelley and
would not have written it but for an old promise to the Shelley family.
When it was published, Matthew Arnold made sport of certain
conventionalities and extravagances that were, my father and I had come to
see, the violence or clumsiness of a conscientious man hiding from himself
a lack of sympathy. He had abandoned too, or was about to abandon, what
was to have been his master-work, "The Life of Goethe," though in his
youth a lecture course at Alexandra College that spoke too openly of
Goethe's loves had brought upon him the displeasure of our Protestant
Archbishop of Dublin. Only Wordsworth, he said, kept, more than all, his
early love.
Though my faith was shaken, it was only when he urged me to read George
Eliot that I became angry and disillusioned & worked myself into a quarrel
or half-quarrel. I had read all Victor Hugo's romances and a couple of
Balzac's and was in no mind to like her. She seemed to have a distrust or
a distaste for all in life that gives one a springing foot. Then too she
knew so well how to enforce her distaste by the authority of her
mid-Victorian science or by some habit of mind of its breeding, that I,
who had not escaped the fascination of what I loathed, doubted while the
book lay open whatsoever my instinct knew of splendour. She disturbed me
and alarmed me, but when I spoke of her to my father, he threw her aside
with a phrase, "Oh, she was an ugly woman who hated handsome men and
handsome women;" and he began to praise "Wuthering Heights."
Only the other day, when I got Dowden's letters, did I discover for how
many years the friendship between Dowden and my father had been an
antagonism. My father had written from Fitzroy Road in the sixties that
the brotherhood, by which he meant the poet Edwin Ellis, Nettleship and
himself, "abhorred Wordsworth;" and Dowden, not remembering that another
week would bring a different mood and abhorrence, had written a pained and
solemn letter. My father had answered that Dowden believed too much in the
intellect and that all valuable education was but a stirring up of the
emotions and had added that this did not mean excitability. "In the
completely emotional man," he wrote, "the least awakening of feeling is a
harmony in which every chord of every feeling vibrates. Excitement is the
feature of an insufficiently emotional nature, the harsh vibrating
discourse of but one or two chords." Living in a free world accustomed to
the gay exaggeration of the talk of equals, of men who talk and write to
discover truth and not for popular instruction, he had already, when both
men were in their twenties, decided it is plain that Dowden was a
Provincial.