I had very little money and one day the toll-taker at the metal bridge
over the Liffey and a gossip of his laughed when I refused the halfpenny
and said "no, I will go round by O'Connell Bridge." When I called for the
first time at a house in Leinster Road several middle-aged women were
playing cards and suggested my taking a hand and gave me a glass of
sherry. The sherry went to my head and I was impoverished for days by the
loss of sixpence. My hostess was Ellen O'Leary, who kept house for her
brother John O'Leary the Fenian, the handsomest old man I had ever seen.
He had been condemned to twenty years penal servitude but had been set
free after five on condition that he did not return to Ireland for fifteen
years. He had said to the government, "I will not return if Germany makes
war on you, but I will return if France does." He and his old sister lived
exactly opposite the Orange leader for whom he had a great respect. His
sister stirred my affection at first for no better reason than her
likeness of face and figure to the matron of my London school, a friendly
person, but when I came to know her I found sister and brother alike were
of Plutarch's people. She told me of her brother's life, how in his youth
as now in his age, he would spend his afternoons searching for rare books
among second-hand book-shops, how the Fenian organizer James Stephens had
found him there and asked for his help. "I do not think you have any
chance of success," he had said, "but if you never ask me to enroll
anybody else I will join, it will be very good for the morals of the
country." She told me how it grew to be a formidable movement, and of the
arrests that followed (I believe that her own sweetheart had somehow
fallen among the wreckage,) of sentences of death pronounced upon false
evidence amid a public panic, and told it all without bitterness. No
fanaticism could thrive amid such gentleness. She never found it hard to
believe that an opponent had as high a motive as her own and needed upon
her difficult road no spur of hate.
Her brother seemed very unlike on a first hearing for he had some violent
oaths, "Good God in Heaven" being one of them; and if he disliked anything
one said or did, he spoke all his thought, but in a little one heard his
justice match her charity. "Never has there been a cause so bad," he would
say, "that it has not been defended by good men for good reasons." Nor
would he overvalue any man because they shared opinions; and when he lent
me the poems of Davis and the Young Irelanders, of whom I had known
nothing, he did not, although the poems of Davis had made him a patriot,
claim that they were very good poetry.
His room was full of books, always second-hand copies that had often been
ugly and badly printed when new and had not grown to my unhistoric mind
more pleasing from the dirt of some old Dublin book-shop. Great numbers
were Irish, and for the first time I began to read histories and verses
that a Catholic Irishman knows from boyhood. He seemed to consider
politics almost wholly as a moral discipline, and seldom said of any
proposed course of action that it was practical or otherwise. When he
spoke to me of his prison life he spoke of all with seeming freedom, but
presently one noticed that he never spoke of hardship and if one asked him
why, he would say, "I was in the hands of my enemies, why should I
complain?" I have heard since that the governor of his jail found out that
he had endured some unnecessary discomfort for months and had asked why he
did not speak of it. "I did not come here to complain," was the answer. He
had the moral genius that moves all young people and moves them the more
if they are repelled by those who have strict opinions and yet have lived
commonplace lives. I had begun, as would any other of my training, to say
violent and paradoxical things to shock provincial sobriety, and Dowden's
ironical calm had come to seem but a professional pose. But here was
something as spontaneous as the life of an artist. Sometimes he would say
things that would have sounded well in some heroic Elizabethan play. It
became my delight to rouse him to these outbursts for I was the poet in
the presence of his theme. Once when I was defending an Irish politician
who had made a great outcry because he was treated as a common felon, by
showing that he did it for the cause's sake, he said, "there are things
that a man must not do even to save a nation." He would speak a sentence
like that in ignorance of its passionate value, and would forget it the
moment after.
I met at his house friends of later life, Katharine Tynan who still lived
upon her father's farm, and Dr. Hyde, still a college student who took
snuff like those Mayo county people, whose stories and songs he was
writing down. "Davitt wants followers by the thousand," O'Leary would say,
"I only want half-a-dozen." One constant caller looked at me with much
hostility, John F. Taylor, an obscure great orator. The other day in
Dublin I overheard a man murmuring to another one of his speeches as I
might some Elizabethan lyric that is in my very bones. It was delivered at
some Dublin debate, some College society perhaps. The Lord Chancellor had
spoken with balanced unemotional sentences now self-complacent, now in
derision. Taylor began hesitating and stopping for words, but after
speaking very badly for a little, straightened his figure and spoke as out
of a dream: "I am carried to another age, a nobler court, and another Lord
Chancellor is speaking. I am at the court of the first Pharaoh." Thereupon
he put into the mouth of that Egyptian all his audience had listened to,
but now it was spoken to the children of Israel. "If you have any
spirituality as you boast, why not use our great empire to spread it
through the world, why still cling to that beggarly nationality of yours?
what are its history and its works weighed with those of Egypt." Then his
voice changed and sank: "I see a man at the edge of the crowd; he is
standing listening there, but he will not obey;" and then with his voice
rising to a cry, "had he obeyed he would never have come down the mountain
carrying in his arms the tables of the Law in the language of the outlaw."
He had been in a linen-draper's shop for a while, had educated himself and
put himself to college, and was now, as a lawyer, famous for hopeless
cases where unsure judgment could not make things worse, and eloquence,
power of cross-examination and learning might amend all. Conversation with
him was always argument, and for an obstinate opponent he had such phrases
as, "have you your head in a bag, sir?" and I seemed his particular
aversion. As with many of the self-made men of that generation, Carlyle
was his chief literary enthusiasm, supporting him, as he believed, in his
contempt for the complexities and refinements he had not found in his hard
life, and I belonged to a generation that had begun to call Carlyle
rhetorician and demagogue. I had once seen what I had believed to be an
enraged bull in a field and had walked up to it as a test of courage to
discover, just as panic fell upon me, that it was merely an irritable cow.
I braved Taylor again and again, but always found him worse than my
expectation. I would say, quoting Mill, "oratory is heard, poetry is
overheard." And he would answer, his voice full of contempt, that there
was always an audience; and yet, in his moments of lofty speech, he
himself was alone no matter what the crowd.
At other times his science or his Catholic orthodoxy, I never could
discover which, would become enraged with my supernaturalism. I can but
once remember escaping him unabashed and unconquered. I said with
deliberate exaggeration at some evening party at O'Leary's "five out of
every six people have seen a ghost;" and Taylor fell into my net with
"well, I will ask everybody here." I managed that the first answer should
come from a man who had heard a voice he believed to be that of his dead
brother, and the second from a doctor's wife who had lived in a haunted
house and met a man with his throat cut, whose throat as he drifted along
the garden-walk "had opened and closed like the mouth of a fish." Taylor
threw up his head like an angry horse, but asked no further question, and
did not return to the subject that evening. If he had gone on he would
have heard from everybody some like story though not all at first hand,
and Miss O'Leary would have told him what happened at the death of one of
the MacManus brothers, well known in the politics of Young Ireland. One
brother was watching by the bed where the other lay dying and saw a
strange hawk-like bird fly through the open window and alight upon the
breast of the dying man. He did not dare to drive it away and it remained
there, as it seemed, looking into his brother's eyes until death came, and
then it flew out of the window. I think, though I am not sure, that she
had the story from the watcher himself.
It was understood that Taylor's temper kept him from public life, though
he may have been the greatest orator of his time, partly because no leader
would accept him, and still more because, in the words of one of his
Dublin enemies, "he had never joined any party and as soon as one joined
him he seceded." With O'Leary he was always, even when they differed, as
they often did, gentle and deferential, but once only, and that was years
afterwards, did I think that he was about to include me among his friends.
We met by chance in a London street and he stopped me with an abrupt
movement: "Yeats," he said, "I have been thinking. If you and ... (naming
another aversion,) were born in a small Italian principality in the Middle
Ages, he would have friends at court and you would be in exile with a
price on your head." He went off without another word, and the next time
we met he was no less offensive than before. He, imprisoned in himself,
and not the always unperturbed O'Leary, comes before me as the tragic
figure of my youth. The same passion for all moral and physical splendour
that drew him to O'Leary would make him beg leave to wear, for some few
days, a friend's ring or pin, and gave him a heart that every pretty woman
set on fire. I doubt if he was happy in his loves; for those his powerful
intellect had fascinated were, I believe, repelled by his coarse red hair,
his gaunt ungainly body, his stiff movements as of a Dutch doll, his badly
rolled, shabby umbrella. And yet with women, as with O'Leary, he was
gentle, deferential, almost diffident.
A Young Ireland Society met in the lecture hall of a workman's club in
York Street with O'Leary for president, and there four or five university
students and myself and occasionally Taylor spoke on Irish history or
literature. When Taylor spoke, it was a great event, and his delivery in
the course of a speech or lecture of some political verse by Thomas Davis
gave me a conviction of how great might be the effect of verse spoken by
a man almost rhythm-drunk at some moment of intensity, the apex of long
mounting thought. Verses that seemed when one saw them upon the page flat
and empty caught from that voice, whose beauty was half in its harsh
strangeness, nobility and style. My father had always read verse with an
equal intensity and a greater subtlety, but this art was public and his
private, and it is Taylor's voice that rings in my ears and awakens my
longing when I have heard some player speak lines, "so naturally," as a
famous player said to me, "that nobody can find out that it is verse at
all." I made a good many speeches, more I believe as a training for
self-possession than from desire of speech.
Once our debates roused a passion that came to the newspapers and the
streets. There was an excitable man who had fought for the Pope against
the Italian patriots and who always rode a white horse in our Nationalist
processions. He got on badly with O'Leary who had told him that
"attempting to oppress others was a poor preparation for liberating your
own country." O'Leary had written some letter to the press condemning the
"Irish-American Dynamite Party" as it was called, and defining the limits
of "honourable warfare." At the next meeting, the papal soldier rose in
the middle of the discussion on some other matter and moved a vote of
censure on O'Leary. "I myself" he said "do not approve of bombs, but I do
not think that any Irishman should be discouraged." O'Leary ruled him out
of order. He refused to obey and remained standing. Those round him began
to threaten. He swung the chair he had been sitting on round his head and
defied everybody. However he was seized from all sides and thrown out, and
a special meeting called to expel him. He wrote letters to the papers and
addressed a crowd somewhere. "No Young Ireland Society," he protested,
"could expel a man whose grandfather had been hanged in 1798." When the
night of the special meeting came his expulsion was moved, but before the
vote could be taken an excited man announced that there was a crowd in the
street, that the papal soldier was making a speech, that in a moment we
should be attacked. Three or four of us ran and put our backs to the door
while others carried on the debate. It was an inner door with narrow glass
windows at each side and through these we could see the street-door and
the crowd in the street. Presently a man asked us through the crack in the
door if we would as a favour "leave the crowd to the workman's club
upstairs." In a couple of minutes there was a great noise of sticks and
broken glass, and after that our landlord came to find out who was to pay
for the hall-lamp.