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_THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL_
PRIVATELY PRINTED BOOKS
(_Uniform with this Volume_)
THE STORY-TELLER'S HOLIDAY (_George Moore_) _July 1918_
AVOWALS (_George Moore_) _September 1919_
ESTHER WATERS (_George Moore_) _October 1920_
THE COMING OF GABRIELLE (_George Moore_) _December 1920_
HELOISE AND ABELARD (_George Moore_) _February 1921_
NINE TALES FROM "LES CONTES DROLATIQUES" OF BALZAC
(_Translated by Robert Crawford_) _November 1921_
A PORTRAIT OF GEORGE MOORE IN A STUDY OF HIS WORK
(_John Freeman_) _May 1922_
THE CAULDRON OF ANNWN (_Thomas Evelyn Ellis_) _June 1922_
[Illustration: _Emery Walker Ph.oc. From a picture by Charles Shannon_]
THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL
By W. B. YEATS
LONDON
PRIVATELY PRINTED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY BY
T. WERNER LAURIE, LTD.
1922
_To_
JOHN QUINN
_my friend and helper,
and friend and helper of certain people
mentioned in this book_.
GIFT
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL
_This edition consists of one thousand copies numbered and signed._
_This is No._ 24
PREFACE
_I have found in an old diary a quotation from Stephane Mallarme, saying
that his epoch was troubled by the trembling of the veil of the Temple. As
those words were still true, during the years of my life described in this
book, I have chosen The Trembling of the Veil for its title._
_Except in one or two trivial details, where I have the warrant of old
friendship, I have not, without permission, quoted conversation or
described occurrence from the private life of named or recognisable
persons. I have not felt my freedom abated, for most of the friends of my
youth are dead and over the dead I have an historian's rights. They were
artists and writers and certain among them men of genius, and the life of
a man of genius, because of his greater sincerity, is often an experiment
that needs analysis and record. At least my generation so valued
personality that it thought so. I have said all the good I know and all
the evil: I have kept nothing back necessary to understanding._
_W. B. YEATS._
_May, 1922.
Thoor Ballylee._
CONTENTS
PAGE
BOOK I FOUR YEARS 1887-1891 3
BOOK II IRELAND AFTER THE FALL OF PARNELL 83
BOOK III HODOS CAMELIONIS 135
BOOK IV THE TRAGIC GENERATION 157
BOOK V THE STIRRING OF THE BONES 225
BOOK I FOUR YEARS--1887-1891
THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL
_FOUR YEARS_ 1887-1891
I
At the end of the 'eighties my father and mother, my brother and sisters
and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were settled in Bedford Park in
a red-brick house with several mantelpieces of wood, copied from marble
mantelpieces designed by the brothers Adam, a balcony and a little garden
shadowed by a great horse-chestnut tree. Years before we had lived there,
when the crooked ostentatiously picturesque streets with great trees
casting great shadows had been a new enthusiasm: the Pre-Raphaelite
movement at last affecting life. But now exaggerated criticism had taken
the place of enthusiasm, the tiled roofs, the first in modern London, were
said to leak, which they did not, and the drains to be bad, though that
was no longer true; and I imagine that houses were cheap. I remember
feeling disappointed because the co-operative stores, with their little
seventeenth century panes, had lost the romance they had when I had passed
them still unfinished on my way to school; and because the public house,
called The Tabard after Chaucer's Inn, was so plainly a common public
house; and because the great sign of a trumpeter designed by Rooke, the
Pre-Raphaelite artist, had been freshened by some inferior hand. The big
red-brick church had never pleased me, and I was accustomed, when I saw
the wooden balustrade that ran along the slanting edge of the roof where
nobody ever walked or could walk, to remember the opinion of some
architect friend of my father's, that it had been put there to keep the
birds from falling off. Still, however, it had some village characters and
helped us to feel not wholly lost in the metropolis. I no longer went to
church as a regular habit, but go I sometimes did, for one Sunday morning
I saw these words painted on a board in the porch: "The congregation are
requested to kneel during prayers; the kneelers are afterwards to be hung
upon pegs provided for the purpose." In front of every seat hung a little
cushion and these cushions were called "kneelers." Presently the joke ran
through the community, where there were many artists who considered
religion at best an unimportant accessory to good architecture and who
disliked that particular church.
II
I could not understand where the charm had gone that I had felt, when as a
school-boy of twelve or thirteen I had played among the unfinished houses,
once leaving the marks of my two hands, blacked by a fall among some
paint, upon a white balustrade. Sometimes I thought it was because these
were real houses, while my play had been among toy-houses some day to be
inhabited by imaginary people full of the happiness that one can see in
picture books.
I was in all things Pre-Raphaelite. When I was fifteen or sixteen my
father had told me about Rossetti and Blake and given me their poetry to
read; and once at Liverpool on my way to Sligo I had seen Dante's Dream in
the gallery there, a picture painted when Rossetti had lost his dramatic
power and to-day not very pleasing to me, and its colour, its people, its
romantic architecture had blotted all other pictures away. It was a
perpetual bewilderment that my father, who had begun life as a
Pre-Raphaelite painter, now painted portraits of the first comer, children
selling newspapers, or a consumptive girl with a basket of fish upon her
head, and that when, moved perhaps by some memory of his youth, he chose
some theme from poetic tradition, he would soon weary and leave it
unfinished. I had seen the change coming bit by bit and its defence
elaborated by young men fresh from the Paris art-schools. "We must paint
what is in front of us," or "A man must be of his own time," they would
say, and if I spoke of Blake or Rossetti they would point out his bad
drawing and tell me to admire Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage. Then, too,
they were very ignorant men; they read nothing, for nothing mattered but
"knowing how to paint," being in reaction against a generation that seemed
to have wasted its time upon so many things. I thought myself alone in
hating these young men, now indeed getting towards middle life, their
contempt for the past, their monopoly of the future, but in a few months I
was to discover others of my own age, who thought as I did, for it is not
true that youth looks before it with the mechanical gaze of a well-drilled
soldier. Its quarrel is not with the past, but with the present, where its
elders are so obviously powerful and no cause seems lost if it seem to
threaten that power. Does cultivated youth ever really love the future,
where the eye can discover no persecuted Royalty hidden among oak leaves,
though from it certainly does come so much proletarian rhetoric?
I was unlike others of my generation in one thing only. I am very
religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the
simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion, almost
an infallible church out of poetic tradition: a fardel of stories, and of
personages, and of emotions, inseparable from their first expression,
passed on from generation to generation by poets and painters with some
help from philosophers and theologians. I wished for a world, where I
could discover this tradition perpetually, and not in pictures and in
poems only, but in tiles round the chimney-piece and in the hangings that
kept out the draught. I had even created a dogma: "Because those imaginary
people are created out of the deepest instinct of man, to be his measure
and his norm, whatever I can imagine those mouths speaking may be the
nearest I can go to truth." When I listened they seemed always to speak of
one thing only: they, their loves, every incident of their lives, were
steeped in the supernatural. Could even Titian's "Ariosto" that I loved
beyond other portraits have its grave look, as if waiting for some perfect
final event, if the painters before Titian had not learned portraiture,
while painting into the corner of compositions full of saints and
Madonnas, their kneeling patrons? At seventeen years old I was already an
old-fashioned brass cannon full of shot, and nothing had kept me from
going off but a doubt as to my capacity to shoot straight.
III
I was not an industrious student and knew only what I had found by
accident and I found nothing I cared for after Titian, and Titian I knew
from an imitation of his _Supper of Emmaus_ in Dublin, till Blake and the
Pre-Raphaelites; and among my father's friends were no Pre-Raphaelites.
Some indeed had come to Bedford Park in the enthusiasm of the first
building and others to be near those that had. There was Todhunter, a
well-off man who had bought my father's pictures while my father was still
Pre-Raphaelite; once a Dublin doctor he was now a poet and a writer of
poetical plays; a tall, sallow, lank, melancholy man, a good scholar and a
good intellect; and with him my father carried on a warm exasperated
friendship, fed I think by old memories and wasted by quarrels over
matters of opinion. Of all the survivors he was the most dejected and the
least estranged, and I remember encouraging him, with a sense of worship
shared, to buy a very expensive carpet designed by Morris. He displayed it
without strong liking and would have agreed had there been any to find
fault. If he had liked anything strongly he might have been a famous man,
for a few years later he was to write, under some casual patriotic
impulse, certain excellent verses now in all Irish anthologies; but with
him every book was a new planting, and not a new bud on an old bough. He
had I think no peace in himself. But my father's chief friend was York
Powell, a famous Oxford Professor of history, a broad-built, broad-headed,
brown-bearded man clothed in heavy blue cloth and looking, but for his
glasses and the dim sight of a student, like some captain in the merchant
service. One often passed with pleasure from Todhunter's company to that
of one who was almost ostentatiously at peace. He cared nothing for
philosophy, nothing for economics, nothing for the policy of nations; for
history, as he saw it, was a memory of men who were amusing or exciting to
think about. He impressed all who met him, and seemed to some a man of
genius, but he had not enough ambition to shape his thought, or conviction
to give rhythm to his style and remained always a poor writer. I was too
full of unfinished speculations and premature convictions to value rightly
his conversation, informed by a vast erudition, which would give itself to
every casual association of speech and company, precisely because he had
neither cause nor design. My father, however, found Powell's concrete
narrative manner in talk a necessary completion of his own, and when I
asked him in a letter many years later where he got his philosophy replied
"from York Powell" and thereon added, no doubt remembering that Powell was
without ideas, "by looking at him." Then there was a good listener, a
painter in whose hall hung a big picture painted in his student days of
Ulysses sailing home from the Phaeacian court, an orange and a skin of
wine at his side, blue mountains towering behind; but who lived by drawing
domestic scenes and lovers' meetings for a weekly magazine that had an
immense circulation among the imperfectly educated. To escape the boredom
of work, which he never turned to but under pressure of necessity and
usually late at night, with the publisher's messenger in the hall, he had
half-filled his studio with mechanical toys, of his own invention, and
perpetually increased their number. A model railway train at intervals
puffed its way along the walls, passing several railway stations and
signal boxes; and on the floor lay a camp with attacking and defending
soldiers and a fortification that blew up when the attackers fired a pea
through a certain window; while a large model of a Thames barge hung from
the ceiling. Opposite our house lived an old artist who worked also for
the illustrated papers for a living, but painted landscapes for his
pleasure, and of him I remember nothing except that he had outlived
ambition, was a good listener, and that my father explained his gaunt
appearance by his descent from Pocahontas. If all these men were a little
like becalmed ships, there was certainly one man whose sails were full.
Three or four doors off on our side of the road lived a decorative artist
in all the naive confidence of popular ideals and the public approval. He
was our daily comedy. "I myself and Sir Frederick Leighton are the
greatest decorative artists of the age," was among his sayings, and a
great Lych-gate, bought from some country church-yard, reared its thatched
roof, meant to shelter bearers and coffin, above the entrance to his front
garden to show that he at any rate knew nothing of discouragement. In this
fairly numerous company--there were others though no other face rises
before me--my father and York Powell found listeners for a conversation
that had no special loyalties, or antagonisms; while I could only talk
upon set topics, being in the heat of my youth, and the topics that filled
me with excitement were never spoken of.
IV
Bedford Park had a red brick clubhouse with a little theatre that began to
stir my imagination. I persuaded Todhunter to write a pastoral play and
have it performed there.
A couple of years before, while we were still in Dublin, he had given at
Hengler's Circus, remodelled as a Greek Theatre, a most expensive
performance of his _Helena of Troas_, an oratorical Swinburnian play which
I had thought as unactable as it was unreadable. Since I was seventeen I
had constantly tested my own ambition with Keats's praise of him who "left
great verses to a little clan," so it was but natural that I should spend
an evening persuading him that we had nothing to do with the great public,
that it should be a point of honour to be content with our own little
public, that he should write of shepherds and shepherdesses because people
would expect them to talk poetry and move without melodrama. He wrote his
_Sicilian Idyll_, which I have not looked at for thirty years, and never
rated very high as poetry, and had the one unmistakable success of his
life. The little theatre was full for twice the number of performances
intended, for artists, men of letters and students had come from all over
London.
I made through these performances a close friend and a discovery that was
to influence my life. Todhunter had engaged several professional actors
with a little reputation, but had given the chief woman's part to Florence
Farr, who had qualities no contemporary professional practice could have
increased, the chief man's part to an amateur, Heron Allen, solicitor,
fiddler and popular writer on palmistry. Heron Allen and Florence Farr
read poetry for their pleasure. While they were upon the stage no one else
could hold an eye or an ear. Their speech was music, the poetry acquired a
nobility, a passionate austerity that made it seem akin for certain
moments to the great poetry of the world. Heron Allen, who had never
spoken in public before except to lecture upon the violin, had the wisdom
to reduce his acting to a series of poses, to be the stately shepherd with
not more gesture than was needed to "twitch his mantle blue" and to let
his grace be foil to Florence Farr's more impassioned delivery. When they
closed their mouths, and some other player opened his, breaking up the
verse to make it conversational, jerking his body or his arms that he
might seem no austere poetical image but very man, I listened in raging
hatred. I kept my seat with difficulty, I searched my memory for insulting
phrases, I even muttered them to myself that the people about might hear.
I had discovered for the first time that in the performance of all drama
that depends for its effect upon beauty of language, poetical culture may
be more important than professional experience.
Florence Farr lived in lodgings some twenty minutes' walk away at Brook
Green, and I was soon a constant caller, talking over plays that I would
some day write her. She had three great gifts, a tranquil beauty like that
of Demeter's image near the British Museum reading room door, and an
incomparable sense of rhythm and a beautiful voice, the seeming natural
expression of the image. And yet there was scarce another gift that she
did not value above those three. We all have our simplifying image, our
genius, and such hard burden does it lay upon us that, but for the praise
of others, we would deride it and hunt it away. She could only express
hers through an unfashionable art, an art that has scarce existed since
the seventeenth century, and so could only earn unimportant occasional
praise. She would dress without care or calculation as if to hide her
beauty and seem contemptuous of its power. If a man fell in love with her
she would notice that she had seen just that movement upon the stage or
had heard just that intonation and all seemed unreal. If she read out some
poem in English or in French all was passion, all a traditional splendour,
but she spoke of actual things with a cold wit or under the strain of
paradox. Wit and paradox alike sought to pull down whatever had tradition
or passion and she was soon to spend her days in the British Museum
reading room and become erudite in many heterogeneous studies moved by an
insatiable, destroying curiosity. I formed with her an enduring friendship
that was an enduring exasperation--"why do you play the part with a bent
back and a squeak in the voice? How can you be a character actor, you who
hate all our life, you who belong to a life that is a vision?" But
argument was no use, and some Nurse in Euripedes must be played with all
an old woman's infirmities and not as I would have it, with all a Sybil's
majesty, because "it is no use doing what nobody wants," or because she
would show that she "could do what the others did."
I used in my rage to compare her thoughts, when her worst mood was upon
her, to a game called Spillikens which I had seen played in my childhood
with little pieces of bone that you had to draw out with a hook from a
bundle of like pieces. A bundle of bones instead of Demeter's golden
sheaf! Her sitting room at the Brook Green lodging house was soon a
reflection of her mind, the walls covered with musical instruments, pieces
of oriental drapery, and Egyptian gods and goddesses painted by herself in
the British Museum.
V
Presently a hansom drove up to our door at Bedford Park with Miss Maud
Gonne, who brought an introduction to my father from old John O'Leary, the
Fenian leader. She vexed my father by praise of war, war for its own sake,
not as the creator of certain virtues but as if there were some virtue in
excitement itself. I supported her against my father, which vexed him the
more, though he might have understood that, apart from the fact that
Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage were somehow involved, a man so young as
I could not have differed from a woman so beautiful and so young. To-day,
with her great height and the unchangeable lineaments of her form, she
looks the Sybil I would have had played by Florence Farr, but in that day
she seemed a classical impersonation of the Spring, the Virgilian
commendation "She walks like a goddess" made for her alone. Her complexion
was luminous, like that of apple blossom through which the light falls,
and I remember her standing that first day by a great heap of such
blossoms in the window. In the next few years I saw her always when she
passed to and fro between Dublin and Paris, surrounded, no matter how
rapid her journey and how brief her stay at either end of it, by cages
full of birds, canaries, finches of all kinds, dogs, a parrot, and once a
full-grown hawk from Donegal. Once when I saw her to her railway carriage
I noticed how the cages obstructed wraps and cushions and wondered what
her fellow travellers would say, but the carriage remained empty. It was
years before I could see into the mind that lay hidden under so much
beauty and so much energy.
VI
Some quarter of an hour's walk from Bedford Park, out on the high road to
Richmond, lived W. E. Henley, and I, like many others, began under him my
education. His portrait, a lithograph by Rothenstein, hangs over my
mantelpiece among portraits of other friends. He is drawn standing, but
because doubtless of his crippled legs he leans forward, resting his
elbows upon some slightly suggested object--a table or a window-sill. His
heavy figure and powerful head, the disordered hair standing upright, his
short irregular beard and moustache, his lined and wrinkled face, his eyes
steadily fixed upon some object, in complete confidence and
self-possession, and yet as in half-broken reverie, all are there exactly
as I remember him. I have seen other portraits and they too show him
exactly as I remember him, as though he had but one appearance and that
seen fully at the first glance and by all alike. He was most human--human
I used to say like one of Shakespeare's characters--and yet pressed and
pummelled, as it were, into a single attitude, almost into a gesture and a
speech as by some overwhelming situation. I disagreed with him about
everything, but I admired him beyond words. With the exception of some
early poems founded upon old French models I disliked his poetry, mainly
because he wrote in _vers libre_, which I associated with Tyndall and
Huxley, and Bastien-Lepage's clownish peasant staring with vacant eyes at
her great boots; and filled it with unimpassioned description of an
hospital ward where his leg had been amputated. I wanted the strongest
passions, passions that had nothing to do with observation, sung in
metrical forms that seemed old enough to be sung by men half-asleep or
riding upon a journey. Furthermore, Pre-Raphaelism affected him as some
people are affected by a cat in the room, and though he professed himself
at our first meeting without political interests or convictions, he soon
grew into a violent unionist and imperialist. I used to say when I spoke
of his poems: "He is like a great actor with a bad part; yet who would
look at Hamlet in the grave scene if Salvini played the grave-digger?" and
I might so have explained much that he said and did. I meant that he was
like a great actor of passion--character-acting meant nothing to me for
many years--and an actor of passion will display some one quality of soul,
personified again and again, just as a great poetical painter, Titian,
Botticelli, Rossetti, may depend for his greatness upon a type of beauty
which presently we call by his name. Irving, the last of the sort on the
English stage, and in modern England and France it is the rarest sort,
never moved me but in the expression of intellectual pride and though I
saw Salvini but once I am convinced that his genius was a kind of animal
nobility. Henley, half inarticulate--"I am very costive," he would
say--beset with personal quarrels, built up an image of power and
magnanimity till it became, at moments, when seen as it were by lightning,
his true self. Half his opinions were the contrivance of a
sub-consciousness that sought always to bring life to the dramatic crisis
and expression to that point of artifice where the true self could find
its tongue. Without opponents there had been no drama, and in his youth
Ruskinism and Pre-Raphaelitism, for he was of my father's generation, were
the only possible opponents. How could one resent his prejudice when, that
he himself might play a worthy part, he must find beyond the common rout,
whom he derided and flouted daily, opponents he could imagine moulded like
himself? Once he said to me in the height of his imperial propaganda,
"Tell those young men in Ireland that this great thing must go on. They
say Ireland is not fit for self-government, but that is nonsense. It is as
fit as any other European country, but we cannot grant it." And then he
spoke of his desire to found and edit a Dublin newspaper. It would have
expounded the Gaelic propaganda then beginning, though Dr Hyde had, as
yet, no league, our old stories, our modern literature--everything that
did not demand any shred or patch of government. He dreamed of a tyranny,
but it was that of Cosimo de' Medici.
VII
We gathered on Sunday evenings in two rooms, with folding doors between,
and hung, I think, with photographs from Dutch masters, and in one room
there was always, I think, a table with cold meat. I can recall but one
elderly man--Dunn his name was--rather silent and full of good sense, an
old friend of Henley's. We were young men, none as yet established in his
own, or in the world's opinion, and Henley was our leader and our
confidant. One evening, I found him alone amused and exasperated: "Young
A----," he cried "has just been round to ask my advice. Would I think it a
wise thing if he bolted with Mrs B----? 'Have you quite determined to do
it?' I asked him. 'Quite.' 'Well,' I said, 'in that case I refuse to give
you any advice.'" Mrs B---- was a beautiful talented woman, who, as the
Welsh Triad said of Guinievere, "was much given to being carried off." I
think we listened to him, and often obeyed him, partly because he was
quite plainly not upon the side of our parents. We might have a different
ground of quarrel, but the result seemed more important than the ground,
and his confident manner and speech made us believe, perhaps for the first
time, in victory. And besides, if he did denounce, and in my case he
certainly did, what we held in secret reverence, he never failed to
associate it with things or persons that did not move us to reverence.
Once I found him just returned from some art congress in Liverpool or in
Manchester. "The salvation armyism of art," he called it, and gave a
grotesque description of some city councillor he had found admiring
Turner. Henley, who hated all that Ruskin praised, thereupon derided
Turner, and finding the city councillor the next day on the other side of
the gallery, admiring some Pre-Raphaelite there, derided that
Pre-Raphaelite. The third day Henley discovered the poor man on a chair in
the middle of the room staring disconsolately upon the floor. He terrified
us also and certainly I did not dare, and I think none of us dared, to
speak our admiration for book or picture he condemned, but he made us feel
always our importance, and no man among us could do good work, or show the
promise of it, and lack his praise. I can remember meeting of a Sunday
night Charles Whibley, Kenneth Grahame, author of _The Golden Age_, Barry
Pain, now a well-known novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a
famous talker, George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chief
secretary, and now or later Oscar Wilde, who was some ten years older than
the rest of us. But faces and names are vague to me and while faces that
I met but once may rise clearly before me, a face met on many a Sunday has
perhaps vanished. Kipling came sometimes, I think, but I never met him;
and Stepniak, the Nihilist, whom I knew well elsewhere but not there,
said--"I cannot go more than once a year, it is too exhausting." Henley
got the best out of us all, because he had made us accept him as our judge
and we knew that his judgment could neither sleep, nor be softened, nor
changed, nor turned aside. When I think of him, the antithesis that is the
foundation of human nature being ever in my sight, I see his crippled legs
as though he were some Vulcan perpetually forging swords for other men to
use; and certainly I always thought of C----, a fine classical scholar, a
pale and seemingly gentle man, as our chief swordsman and bravo. When
Henley founded his weekly newspaper, first _The Scots_, afterwards _The
National Observer_, this young man wrote articles and reviews notorious
for savage wit; and years afterwards when _The National Observer_ was
dead, Henley dying, and our cavern of outlaws empty, I met him in Paris
very sad and I think very poor. "Nobody will employ me now," he said.
"Your master is gone," I answered, "and you are like the spear in an old
Irish story that had to be kept dipped in poppy-juice that it might not go
about killing people on its own account." I wrote my first good lyrics and
tolerable essays for _The National Observer_, and as I always signed my
work could go my own road in some measure. Henley often revised my lyrics,
crossing out a line or a stanza and writing in one of his own, and I was
comforted by my belief that he also rewrote Kipling then in the first
flood of popularity. At first, indeed, I was ashamed of being rewritten
and thought that others were not, and only began investigation when the
editorial characteristics--epigrams, archaisms, and all--appeared in the
article upon Paris fashions and in that upon opium by an Egyptian Pasha. I
was not compelled to full conformity for verse is plainly stubborn; and in
prose, that I might avoid unacceptable opinions, I wrote nothing but ghost
or fairy stories, picked up from my mother or some pilot at Rosses Point
and Henley saw that I must needs mix a palette fitted to my subject
matter. But if he had changed every "has" into "hath" I would have let
him, for had not we sunned ourselves in his generosity? "My young men
outdo me and they write better than I," he wrote in some letter praising
Charles Whibley's work, and to another friend with a copy of my _Man Who
Dreamed of Fairyland_: "See what a fine thing has been written by one of
my lads."
VIII
My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never before
heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all
over night with labour and yet all spontaneous. There was present that
night at Henley's, by right of propinquity or of accident, a man full of
the secret spite of dulness, who interrupted from time to time, and always
to check or disorder thought; and I noticed with what mastery he was
foiled and thrown. I noticed, too, that the impression of artificiality
that I think all Wilde's listeners have recorded came from the perfect
rounding of the sentences and from the deliberation that made it possible.
That very impression helped him, as the effect of metre, or of the
antithetical prose of the seventeenth century, which is itself a true
metre, helped its writers, for he could pass without incongruity from some
unforeseen, swift stroke of wit to elaborate reverie. I heard him say a
few nights later: "Give me _The Winter's Tale_, 'Daffodils that come
before the swallow dare' but not _King Lear_. What is _King Lear_ but poor
life staggering in the fog?" and the slow, carefully modulated cadence
sounded natural to my ears. That first night he praised Walter Pater's
_Studies in the History of the Renaissance_: "It is my golden book; I
never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of decadence:
the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written." "But,"
said the dull man, "would you not have given us time to read it?" "Oh no,"
was the retort, "there would have been plenty of time afterwards--in
either world." I think he seemed to us, baffled as we were by youth, or by
infirmity, a triumphant figure, and to some of us a figure from another
age, an audacious Italian fifteenth century figure. A few weeks before I
had heard one of my father's friends, an official in a publishing firm
that had employed both Wilde and Henley as editors, blaming Henley who was
"no use except under control" and praising Wilde, "so indolent but such a
genius"; and now the firm became the topic of our talk. "How often do you
go to the office?" said Henley. "I used to go three times a week," said
Wilde, "for an hour a day but I have since struck off one of the days."
"My God," said Henley, "I went five times a week for five hours a day and
when I wanted to strike off a day they had a special committee meeting."
"Furthermore," was Wilde's answer, "I never answered their letters. I have
known men come to London full of bright prospects and seen them complete
wrecks in a few months through a habit of answering letters." He too knew
how to keep our elders in their place, and his method was plainly the more
successful, for Henley had been dismissed. "No he is not an aesthete,"
Henley commented later, being somewhat embarrassed by Wilde's
Pre-Raphaelite entanglement; "one soon finds that he is a scholar and a
gentleman." And when I dined with Wilde a few days afterwards he began at
once, "I had to strain every nerve to equal that man at all"; and I was
too loyal to speak my thought: "You and not he said all the brilliant
things." He like the rest of us had felt the strain of an intensity that
seemed to hold life at the point of drama. He had said on that first
meeting "The basis of literary friendship is mixing the poisoned bowl";
and for a few weeks Henley and he became close friends till, the
astonishment of their meeting over, diversity of character and ambition
pushed them apart, and, with half the cavern helping, Henley began mixing
the poisoned bowl for Wilde. Yet Henley never wholly lost that first
admiration, for after Wilde's downfall he said to me: "Why did he do it? I
told my lads to attack him and yet we might have fought under his banner."
IX
It became the custom, both at Henley's and at Bedford Park, to say that R.
A. M. Stevenson, who frequented both circles, was the better talker. Wilde
had been trussed up like a turkey by undergraduates, dragged up and down a
hill, his champagne emptied into the ice tub, hooted in the streets of
various towns, and I think stoned, and no newspaper named him but in
scorn; his manner had hardened to meet opposition and at times he allowed
one to see an unpardonable insolence. His charm was acquired and
systematized, a mask which he wore only when it pleased him, while the
charm of Stevenson belonged to him like the colour of his hair. If
Stevenson's talk became monologue we did not know it, because our one
object was to show by our attention that he need never leave off. If
thought failed him we would not combat what he had said, or start some new
theme, but would encourage him with a question; and one felt that it had
been always so from childhood up. His mind was full of phantasy for
phantasy's sake and he gave as good entertainment in monologue as his
cousin Robert Louis in poem or story. He was always "supposing"; "Suppose
you had two millions what would you do with it?" and "Suppose you were in
Spain and in love how would you propose?" I recall him one afternoon at
our house at Bedford Park, surrounded by my brother and sisters and a
little group of my father's friends, describing proposals in half a dozen
countries. There your father did it, dressed in such and such a way with
such and such words, and there a friend must wait for the lady outside the
chapel door, sprinkle her with holy water and say, "My friend Jones is
dying for love of you." But when it was over those quaint descriptions, so
full of laughter and sympathy, faded or remained in the memory as
something alien from one's own life, like a dance I once saw in a great
house, where beautifully dressed children wound a long ribbon in and out
as they danced. I was not of Stevenson's party and mainly I think because
he had written a book in praise of Velasquez, praise at that time
universal wherever Pre-Raphaelism was accurst, and to my mind, that had
to pick its symbols where its ignorance permitted, Velasquez seemed the
first bored celebrant of boredom. I was convinced from some obscure
meditation that Stevenson's conversational method had joined him to my
elders and to the indifferent world, as though it were right for old men,
and unambitious men and all women, to be content with charm and humour. It
was the prerogative of youth to take sides and when Wilde said: "Mr
Bernard Shaw has no enemies but is intensely disliked by all his friends,"
I knew it to be a phrase I should never forget, and felt revenged upon a
notorious hater of romance, whose generosity and courage I could not
fathom.
X
I saw a good deal of Wilde at that time--was it 1887 or 1888?--I have no
way of fixing the date except that I had published my first book _The
Wanderings of Usheen_ and that Wilde had not yet published his _Decay of
Lying_. He had, before our first meeting, reviewed my book and despite its
vagueness of intention, and the inexactness of its speech, praised without
qualification; and what was worth more than any review he had talked about
it and now he asked me to eat my Christmas dinner with him believing, I
imagine, that I was alone in London. He had just renounced his velveteen,
and even those cuffs turned backward over the sleeves, and had begun to
dress very carefully in the fashion of the moment. He lived in a little
house at Chelsea that the architect Godwin had decorated with an elegance
that owed something to Whistler. There was nothing mediaeval, nor
Pre-Raphaelite, no cupboard door with figures upon flat gold, no peacock
blue, no dark background. I remember vaguely a white drawing room with
Whistler etchings, "let in" to white panels, and a dining room all white,
chairs, walls, mantelpiece, carpet, except for a diamond-shaped piece of
red cloth in the middle of the table under a terra-cotta statuette, and I
think a red shaded lamp hanging from the ceiling to a little above the
statuette. It was perhaps too perfect in its unity, his past of a few
years before had gone too completely, and I remember thinking that the
perfect harmony of his life there, with his beautiful wife and his two
young children, suggested some deliberate artistic composition.
He commended and dispraised himself during dinner by attributing
characteristics like his own to his country: "We Irish are too poetical to
be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest
talkers since the Greeks." When dinner was over he read me from the proofs
of _The Decay of Lying_ and when he came to the sentence: "Schopenhauer
has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet
invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once
melancholy," I said, "Why do you change 'sad' to 'melancholy'?" He replied
that he wanted a full sound at the close of his sentence, and I thought it
no excuse and an example of the vague impressiveness that spoilt his
writing for me. Only when he spoke, or when his writing was the mirror of
his speech, or in some simple fairy tale, had he words exact enough to
hold a subtle ear. He alarmed me, though not as Henley did, for I never
left his house thinking myself fool or dunce. He flattered the intellect
of every man he liked; he made me tell him long Irish stories and
compared my art of storytelling to Homer's; and once when he had described
himself as writing in the census paper "age 19, profession genius,
infirmity talent" the other guest, a young journalist fresh from Oxford or
Cambridge, said, "What should I have written?" and was told that it should
have been "profession talent, infirmity genius." When, however, I called,
wearing shoes a little too yellow--unblackened leather had just become
fashionable--I realized their extravagance when I saw his eyes fixed upon
them; and another day Wilde asked me to tell his little boy a fairy story,
and I had but got as far as "Once upon a time there was a giant" when the
little boy screamed and ran out of the room. Wilde looked grave and I was
plunged into the shame of clumsiness that afflicts the young. When I asked
for some literary gossip for some provincial newspaper, that paid me a few
shillings a month, he explained very explicitly that writing literary
gossip was no job for a gentleman.
Though to be compared to Homer passed the time pleasantly, I had not been
greatly perturbed had he stopped me with: "Is it a long story?" as Henley
would certainly have done. I was abashed before him as wit and man of the
world alone. I remember that he deprecated the very general belief in his
success or his efficiency, and I think with sincerity. One form of success
had gone: he was no more the lion of the season and he had not discovered
his gift for writing comedy, yet I think I knew him at the happiest moment
of his life. No scandal had touched his name, his fame as a talker was
growing among his equals, and he seemed to live in the enjoyment of his
own spontaneity. One day he began: "I have been inventing a Christian
heresy," and he told a detailed story, in the style of some early father,
of how Christ recovered after the Crucifixion, and escaping from the tomb,
lived on for many years, the one man upon earth who knew the falsehood of
Christianity. Once St Paul visited his town and he alone in the
carpenters' quarter did not go to hear him preach. The other carpenters
noticed that henceforth, for some unknown reason, he kept his hands
covered. A few days afterwards I found Wilde with smock frocks in various
colours spread out upon the floor in front of him, while a missionary
explained that he did not object to the heathen going naked upon week
days, but insisted upon clothes in church. He had brought the smock frocks
in a cab that the only art-critic whose fame had reached Central Africa
might select a colour; so Wilde sat there weighing all with a conscious
ecclesiastic solemnity.
XI
Of late years I have often explained Wilde to myself by his family
history. His father was a friend or acquaintance of my father's father and
among my family traditions there is an old Dublin riddle: "Why are Sir
William Wilde's nails so black?" Answer, "Because he has scratched
himself." And there is an old story still current in Dublin of Lady Wilde
saying to a servant, "Why do you put the plates on the coal-scuttle? What
are the chairs meant for?" They were famous people and there are many like
stories; and even a horrible folk story, the invention of some Connaught
peasant, that tells how Sir William Wilde took out the eyes of some men,
who had come to consult him as an oculist, and laid them upon a plate,
intending to replace them in a moment, and how the eyes were eaten by a
cat. As a certain friend of mine, who has made a prolonged study of the
nature of cats, said when he first heard the tale, "Cats love eyes." The
Wilde family was clearly of the sort that fed the imagination of Charles
Lever, dirty, untidy, daring, and what Charles Lever, who loved more
normal activities, might not have valued so highly, very imaginative and
learned. Lady Wilde, who when I knew her received her friends with blinds
drawn and shutters closed that none might see her withered face, longed
always perhaps, though certainly amid much self-mockery, for some
impossible splendour of character and circumstance. She lived near her son
in level Chelsea, but I have heard her say, "I want to live on some high
place, Primrose Hill or Highgate, because I was an eagle in my youth." I
think her son lived with no self-mockery at all an imaginary life;
perpetually performed a play which was in all things the opposite of all
that he had known in childhood and early youth; never put off completely
his wonder at opening his eyes every morning on his own beautiful house,
and in remembering that he had dined yesterday with a duchess, and that he
delighted in Flaubert and Pater, read Homer in the original and not as a
schoolmaster reads him for the grammar. I think, too, that because of all
that half-civilized blood in his veins he could not endure the sedentary
toil of creative art and so remained a man of action, exaggerating, for
the sake of immediate effect, every trick learned from his masters,
turning their easel painting into painted scenes. He was a parvenu, but a
parvenu whose whole bearing proved that if he did dedicate every story in
_The House of Pomegranates_ to a lady of title, it was but to show that he
was Jack and the social ladder his pantomime beanstalk. "Did you ever
hear him say 'Marquess of Dimmesdale'?" a friend of his once asked me. "He
does not say 'the Duke of York' with any pleasure."
He told me once that he had been offered a safe seat in Parliament and,
had he accepted, he might have had a career like that of Beaconsfield,
whose early style resembles his, being meant for crowds, for excitement,
for hurried decisions, for immediate triumphs. Such men get their
sincerity, if at all, from the contact of events; the dinner table was
Wilde's event and made him the greatest talker of his time, and his plays
and dialogues have what merit they possess from being now an imitation,
now a record, of his talk. Even in those days I would often defend him by
saying that his very admiration for his predecessors in poetry, for
Browning, for Swinburne and Rossetti, in their first vogue while he was a
very young man, made any success seem impossible that could satisfy his
immense ambition: never but once before had the artist seemed so great,
never had the work of art seemed so difficult. I would then compare him
with Benvenuto Cellini who, coming after Michael Angelo, found nothing
left to do so satisfactory as to turn bravo and quarrel with the man who
broke Michael Angelo's nose.
XII
I cannot remember who first brought me to the old stable beside Kelmscott
House, William Morris's house at Hammersmith, and to the debates held
there upon Sunday evenings by the Socialist League. I was soon of the
little group who had supper with Morris afterwards. I met at these
suppers very constantly Walter Crane, Emery Walker, in association with
Cobden Sanderson, the printer of many fine books, and less constantly
Bernard Shaw and Cockerell, now of the Museum of Cambridge, and perhaps
but once or twice Hyndman the Socialist and the Anarchist Prince
Kropotkin. There, too, one always met certain more or less educated
workmen, rough of speech and manner, with a conviction to meet every turn.
I was told by one of them, on a night when I had done perhaps more than my
share of the talking, that I had talked more nonsense in one evening than
he had heard in the whole course of his past life. I had merely preferred
Parnell, then at the height of his career, to Michael Davitt, who had
wrecked his Irish influence by international politics. We sat round a long
unpolished and unpainted trestle table of new wood in a room where hung
Rossetti's _Pomegranate_, a portrait of Mrs. Morris, and where one wall
and part of the ceiling were covered by a great Persian carpet. Morris had
said somewhere or other that carpets were meant for people who took their
shoes off when they entered a house and were most in place upon a tent
floor. I was a little disappointed in the house, for Morris was an old man
content at last to gather beautiful things rather than to arrange a
beautiful house. I saw the drawing-room once or twice, and there alone all
my sense of decoration, founded upon the background of Rossetti's
pictures, was satisfied by a big cupboard painted with a scene from
Chaucer by Burne-Jones; but even there were objects, perhaps a chair or a
little table, that seemed accidental, bought hurriedly perhaps and with
little thought, to make wife or daughter comfortable. I had read as a boy,
in books belonging to my father, the third volume of _The Earthly
Paradise_, and _The Defence of Guenevere_, which pleased me less, but had
not opened either for a long time. _The Man Who Never Laughed Again_ had
seemed the most wonderful of tales till my father had accused me of
preferring Morris to Keats, got angry about it, and put me altogether out
of countenance. He had spoiled my pleasure, for now I questioned while I
read and at last ceased to read; nor had Morris written as yet those prose
romances that became after his death so great a joy that they were the
only books I was ever to read slowly that I might not come too quickly to
the end. It was now Morris himself that stirred my interest, and I took to
him first because of some little tricks of speech and body that reminded
me of my old grandfather in Sligo, but soon discovered his spontaneity and
joy and made him my chief of men. To-day I do not set his poetry very
high, but for an odd altogether wonderful line, or thought; and yet, if
some angel offered me the choice, I would choose to live his life, poetry
and all, rather than my own or any other man's. A reproduction of his
portrait by Watts hangs over my mantelpiece with Henley's, and those of
other friends. Its grave wide-open eyes, like the eyes of some dreaming
beast, remind me of the open eyes of Titian's "Ariosto," while the broad
vigorous body suggests a mind that has no need of the intellect to remain
sane, though it give itself to every phantasy: the dreamer of the middle
ages. It is "the fool of fairy ... wide and wild as a hill," the resolute
European image that yet half remembers Buddha's motionless meditation, and
has no trait in common with the wavering, lean image of hungry
speculation, that cannot but fill the mind's eye because of certain famous
Hamlets of our stage. Shakespeare himself foreshadowed a symbolic change,
that shows a change in the whole temperament of the world, for though he
called his Hamlet "fat" and even "scant of breath," he thrust between his
fingers agile rapier and dagger.
The dream world of Morris was as much the antithesis of daily life as with
other men of genius, but he was never conscious of the antithesis and so
knew nothing of intellectual suffering. His intellect, unexhausted by
speculation or casuistry, was wholly at the service of hand and eye, and
whatever he pleased he did with an unheard of ease and simplicity, and if
style and vocabulary were at times monotonous, he could not have made them
otherwise without ceasing to be himself. Instead of the language of
Chaucer and Shakespeare, its warp fresh from field and market, if the woof
were learned, his age offered him a speech, exhausted from abstraction,
that only returned to its full vitality when written learnedly and slowly.
The roots of his antithetical dream were visible enough: a never idle man
of great physical strength and extremely irascible--did he not fling a
badly baked plum pudding through the window upon Christmas Day?--a man
more joyous than any intellectual man of our world, called himself "the
idle singer of an empty day," created new forms of melancholy, and faint
persons, like the knights and ladies of Burne-Jones, who are never, no not
once in forty volumes, put out of temper. A blunderer who had said to the
only unconverted man at a Socialist picnic in Dublin, to prove that
equality came easy, "I was brought up a gentleman and now as you can see
associate with all sorts" and left wounds thereby that rankled after
twenty years, a man of whom I have heard it said "He is always afraid that
he is doing something wrong and generally is," wrote long stories with
apparently no other object than that his persons might show to one
another, through situations of poignant difficulty the most exquisite
tact.
He did not project like Henley or like Wilde, an image of himself, because
having all his imagination set upon making and doing he had little self
knowledge. He imagined instead new conditions of making and doing; and in
the teeth of those scientific generalizations that cowed my boyhood, I can
see some like imagining in every great change, believing that the first
flying fish first leaped, not because it sought "adaptation" to the air,
but out of horror of the sea.
XIII
Soon after I began to attend the lectures a French class was started in
the old coach-house for certain young Socialists who planned a tour in
France, and I joined it, and was for a time a model student constantly
encouraged by the compliments of the old French mistress. I told my father
of the class, and he asked me to get my sisters admitted. I made
difficulties and put off speaking of the matter, for I knew that the new
and admirable self I was making would turn, under family eyes, into plain
rag-doll. How could I pretend to be industrious, and even carry
dramatisation to the point of learning my lessons, when my sisters were
there and knew that I was nothing of the kind? But I had no argument I
could use, and my sisters were admitted. They said nothing unkind, so far
as I can remember, but in a week or two I was my old procrastinating idle
self and had soon left the class altogether. My elder sister stayed on
and became an embroideress under Miss May Morris, and the hangings round
Morris's big bed at Kelmscott House, Oxfordshire, with their verses about
lying happily in bed when "all birds sing in the town of the tree," were
from her needle, though not from her design. She worked for the first few
months at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, and in my imagination I cannot
always separate what I saw and heard from her report, or indeed from the
report of that tribe or guild who looked up to Morris as to some
worshipped mediaeval king. He had no need for other people. I doubt if
their marriage or death made him sad or glad, and yet no man I have known
was so well loved; you saw him producing everywhere organisation and
beauty, seeming, almost in the same instant, helpless and triumphant; and
people loved him as children are loved. People much in his neighbourhood
became gradually occupied with him or about his affairs, and, without any
wish on his part, as simple people become occupied with children. I
remember a man who was proud and pleased because he had distracted
Morris's thoughts from an attack of gout by leading the conversation
delicately to the hated name of Milton. He began at Swinburne: "O,
Swinburne," said Morris, "is a rhetorician; my masters have been Keats and
Chaucer, for they make pictures." "Does not Milton make pictures?" asked
my informant. "No," was the answer, "Dante makes pictures, but Milton,
though he had a great earnest mind, expressed himself as a rhetorician."
"Great earnest mind" sounded strange to me, and I doubt not that were his
questioner not a simple man Morris had been more violent. Another day the
same man started by praising Chaucer, but the gout was worse, and Morris
cursed Chaucer for destroying the English language with foreign words.
He had few detachable phrases, and I can remember little of his speech,
which many thought the best of all good talk, except that it matched his
burly body and seemed within definite boundaries inexhaustible in fact and
expression. He alone of all the men I have known seemed guided by some
beast-like instinct and never ate strange meat. "Balzac! Balzac!" he said
to me once, "oh, that was the man the French Bourgeoisie read so much a
few years ago." I can remember him at supper praising wine: "Why do people
say it is prosaic to be inspired by wine? Has it not been made by the
sunlight and the sap?" and his dispraising houses decorated by himself:
"Do you suppose I like that kind of house? I would like a house like a big
barn, where one ate in one corner, cooked in another corner, slept in the
third corner, and in the fourth received one's friends"; and his
complaining of Ruskin's objection to the underground railway: "If you must
have a railway the best thing you can do with it is to put it in a tube
with a cork at each end." I remember, too, that when I asked what led up
to his movement, he replied: "Oh, Ruskin and Carlyle, but somebody should
have been beside Carlyle and punched his head every five minutes." Though
I remember little, I do not doubt that, had I continued going there on
Sunday evenings, I should have caught fire from his words and turned my
hand to some mediaeval work or other.
Just before I had ceased to go there I had sent my _Wanderings of Usheen_
to his daughter, hoping of course that it might meet his eyes, and soon
after sending it I came upon him by chance in Holborn--"You write my sort
of poetry," he said and began to praise me and to promise to send his
praise to _The Commonwealth_, the League organ, and he would have said
more had he not caught sight of a new ornamental cast-iron lamp post and
got very heated upon that subject.
I did not read economics, having turned socialist because of Morris's
lectures and pamphlets, and I think it unlikely that Morris himself could
read economics. That old dogma of mine seemed germane to the matter. If
the men and women imagined by the poets were the norm, and if Morris had,
in let us say "News from Nowhere," then running through _The
Commonwealth_, described such men and women, living under their natural
conditions, or as they would desire to live, then those conditions
themselves must be the norm and could we but get rid of certain
institutions the world would turn from eccentricity. Perhaps Morris
himself justified himself in his own heart by as simple an argument, and
was, as the socialist D---- said to me one night, walking home after some
lecture, "an anarchist without knowing it." Certainly I and all about me,
including D---- himself, were for chopping up the old king for Medea's
pot. Morris had told us to have nothing to do with the parliamentary
socialists, represented for men in general by the Fabian Society and
Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation and for us in particular by D----.
During the period of transition mistakes must be made, and the discredit
of these mistakes must be left to "the Bourgeoisie"; and besides, when you
begin to talk of this measure, or that other, you lose sight of the goal,
and see, to reverse Swinburne's description of Tiresias, "Light on the way
but darkness on the goal." By mistakes Morris meant vexatious restrictions
and compromises--"If any man puts me into a labour squad, I will lie on
my back and kick." That phrase very much expresses our idea of
revolutionary tactics: we all intended to lie upon our back and kick.
D----, pale and sedentary, did not dislike labour squads and we all hated
him with the left side of our heads, while admiring him immensely with the
right side. He alone was invited to entertain Mrs Morris, having many
tales of his Irish uncles, more especially of one particular uncle who had
tried to commit suicide by shutting his head into a carpet-bag. At that
time he was an obscure man, known only for a witty speaker at street
corners and in Park demonstrations. He had, with an assumed truculence and
fury, cold logic, an invariable gentleness, an unruffled courtesy, and yet
could never close a speech without being denounced by a journeyman hatter,
with an Italian name. Converted to socialism by D----, and to anarchism by
himself, with swinging arm and uplifted voice, this man put, and perhaps,
exaggerated our scruple about Parliament. "I lack," said D----, "the bump
of reverence"; whereon the wild man shouted: "You 'ave a 'ole." There are
moments when looking back I somewhat confuse my own figure with that of
the hatter, image of our hysteria, for I too became violent with the
violent solemnity of a religious devotee. I can even remember sitting
behind D---- and saying some rude thing or other over his shoulder.
I don't remember why I gave it up but I did quite suddenly and the push
may have come from a young workman who was educating himself between
Morris and Karl Marx. He had planned a history of the Navy, and when I had
spoken of the battleships of Nelson's day had said, "O, that was the
decadence of the battleship," but if his naval interests were mediaeval,
his ideas about religion were pure Karl Marx, and we were soon in
perpetual argument. Then gradually the attitude towards religion of almost
everybody but Morris, who avoided the subject altogether, got upon my
nerves, for I broke out after some lecture or other with all the arrogance
of raging youth. They attacked religion, I said, or some such words, and
yet there must be a change of heart and only religion could make it. What
was the use of talking about some new revolution putting all things right,
when the change must come, if come it did, with astronomical slowness,
like the cooling of the sun, or it may have been like the drying of the
moon? Morris rang his chairman's bell, but I was too angry to listen, and
he had to ring it a second time before I sat down. He said that night at
supper, "Of course I know there must be a change of heart, but it will not
come as slowly as all that. I rang my bell because you were not being
understood." He did not show any vexation, but I never returned after that
night; and yet I did not always believe what I had said, and only
gradually gave up thinking of and planning for some near sudden change for
the better.
XIV
I spent my days at the British Museum and must, I think, have been
delicate, for I remember often putting off hour after hour consulting some
necessary book because I shrank from lifting the heavy volumes of the
catalogue; and yet to save money for my afternoon coffee and roll I often
walked the whole way home to Bedford Park. I was compiling, for a series
of shilling books, an anthology of Irish fairy-stories and, for an
American publisher, a two-volume selection from the Irish novelists that
would be somewhat dearer. I was not well paid, for each book cost me more
than three months' reading; and I was paid for the first some twelve
pounds ("O, Mr. E.," said publisher to editor, "you must never again pay
so much!") and for the second twenty, but I did not think myself badly
paid, for I had chosen the work for my own purposes.
Though I went to Sligo every summer, I was compelled to live out of
Ireland the greater part of every year, and was but keeping my mind upon
what I knew must be the subject-matter of my poetry. I believed that if
Morris had set his stories amid the scenery of his own Wales, for I knew
him to be of Welsh extraction and supposed wrongly that he had spent his
childhood there, that if Shelley had nailed his _Prometheus_, or some
equal symbol, upon some Welsh or Scottish rock, their art had entered more
intimately, more microscopically, as it were, into our thought and had
given perhaps to modern poetry a breadth and stability like that of
ancient poetry. The statues of Mausolus and Artemisia at the British
Museum, private, half-animal, half-divine figures, all unlike the Grecian
athletes and Egyptian kings in their near neighbourhood, that stand in the
middle of the crowd's applause, or sit above measuring it out
unpersuadable justice, became to me, now or later, images of an
unpremeditated joyous energy, that neither I nor any other man, racked by
doubt and inquiry, can achieve; and that yet, if once achieved, might seem
to men and women of Connemara or of Galway their very soul. In our study
of that ruined tomb raised by a queen to her dead lover, and finished by
the unpaid labour of great sculptors, after her death from grief, or so
runs the tale, we cannot distinguish the handiworks of Scopas and
Praxiteles; and I wanted to create once more an art where the artist's
handiwork would hide as under those half anonymous chisels, or as we find
it in some old Scots ballads, or in some twelfth or thirteenth century
Arthurian Romance. That handiwork assured, I had martyred no man for
modelling his own image upon Pallas Athena's buckler; for I took great
pleasure in certain allusions to the singer's life, one finds in old
romances and ballads, and thought his presence there all the more poignant
because we discover it half lost, like portly Chaucer, behind his own
maunciple and pardoner upon the Canterbury roads. Wolfram von Eschenbach,
singing his German Parsifal, broke off some description of a famished city
to remember that in his own house at home the very mice lacked food, and
what old ballad singer was it who claimed to have fought by day in the
very battle he sang by night? So masterful indeed was that instinct that
when the minstrel knew not who his poet was, he must needs make up a man:
"When any stranger asks who is the sweetest of singers, answer with one
voice: 'a blind man; he dwells upon rocky Chios; his songs shall be the
most beautiful for ever.'" Elaborate modern psychology sounds egotistical,
I thought, when it speaks in the first person, but not those simple
emotions which resemble the more, the more powerful they are, everybody's
emotion, and I was soon to write many poems where an always personal
emotion was woven into a general pattern of myth and symbol. When the
Fenian poet says that his heart has grown cold and callous--"For thy
hapless fate, dear Ireland, and sorrows of my own"--he but follows
tradition and if he does not move us deeply, it is because he has no
sensuous musical vocabulary that comes at need, without compelling him to
sedentary toil and so driving him out from his fellows. I thought to
create that sensuous, musical vocabulary, and not for myself only, but
that I might leave it to later Irish poets, much as a mediaeval Japanese
painter left his style as an inheritance to his family, and was careful to
use a traditional manner and matter, yet did something altogether
different, changed by that toil, impelled by my share in Cain's curse, by
all that sterile modern complication, by my "originality," as the
newspapers call it. Morris set out to make a revolution that the persons
of his _Well at the World's End_ or his _Waters of the Wondrous Isles_,
always, to my mind, in the likeness of Artemisia and her man, might walk
his native scenery; and I, that my native scenery might find imaginary
inhabitants, half-planned a new method and a new culture. My mind began
drifting vaguely towards that doctrine of "the mask" which has convinced
me that every passionate man (I have nothing to do with mechanist, or
philanthropist, or man whose eyes have no preference) is, as it were,
linked with another age, historical or imaginary, where alone he finds
images that rouse his energy. Napoleon was never of his own time, as the
naturalistic writers and painters bid all men be, but had some Roman
emperor's image in his head and some condottiere blood in his heart; and
when he crowned that head at Rome with his own hands he had covered, as
may be seen from David's painting, his hesitation with that emperor's old
suit.
XV