mainly to discuss my thoughts that I could not bring to a man without
meeting some competing thought, but partly because their tea and toast
saved my pennies for the 'bus ride home; but with women, apart from their
intimate exchanges of thought, I was timid and abashed. I was sitting on a
seat in front of the British Museum feeding pigeons when a couple of girls
sat near and began enticing my pigeons away, laughing and whispering to
one another, and I looked straight in front of me, very indignant, and
presently went into the Museum without turning my head towards them. Since
then I have often wondered if they were pretty or merely very young.
Sometimes I told myself very adventurous love-stories with myself for
hero, and at other times I planned out a life of lonely austerity, and at
other times mixed the ideals and planned a life of lonely austerity
mitigated by periodical lapses. I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo
in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little
island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick
I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which
balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water.
From the sudden remembrance came my poem _Innisfree_, my first lyric with
anything in its rhythm of my own music. I had begun to loosen rhythm as an
escape from rhetoric and from that emotion of the crowd that rhetoric
brings, but I only understood vaguely and occasionally that I must for my
special purpose use nothing but the common syntax. A couple of years
later I would not have written that first line with its conventional
archaism--"Arise and go"--nor the inversion in the last stanza. Passing
another day by the new Law Courts, a building that I admired because it
was Gothic--"It is not very good," Morris had said, "but it is better than
anything else they have got and so they hate it"--I grew suddenly
oppressed by the great weight of stone, and thought, "There are miles and
miles of stone and brick all round me," and presently added, "If John the
Baptist or his like were to come again and had his mind set upon it, he
could make all these people go out into some wilderness leaving their
buildings empty," and that thought, which does not seem very valuable now,
so enlightened the day that it is still vivid in the memory. I spent a few
days at Oxford copying out a seventeenth century translation of Poggio's
_Liber Facetiarum_ or the _Hypneroto-machia_ of Poliphili for a publisher;
I forget which, for I copied both; and returned very pale to my troubled
family. I had lived upon bread and tea because I thought that if antiquity
found locust and wild honey nutritive, my soul was strong enough to need
no better. I was always planning some great gesture, putting the whole
world into one scale of the balance and my soul into the other and
imagining that the whole world somehow kicked the beam. More than thirty
years have passed and I have seen no forcible young man of letters brave
the metropolis, without some like stimulant; and all after two or three,
or twelve or fifteen years, according to obstinacy, have understood that
we achieve, if we do achieve, in little sedentary stitches as though we
were making lace. I had one unmeasured advantage from my stimulant: I
could ink my socks, that they might not show through my shoes, with a most
haughty mind, imagining myself, and my torn tackle, somewhere else, in
some far place "under the canopy ... i' the city of kites and crows."
In London I saw nothing good and constantly remembered that Ruskin had
said to some friend of my father's--"As I go to my work at the British
Museum I see the faces of the people become daily more corrupt." I
convinced myself for a time, that on the same journey I saw but what he
saw. Certain old women's faces filled me with horror, faces that are no
longer there, or if they are pass before me unnoticed: the fat blotched
faces, rising above double chins, of women who have drunk too much beer
and eaten much meat. In Dublin I had often seen old women walking with
erect heads and gaunt bodies, talking to themselves with loud voices, mad
with drink and poverty, but they were different, they belonged to romance.
Da Vinci had drawn women who looked so and so carried their bodies.
XVI
I attempted to restore one old friend of my father's to the practice of
his youth, but failed, though he, unlike my father, had not changed his
belief. My father brought me to dine with Jack Nettleship at Wigmore
Street, once inventor of imaginative designs and now a painter of
melodramatic lions. At dinner I had talked a great deal--too much, I
imagine, for so young a man, or maybe for any man--and on the way home my
father, who had been plainly anxious that I should make a good impression,
was very angry. He said I had talked for effect and that talking for
effect was precisely what one must never do; he had always hated rhetoric
and emphasis and had made me hate it; and his anger plunged me into great
dejection. I called at Nettleship's studio the next day to apologise, and
Nettleship opened the door himself and received me with enthusiasm. He had
explained to some woman guest that I would probably talk well, being an
Irishman, but the reality had surpassed, etc., etc. I was not flattered,
though relieved at not having to apologise, for I soon discovered that
what he really admired was my volubility, for he himself was very silent.
He seemed about sixty, had a bald head, a grey beard, and a nose, as one
of my father's friends used to say, like an opera-glass, and sipped cocoa
all the afternoon and evening from an enormous tea-cup that must have been
designed for him alone, not caring how cold the cocoa grew. Years before
he had been thrown from his horse, while hunting, and broke his arm, and
because it had been badly set suffered great pain for a long time. A
little whisky would always stop the pain, and soon a little became a great
deal and he found himself a drunkard, but having signed his liberty away
for certain months he was completely cured. He had acquired, however, the
need of some liquid which he could sip constantly. I brought him an
admiration settled in early boyhood, for my father had always said,
"George Wilson was our born painter, but Nettleship our genius," and even
had he shown me nothing I could care for, I had admired him still because
my admiration was in my bones. He showed me his early designs, and they,
though often badly drawn, fulfilled my hopes. Something of Blake they
certainly did show, but had in place of Blake's joyous, intellectual
energy a Saturnian passion and melancholy. "God Creating Evil," the
death-like head with a woman and a tiger coming from the forehead, which
Rossetti--or was it Browning?--had described "as the most sublime design
of ancient or modern art," had been lost, but there was another version of
the same thought, and other designs never published or exhibited. They
rise before me even now in meditation, especially a blind Titan-like ghost
floating with groping hands above the tree-tops. I wrote a criticism, and
arranged for reproductions with the editor of an art magazine, but after
it was written and accepted the proprietor, lifting what I considered an
obsequious caw in the Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage
rookery, insisted upon its rejection. Nettleship did not mind its
rejection, saying, "Who cares for such things now? Not ten people," but he
did mind my refusal to show him what I had written. Though what I had
written was all eulogy, I dreaded his judgment for it was my first art
criticism. I hated his big lion pictures, where he attempted an art too
much concerned with the sense of touch, with the softness or roughness,
the minutely observed irregularity of surfaces, for his genius; and I
think he knew it. "Rossetti used to call my pictures pot-boilers," he
said, "but they are all--all"--and he waved his arm to the
canvasses--"symbols." When I wanted him to design gods, and angels, and
lost spirits once more, he always came back to the point "Nobody would be
pleased." "Everybody should have a _raison d'etre_" was one of his
phrases. "Mrs ----'s articles are not good but they are her _raison
d'etre_." I had but little knowledge of art for there was little
scholarship in the Dublin art school, so I overrated the quality of
anything that could be connected with my general beliefs about the world.
If I had been able to give angelical or diabolical names to his lions I
might have liked them also and I think that Nettleship himself would have
liked them better and liking them better have become a better painter. We
had the same kind of religious feeling, but I could give a crude
philosophical expression to mine while he could only express his in action
or with brush and pencil. He often told me of certain ascetic ambitions,
very much like my own, for he had kept all the moral ambition of youth, as
for instance--"Yeats, the other night I was arrested by a policeman--was
walking round Regent's Park barefooted to keep the flesh under--good sort
of thing to do. I was carrying my boots in my hand and he thought I was a
burglar and even when I explained and gave him half a crown, he would not
let me go till I had promised to put on my boots before I met the next
policeman."
He was very proud and shy and I could not imagine anybody asking him
questions and so I was content to take these stories as they came:
confirmations of what I had heard of him in boyhood. One story in
particular had stirred my imagination for, ashamed all my boyhood of my
lack of physical courage, I admired what was beyond my imitation. He
thought that any weakness, even a weakness of body, had the character of
sin and while at breakfast with his brother, with whom he shared a room on
the third floor of a corner house, he said that his nerves were out of
order. Presently he left the table, and got out through the window and on
to a stone ledge that ran along the wall under the windowsills. He sidled
along the ledge, and turning the corner with it, got in at a different
window and returned to the table. "My nerves," he said, "are better than I
thought."
Nettleship said to me: "Has Edwin Ellis ever said anything about the
effect of drink upon my genius?" "No," I answered. "I ask," he said,
"because I have always thought that Ellis has some strange medical
insight." Though I had answered no, Ellis had only a few days before used
these words: "Nettleship drank his genius away." Ellis, but lately
returned from Perugia where he had lived many years, was another old
friend of my father's but some years younger than Nettleship or my father.
Nettleship had found his simplifying image, but in his painting had turned
away from it, while Ellis, the son of Alexander Ellis, a once famous man
of science, who was perhaps the last man in England to run the circle of
the sciences without superficiality, had never found that image at all. He
was a painter and poet, but his painting, which did not interest me,
showed no influence but that of Leighton. He had started perhaps a couple
of years too late for Pre-Raphaelite influence, for no great
Pre-Raphaelite picture was painted after 1870, and left England too soon
for that of the French painters. He was, however, sometimes moving as a
poet and still more often an astonishment. I have known him cast something
just said into a dozen lines of musical verse, without apparently ceasing
to talk; but the work once done he could not or would not amend it, and my
father thought he lacked all ambition. Yet he had at times nobility of
rhythm--an instinct for grandeur, and after thirty years I still repeat to
myself his address to Mother Earth--
"O mother of the hills, forgive our towers,
O mother of the clouds forgive our dreams."
And there are certain whole poems that I read from time to time or try to
make others read. There is that poem where the manner is unworthy of the
matter, being loose and facile, describing Adam and Eve fleeing from
Paradise. Adam asks Eve what she carries so carefully, and Eve replies
that it is a little of the apple-core kept for their children. There is
that vision concerning _Christ the Less_, a too hurriedly written ballad,
where the half of Christ sacrificed to the divine half "that fled to seek
felicity" wanders wailing through Golgotha, and there is _The Saint and
the Youth_, in which I can discover no fault at all. He loved
complexities--"Seven silences like candles round her face" is a line of
his--and whether he wrote well or ill had always a manner which I would
have known from that of any other poet. He would say to me, "I am a
mathematician with the mathematics left out"--his father was a great
mathematician--or "A woman once said to me, 'Mr Ellis, why are your poems
like sums?'" And certainly he loved symbols and abstractions. He said
once, when I had asked him not to mention something or other, "Surely you
have discovered by this time that I know of no means whereby I can mention
a fact in conversation."
He had a passion for Blake, picked up in Pre-Raphaelite studios, and early
in our acquaintance put into my hands a scrap of notepaper on which he had
written some years before an interpretation of the poem that begins
"The fields from Islington to Marylebone,
To Primrose Hill and St. John's Wood,
Were builded over with pillars of gold,
And there Jerusalem's pillars stood."
The four quarters of London represented Blake's four great mythological
personages, the Zoas, and also the four elements. These few sentences were
the foundation of all study of the philosophy of William Blake that
requires an exact knowledge for its pursuit and that traces the
connection between his system and that of Swedenborg or of Boehme. I
recognised certain attributions, from what is sometimes called the
Christian Cabbala, of which Ellis had never heard, and with this proof
that his interpretation was more than fantasy he and I began our four
years' work upon the Prophetic Books of William Blake. We took it as
almost a sign of Blake's personal help when we discovered that the spring
of 1889, when we first joined our knowledge, was one hundred years from
the publication of _The Book of Thel_, the first published of the
Prophetic Books, as though it were firmly established that the dead
delight in anniversaries. After months of discussion and reading we made a
concordance of all Blake's mystical terms, and there was much copying to
be done in the Museum and at Red Hill, where the descendants of Blake's
friend and patron, the landscape painter John Linnell, had many
manuscripts. The Linnells were narrow in their religious ideas and
doubtful of Blake's orthodoxy, whom they held, however, in great honour,
and I remember a timid old lady who had known Blake when a child saying,
"He had very wrong ideas, he did not believe in the historical Jesus." One
old man sat always beside us, ostensibly to sharpen our pencils but
perhaps really to see that we did not steal the manuscripts, and they gave
us very old port at lunch, and I have upon my dining-room walls their
present of Blake's Dante engravings. Going thither and returning Ellis
would entertain me by philosophical discussion varied with improvised
stories, at first folk-tales which he professed to have picked up in
Scotland, and, though I had read and collected many folk tales, I did not
see through the deceit. I have a partial memory of two more elaborate
tales, one of an Italian conspirator flying barefoot, from I forget what
adventure through I forget what Italian city, in the early morning.
Fearing to be recognised by his bare feet, he slipped past the sleepy
porter at an hotel, calling out "number so and so" as if he were some
belated guest. Then passing from bedroom door to door he tried on the
boots, and just as he got a pair to fit, a voice cried from the room: "Who
is that?" "Merely me, sir," he called back, "taking your boots." The other
was of a martyr's Bible, round which the cardinal virtues had taken
personal form--this a fragment of Blake's philosophy. It was in the
possession of an old clergyman when a certain jockey called upon him, and
the cardinal virtues, confused between jockey and clergyman, devoted
themselves to the jockey. As whenever he sinned a cardinal virtue
interfered and turned him back to virtue, he lived in great credit, and
made, but for one sentence, a very holy death. As his wife and family
knelt round in admiration and grief he suddenly said "damn." "O my dear,"
said his wife, "what a dreadful expression." He answered, "I am going to
heaven," and straightway died. It was a long tale, for there were all the
jockey's vain attempts to sin, as well as all the adventures of the
clergyman, who became very sinful indeed, but it ended happily for when
the jockey died the cardinal virtues returned to the clergyman. I think he
would talk to any audience that offered, one audience being the same as
another in his eyes, and it may have been for this reason that my father
called him unambitious. When he was a young man he had befriended a
reformed thief and had asked the grateful thief to take him round the
thieves' quarters of London. The thief, however, hurried him away from the
worst saying, "Another minute and they would have found you out. If they
were not the stupidest of men in London, they had done so already." Ellis
had gone through a detailed, romantic and witty account of all the houses
he had robbed and all the throats he had cut in one short life.
His conversation would often pass out of my comprehension, or indeed I
think of any man's, into a labyrinth of abstraction and subtlety and then
suddenly return with some verbal conceit or turn of wit. The mind is known
to attain in certain conditions of trance a quickness so extraordinary
that we are compelled at times to imagine a condition of unendurable
intellectual intensity from which we are saved by the merciful stupidity
of the body, and I think that the mind of Edwin Ellis was constantly upon
the edge of trance. Once we were discussing the symbolism of sex in the
philosophy of Blake and had been in disagreement all the afternoon. I
began talking with a new sense of conviction and after a moment Ellis, who
was at his easel, threw down his brush and said that he had just seen the
same explanation in a series of symbolic visions. "In another moment," he
said, "I should have been off." We went into the open air and walked up
and down to get rid of that feeling, but presently we came in again and I
began again my explanation, Ellis lying upon the sofa. I had been talking
some time when Mrs Ellis came into the room and said, "Why are you sitting
in the dark?" Ellis answered, "But we are not," and then added in a voice
of wonder, "I thought the lamp was lit, and that I was sitting up, and
now I find that I am lying down and that we are in darkness." I had seen a
flicker of light over the ceiling but thought it a reflection from some
light outside the house, which may have been the case.
XVII
I had already met most of the poets of my generation. I had said, soon
after the publication of _The Wanderings of Usheen_, to the editor of a
series of shilling reprints, who had set me to compile tales of the Irish
fairies, "I am growing jealous of other poets and we will all grow jealous
of each other unless we know each other and so feel a share in each
other's triumph." He was a Welshman, lately a mining engineer, Ernest
Rhys, a writer of Welsh translations and original poems, that have often
moved me greatly though I can think of no one else who has read them. He
was perhaps a dozen years older than myself and through his work as editor
knew everybody who would compile a book for seven or eight pounds. Between
us we founded The Rhymers' Club, which for some years was to meet every
night in an upper room with a sanded floor in an ancient eating house in
the Strand called The Cheshire Cheese. Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson,
Victor Plarr, Ernest Radford, John Davidson, Richard le Gallienne, T. W.
Rolleston, Selwyn Image, Edwin Ellis, and John Todhunter came constantly
for a time, Arthur Symons and Herbert Home, less constantly, while William
Watson joined but never came and Francis Thompson came once but never
joined; and sometimes if we met in a private house, which we did
occasionally, Oscar Wilde came. It had been useless to invite him to The
Cheshire Cheese for he hated Bohemia. "Olive Schreiner," he said once to
me, "is staying in the East End because that is the only place where
people do not wear masks upon their faces, but I have told her that I live
in the West End because nothing in life interests me but the mask."
We read our poems to one another and talked criticism and drank a little
wine. I sometimes say when I speak of the club, "We had such and such
ideas, such and such a quarrel with the great Victorians, we set before us
such and such aims," as though we had many philosophical ideas. I say this
because I am ashamed to admit that I had these ideas and that whenever I
began to talk of them a gloomy silence fell upon the room. A young Irish
poet, who wrote excellently but had the worst manners, was to say a few
years later, "You do not talk like a poet, you talk like a man of
letters," and if all the Rhymers had not been polite, if most of them had
not been to Oxford or Cambridge, the greater number would have said the
same thing. I was full of thought, often very abstract thought, longing
all the while to be full of images, because I had gone to the art school
instead of a university. Yet even if I had gone to a university, and
learned all the classical foundations of English literature and English
culture, all that great erudition which once accepted frees the mind from
restlessness, I should have had to give up my Irish subject matter, or
attempt to found a new tradition. Lacking sufficient recognized precedent
I must needs find out some reason for all I did. I knew almost from the
start that to overflow with reasons was to be not quite well-born, and
when I could I hid them, as men hide a disagreeable ancestry; and that
there was no help for it seeing that my country was not born at all. I was
of those doomed to imperfect achievement, and under a curse, as it were,
like some race of birds compelled to spend the time, needed for the making
of the nest, in argument as to the convenience of moss and twig and
lichen. Le Gallienne and Davidson, and even Symons, were provincial at
their setting out, but their provincialism was curable, mine incurable;
while the one conviction shared by all the younger men, but principally by
Johnson and Home, who imposed their personalities upon us, was an
opposition to all ideas, all generalizations that can be explained and
debated. E---- fresh from Paris would sometimes say--"We are concerned
with nothing but impressions," but that itself was a generalization and
met but stony silence. Conversation constantly dwindled into "Do you like
so and so's last book?" "No, I prefer the book before it," and I think
that but for its Irish members, who said whatever came into their heads,
the club would not have survived its first difficult months. I saw--now
ashamed that I saw "like a man of letters," now exasperated at their
indifference to the fashion of their own river-bed--that Swinburne in one
way, Browning in another, and Tennyson in a third, had filled their work
with what I called "impurities," curiosities about politics, about
science, about history, about religion; and that we must create once more
the pure work.
Our clothes were, for the most part unadventurous like our conversation,
though I indeed wore a brown velveteen coat, a loose tie, and a very old
inverness cape, discarded by my father twenty years before and preserved
by my Sligo-born mother whose actions were unreasoning and habitual like
the seasons. But no other member of the club, except Le Gallienne, who
wore a loose tie, and Symons, who had an inverness cape that was quite new
and almost fashionable, would have shown himself for the world in any
costume but "that of an English gentleman." "One should be quite
unnoticeable," Johnson explained to me. Those who conformed most carefully
to the fashion in their clothes, generally departed furthest from it in
their handwriting, which was small, neat, and studied, one poet--which, I
forget--having founded his upon the handwriting of George Herbert. Dowson
and Symons I was to know better in later years when Symons became a very
dear friend, and I never got behind John Davidson's Scottish roughness and
exasperation, though I saw much of him, but from the first I devoted
myself to Lionel Johnson. He and Horne and Image and one or two others,
shared a man-servant and an old house in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square,
typical figures of transition, doing as an achievement of learning and of
exquisite taste what their predecessors did in careless abundance. All
were Pre-Raphaelite, and sometimes one might meet in the rooms of one or
other a ragged figure, as of some fallen dynasty, Simeon Solomon the
Pre-Raphaelite painter, once the friend of Rossetti and of Swinburne, but
fresh now from some low public house. Condemned to a long term of
imprisonment for a criminal offence, he had sunk into drunkenness and
misery. Introduced one night, however, to some man who mistook him, in the
dim candle light, for another Solomon, a successful academic painter and
R.A., he started to his feet in a rage with, "Sir, do you dare to mistake
me for that mountebank?" Though not one had hearkened to the feeblest
caw, or been spattered by the smallest dropping from any Huxley, Tyndall,
Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage bundle of old twigs I began by suspecting
them of lukewarmness, and even backsliding, and I owe it to that suspicion
that I never became intimate with Horne, who lived to become the greatest
English authority upon Italian life in the fourteenth century and to write
the one standard work on Botticelli. Connoisseur in several arts, he had
designed a little church in the manner of Inigo Jones for a burial ground
near the Marble Arch. Though I now think his little church a masterpiece,
its style was more than a century too late to hit my fancy, at two or
three and twenty; and I accused him of leaning towards that eighteenth
century
"That taught a school
Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit
Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit,
Their verses tallied."
Another fanaticism delayed my friendship with two men, who are now my
friends and in certain matters my chief instructors. Somebody, probably
Lionel Johnson, brought me to the studio of Charles Ricketts and Charles
Shannon, certainly heirs of the great generation, and the first thing I
saw was a Shannon picture of a lady and child, arrayed in lace silk and
satin, suggesting that hated century. My eyes were full of some more
mythological mother and child and I would have none of it and I told
Shannon that he had not painted a mother and child, but elegant people
expecting visitors and I thought that a great reproach. Somebody writing
in _The Germ_ had said that a picture of a pheasant and an apple was
merely a picture of something to eat and I was so angry with the
indifference to subject, which was the commonplace of all art criticism
since Bastien-Lepage, that I could at times see nothing else but subject.
I thought that, though it might not matter to the man himself whether he
loved a white woman or a black, a female pickpocket or a regular
communicant of the Church of England, if only he loved strongly, it
certainly did matter to his relations and even under some circumstances to
his whole neighbourhood. Sometimes indeed, like some father in Moliere, I
ignored the lover's feelings altogether and even refused to admit that a
trace of the devil, perhaps a trace of colour, may lend piquancy,
especially if the connection be not permanent.
Among these men, of whom so many of the greatest talents were to live such
passionate lives and die such tragic deaths, one serene man, T. W.
Rolleston, seemed always out of place; it was I brought him there,
intending to set him to some work in Ireland later on. I have known young
Dublin working men slip out of their workshop to see the second Thomas
Davis passing by, and even remember a conspiracy, by some three or four,
to make him "the leader of the Irish race at home and abroad," and all
because he had regular features; and when all is said Alexander the Great
and Alcibiades were personable men, and the Founder of the Christian
religion was the only man who was neither a little too tall nor a little
too short, but exactly six feet high. We in Ireland thought as do the
plays and ballads, not understanding that, from the first moment wherein
nature foresaw the birth of Bastien-Lepage, she has only granted great
creative power to men whose faces are contorted with extravagance or
curiosity, or dulled with some protecting stupidity.
I had now met all those who were to make the 'nineties of the last century
tragic in the history of literature, but as yet we were all seemingly
equal, whether in talent or in luck, and scarce even personalties to one
another. I remember saying one night at the Cheshire Cheese, when more
poets than usual had come, "None of us can say who will succeed, or even
who has or has not talent. The only thing certain about us is that we are
too many."
XVIII
I have described what image--always opposite to the natural self or the
natural world--Wilde, Henley, Morris, copied or tried to copy, but I have
not said if I found an image for myself. I know very little about myself
and much less of that anti-self: probably the woman who cooks my dinner or
the woman who sweeps out my study knows more than I. It is perhaps because
nature made me a gregarious man, going hither and thither looking for
conversation, and ready to deny from fear or favour his dearest
conviction, that I love proud and lonely things. When I was a child and
went daily to the sexton's daughter for writing lessons, I found one poem
in her School Reader that delighted me beyond all others: a fragment of
some metrical translation from Aristophanes wherein the birds sing scorn
upon mankind. In later years my mind gave itself to gregarious Shelley's
dream of a young man, his hair blanched with sorrow, studying philosophy
in some lonely tower, or of his old man, master of all human knowledge,
hidden from human sight in some shell-strewn cavern on the Mediterranean
shore. One passage above all ran perpetually in my ears--
"Some feign that he is Enoch: others dream
He was pre-Adamite, and has survived
Cycles of generation and of ruin.
The sage, in truth, by dreadful abstinence,
And conquering penance of the mutinous flesh,
Deep contemplation and unwearied study,
In years outstretched beyond the date of man,
May have attained to sovereignty and science
Over those strong and secret things and thoughts
Which others fear and know not.
_Mahmud._ I would talk
With this old Jew.
_Hassan._ Thy will is even now
Made known to him where he dwells in a sea-cavern
'Mid the Demonesi, less accessible
Than thou or God! He who would question him
Must sail alone at sunset where the stream
Of ocean sleeps around those foamless isles,
When the young moon is westering as now,
And evening airs wander upon the wave;
And, when the pines of that bee-pasturing isle,
Green Erebinthus, quench the fiery shadow
Of his gilt prow within the sapphire water,
Then must the lonely helmsman cry aloud
'Ahasuerus!' and the caverns round
Will answer 'Ahasuerus!' If his prayer
Be granted, a faint meteor will arise,
Lighting him over Marmora; and a wind
Will rush out of the sighing pine-forest,
And with the wind a storm of harmony
Unutterably sweet, and pilot him
Through the soft twilight to the Bosphorus:
Thence, at the hour and place and circumstance
Fit for the matter of their conference,
The Jew appears. Few dare, and few who dare
Win the desired communion."
Already in Dublin, I had been attracted to the Theosophists because they
had affirmed the real existence of the Jew, or of his like, and, apart
from whatever might have been imagined by Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran,
and Bastien-Lepage, I saw nothing against his reality. Presently having
heard that Madame Blavatsky had arrived from France, or from India, I
thought it time to look the matter up. Certainly if wisdom existed
anywhere in the world it must be in some such lonely mind admitting no
duty to us, communing with God only, conceding nothing from fear or
favour. Have not all peoples, while bound together in a single mind and
taste, believed that such men existed and paid them that honour, or paid
it to their mere shadow, which they have refused to philanthropists and to
men of learning.
XIX
I found Madame Blavatsky in a little house at Norwood, with but, as she
said, three followers left--the Society of Psychical Research had just
reported on her Indian phenomena--and as one of the three followers sat in
an outer room to keep out undesirable visitors, I was kept a long time
kicking my heels. Presently I was admitted and found an old woman in a
plain loose dark dress: a sort of old Irish peasant woman with an air of
humour and audacious power. I was still kept waiting, for she was deep in
conversation with a woman visitor. I strayed through folding doors into
the next room and stood, in sheer idleness of mind, looking at a cuckoo
clock. It was certainly stopped, for the weights were off and lying upon
the ground, and yet, as I stood there the cuckoo came out and cuckooed at
me. I interrupted Madame Blavatsky to say, "Your clock has hooted me."
"It oftens hoots at a stranger," she replied. "Is there a spirit in it?" I
said. "I do not know," she said, "I should have to be alone to know what
is in it." I went back to the clock and began examining it and heard her
say: "Do not break my clock." I wondered if there was some hidden
mechanism and I should have been put out, I suppose, had I found any,
though Henley had said to me, "Of course she gets up fraudulent miracles,
but a person of genius has to do something; Sarah Bernhardt sleeps in her
coffin." Presently the visitor went away and Madame Blavatsky explained
that she was a propagandist for women's rights who had called to find out
"why men were so bad." "What explanation did you give her?" I said. "That
men were born bad, but women made themselves so," and then she explained
that I had been kept waiting because she had mistaken me for some man,
whose name resembled mine and who wanted to persuade her of the flatness
of the earth.
When I next saw her she had moved into a house at Holland Park, and some
time must have passed--probably I had been in Sligo where I returned
constantly for long visits--for she was surrounded by followers. She sat
nightly before a little table covered with green baize and on this green
baize she scribbled constantly with a piece of white chalk. She would
scribble symbols, sometimes humorously explained, and sometimes
unintelligible figures, but the chalk was intended to mark down her score
when she played patience. One saw in the next room a large table where
every night her followers and guests, often a great number, sat down to
their vegetable meal, while she encouraged or mocked through the folding
doors. A great passionate nature, a sort of female Dr Johnson, impressive
I think to every man or woman who had themselves any richness, she seemed
impatient of the formalism of the shrill abstract idealism of those about
her, and this impatience broke out in railing and many nicknames: "O you
are a flap-doodle, but then you are a theosophist and a brother." The most
devout and learned of all her followers said to me, "H. P. B. has just
told me that there is another globe stuck on to this at the north pole, so
that the earth has really a shape something like a dumb-bell." I said, for
I knew that her imagination contained all the folklore of the world, "That
must be some piece of Eastern mythology." "O no it is not," he said, "of
that I am certain, and there must be something in it or she would not have
said it." Her mockery was not kept for her followers alone, and her voice
would become harsh, and her mockery lose fantasy and humour, when she
spoke of what seemed to her scientific materialism. Once I saw this
antagonism, guided by some kind of telepathic divination, take a form of
brutal fantasy. I brought a very able Dublin woman to see her and this
woman had a brother, a physiologist whose reputation, though known to
specialists alone, was European, and because of this brother a family
pride in everything scientific and modern. The Dublin woman scarcely
opened her mouth the whole evening and her name was certainly unknown to
Madame Blavatsky, yet I saw at once in that wrinkled old face bent over
the cards, and the only time I ever saw it there, a personal hostility,
the dislike of one woman for another. Madame Blavatsky seemed to bundle
herself up, becoming all primeval peasant, and began complaining of her
ailments, more especially of her bad leg. But of late her master--her
"old Jew," her "Ahasuerus"--cured it, or set it on the way to be cured. "I
was sitting here in my chair," said she, "when the master came in and
brought something with him which he put over my knee, something warm which
enclosed my knee--it was a live dog which he had cut open." I recognized a
cure used sometimes in mediaeval medicine. She had two masters and their
portraits, ideal Indian heads, painted by some most incompetent artist,
stood upon either side of the folding doors. One night when talk was
impersonal and general, I sat gazing through the folding doors into the
dimly lighted dining room beyond. I noticed a curious red light shining
upon a picture and got up to see where the red light came from. It was the
picture of an Indian and as I came near it slowly vanished. When I
returned to my seat, Madame Blavatsky said, "What did you see?" "A
picture," I said. "Tell it to go away." "It is already gone." "So much the
better," she said, "I was afraid it was mediumship. But it is only
clairvoyance." "What is the difference?" "If it had been mediumship, it
would have stayed in spite of you. Beware of mediumship; it is a kind of
madness; I know for I have been through it."
I found her almost always full of gaiety that, unlike the occasional
joking of those about her, was illogical and incalculable and yet always
kindly and tolerant. I had called one evening to find her absent but
expected every moment. She had been somewhere at the seaside for her
health and arrived with a little suite of followers. She sat down at once
in her big chair, and began unfolding a brown paper parcel while all
looked on full of curiosity. It contained a large family Bible. "This is a
present for my maid," she said. "What a Bible and not even annotated!"
said some shocked voice. "Well, my children," was the answer, "what is the
good of giving lemons to those who want oranges?" When I first began to
frequent her house, as I soon did very constantly, I noticed a handsome
clever woman of the world there, who seemed certainly very much out of
place, penitent though she thought herself. Presently there was much
scandal and gossip for the penitent was plainly entangled with two young
men, who were expected to grow into ascetic sages. The scandal was so
great that Madame Blavatsky had to call the penitent before her and to
speak after this fashion, "We think that it is necessary to crush the
animal nature; you should live in chastity in act and thought. Initiation
is granted only to those who are entirely chaste," and so it ran on for
some time. However, after some minutes in that vehement style, the
penitent standing crushed and shamed before her, she had wound up, "I
cannot permit you more than one." She was quite sincere but thought that
nothing mattered but what happened in the mind, and that if we could not
master the mind our actions were of little importance. One young man
filled her with exasperation for she thought that his settled gloom came
from his chastity. I had known him in Dublin where he had been accustomed
to interrupt long periods of asceticism, in which he would eat vegetables
and drink water, with brief outbreaks of what he considered the devil.
After an outbreak he would for a few hours dazzle the imagination of the
members of the local theosophical society with poetical rhapsodies about
harlots and street lamps, and then sink into weeks of melancholy. A
fellow-theosophist once found him hanging from the windowpole, but cut him
down in the nick of time. I said to the man who cut him down, "What did
you say to each other?" He said, "We spent the night telling comic stories
and laughing a great deal." This man, torn between sensuality and
visionary ambition, was now the most devout of all, and told me that in
the middle of the night he could often hear the ringing of the little
"astral bell" whereby Madame Blavatsky's master called her attention, and
that, although it was a silvery low tone, it made the whole house shake.
Another night I found him waiting in the hall to show in those who had
right of entrance, on some night when the discussion was private, and as I
passed he whispered into my ear, "Madame Blavatsky is perhaps not a real
woman at all. They say that her dead body was found many years ago upon
some Russian battlefield." She had two dominant moods, both of extreme
activity, one calm and philosophic, and this was the mood always on that
night in the week when she answered questions upon her system, and as I
look back after thirty years I often ask myself, "Was her speech
automatic? Was she a trance medium, or in some similar state, one night in
every week?" In the other mood she was full of fantasy and inconsequent
raillery. "That is the Greek Church, a triangle like all true religion," I
recall her saying, as she chalked out a triangle on the green baize, and
then as she made it disappear in meaningless scribbles, "it spread out and
became a bramble bush like the Church of Rome." Then rubbing it all out
except one straight line, "Now they have lopped off the branches and
turned it into a broomstick and that is protestantism." And so it was
night after night always varied and unforeseen. I have observed a like
sudden extreme change in others, half whose thought was supernatural and
Lawrence Oliphant records somewhere or other like observations. I can
remember only once finding her in a mood of reverie, something had
happened to damp her spirits, some attack upon her movement, or upon
herself. She spoke of Balzac, whom she had seen but once, of Alfred de
Musset, whom she had known well enough to dislike for his morbidity, and
George Sand, whom she had known so well that they had dabbled in magic
together of which "neither knew anything at all" in those days; and she
ran on, as if there was nobody there to overhear her, "I used to wonder at
and pity the people who sell their souls to the devil, but now I only pity
them. They do it to have somebody on their side," and added to that, after
some words I have forgotten, "I write, write, write as the Wandering Jew
walks, walks, walks."
Besides the devotees, who came to listen and to turn every doctrine into a
new sanction for the puritanical convictions of their Victorian childhood,
cranks came from half Europe and from all America, and they came that they
might talk. One American said to me, "She has become the most famous woman
in the world by sitting in a big chair and permitting us to talk." They
talked and she played patience, and totted up her score on the green
baize, and generally seemed to listen, but sometimes she would listen no
more. There was a woman who talked perpetually of "the divine spark"
within her, until Madame Blavatsky stopped her with--"Yes, my dear, you
have a divine spark within you and if you are not very careful you will
hear it snore." A certain Salvation Army captain probably pleased her, for
if vociferous and loud of voice, he had much animation. He had known
hardship and spoke of his visions while starving in the streets and he
was still perhaps a little light in the head. I wondered what he could
preach to ignorant men, his head ablaze with wild mysticism, till I met a
man who had heard him talking near Covent Garden to some crowd in the
street. "My friends," he was saying, "you have the kingdom of heaven
within you and it would take a pretty big pill to get that out."
Meanwhile I had got no nearer to proving that the sage Ahasuerus "dwells
in a sea cavern 'mid the Demonesi," nor did I learn any more of those
"Masters" whose representative Madame Blavatsky claimed to be. All there
seemed to feel their presence, and all spoke of them as if they were more
important than any visible inhabitant of the house. When Madame Blavatsky
was more silent, less vivid than usual, it was "because her Masters were
angry;" they had rebuked her because of some error, and she professed
constant error. Once I seemed in their presence, or that of some messenger
of theirs. It was about nine at night, and half a dozen of us sat round
her big table cloth, when the room seemed to fill with the odour of
incense. Somebody came from upstairs, but could smell nothing--had been
outside the influence it seems--but to myself and the others, it was very
strong. Madame Blavatsky said it was a common Indian incense, and that
some pupil of her master's was present; she seemed anxious to make light
of the matter and turned the conversation to something else. Certainly it
was a romantic house, and I did not separate myself from it by my own
will. I had learned from Blake to hate all abstraction, and, affected by
the abstraction of what were called "esoteric teachings," I began a series
of experiments. Some book or magazine published by the society had quoted
from that essay of magic, which Sibley, the eighteenth century astrologer,
had bound up with his big book upon astrology. If you burnt a flower to
ashes and put the ashes under, I think, the receiver of an air pump, and
stood the receiver in the moonlight for so many nights, the ghost of the
flower would appear hovering over its ashes. I got together a committee
which performed this experiment without results. The "esoteric teachings"
had declared that a certain very pure kind of indigo was the symbol of one
of the seven principles into which they divided human nature. I got with
some difficulty a little of this pure indigo, and gave portions of it to
members of the committee, and asked them to put it under their pillows at
night and record their dreams. I argued that all natural scenery must be
divided into seven types according to these principles, and by their study
we could rid the mind of abstraction. Presently a secretary, a friendly,
intelligent man, asked me to come and see him, and, when I did, complained
that I was causing discussion and disturbance. A certain fanatical hungry
face had been noticed red and tearful, and it was quite plain that I was
not in agreement with their methods or their philosophy. "We have certain
definite ideas," he said, "and we have but one duty, to spread them
through the world. I know that all these people become dogmatic, that they
believe what they can never prove, that their withdrawal from family life
is for them a great misfortune, but what are we to do? We have been told
that all spiritual influx into the society will come to an end in 1897 for
exactly one hundred years; before that date our fundamental ideas must be
spread in all countries." I knew the doctrine, and it made me wonder why
that old woman, or the "masters" from whom, whatever they were or were
not, her genius had come, insisted upon it; for influx of some kind there
must always be. Did they dread heresy, or had they no purpose but the
greatest possible immediate effect?
XX
At the British Museum reading room I often saw a man of thirty-six, or
thirty-seven, in a brown velveteen coat, with a gaunt resolute face, and
an athletic body, who seemed before I heard his name, or knew the nature
of his studies, a figure of romance. Presently I was introduced, where or
by what man or woman I do not remember. He was called Liddle Mathers, but
would soon, under the touch of "The Celtic Movement," become Macgregor
Mathers, and then plain Macgregor. He was the author of _The Kabbala
Unveiled_, and his studies were two only--magic and the theory of war, for
he believed himself a born commander and all but equal in wisdom and in
power to that old Jew. He had copied many manuscripts on magic ceremonial
and doctrine in the British Museum, and was to copy many more in
Continental libraries, and it was through him mainly that I began certain
studies and experiences, that were to convince me that images well up
before the mind's eye from a deeper source than conscious or subconscious
memory. I believe that his mind in those early days did not belie his face
and body, though in later years it became unhinged, for he kept a proud
head amid great poverty. One that boxed with him nightly has told me that
for many weeks he could knock him down, though Mathers was the stronger
man, and only knew long after that during those weeks Mathers starved.
With him I met an old white-haired Oxfordshire clergyman, the most
panic-stricken person I have ever known, though Mathers' introduction had
been "he unites us to the great adepts of antiquity." This old man took me
aside that he might say--"I hope you never invoke spirits--that is a very
dangerous thing to do. I am told that even the planetary spirits turn upon
us in the end." I said, "Have you ever seen an apparition?" "O yes, once,"
he said. "I have my alchemical laboratory in a cellar under my house where
the Bishop cannot see it. One day I was walking up and down there when I
heard another footstep walking up and down beside me. I turned and saw a
girl I had been in love with when I was a young man, but she died long
ago. She wanted me to kiss her. O no, I would not do that." "Why not?" I
said. "O she might have got power over me." "Has your alchemical research
had any success?" I said. "Yes, I once made the elixir of life. A French
alchemist said it had the right smell and the right colour" (the alchemist
may have been Eliphas Levi, who visited England in the 'sixties, and would
have said anything) "but the first effect of the elixir is that your nails
fall out and your hair falls off. I was afraid that I might have made a
mistake and that nothing else might happen, so I put it away on a shelf. I
meant to drink it when I was an old man, but when I got it down the other
day it had all dried up."
Soon after my first meeting with Mathers he emerged into brief prosperity,
becoming for two or three years Curator of a private museum at Forest
Hill, and marrying a young and beautiful wife, the sister of the
philosopher, Henri Bergson. His house at Forest Hill was soon a romantic
place to a little group, Florence Farr, myself, and some dozen fellow
students. I think that it was she, her curiosity being insatiable, who
first brought news of that house and that she brought it in mockery and in
wonder. Mathers had taken her for a walk through a field of sheep and had
said, "Look at the sheep. I am going to imagine myself a ram," and at once
all the sheep ran after him; another day he had tried to quell a thunder
storm by making symbols in the air with a masonic sword, but the storm had
not been quelled; and then came the crowning wonder. He had given her a
piece of cardboard on which was a coloured geometrical symbol and had told
her to hold it to her forehead and she had found herself walking upon a
cliff above the sea, seagulls shrieking overhead. I did not think the ram
story impossible, and even tried half a dozen times to excite a cat by
imagining a mouse in front of its nose, but still some chance movement of
the flock might have deceived her. But what could have deceived her in
that final marvel? Then another brought a like report, and presently my
own turn came. He gave me a cardboard symbol and I closed my eyes. Sight
came slowly, there was not that sudden miracle as if the darkness had been
cut with a knife, for that miracle is mostly a woman's privilege, but
there rose before me mental images that I could not control: a desert and
black Titan raising himself up by his two hands from the middle of a heap
of ancient ruins. Mathers explained that I had seen a being of the order
of Salamanders because he had shown me their symbol, but it was not
necessary even to show the symbol, it would have been sufficient that he
imagined it. I had already written in my diary, under some date in 1887,
that Madame Blavatsky's Masters were "trance personalities," and I must
have meant such beings as my black Titan, only more lasting and more
powerful. I had found when a boy in Dublin on a table in the Royal Irish
Academy a pamphlet on Japanese art and read there of an animal painter so
remarkable that horses he had painted upon a Temple wall, had slipped down
after dark and trampled the neighbours' fields of rice. Somebody had come
into the temple in the early morning, had been startled by a shower of
water drops, had looked up and seen painted horses still wet from the
dew-covered fields, but now "trembling into stillness."
I had soon mastered Mathers' symbolic system, and discovered that for a
considerable minority--whom I could select by certain unanalysable
characteristics--the visible world would completely vanish, and that
world, summoned by the symbol, take its place. One day when alone in a
third-class carriage, in the very middle of the railway bridge that
crosses the Thames near Victoria, I smelt incense. I was on my way to
Forest Hill; might it not come from some spirit Mathers had called up? I
had wondered when I smelt it at Madame Blavatsky's--if there might be some
contrivance, some secret censer, but that explanation was no longer
possible. I believed that Salamander of his but an image, and presently I
found analogies between smell and image. It must be from thought but what
certainty had I, that what had taken me by surprise, could be from my own
thought, and if a thought could affect the sense of smell, why not the
sense of touch? Then I discovered among that group of students that
surrounded Macgregor, a man who had fought a cat in his dreams and awaked
to find his breast covered with scratches. Was there an impassable
barrier between those scratches and the trampled fields of rice? It would
seem so, and yet all was uncertainty. What fixed law would our experiments
leave to our imagination?
Mathers had learning but no scholarship, much imagination and imperfect
taste, but if he made some absurd statement, some incredible claim, some
hackneyed joke, we would half consciously change claim, statement or joke,
as though he were a figure in a play of our composition. He was a
necessary extravagance, and he had carried further than anyone else, a
claim implicit in the romantic movement from the time of Shelley and of
Goethe; and in body and in voice at least he was perfect; so might Faust
have looked at the end of his hundred years. In the credulity of our youth
we secretly wondered if he had not met with, perhaps even been taught by
some old man who had found the elixir. Nor did he undeceive us. "If you
find the elixir," he was accustomed to say, "you always look a few years
younger than the age at which you found it. If you find it at sixty you
will look fifty for a hundred years." None of us would have admitted that
we believed in stone or elixir, the old Oxfordshire clergyman excited no
belief, yet one among us certainly laboured with crucible or athanor. Ten
years ago I called upon an elderly solicitor, on some business, but at his
private house, and I remembered whose pupil he had been when I found among
the ashes of the hearth a little earthen pot. He pretended that he studied
alchemy that he might some day write its history, and I found when I
questioned others, that for twenty years there had been just such a little
pot among the ashes.
XXI
I generalized a great deal and was ashamed of it. I thought it was my
business in life to be an artist and a poet, and that there could be no
business comparable to that. I refused to read books and even to meet
people who excited me to generalization, all to no purpose. I said my
prayers much as in childhood, though without the old regularity of hour
and place, and I began to pray that my imagination might somehow be
rescued from abstraction and became as preoccupied with life as had been
the imagination of Chaucer. For ten or twelve years more I suffered
continual remorse, and only became content when my abstractions had
composed themselves into picture and dramatization. My very remorse helped
to spoil my early poetry, giving it an element of sentimentality through
my refusal to permit it any share of an intellect which I considered
impure. Even in practical life I only very gradually began to use
generalizations, that have since become the foundation of all I have done,
or shall do, in Ireland. For all I know all men may have been so timid,
for I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we
shall ever find, but as yet we do not know truths that belong to us from
opinions, caught up in casual irritation or momentary fantasy. As life
goes on we discover that certain thoughts sustain us in defeat, or give us
victory, whether over ourselves or others, and it is these thoughts,
tested by passion, that we call convictions. Among subjective men (in all
those, that is, who must spin a web out of their own bowels) the victory
is an intellectual daily recreation of all that exterior fate snatches
away, and so that fate's antithesis; while what I have called "the Mask"
is an emotional antithesis to all that comes out of their internal nature.
We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy.
XXII
A conviction that the world was now but a bundle of fragments possessed me
without ceasing. I had tried this conviction on the Rhymers, thereby
plunging into greater silence an already too silent evening. "Johnson," I
was accustomed to say, "you are the only man I know whose silence has beak
and claw." I had lectured on it to some London Irish society, and I was to
lecture upon it later on in Dublin, but I never found but one interested
man, an official of the Primrose League, who was also an active member of
the Fenian Brotherhood. "I am an extreme conservative apart from Ireland,"
I have heard him explain; and I have no doubt that personal experience
made him share the sight of any eye that saw the world in fragments. I had
been put into a rage by the followers of Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran,
and Bastien-Lepage, who not only asserted the unimportance of subject
whether in art or literature, but the independence of the arts from one
another. Upon the other hand, I delighted in every age where poet and
artist confined themselves gladly to some inherited subject matter known
to the whole people, for I thought that in man and race alike there is
something called "Unity of Being," using that term as Dante used it when
he compared beauty in the _Convito_ to a perfectly proportioned human
body. My father, from whom I had learned the term, preferred a comparison
to a musical instrument so strung that if we touch a string all the
strings murmur faintly. There is not more desire, he had said, in lust
than in true love, but in true love desire awakens pity, hope, affection,
admiration, and, given appropriate circumstance, every emotion possible to
man. When I began, however, to apply this thought to the state and to
argue for a law-made balance among trades and occupations my father
displayed at once the violent free trader and propagandist of liberty. I
thought that the enemy of this unity was abstraction, meaning by
abstraction not the distinction but the isolation of occupation, or class
or faculty--
"Call down the hawk from the air
Let him be hooded, or caged,
Till the yellow eye has grown mild,
For larder and spit are bare,
The old cook enraged,
The scullion gone wild."
I knew no mediaeval cathedral, and Westminster, being a part of abhorred
London, did not interest me, but I thought constantly of Homer and Dante,
and the tombs of Mausolus and Artemisia, the great figures of King and
Queen and the lesser figures of Greek and Amazon, Centaur and Greek. I
thought that all art should be a Centaur finding in the popular lore its
back and its strong legs. I got great pleasure too from remembering that
Homer was sung, and from that tale of Dante hearing a common man sing some
stanza from _The Divine Comedy_, and from Don Quixote's meeting with some
common man that sang Ariosto. Morris had never seemed to care greatly for
any poet later than Chaucer and though I preferred Shakespeare to Chaucer
I begrudged my own preference. Had not Europe shared one mind and heart,
until both mind and heart began to break into fragments a little before
Shakespeare's birth? Music and verse began to fall apart when Chaucer
robbed verse of its speed that he might give it greater meditation, though
for another generation or so minstrels were to sing his lengthy elaborated
_Troilus and Criseyde_; painting parted from religion in the later
Renaissance that it might study effects of tangibility undisturbed; while,
that it might characterize, where it had once personified, it renounced,
in our own age, all that inherited subject matter which we have named
poetry. Presently I was indeed to number character itself among the
abstractions, encouraged by Congreve's saying that "passions are too
powerful in the fair sex to let humour," or as we say character, "have its
course." Nor have we fared better under the common daylight, for pure
reason has notoriously made but light of practical reason, and has been
made light of in its turn from that morning when Descartes discovered that
he could think better in his bed than out of it; nor needed I original
thought to discover, being so late of the school of Morris, that machinery
had not separated from handicraft wholly for the world's good, nor to
notice that the distinction of classes had become their isolation. If the
London merchants of our day competed together in writing lyrics they would
not, like the Tudor merchants, dance in the open street before the house
of the victor; nor do the great ladies of London finish their balls on the
pavement before their doors as did the great Venetian ladies, even in the
eighteenth century, conscious of an all enfolding sympathy. Doubtless
because fragments broke into ever smaller fragments we saw one another in
a light of bitter comedy, and in the arts, where now one technical element
reigned and now another, generation hated generation, and accomplished
beauty was snatched away when it had most engaged our affections. One
thing I did not foresee, not having the courage of my own thought: the
growing murderousness of the world.
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
XXIII
If abstraction had reached, or all but reached its climax, escape might be
possible for many, and if it had not, individual men might still escape.
If Chaucer's personages had disengaged themselves from Chaucer's crowd,
forgot their common goal and shrine, and after sundry magnifications
became each in turn the centre of some Elizabethan play, and had after
split into their elements and so given birth to romantic poetry, must I
reverse the cinematograph? I thought that the general movement of
literature must be such a reversal, men being there displayed in casual,
temporary, contact as at the Tabard door. I had lately read Tolstoy's
_Anna Karenina_ and thought that where his theoretical capacity had not
awakened there was such a turning back: but a nation or an individual with
great emotional intensity might follow the pilgrims as it were to some
unknown shrine, and give to all those separated elements and to all that
abstract love and melancholy, a symbolical, a mythological coherence. Not
Chaucer's rough tongued riders, but rather an ended pilgrimage, a
procession of the Gods! Arthur Symons brought back from Paris stories of
Verhaeren and Maeterlinck, and so brought me confirmation, as I thought,
and I began to announce a poetry like that of the Sufi's. I could not
endure, however, an international art, picking stories and symbols where
it pleased. Might I not, with health and good luck to aid me, create some
new _Prometheus Unbound_; Patrick or Columbkil, Oisin or Fion, in
Prometheus' stead; and, instead of Caucasus, Cro-Patric or Ben Bulben?
Have not all races had their first unity from a polytheism, that marries
them to rock and hill? We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which the
uneducated classes knew and even sang, and might we not make those stories
current among the educated classes, rediscovering for the work's sake what
I have called "the applied arts of literature," the association of
literature, that is, with music, speech, and dance; and at last, it might
be, so deepen the political passion of the nation that all, artist and
poet, craftsman and day-labourer would accept a common design? Perhaps
even these images, once created and associated with river and mountain,
might move of themselves and with some powerful, even turbulent life, like
those painted horses that trampled the rice fields of Japan.
XXIV
I used to tell the few friends to whom I could speak these secret thoughts
that I would make the attempt in Ireland but fail, for our civilization,
its elements multiplying by division like certain low forms of life, was
all-powerful; but in reality I had the wildest hopes. To-day I add to that
first conviction, to that first desire for unity, this other conviction,
long a mere opinion vaguely or intermittently apprehended: Nations, races,
and individual men are unified by an image, or bundle of related images,
symbolical or evocative of the state of mind, which is of all states of
mind not impossible, the most difficult to that man, race, or nation;
because only the greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without
despair, rouses the will to full intensity.
A powerful class by terror, rhetoric, and organized sentimentality, may
drive their people to war but the day draws near when they cannot keep
them there; and how shall they face the pure nations of the East when the
day comes to do it with but equal arms? I had seen Ireland in my own time
turn from the bragging rhetoric and gregarious humour of O'Connell's
generation and school, and offer herself to the solitary and proud Parnell
as to her anti-self, buskin following hard on sock, and I had begun to
hope, or to half hope, that we might be the first in Europe to seek unity
as deliberately as it had been sought by theologian, poet, sculptor,
architect, from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. Doubtless we must
seek it differently, no longer considering it convenient to epitomize all
human knowledge, but find it we well might could we first find philosophy
and a little passion.