BOOK IV

THE TRAGIC GENERATION

_THE TRAGIC GENERATION_

I

Two or three years after our return to Bedford Park _The Doll's House_ had

been played at the Royalty Theatre in Dean Street, the first Ibsen play to

be played in England, and somebody had given me a seat for the gallery. In

the middle of the first act, while the heroine was asking for macaroons, a

middle-aged washerwoman who sat in front of me, stood up and said to the

little boy at her side, "Tommy, if you promise to go home straight, we

will go now;" and at the end of the play, as I wandered through the

entrance hall, I heard an elderly critic murmur, "A series of

conversations terminated by an accident." I was divided in mind, I hated

the play; what was it but Carolus Durand, Bastien-Lepage, Huxley and

Tyndall, all over again; I resented being invited to admire dialogue so

close to modern educated speech that music and style were impossible.

"Art is art because it is not nature," I kept repeating to myself, but how

could I take the same side with critic and washerwoman? As time passed

Ibsen became in my eyes the chosen author of very clever young

journalists, who, condemned to their treadmill of abstraction, hated music

and style; and yet neither I nor my generation could escape him because,

though we and he had not the same friends, we had the same enemies. I

bought his collected works in Mr. Archer's translation out of my thirty

shillings a week and carried them to and fro upon my journeys to Ireland

and Sligo, and Florence Farr, who had but one great gift, the most perfect

poetical elocution, became prominent as an Ibsen actress and had almost a

success in _Rosmersholm_, where there is symbolism and a stale odour of

spoilt poetry. She and I and half our friends found ourselves involved in

a quarrel with the supporters of old fashioned melodrama, and conventional

romance, and in the support of the new dramatists who wrote in what the

Daily Press chose to consider the manner of Ibsen. In 1894 she became

manageress of the Avenue Theatre with a play of Dr. Todhunter's, called

_The Comedy of Sighs_, and Mr Bernard Shaw's _Arms and the Man_. She asked

me to write a one act play for her niece, Miss Dorothy Paget, a girl of

eight or nine, to make her first stage appearance in; and I, with my Irish

Theatre in mind, wrote _The Land of Heart's Desire_, in some discomfort

when the child was theme, as I knew nothing of children, but with an

abundant mind when Mary Bruin was for I knew an Irish woman whose unrest

troubled me and lay beyond my comprehension. When she opened her theatre

she had to meet a hostile audience, almost as violent as that Synge met in

January, 1907, and certainly more brutal, for the Abbey audience had no

hatred for the players, and I think but little for Synge himself. Nor had

she the certainty of final victory to give her courage, for _The Comedy of

Sighs_ was a rambling story told with a little paradoxical wit. She had

brought the trouble upon herself perhaps, for always in revolt against her

own poetical gift, which now seemed obsolete, and against her own

Demeter-like face in the mirror, she had tried when interviewed by the

Press to shock and startle--to seem to desire enemies; and yet, unsure of

her own judgment being out of her own trade, had feared to begin with

Shaw's athletic wit, and now outraged convention saw its chance. For two

hours and a half, pit and gallery drowned the voices of the players with

boos and jeers that were meant to be bitter to the author who sat visible

to all in his box surrounded by his family, and to the actress struggling

bravely through her weary part; and then pit and gallery went home to

spread their lying story that the actress had a fit of hysterics in her

dressing-room.

Todhunter had sat on to the end, and there were, I think, four acts of it,

listening to the howling of his enemies, while his friends slipped out one

by one, till one saw everywhere their empty seats, but nothing could

arouse the fighting instincts of that melancholy man. Next day I tried to

get him to publish his book of words with satirical designs and

illustrations, by Beardsley, who was just rising into fame, and an

introduction attacking the public, but though petulant and irascible he

was incapable of any emotion that could give life to a cause. He shared

the superstition still current in the theatre, that the public wants

sincere drama, but is kept from it by some conspiracy of managers or

newspapers, and could not get out of his head that the actors were to

blame. Shaw, whose turn came next, had foreseen all months before, and had

planned an opening that would confound his enemies. For the first few

minutes _Arms and the Man_ is crude melodrama and then just when the

audience are thinking how crude it is, it turns into excellent farce. At

the dress rehearsal, a dramatist who had his own quarrel with the public,

was taken in the noose; for at the first laugh he stood up, turned his

back on the stage, scowled at the audience, and even when everybody else

knew what turn the play had taken, continued to scowl, and order those

nearest to be silent.

On the first night the whole pit and gallery, except certain members of

the Fabian Society, started to laugh at the author and then, discovering

that they themselves were being laughed at, sat there not converted--their

hatred was too bitter for that--but dumbfounded, while the rest of the

house cheered and laughed. In the silence that greeted the author after

the cry for a speech one man did indeed get his courage and boo loudly. "I

assure the gentleman in the gallery," was Shaw's answer, "that he and I

are of exactly the same opinion, but what can we do against a whole house

who are of the contrary opinion?" And from that moment Bernard Shaw became

the most formidable man in modern letters, and even the most drunken of

medical students knew it. My own play, which had been played with _The

Comedy of Sighs_, had roused no passions, but had pleased a sufficient

minority for Florence Farr to keep it upon the stage with _Arms and the

Man_, and I was in the theatre almost every night for some weeks. "Oh,

yes, the people seem to like _Arms and the Man_," said one of Mr Shaw's

players to me, "but we have just found out that we are all wrong. Mr Shaw

did really mean it quite seriously, for he has written a letter to say so,

and we must not play for laughs any more." Another night I found the

manager, triumphant and excited, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of

Edinburgh had been there, and the Duke of Edinburgh had spoken his dislike

out loud so that the whole stalls could hear, but the Prince of Wales had

been "very pleasant" and "got the Duke of Edinburgh away as soon as

possible." "They asked for me," he went on, "and the Duke of Edinburgh

kept on repeating, 'The man is mad,' meaning Mr Shaw, and the Prince of

Wales asked who Mr Shaw was, and what he meant by it." I myself was almost

as bewildered for though I came mainly to see how my own play went, and

for the first fortnight to vex my most patient actors with new lines, I

listened with excitement to see how the audience would like certain

passages of _Arms and the Man_. I hated it; it seemed to me inorganic,

logical straightness and not the crooked road of life and I stood aghast

before its energy as to-day before that of the Stone Drill by Mr. Epstein

or of some design by Mr Wyndham Lewis. He was right to claim Samuel Butler

for his master, for Butler was the first Englishman to make the discovery,

that it is possible to write with great effect without music, without

style, either good or bad, to eliminate from the mind all emotional

implication and to prefer plain water to every vintage, so much

metropolitan lead and solder to any tendril of the vine. Presently I had a

nightmare that I was haunted by a sewing machine, that clicked and shone,

but the incredible thing was that the machine smiled, smiled perpetually.

Yet I delighted in Shaw the formidable man. He could hit my enemies and

the enemies of all I loved, as I could never hit, as no living author that

was dear to me could ever hit.

Florence Farr's way home was mine also for a part of the way, and it was

often of this that we talked, and sometimes, though not always, she would

share my hesitations, and for years to come I was to wonder whenever Shaw

became my topic, whether the cock crowed for my blame or for my praise.

II

Shaw and Wilde, had no catastrophe come, would have long divided the stage

between them, though they were most unlike--for Wilde believed himself to

value nothing but words in their emotional associations, and he had turned

his style to a parade as though it were his show, and he Lord Mayor.

I was at Sligo again and I saw the announcement of his action against Lord

Queensberry, when starting from my uncle's house to walk to Knocknarea to

dine with Cochrane of the Glen, as he was called, to distinguish him from

others of that name, an able old man. He had a relation, a poor mad girl,

who shared our meals, and at whom I shuddered. She would take a flower

from the vase in front of her and push it along the tablecloth towards any

male guest who sat near. The old man himself had strange opinions, born

not from any mental eccentricity, but from the solitude of his life; and a

freedom from all prejudice that was not of his own discovery. "The world

is getting more manly," he would say, "it has begun to drink port again,"

or "Ireland is going to become prosperous. Divorced couples now choose

Ireland for a retreat, just as before Scotland became prosperous they

began to go there. There are a divorced wife and her lover living at the

other side of the mountain." I remember that I spoke that night of Wilde's

kindness to myself, said I did not believe him guilty, quoted the

psychologist Bain, who has attributed to every sensualist "a voluminous

tenderness," and described Wilde's hard brilliance, his dominating

self-possession. I considered him essentially a man of action, that he was

a writer by perversity and accident, and would have been more important as

soldier or politician; and I was certain that, guilty or not guilty, he

would prove himself a man. I was probably excited, and did most of the

talking, for if Cochrane had talked, I would have remembered an amusing

sentence or two; but he was certainly sympathetic. A couple of days later

I received a letter from Lionel Johnson, denouncing Wilde with great

bitterness. He had "a cold scientific intellect;" he got a "sense of

triumph and power; at every dinner-table he dominated, from the knowledge

that he was guilty of that sin which, more than any other possible to man,

would turn all those people against him if they but knew." He wrote in the

mood of his poem, _To the Destroyer of a Soul_, addressed to Wilde, as I

have always believed, though I know nothing of the circumstance that made

him write it.

I might have known that Wilde's phantasy had taken some tragic turn, and

that he was meditating upon possible disaster, but one took all his words

for play--had he not called insincerity "a mere multiplication of the

personality" or some such words? I had met a man who had found him in a

barber's shop in Venice, and heard him explain, "I am having my hair

curled that I may resemble Nero;" and when, as editor of an Irish

anthology, I had asked leave to quote "Tread gently, she is near under the

snow," he had written that I might do so if I pleased, but his most

characteristic poem was that sonnet with the lines

"Lo! with a little rod

I did but touch the honey's romance--

And must I lose a soul's inheritance."

When in London for my play I had asked news from an actor who had seen him

constantly. "He is in deep melancholy," was the answer. "He says that he

tries to sleep away as much of life as possible, only leaving his bed at

two or three in the afternoon, and spending the rest of the day at the

Cafe Royal. He has written what he calls the best short story in the

world, and will have it that he repeats to himself on getting out of bed

and before every meal. 'Christ came from a white plain to a purple city,

and as he passed through the first street, he heard voices overhead, and

saw a young man lying drunk upon a window sill, "Why do you waste your

soul in drunkenness?" He said. "Lord, I was a leper and You healed me,

what else can I do?" A little further through the town he saw a young man

following a harlot, and said, "Why do you dissolve your soul in

debauchery?" and the young man answered, "Lord, I was blind, and You

healed me, what else can I do?" At last in the middle of the city He saw

an old man crouching, weeping upon the ground, and when He asked why he

wept, the old man answered, "Lord, I was dead and You raised me into life,

what else can I do but weep?"'"

Wilde published that story a little later, but spoiled it with the verbal

decoration of his epoch, and I have to repeat it to myself as I first

heard it, before I can see its terrible beauty. I no more doubt its

sincerity than I doubt that his parade of gloom, all that late rising, and

sleeping away his life, that elaborate playing with tragedy, was an

attempt to escape from an emotion by its exaggeration. He had three

successful plays running at once; he had been almost poor, and now, his

head full of Flaubert, found himself with ten thousand a year:--"Lord, I

was dead, and You raised me into life, what else can I do but weep." A

comedian, he was in the hands of those dramatists who understand nothing

but tragedy.

A few days after the first production of my _Land of Heart's Desire_, I

had my last conversation with him. He had come into the theatre as the

curtain fell upon my play, and I knew that it was to ask my pardon that he

overwhelmed me with compliments; and yet I wonder if he would have chosen

those precise compliments, or spoken so extravagantly, but for the turn

his thoughts had taken: "Your story in _The National Observer_, _The

Crucifixion of the Outcast_, is sublime, wonderful, wonderful."

Some business or other brought me to London once more and I asked various

Irish writers for letters of sympathy, and I was refused by none but

Edward Dowden, who gave me what I considered an irrelevant excuse--his

dislike for everything that Wilde had written. I heard that Wilde was at

his mother's house in Oakley Street, and I called there, but the Irish

servant told me, her face drawn and tragic as in the presence of death,

that he was not there, but that I could see his brother. Willie Wilde

received me with, "Who are you; what do you want?" but became all

friendship when I told him that I had brought letters of sympathy. He took

the bundle of letters in his hand, but said, "Do these letters urge him to

run away? Every friend he has is urging him to, but we have made up our

minds that he must stay and take his chance." "No," I said, "I certainly

do not think that he should run away, nor do those letters advise it."

"Letters from Ireland," he said. "Thank you, thank you. He will be glad to

get those letters, but I would keep them from him if they advised him to

run away." Then he threw himself back in his chair and began to talk with

incoherent emotion, and in phrases that echoed now and again his brother's

style at its worst; there were tear in his eyes, and he was, I think,

slightly intoxicated. "He could escape, oh, yes, he could escape--there is

a yacht in the Thames, and five thousand pounds to pay his bail--well, not

exactly in the Thames, but there is a yacht--oh, yes, he could escape,

even if I had to inflate a balloon in the back yard with my own hand, but

he has resolved to stay, to face it out, to stand the music like Christ.

You must have heard--it is not necessary to go into detail--but he and I,

we have not been friends; but he came to me like a wounded stag, and I

took him in." "After his release"--after the failure of his action against

Lord Queensberry, I think--"Stewart Headlam engaged a room at an hotel and

brought him there under another name, but the manager came up and said,

'Are you Mr. Wilde?' You know what my brother is, you know how he would

answer that. He said, 'Yes, I am Oscar Wilde,' and the manager said he

must not stay. The same thing happened in hotel after hotel, and at last

he made up his mind to come here. It is his vanity that has brought all

this disgrace upon him; they swung incense before him." He dwelt upon the

rhythm of the words as his brother would have done--"They swung it before

his heart." His first emotion at the thought of the letters over, he

became more simple, and explained that his brother considered that his

crime was not the vice itself, but that he should have brought such misery

upon his wife and children, and that he was bound to accept any chance,

however slight, that might reestablish his position. "If he is acquitted,"

he said, "he will stay out of England for a few years, and can then gather

his friends about him once more--even if he is condemned he will purge his

offence--but if he runs away he will lose every friend that he has." I

heard later, from whom I forget now, that Lady Wilde had said, "If you

stay, even if you go to prison, you will always be my son, it will make no

difference to my affection, but if you go, I will never speak to you

again." While I was there, some woman who had just seen him--Willie

Wilde's wife, I think--came in, and threw herself in a chair, and said in

an exhausted voice, "It is all right now, he has made up his mind to go to

prison if necessary." Before his release, two years later, his brother and

mother were dead, and a little later his wife, struck by paralysis during

his imprisonment, I think, was dead, too; and he himself, his constitution

ruined by prison life, followed quickly; but I have never doubted, even

for an instant, that he made the right decision, and that he owes to that

decision half of his renown.

Cultivated London, that before the action against Lord Queensberry had

mocked his pose and affected style, and refused to acknowledge his wit,

was now full of his advocates, though I did not meet a single man who

considered him innocent. One old enemy of his overtook me in the street

and began to praise his audacity, his self-possession. "He has made," he

said, "of infamy a new Thermopylae." I had written in reply to Lionel

Johnson's letter that I regretted Wilde's downfall but not that of his

imitators, but Johnson had changed with the rest. "Why do you not regret

the fall of Wilde's imitators"--I had but tried to share what I thought

his opinion--"They were worthless, but should have been left to

criticism." Wilde himself was a martyr in his eyes, and when I said that

tragedy might give his art a greater depth, he would not even grant a

martyr's enemies that poor merit, and thought Wilde would produce, when

it was all over, some comedy exactly like the others, writing from an art

where events could leave no trace. Everywhere one met writers and artists

who praised his wit and eloquence in the witness box, or repeated some

private saying. Willie Redmond told of finding him, to his astonishment,

at the conversazione of some theatrical society, standing amid an

infuriated crowd, mocking with more than all his old satirical wit the

actors and their country. He had said to a well-known painter during one

or other of the trials, "My poor brother writes to me that he is defending

me all over London; my poor, dear brother, he could compromise a steam

engine." His brother, too, had suffered a change, for, if rumour did not

wrong him, "the wounded stag" had not been at all graciously received.

"Thank God my vices were decent," had been his comment, and refusing to

sit at the same table, he had dined at some neighbouring hotel at his

brother's expense. His successful brother who had scorned him for a

drunken ne'er-do-well was now at his mercy, and besides, he probably

shared, until tragedy awoke another self, the rage and contempt that

filled the crowds in the street, and all men and women who had an

over-abundant normal sexual instinct. "Wilde will never lift his head

again," said the art critic, Gleeson White, "for he has against him all

men of infamous life." When the verdict was announced the harlots in the

street outside danced upon the pavement.

III

Somewhere about 1450, though later in some parts of Europe by a hundred

years or so, and in some earlier, men attained to personality in great

numbers, "Unity of Being," and became like a "perfectly proportioned human

body," and as men so fashioned held places of power, their nations had it

too, prince and ploughman sharing that thought and feeling. What

afterwards showed for rifts and cracks were there already, but imperious

impulse held all together. Then the scattering came, the seeding of the

poppy, bursting of pea-pod, and for a time personality seemed but the

stronger for it. Shakespeare's people make all things serve their passion,

and that passion is for the moment the whole energy of their being--birds,

beasts, men, women, landscape, society, are but symbols and metaphors,

nothing is studied in itself, the mind is a dark well, no surface, depth

only. The men that Titian painted, the men that Jongsen painted, even the

men of Van Dyck, seemed at moments like great hawks at rest. In the Dublin

National Gallery there hung, perhaps there still hangs, upon the same

wall, a portrait of some Venetian gentleman by Strozzi, and Mr. Sargent's

painting of President Wilson. Whatever thought broods in the dark eyes of

that Venetian gentleman, has drawn its life from his whole body; it feeds

upon it as the flame feeds upon the candle--and should that thought be

changed, his pose would change, his very cloak would rustle for his whole

body thinks. President Wilson lives only in the eyes, which are steady and

intent; the flesh about the mouth is dead, and the hands are dead, and the

clothes suggest no movement of his body, nor any movement but that of the

valet, who has brushed and folded in mechanical routine. There, all was an

energy flowing outward from the nature itself; here, all is the anxious

study and slight deflection of external force; there man's mind and body

were predominantly subjective; here all is objective, using those words

not as philosophy uses them, but as we use them in conversation.

The bright part of the moon's disk, to adopt the symbolism of a certain

poem, is subjective mind, and the dark, objective mind, and we have eight

and twenty Phases for our classification of mankind, and of the movement

of his thought. At the first Phase--the night where there is no

moonlight--all is objective, while when, upon the fifteenth night, the

moon comes to the full, there is only subjective mind. The mid-renaissance

could but approximate to the full moon "For there is no human life at the

full or the dark," but we may attribute to the next three nights of the

moon the men of Shakespeare, of Titian, of Strozzi, and of Van Dyck, and

watch them grow more reasonable, more orderly, less turbulent, as the

nights pass; and it is well to find before the fourth--the nineteenth moon

counting from the start--a sudden change, as when a cloud becomes rain, or

water freezes, for the great transitions are sudden; popular, typical men

have grown more ugly and more argumentative; the face that Van Dyck called

a fatal face has faded before Cromwell's warty opinionated head.

Henceforth no mind made like "a perfectly proportioned human body" shall

sway the public, for great men must live in a portion of themselves,

become professional and abstract; but seeing that the moon's third quarter

is scarce passed, that abstraction has attained but not passed its climax,

that a half, as I affirm it, of the twenty-second night still lingers,

they may subdue and conquer; cherish, even, some Utopian dream; spread

abstraction ever further till thought is but a film, and there is no dark

depth any more, surface only. But men who belong by nature to the nights

near to the full are still born, a tragic minority, and how shall they do

their work when too ambitious for a private station, except as Wilde of

the nineteenth Phase, as my symbolism has it, did his work. He understood

his weakness, true personality was impossible, for that is born in

solitude, and at his moon one is not solitary; he must project himself

before the eyes of others, and, having great ambition, before some great

crowd of eyes; but there is no longer any great crowd that cares for his

true thought. He must humour and cajole and pose, take worn-out stage

situations, for he knows that he may be as romantic as he please, so long

as he does not believe in his romance, and all that he may get their ears

for a few strokes of contemptuous wit in which he does believe.

We Rhymers did not humour and cajole; but it was not wholly from demerit,

it was in part because of different merit, that he refused our exile.

Shaw, as I understand him, has no true quarrel with his time, its moon and

his almost exactly coincide. He is quite content to exchange Narcissus and

his Pool for the signal box at a railway junction, where goods and

travellers pass perpetually upon their logical glittering road. Wilde was

a monarchist, though content that monarchy should turn demagogue for its

own safety, and he held a theatre by the means whereby he held a London

dinner table. "He who can dominate a London dinner table," he had boasted,

"can dominate the world." While Shaw has but carried his street-corner

socialist eloquence on to the stage, and in him one discovers, in his

writing and his public speech, as once--before their outline had been

softened by prosperity or the passage of the years--in his clothes and in

his stiff joints, the civilization that Sargent's picture has explored.

Neither his crowd nor he have yet made that discovery that brought

President Wilson so near his death, that the moon draws to its fourth

quarter. But what happens to the individual man whose moon has come to

that fourth quarter, and what to the civilization...?

I can but remember pipe music to-night, though I can half hear beyond it

in the memory a weightier music, but this much at any rate is certain--the

dream of my early manhood, that a modern nation can return to Unity of

Culture, is false; though it may be we can achieve it for some small

circle of men and women, and there leave it till the moon bring round its

century.

"The cat went here and there

And the moon spun round like a top,

And the nearest kin of the moon

The creeping cat looked up.

* * * *

Minnaloushe creeps through the grass

From moonlit place to place;

The sacred moon overhead

Has taken a new phase.

Does Minnaloushe know that her pupils

Will pass from change to change,

And that from round to crescent

From crescent to round they range?

Minnaloushe creeps through the grass

Alone, important and wise,

And lifts to the changing moon

Her changing eyes."

IV

Henley's troubles and infirmities were growing upon him. He, too, an

ambitious, formidable man, who showed alike in his practice and in his

theory, in his lack of sympathy for Rossetti and Landor, for instance,

that he never understood how small a fragment of our own nature can be

brought to perfect expression, nor that even but with great toil, in a

much divided civilization; though, doubtless, if our own Phase be right, a

fragment may be an image of the whole, the moon's still scarce crumbled

image, as it were, in a glass of wine. He would be, and have all poets be,

a true epitome of the whole mass, a Herrick and Dr. Johnson in the same

body and because this--not so difficult before the Mermaid closed its

door--is no longer possible, his work lacks music, is abstract, as even an

actor's movement can be when the thought of doing is plainer to his mind

than the doing itself: the straight line from cup to lip, let us say, more

plain than the hand's own sensation weighed down by that heavy spillable

cup. I think he was content, when he had called before our eyes--before

the too understanding eyes of his chosen crowd--the violent burly man that

he had dreamed, content with the mere suggestion, and so did not work long

enough at his verses. He disliked Victor Hugo as much as he did Rossetti,

and yet Rossetti's translation from _Les Burgraves_, because of its mere

technical mastery, out-sings Henley in his own song--

"My mother is dead; God's patience wears;

It seems my Chaplain will not have done.

Love on: who cares?

Who cares? Love on."

I can read his poetry with emotion, but I read it for some glimpse of what

he might have been as Border balladist, or Cavalier, or of what he

actually was, not as poet but as man. He had what Wilde lacked, even in

his ruin, passion, was maybe as passionate as some great man of action, as

Parnell, let us say. When he and Stevenson quarrelled, he cried over it

with some woman or other, and his notorious article was but for vengeance

upon Mrs. Stevenson, who had arranged for the public eye, what he

considered an imaginary figure, with no resemblance to the gay companion

who had founded his life, to that life's injury, upon "The august, the

immortal musketeers." She had caused the quarrel, as he believed, and now

she had robbed him over again, by blotting from the world's memory the

friend of his youth; and because he believed it I read those angry

paragraphs with but deeper sympathy for the writer; and I think that the

man who has left them out of Henley's collected writings has wronged his

memory, as Mrs. Stevenson wronged the memory of Stevenson.

He was no contemplative man, no pleased possessor of wooden models and

paper patterns, but a great passionate man, and no friend of his would

have him pictured otherwise. I saw little of him in later years, but I

doubt if he was ever the same after the death of his six-year old

daughter. Few passages of his verse touch me as do those few mentions of

her though they lack precision of word and sound. When she is but a hope,

he prays that she may have his 'gift of life' and his wife's 'gift of

love,' and when she is but a few months old he murmurs over her sleep--

When you wake in your crib,

You an inch of experience--

Vaulted about

With the wonder of darkness;

Wailing and striving

To reach from your feebleness

Something you feel

Will be good to and cherish you.

And now he commends some friend "boyish and kind, and shy," who greeted

him, and greeted his wife, "that day we brought our beautiful one to lie

in the green peace" and who is now dead himself, and after that he speaks

of love "turned by death to longing" and so, to an enemy.

When I spoke to him of his child's death he said, "she was a person of

genius; she had the genius of the mind, and the genius of the body." And

later I heard him talk of her as a man talks of something he cannot keep

silence over because it is in all his thoughts. I can remember, too, his

talking of some book of natural history he had read, that he might be able

to answer her questions.

He had a house now at Mortlake on the Thames with a great ivy tod

shadowing door and window, and one night there he shocked and startled a

roomful of men by showing how far he could be swept beyond our reach in

reveries of affection. The dull man, who had tried to put Wilde out of

countenance, suddenly said to the whole room, roused by I cannot remember

what incautious remark of mine made to some man at my side: "Yeats

believes in magic; what nonsense." Henley said, "No, it may not be

nonsense; black magic is all the go in Paris now." And then turning

towards me with a changed sound in his voice, "It is just a game, isn't

it." I replied, not noticing till too late his serious tone, and wishing

to avoid discussion in the dull man's company, "One has had a vision; one

wants to have another, that is all." Then Henley said, speaking in a very

low voice, "I want to know how I am to get to my daughter. I was sitting

here the other night when she came into the room and played round the

table and went out again. Then I saw that the door was shut and I knew

that I had seen a vision." There was an embarrassed silence, and then

somebody spoke of something else and we began to discuss it hurriedly and

eagerly.

V

I came now to be more in London, never missing the meetings of the

Rhymers' Club, nor those of the council of the Irish Literary Society,

where I constantly fought out our Irish quarrels and pressed upon the

unwilling Gavan Duffy the books of our new movement. The Irish members of

Parliament looked upon us with some hostility because we had made it a

matter of principle never to put a politician in the chair, and upon other

grounds. One day, some old Irish member of Parliament made perhaps his

only appearance at a gathering of members. He recited with great emotion a

ballad of his own composition in the manner of Young Ireland, repeating

over his sacred names, Wolfe Tone, Emmet, and Owen Roe, and mourning that

new poets and new movements should have taken something of their

sacredness away. The ballad had no literary merit, but I went home with a

troubled conscience; and for a dozen years perhaps, till I began to see

the result of our work in a deepened perception of all those things that

strengthen race, that trouble remained. I had in mind that old politician

as I wrote but the other day--

"Our part

To murmur name upon name

As a mother names her child."

The Rhymers had begun to break up in tragedy, though we did not know that

till the play had finished. I have never found a full explanation of that

tragedy; sometimes I have remembered that, unlike the Victorian poets,

almost all were poor men, and had made it a matter of conscience to turn

from every kind of money-making that prevented good writing, and that

poverty meant strain, and for the most part, a refusal of domestic life.

Then I have remembered that Johnson had private means, and that others who

came to tragic ends, had wives and families. Another day I think that

perhaps our form of lyric, our insistence upon emotion which has no

relation to any public interest, gathered together, overwrought, unstable

men; and remember the moment after that the first to go out of his mind

had no lyrical gift, and that we valued him mainly because he seemed a

witty man of the world; and that a little later another who seemed, alike

as man and writer, dull and formless, went out of his mind, first burning

poems which I cannot believe would have proved him as the one man who saw

them claims, a man of genius. The meetings were always decorous and often

dull; some one would read out a poem and we would comment, too politely

for the criticism to have great value; and yet that we read out our poems,

and thought that they could be so tested, was a definition of our aims.

_Love's Nocturne_ is one of the most beautiful poems in the world, but no

one can find out its beauty, so intricate its thought and metaphor, till

he has read it over several times, or often stopped his reading to think

out the meaning of some passage, and the _Faustine_ of Swinburne, where

many separate verses are powerful and musical, could not, were it read

out, be understood with pleasure, however clearly it were read, because it

has no more logical structure than a bag of shot. I shall, however,

remember all my life that evening when Lionel Johnson read or spoke aloud

in his musical monotone, where meaning and cadence found the most precise

elocution, his poem suggested "by the Statue of King Charles at Charing

Cross." It was as though I listened to a great speech. Nor will that poem

be to me again what it was that first night. For long I only knew Dowson's

_O Mors_, to quote but the first words of its long title, and his

_Villanelle of Sunset_ from his reading, and it was because of the desire

to hold them in my hand that I suggested the first _Book of The Rhymers'

Club_. They were not speech but perfect song, though song for the speaking

voice. It was perhaps our delight in poetry that was, before all else,

speech or song, and could hold the attention of a fitting audience like a

good play or good conversation, that made Francis Thompson, whom we

admired so much--before the publication of his first poem I had brought to

the Cheshire Cheese the proof sheets of his _Ode to the Setting Sun_, his

first published poem--come but once and refuse to contribute to our book.

Preoccupied with his elaborate verse, he may have seen only that which we

renounced, and thought what seemed to us simplicity, mere emptiness. To

some members this simplicity was perhaps created by their tumultuous

lives, they praised a desired woman and hoped that she would find amid

their praise her very self, or at worst, their very passion; and knew that

she, ignoramus that she was, would have slept in the middle of _Love's

Nocturne_, lofty and tender though it be. Woman herself was still in our

eyes, for all that, romantic and mysterious, still the priestess of her

shrine, our emotions remembering the _Lilith_ and the _Sybilla Palmifera_

of Rossetti; for as yet that sense of comedy, which was soon to mould the

very fashion plates, and, in the eyes of men of my generation, to destroy

at last the sense of beauty itself, had scarce begun to show here and

there, in slight subordinate touches among the designs of great painters

and craftsmen. It could not be otherwise, for Johnson's favourite phrase,

that life is ritual, expressed something that was in some degree in all

our thoughts, and how could life be ritual if woman had not her symbolical

place?

If Rossetti was a sub-conscious influence, and perhaps the most powerful

of all, we looked consciously to Pater for our philosophy. Three or four

years ago I re-read _Marius the Epicurean_, expecting to find I cared for

it no longer, but it still seemed to me, as I think it seemed to us all,

the only great prose in modern English, and yet I began to wonder if it,

or the attitude of mind of which it was the noblest expression, had not

caused the disaster of my friends. It taught us to walk upon a rope,

tightly stretched through serene air, and we were left to keep our feet

upon a swaying rope in a storm. Pater had made us learned; and, whatever

we might be elsewhere, ceremonious and polite, and distant in our

relations to one another, and I think none knew as yet that Dowson, who

seemed to drink so little and had so much dignity and reserve, was

breaking his heart for the daughter of the keeper of an Italian eating

house, in dissipation and drink; and that he might that very night sleep

upon a sixpenny bed in a doss house. It seems to me that even yet, and I

am speaking of 1894 and 1895, we knew nothing of one another, but the

poems that we read and criticised; perhaps I have forgotten or was too

much in Ireland for knowledge, but of this I am certain, we shared nothing

but the artistic life. Sometimes Johnson and Symons would visit our sage

at Oxford, and I remember Johnson, whose reports however were not always

to be trusted, returning with a sentence that long ran in my head. He had

noticed books on political economy among Pater's books, and Pater had

said, "Everything that has occupied man, for any length of time, is worthy

of our study." Perhaps it was because of Pater's influence that we, with

an affectation of learning, claimed the whole past of literature for our

authority, instead of finding it like the young men in the age of comedy

that followed us, in some new, and so still unrefuted authority; that we

preferred what seemed still uncrumbled rock, to the still unspotted foam;

that we were traditional alike in our dress, in our manner, in our

opinions, and in our style.

Why should men, who spoke their opinions in low voices, as though they

feared to disturb the readers in some ancient library, and timidly as

though they knew that all subjects had long since been explored, all

questions long since decided in books whereon the dust settled--live lives

of such disorder and seek to rediscover in verse the syntax of impulsive

common life? Was it that we lived in what is called "an age of transition"

and so lacked coherence, or did we but pursue antithesis?

VI

All things, apart from love and melancholy, were a study to us; Horne

already learned in Botticelli had begun to boast that when he wrote of him

there would be no literature, all would be but learning; Symons, as I

wrote when I first met him, studied the music halls, as he might have

studied the age of Chaucer; while I gave much time to what is called the

Christian Cabala; nor was there any branch of knowledge Johnson did not

claim for his own. When I had first gone to see him in 1888 or 1889, at

the Charlotte Street house, I had called about five in the afternoon, but

the man servant that he shared with Horne and Image, told me that he was

not yet up, adding with effusion "he is always up for dinner at seven."

This habit of breakfasting when others dined had been started by insomnia,

but he came to defend it for its own sake. When I asked if it did not

separate him from men and women he replied, "In my library I have all the

knowledge of the world that I need." He had certainly a considerable

library, far larger than that of any young man of my acquaintance, so

large that he wondered if it might not be possible to find some way of

hanging new shelves from the ceiling like chandeliers. That room was

always a pleasure to me, with its curtains of grey corduroy over door and

window and book case, and its walls covered with brown paper, a fashion

invented, I think, by Horne, that was soon to spread. There was a portrait

of Cardinal Newman, looking a little like Johnson himself, some religious

picture by Simeon Solomon, and works upon theology in Greek and Latin and

a general air of neatness and severity; and talking there by candle light

it never seemed very difficult to murmur Villiers de L'isle Adam's proud

words, "As for living--our servants will do that for us." Yet I can now

see that Johnson himself in some hidden, half-conscious part of him

desired the world he had renounced, desired it as an object of study. I

was often puzzled as to when and where he could have met the famous men or

beautiful women, whose conversation, often wise, and always appropriate,

he quoted so often, and it was not till a little before his death that I

discovered that these conversations were imaginary. He never altered a

detail of speech, and would quote what he had invented for Gladstone or

Newman for years without amplification or amendment, with what seemed a

scholar's accuracy. His favourite quotations were from Newman, whom, I

believe, he had never met, though I can remember nothing now but Newman's

greeting to Johnson, "I have always considered the profession of a man of

letters a third order of the priesthood!" and these quotations became so

well known that at Newman's death, the editor of _The Nineteenth Century_

asked them for publication. Because of his delight in all that was formal

and arranged he objected to the public quotation of private conversation

even after death, and this scruple helped his refusal. Perhaps this

dreaming was made a necessity by his artificial life, yet before that life

began he wrote from Oxford to his Tory but flattered family, that as he

stood mounted upon a library ladder in his rooms taking a book from a

shelf, Gladstone, about to pass the open door on his way upstairs to some

college authority, had stopped, hesitated, come into the room and there

spent an hour of talk. Presently it was discovered that Gladstone had not

been near Oxford on the date given; yet he quoted that conversation

without variation of a word until the end of his life, and I think

believed in it as firmly as did his friends. These conversations were

always admirable in their drama, but never too dramatic or even too

polished to lose their casual accidental character; they were the

phantasmagoria through which his philosophy of life found its expression.

If he made his knowledge of the world out of his phantasy, his knowledge

of tongues and books was certainly very great; and yet was that knowledge

as great as he would have us believe? Did he really know Welsh, for

instance, had he really as he told me, made his only love song, his

incomparable _Morfydd_ out of three lines in Welsh, heard sung by a woman

at her door on a walking tour in Wales, or did he but wish to hide that he

shared in their emotion?

"O, what are the winds?

And what are the waters?

Mine are your eyes."

He wanted us to believe that all things, his poetry with its Latin weight,

his religion with its constant reference to the Fathers of the Church, or

to the philosophers of the Church, almost his very courtesy were a study

and achievement of the intellect. Arthur Symons' poetry made him angry,

because it would substitute for that achievement, Parisian impressionism,

"a London fog, the blurred tawny lamplight, the red omnibus, the dreary

rain, the depressing mud, the glaring gin shop, the slatternly shivering

women, three dexterous stanzas telling you that and nothing more." I, on

the other hand, angered him by talking as if art existed for emotion only,

and for refutation he would quote the close of the Aeschylean Trilogy,

the trial of Orestes on the Acropolis. Yet at moments the thought came to

him that intellect, as he conceived it, was too much a thing of many

books, that it lacked lively experience. "Yeats," he has said to me, "You

need ten years in a library, but I have need of ten years in the

wilderness." When he said "Wilderness" I am certain, however, that he

thought of some historical, some bookish desert, the Thebaid, or the lands

about the Mareotic sea. His best poetry is natural and impassioned, but he

spoke little of it, but much about his prose, and would contend that I had

no right to consider words made to read, less natural than words made to

be spoken; and he delighted in a sentence in his book on Thomas Hardy,

that kept its vitality, as he contended, though two pages long. He

punctuated after the manner of the seventeenth century and was always

ready to spend an hour discussing the exact use of the colon. "One should

use a colon where other people use a semi-colon, a semi-colon where other

people use a comma," was, I think, but a condescension to my ignorance for

the matter was plainly beset with many subtleties.

VII

Not till some time in 1895 did I think he could ever drink too much for

his sobriety--though what he drank would certainly be too much for that of

most of the men whom I knew--I no more doubted his self-control, though we

were very intimate friends, than I doubted his memories of Cardinal

Newman. The discovery that he did was a great shock to me, and, I think,

altered my general view of the world. I had, by my friendship with

O'Leary, by my fight against Gavan Duffy, drawn the attention of a group

of men, who at that time controlled what remained of the old Fenian

movement in England and Scotland; and at a moment when an attempt, that

came to nothing, was being made to combine once more our constitutional

and unconstitutional politics, I had been asked to represent them at some

convention in the United States. I went to consult Johnson, whom I found

sitting at a table with books about him. I was greatly tempted, because I

was promised complete freedom of speech; and I was at the time enraged by

some wild articles published by some Irish American newspaper, suggesting

the burning down of the houses of Irish landlords. Nine years later I was

lecturing in America, and a charming old Irishman came to see me with an

interview to write, and we spent, and as I think in entire neglect of his

interview, one of the happiest hours I have ever spent, comparing our

tales of the Irish fairies, in which he very firmly believed. When he had

gone I looked at his card, to discover that he was the writer of that

criminal incitement. I told Johnson that if I had a week to decide in I

would probably decide to go, but as they had only given me three days, I

had refused. He would not hear of my refusal with so much awaiting my

condemnation; and that condemnation would be effective with Catholics, for

he would find me passages in the Fathers, condemning every kind of

political crime, that of the dynamiter and the incendiary especially. I

asked how could the Fathers have condemned weapons they had never heard

of, but those weapons, he contended, were merely developments of old

methods and weapons; they had decided all in principle; but I need not

trouble myself about the matter, for he would put into my hands before I

sailed the typewritten statement of their doctrine, dealing with the

present situation in the utmost detail. He seemed perfectly logical, but a

little more confident and impassioned than usual, and I had, I think,

promised to accept--when he rose from his chair, took a step towards me in

his eagerness, and fell on to the floor; and I saw that he was drunk. From

that on, he began to lose control of his life; he shifted from Charlotte

Street, where, I think, there was fear that he would overset lamp or

candle and burn the house, to Gray's Inn, and from Gray's Inn to old

rambling rooms in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and at last one called to find his

outer door shut, the milk on the doorstep sour. Sometimes I would urge him

to put himself, as Jack Nettleship had done, into an Institute. One day

when I had been very urgent, he spoke of "a craving that made every atom

of his body cry out" and said the moment after, "I do not want to be

cured," and a moment after that, "In ten years I shall be penniless and

shabby, and borrow half-crowns from friends." He seemed to contemplate a

vision that gave him pleasure, and now that I look back, I remember that

he once said to me that Wilde got, perhaps, an increase of pleasure and

excitement from the degradation of that group of beggars and blackmailers

where he sought his pathics, and I remember, too, his smile at my

surprise, as though he spoke of psychological depths I could never enter.

Did the austerity, the melancholy of his thoughts, that spiritual ecstasy

which he touched at times, heighten, as complementary colours heighten one

another, not only the Vision of Evil, but its fascination? Was it only

Villon, or did Dante also feel the fascination of evil, when shown in its

horror, and, as it were, judged and lost; and what proud man does not

feel temptation strengthened from the certainty that his intellect is not

deceived?

VIII

I began now to hear stories of Dowson, whom I knew only at the Rhymers, or

through some chance meeting at Johnson's. I was indolent and

procrastinating, and when I thought of asking him to dine, or taking some

other step towards better knowledge, he seemed to be in Paris, or at

Dieppe. He was drinking, but, unlike Johnson, who, at the autopsy after

his death, was discovered never to have grown, except in the brain, after

his fifteenth year, he was full of sexual desire. Johnson and he were

close friends, and Johnson lectured him out of the Fathers upon chastity,

and boasted of the great good done him thereby. But the rest of us counted

the glasses emptied in their talk. I began to hear now in some detail of

the restaurant-keeper's daughter, and of her marriage to the waiter, and

of that weekly game of cards with her that filled so great a share of

Dowson's emotional life. Sober, he would look at no other woman, it was

said, but, drunk, would desire whatever woman chance brought, clean or

dirty.

Johnson was stern by nature, strong by intellect, and always, I think,

deliberately picked his company, but Dowson seemed gentle, affectionate,

drifting. His poetry shows how sincerely he felt the fascination of

religion, but his religion had certainly no dogmatic outline, being but a

desire for a condition of virginal ecstasy. If it is true, as Arthur

Symons, his very close friend, has written, that he loved the

restaurant-keeper's daughter for her youth, one may be almost certain

that he sought from religion some similar quality, something of that which

the angels find who move perpetually, as Swedenborg has said, towards "the

dayspring of their youth." Johnson's poetry, like Johnson himself before

his last decay, conveys an emotion of joy, of intellectual clearness, of

hard energy; he gave us of his triumph; while Dowson's poetry is sad, as

he himself seemed, and pictures his life of temptation and defeat,

"Unto us they belong

Us the bitter and gay,

Wine and women and song."

Their way of looking at their intoxication showed their characters.

Johnson, who could not have written _Dark Angel_ if he did not suffer from

remorse, showed to his friends an impenitent face, and defeated me when I

tried to prevent the foundation of an Irish convivial club--it was brought

to an end after one meeting by the indignation of the members'

wives--whereas the last time I saw Dowson he was pouring out a glass of

whiskey for himself in an empty corner of my room and murmuring over and

over in what seemed automatic apology "The first to-day."

IX

Two men are always at my side, Lionel Johnson and John Synge whom I was to

meet a little later; but Johnson is to me the more vivid in memory,

possibly because of the external finish, the clearly-marked lineaments of

his body, which seemed but to express the clarity of his mind. I think

Dowson's best verse immortal, bound, that is, to outlive famous novels

and plays and learned histories and other discursive things, but he was

too vague and gentle for my affections. I understood him too well, for I

had been like him but for the appetite that made me search out strong

condiments. Though I cannot explain what brought others of my generation

to such misfortune, I think that (falling backward upon my parable of the

moon) I can explain some part of Dowson's and Johnson's dissipation--

"What portion in the world can the artist have,

Who has awaked from the common dream,

But dissipation and despair?"

When Edmund Spencer described the islands of Phaedria and of Acrasia he

aroused the indignation of Lord Burleigh, "that rugged forehead" and Lord

Burleigh was in the right if morality were our only object.

In those islands certain qualities of beauty, certain forms of sensuous

loveliness were separated from all the general purposes of life, as they

had not been hitherto in European literature--and would not be again, for

even the historical process has its ebb and flow, till Keats wrote his

_Endymion_. I think that the movement of our thought has more and more so

separated certain images and regions of the mind, and that these images

grow in beauty as they grow in sterility. Shakespeare leaned, as it were,

even as craftsman, upon the general fate of men and nations, had about him

the excitement of the playhouse; and all poets, including Spencer in all

but a few pages, until our age came, and when it came almost all, have had

some propaganda or traditional doctrine to give companionship with their

fellows. Had not Matthew Arnold his faith in what he described as the

best thought of his generation? Browning his psychological curiosity,

Tennyson, as before him Shelley and Wordsworth, moral values that were not

aesthetic values? But Coleridge of the _Ancient Mariner_, and _Kubla

Khan_, and Rossetti in all his writings made what Arnold has called that

"morbid effort," that search for "perfection of thought and feeling, and

to unite this to perfection of form," sought this new, pure beauty, and

suffered in their lives because of it. The typical men of the classical

age (I think of Commodus, with his half-animal beauty, his cruelty, and

his caprice), lived public lives, pursuing curiosities of appetite, and so

found in Christianity, with its Thebaid and its Mariotic Sea the needed

curb. But what can the Christian confessor say to those who more and more

must make all out of the privacy of their thought, calling up perpetual

images of desire, for he cannot say "Cease to be artist, cease to be

poet," where the whole life is art and poetry, nor can he bid men leave

the world, who suffer from the terrors that pass before shut-eyes.

Coleridge, and Rossetti though his dull brother did once persuade him that

he was an agnostic, were devout Christians, and Steinbock and Beardsley

were so towards their lives' end, and Dowson and Johnson always, and yet I

think it but deepened despair and multiplied temptation.

"Dark Angel, with thine aching lust,

To rid the world of penitence:

Malicious angel, who still dost

My soul such subtil violence!

When music sounds, then changest thou

A silvery to a sultry fire:

Nor will thine envious heart allow

Delight untortured by desire.

Through thee, the gracious Muses turn

To Furies, O mine Enemy!

And all the things of beauty burn

With flames of evil ecstasy.

Because of thee, the land of dreams

Becomes a gathering place of fears:

Until tormented slumber seems

One vehemence of useless tears."

Why are these strange souls born everywhere to-day? with hearts that

Christianity, as shaped by history, cannot satisfy. Our love letters wear

out our love; no school of painting outlasts its founders, every stroke of

the brush exhausts the impulse, Pre-Raphaelitism had some twenty years;

impressionism thirty perhaps. Why should we believe that religion can

never bring round its antithesis? Is it true that our air is disturbed, as

Malarme said, by "the trembling of the veil of the temple," or "that our

whole age is seeking to bring forth a sacred book?" Some of us thought

that book near towards the end of last century, but the tide sank again.

X

I do not know whether John Davidson, whose life also was tragic, made that

"morbid effort," that search for "perfection of thought and feeling," for

he is hidden behind failure, to unite it "to perfection of form." At

eleven one morning I met him in the British Museum reading room, probably

in 1894, when I was in London for the production of _The Land of Heart's

Desire_, but certainly after some long absence from London. "Are you

working here?" I said; "No," he said, "I am loafing, for I have finished

my day's work." "What, already?" "I work an hour a day--I cannot work

longer without exhaustion, and even as it is, if I meet anybody and get

into talk, I cannot write the next day; that is why I loaf when my work is

finished." No one had ever doubted his industry; he had supported his wife

and family for years by "devilling" many hours a day for some popular

novelist. "What work is it?" I said. "I am writing verse," he answered. "I

had been writing prose for a long time, and then one day I thought I might

just as well write what I liked, as I must starve in any case. It was the

luckiest thought I ever had, for my agent now gets me forty pounds for a

ballad, and I made three hundred out of my last book of verse."

He was older by ten years than his fellow Rhymers; a national schoolmaster

from Scotland, he had been dismissed, he told us, for asking for a rise in

his salary, and had come to London with his wife and children. He looked

older than his years. "Ellis," he had said, "how old are you?" "Fifty,"

Edwin Ellis replied, or whatever his age was. "Then I will take off my

wig. I never take off my wig when there is a man under thirty in the

room." He had endured and was to endure again, a life of tragic penury,

which was made much harder by the conviction that the world was against

him, that he was refused for some reason his rightful position. Ellis

thought that he pined even for social success, and I that his Scots

jealousy kept him provincial and but half articulate.

During the quarrel over Parnell's grave a quotation from Goethe ran

through the papers, describing our Irish jealousy: "The Irish seem to me

like a pack of hounds, always dragging down some noble stag." But I do not

think we object to distinction for its own sake; if we kill the stag, it

is that we may carry off his head and antlers. "The Irish people," O'Leary

used to say, "do not know good from bad in any art, but they do not hate

the good once it is pointed out to them because it is good." An infallible

Church, with its Mass in Latin, and its mediaeval philosophy, and our

Protestant social prejudice, have kept our ablest men from levelling

passions; but Davidson with a jealousy, which may be Scottish, seeing that

Carlyle had it, was quick to discover sour grapes. He saw in delicate,

laborious, discriminating taste, an effeminate pedantry, and would, when

that mood was on him, delight in all that seemed healthy, popular, and

bustling. Once when I had praised Herbert Horne for his knowledge and his

taste, he burst out, "If a man must be a connoisseur, let him be a

connoisseur in women." He, indeed, was accustomed, in the most

characteristic phrase of his type, to describe the Rhymers as lacking in

"blood and guts," and very nearly brought us to an end by attempting to

supply the deficiency by the addition of four Scotsmen. He brought all

four upon the same evening, and one read out a poem upon the Life Boat,

evidently intended for a recitation; another described how, when

gold-digging in Australia, he had fought and knocked down another miner

for doubting the rotundity of the earth; while of the remainder I can

remember nothing except that they excelled in argument. He insisted upon

their immediate election, and the Rhymers, through that complacency of

good manners whereby educated Englishmen so often surprise me, obeyed,

though secretly resolved never to meet again; and it cost me seven hours'

work to get another meeting, and vote the Scotsmen out. A few days later I

chanced upon Davidson at some restaurant; he was full of amiability, and

when we parted shook my hand, and proclaimed enthusiastically that I had

"blood and guts." I think he might have grown to be a successful man had

he been enthusiastic instead about Dowson or Johnson, or Horne or Symons,

for they had what I still lacked, conscious deliberate craft, and what I

must lack always, scholarship. They had taught me that violent energy,

which is like a fire of straw, consumes in a few minutes the nervous

vitality, and is useless in the arts. Our fire must burn slowly, and we

must constantly turn away to think, constantly analyse what we have done,

be content even to have little life outside our work, to show, perhaps, to

other men, as little as the watch-mender shows, his magnifying glass

caught in his screwed-up eye. Only then do we learn to conserve our

vitality, to keep our mind enough under control and to make our technique

sufficiently flexible for expression of the emotions of life as they

arise. A few months after our meeting in the Museum, Davidson had spent

his inspiration. "The fires are out," he said, "and I must hammer the cold

iron." When I heard a few years ago that he had drowned himself, I knew

that I had always expected some such end. With enough passion to make a

great poet, through meeting no man of culture in early life, he lacked

intellectual receptivity, and, anarchic and indefinite, lacked pose and

gesture, and now no verse of his clings to my memory.

XI

Gradually Arthur Symons came to replace in my intimate friendship, Lionel

Johnson from whom I was slowly separated by a scruple of conscience. If

he came to see me he sat tongue-tied unless I gave him the drink that

seemed necessary to bring his vitality to but its normal pitch, and if I

called upon him he drank so much that I became his confederate. Once, when

a friend and I had sat long after our proper bed-time at his constantly

repeated and most earnest entreaty, knowing what black melancholy would

descend upon him at our departure, and with the unexpressed hope of

getting him to his bed, he fixed upon us a laughing and whimsical look,

and said:--"I want you two men to understand that you are merely two men

that I am drinking with." That was the only time that I was to hear from

him an imaginary conversation that had not an air of the most scrupulous

accuracy. He gave two accounts of a conversation with Wilde in prison; in

one Wilde wore his hair long, and in the other it had been cropped by the

prison barber. He was gradually losing, too, the faculty of experience,

and in his prose and verse repeated the old ideas and emotions, but

faintly, as though with fading interest. I am certain that he prayed much,

and on those rare days that I came upon him dressed and active before

midday or but little after, I concluded that he had been to morning Mass

at Farm Street.

When with Johnson I had tuned myself to his mood, but Arthur Symons, more

than any man I have ever known, could slip as it were into the mind of

another, and my thoughts gained in richness and in clearness from his

sympathy, nor shall I ever know how much my practice and my theory owe to

the passages that he read me from Catullus and from Verlaine and Mallarme.

I had read _Axel_ to myself or was still reading it, so slowly, and with

so much difficulty, that certain passages had an exaggerated importance,

while all remained so obscure that I could without much effort imagine

that here at last was the Sacred Book I longed for. An Irish friend of

mine lives in a house where beside a little old tower rises a great new

Gothic hall and stair, and I have sometimes got him to extinguish all

light but a little Roman lamp, and in that faint light and among great

vague shadows, blotting away the unmeaning ornament, have imagined myself

partaking in some incredible romance. Half-a-dozen times, beginning in

boyhood with Shelley's _Prometheus Unbound_, I have in that mood possessed

for certain hours or months the book that I long for; and Symons, without

ever being false to his own impressionist view of art and of life,

deepened as I think my longing.

It seems to me, looking backward, that we always discussed life at its

most intense moment, that moment which gives a common sacredness to the

Song of Songs, and to the Sermon on the Mount, and in which one discovers

something supernatural, a stirring as it were of the roots of the hair. He

was making those translations from Mallarme and from Verlaine, from

Calderon, from St. John of the Cross, which are the most accomplished

metrical translations of our time, and I think that those from Mallarme

may have given elaborate form to my verses of those years, to the latter

poems of _The Wind Among the Reeds_, to _The Shadowy Waters_, while

Villiers de L'Isle Adam had shaped whatever in my _Rosa Alchemica_ Pater

had not shaped. I can remember the day in Fountain Court when he first

read me Herodiade's address to some Sibyl who is her nurse and it may be

the moon also:

"The horror of my virginity

Delights me, and I would envelope me

In the terror of my tresses, that, by night,

Inviolate reptile, I might feel the white

And glimmering radiance of thy frozen fire,

Thou that art chaste and diest of desire,

White night of ice and of the cruel snow!

Eternal sister, my lone sister, lo

My dreams uplifted before thee! now, apart,

So rare a crystal is my dreaming heart,

And all about me lives but in mine own

Image, the idolatrous mirror of my pride,

Mirroring this Herodiade diamond-eyed."

Yet I am certain that there was something in myself compelling me to

attempt creation of an art as separate from everything heterogenous and

casual, from all character and circumstance, as some Herodiade of our

theatre, dancing seemingly alone in her narrow moving luminous circle.

Certainly I had gone a great distance from my first poems, from all that I

had copied from the folk-art of Ireland, as from the statue of Mausolus

and his Queen, where the luminous circle is motionless and contains the

entire popular life; and yet why am I so certain? I can imagine an Aran

Islander who had strayed into the Luxembourg Gallery, turning bewildered

from Impressionist or Post-Impressionist, but lingering at Moreau's

"Jason," to study in minute astonishment the elaborate background, where

there are so many jewels, so much wrought stone and moulded bronze. Had

not lover promised mistress in his own island song, "A ship with a gold

and silver mast, gloves of the skin of a fish, and shoes of the skin of a

bird, and a suit of the dearest silk in Ireland?"

XII

Hitherto when in London I had stayed with my family in Bedford Park, but

now I was to live for some twelve months in chambers in the Temple that

opened through a little passage into those of Arthur Symons. If anybody

rang at either door, one or other would look through a window in the

connecting passage, and report. We would then decide whether one or both

should receive the visitor, whether his door or mine should be opened, or

whether both doors were to remain closed. I have never liked London, but

London seemed less disagreeable when one could walk in quiet, empty places

after dark, and upon a Sunday morning sit upon the margin of a fountain

almost as alone as if in the country. I was already settled there, I

imagine, when a publisher called and proposed that Symons should edit a

Review or Magazine, and Symons consented on the condition that Beardsley

were Art Editor--and I was delighted at his condition, as I think were all

his other proposed contributors. Aubrey Beardsley had been dismissed from

the Art editorship of _The Yellow Book_ under circumstances that had made

us indignant. He had illustrated Wilde's _Salome_, his strange satiric art

had raised the popular press to fury, and at the height of the excitement

aroused by Wilde's condemnation, a popular novelist, a woman who had great

influence among the most conventional part of the British public, had

written demanding his dismissal. "She owed it to her position before the

British people," she had said. Beardsley was not even a friend of

Wilde's--they even disliked each other--he had no sexual abnormality, but

he was certainly unpopular, and the moment had come to get rid of

unpopular persons. The public at once concluded--they could hardly

conclude otherwise, he was dismissed by telegram--that there was evidence

against him, and Beardsley, who was some twenty-three years old, being

embittered and miserable, plunged into dissipation. We knew that we must

face an infuriated press and public, but being all young we delighted in

enemies and in everything that had an heroic air.

XIII

We might have survived but for our association with Beardsley, perhaps,

but for his _Under the Hill_, a Rabelaisian fragment promising a literary

genius as great maybe as his artistic genius, and for the refusal of the

bookseller who controlled the railway bookstalls to display our wares. The

bookseller's manager, no doubt looking for a design of Beardsley's,

pitched upon Blake's _Anteus setting Virgil and Dante upon the verge of

Cocytus_ as the ground of refusal, and when Arthur Symons pointed out that

Blake was considered "a very spiritual artist" replied, "O, Mr Symons, you

must remember that we have an audience of young ladies as well as an

audience of agnostics." However, he called Arthur Symons back from the

door to say, "If contrary to our expectations _The Savoy_ should have a

large sale, we should be very glad to see you again." As Blake's design

illustrated an article of mine, I wrote a letter upon that remarkable

saying to a principal daily newspaper. But I had mentioned Beardsley, and

I was told that the editor had made it a rule that his paper was never to

mention Beardsley's name. I said upon meeting him later, "Would you have

made the same rule in the case of Hogarth?" against whom much the same

objection could be taken, and he replied with what seemed to me a dreamy

look, as though suddenly reminded of a lost opportunity--"Ah, there was no

popular press in Hogarth's day." We were not allowed to forget that in our

own day there was a popular press, and its opinions began to affect our

casual acquaintance, and even our comfort in public places. At some

well-known house, an elderly man to whom I had just been introduced, got

up from my side and walked to the other end of the room; but it was as

much my reputation as an Irish rebel as the evil company that I was

supposed to keep, that excited some young men in a railway carriage to

comment upon my general career in voices raised that they might catch my

attention. I discovered, however, one evening that we were perhaps envied

as well as despised. I was in the pit at some theatre, and had just

noticed Arthur Symons a little in front of me, when I heard a young man,

who looked like a shop-assistant or clerk, say, "There is Arthur Symons.

If he can't get an order, why can't he pay for a stall." Clearly we were

supposed to prosper upon iniquity, and to go to the pit added a sordid

parsimony. At another theatre I caught sight of a woman that I once liked,

the widow of some friend of my father's youth, and tried to attract her

attention, but she had no eyes for anything but the stage curtain; and at

some house where I met no hostility to myself, a popular novelist snatched

out of my hand a copy of _The Savoy_, and opening it at Beardsley's

drawing, called _The Barber_, began to expound its bad drawing and wound

up with, "Now if you want to admire really great black and white art,

admire the Punch Cartoons of Mr Lindley Sambourne," and our hostess, after

making peace between us, said, "O, Mr Yeats, why do you not send your

poems to _The Spectator_ instead of to _The Savoy_." The answer, "My

friends read the _Savoy_ and they do not read _The Spectator_," brought a

look of deeper disapproval.

Yet, even apart from Beardsley, we were a sufficiently distinguished body:

Max Beerbohm, Bernard Shaw, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Symons,

Charles Conder, Charles Shannon, Havelock Ellis, Selwyn Image, Joseph

Conrad; but nothing counted but the one hated name. I think that had we

been challenged we might have argued something after this

fashion:--"Science through much ridicule and some persecution has won its

right to explore whatever passes before its corporeal eye, and merely

because it passes: to set as it were upon an equality the beetle and the

whale though Ben Jonson could find no justification for the entomologist

in _The New Inn_, but that he had been crossed in love. Literature now

demands the same right of exploration of all that passes before the mind's

eyes, and merely because it passes." Not a complete defence, for it

substitutes a spiritual for a physical objective, but sufficient it may be

for the moment, and to settle our place in the historical process.

The critic might well reply that certain of my generation delighted in

writing with an unscientific partiality for subjects long forbidden. Yet

is it not most important to explore especially what has been long

forbidden, and to do this not only "with the highest moral purpose," like

the followers of Ibsen, but gaily, out of sheer mischief, or sheer delight

in that play of the mind. Donne could be as metaphysical as he pleased,

and yet never seemed unhuman and hysterical as Shelley often does, because

he could be as physical as he pleased; and besides who will thirst for the

metaphysical, who have a parched tongue, if we cannot recover the Vision

of Evil?

I have felt in certain early works of my own which I have long abandoned,

and here and there in the work of others of my generation, a slight,

sentimental sensuality which is disagreeable, and doesn't exist in the

work of Donne, let us say, because he, being permitted to say what he

pleased, was never tempted to linger, or rather to pretend that we can

linger, between spirit and sense. How often had I heard men of my time

talk of the meeting of spirit and sense, yet there is no meeting but only

change upon the instant, and it is by the perception of a change like the

sudden "blacking out" of the lights of the stage, that passion creates its

most violent sensation.

XIV

Dowson was now at Dieppe, now at a Normandy village. Wilde, too, was at

Dieppe; and Symons, Beardsley, and others would cross and recross,

returning with many tales, and there were letters and telegrams. Dowson

wrote a protest against some friend's too vivid essay upon the disorder of

his life, and explained that in reality he was living a life of industry

in a little country village; but before the letter arrived that friend

received a wire, "arrested, sell watch and send proceeds." Dowson's watch

had been left in London--and then another wire, "Am free." Dowson, ran the

tale as I heard it ten years after, had got drunk and fought the baker,

and a deputation of villagers had gone to the magistrate and pointed out

that Monsieur Dowson was one of the most illustrious of English poets.

"Quite right to remind me," said the magistrate, "I will imprison the

baker."

A Rhymer had seen Dowson at some cafe in Dieppe with a particularly common

harlot, and as he passed, Dowson, who was half drunk, caught him by the

sleeve and whispered, "She writes poetry--it is like Browning and Mrs

Browning." Then there came a wonderful tale, repeated by Dowson himself,

whether by word of mouth or by letter I do not remember. Wilde has arrived

in Dieppe, and Dowson presses upon him the necessity of acquiring "a more

wholesome taste." They empty their pockets on to the cafe table, and

though there is not much, there is enough if both heaps are put into one.

Meanwhile the news has spread, and they set out accompanied by a cheering

crowd. Arrived at their destination, Dowson and the crowd remain outside,

and presently Wilde returns. He says in a low voice to Dowson, "The first

these ten years, and it will be the last. It was like cold

mutton"--always, as Henley had said, "a scholar and a gentleman," he no

doubt remembered the sense in which the Elizabethan dramatists used the

words "Cold mutton"--and then aloud so that the crowd may hear him, "But

tell it in England, for it will entirely restore my character."

XV

When the first few numbers of _The Savoy_ had been published, the

contributors and the publisher gave themselves a supper, and Symons

explained that certain among us were invited afterwards to the

publisher's house, and if I went there that once I need never go again. I

considered the publisher a scandalous person, and had refused to meet him;

we were all agreed as to his character, and only differed as to the

distance that should lie between him and us. I had just received two

letters, one from T. W. Rolleston protesting with all the conventional

moral earnestness of an article in _The Spectator_ newspaper, against my

writing for such a magazine; and one from A. E. denouncing that magazine,

which he called the "Organ of the Incubi and the Succubi," with the

intensity of a personal conviction. I had forgotten that Arthur Symons had

borrowed the letters until as we stood about the supper table waiting for

the signal to be seated, I heard the infuriated voice of the publisher

shouting, "Give me the letter, give me the letter, I will prosecute that

man," and I saw Symons waving Rolleston's letter just out of reach. Then

Symons folded it up and put it in his pocket, and began to read out A. E.

and the publisher was silent, and I saw Beardsley listening. Presently

Beardsley came to me and said, "Yeats, I am going to surprise you very

much. I think your friend is right. All my life I have been fascinated by

the spiritual life--when a child I saw a vision of a Bleeding Christ over

the mantelpiece--but after all to do one's work when there are other

things one wants to do so much more, is a kind of religion."

Something, I forget what, delayed me a few minutes after the supper was

over, and when I arrived at our publisher's I found Beardsley propped up

on a chair in the middle of the room, grey and exhausted, and as I came in

he left the chair and went into another room to spit blood, but returned

immediately. Our publisher, perspiration pouring from his face, was

turning the handle of a hurdy gurdy piano--it worked by electricity, I was

told, when the company did not cut off the supply--and very plainly had

had enough of it, but Beardsley pressed him to labour on, "The tone is so

beautiful," "It gives me such deep pleasure," etc., etc. It was his method

of keeping our publisher at a distance.

Another image competes with that image in my memory. Beardsley has arrived

at Fountain Court a little after breakfast with a young woman who belongs

to our publisher's circle and certainly not to ours, and is called

"twopence coloured," or is it "penny plain." He is a little drunk and his

mind has been running upon his dismissal from _The Yellow Book_, for he

puts his hand upon the wall and stares into a mirror. He mutters, "Yes,

yes. I look like a Sodomite," which he certainly did not. "But no, I am

not that," and then begins railing, against his ancestors, accusing them

of that and this, back to and including the great Pitt, from whom he

declares himself descended.

XVI

I can no more justify my convictions in these brief chapters, where I

touch on fundamental things, than Shakespeare could justify within the

limits of a sonnet, his conviction that the soul of the wide world dreams

of things to come; and yet as I have set out to describe nature as I see

it, I must not only describe events but those patterns into which they

fall, when I am the looker-on. A French miracle-working priest once said

to Maud Gonne and myself and to an English Catholic who had come with us,

that a certain holy woman had been the "victim" for his village, and that

another holy woman who had been "victim" for all France, had given him her

Crucifix, because he, too, was doomed to become a "victim."

French psychical research has offered evidence to support the historical

proofs that such saints as Lydwine of Schiedam, whose life suggested to

Paul Claudel his _L'Annonce faite a Marie_, did really cure disease by

taking it upon themselves. As disease was considered the consequence of

sin, to take it upon themselves was to copy Christ. All my proof that mind

flows into mind, and that we cannot separate mind and body, drives me to

accept the thought of victimage in many complex forms, and I ask myself if

I cannot so explain the strange, precocious genius of Beardsley. He was in

my Lunar metaphor a man of the thirteenth Phase, his nature on the edge of

Unity of Being, the understanding of that Unity by the intellect his one

overmastering purpose; whereas Lydwine de Schiedam and her like, being of

the saints, are at the seven and twentieth Phase, and seek a unity with a

life beyond individual being; and so being all subjective he would take

upon himself not the consequences, but the knowledge of sin. I surrender

myself to the wild thought that by so doing he enabled persons who had

never heard his name, to recover innocence. I have so often, too,

practised meditations, or experienced dreams, where the meditations or

dreams of two or three persons contrast and complement one another, in so

far as those persons are in themselves complementary or contrasting, that

I am convinced that it is precisely from the saint or potential saint that

he would gather this knowledge. I see in his fat women and shadowy,

pathetic girls, his horrible children, half child, half embryo, in all

the lascivious monstrous imagery of the privately published designs, the

phantasms that from the beginning have defied the scourge and the hair

shirt. I once said to him half seriously, "Beardsley, I was defending you

last night in the only way in which it is possible to defend you, by

saying that all you draw is inspired by rage against iniquity," and he

answered, "If it were so inspired the work would be in no way different,"

meaning, as I think, that he drew with such sincerity that no change of

motive could change the image.

I know that some turn of disease had begun to parade erotic images before

his eyes, and I do not doubt that he drew these images. "I make a blot

upon the paper," he said to me; "And I begin to shove the ink about and

something comes." But I was wrong to say that he drew these things in rage

against iniquity, for to know that rage he must needs be objective,

concerned with other people, with the Church or the Divinity, with

something outside his own head, and responsible not for the knowledge but

for the consequence of sin. His preparation had been the exhaustion of sin

in act, while the preparation of the Saint is the exhaustion of his pride,

and instead of the Saint's humility, he had come to see the images of the

mind in a kind of frozen passion, the virginity of the intellect.

Does not all art come when a nature, that never ceases to judge itself,

exhausts personal emotion in action or desire so completely that something

impersonal, something that has nothing to do with action or desire,

suddenly starts into its place, something which is as unforeseen, as

completely organized, even as unique, as the images that pass before the

mind between sleeping and waking.

But all art is not victimage; and much of the hatred of the art of

Beardsley came from the fact that victimage, though familiar under another

name to French criticism since the time of Baudelaire, was not known in

England. He pictures almost always disillusion, and apart from those

privately published drawings which he tried upon his deathbed to have

destroyed, there is no representation of desire. Even the beautiful women

are exaggerated into doll-like prettiness by a spirit of irony, or are

poignant with a thwarted or corrupted innocence. I see his art with more

understanding now, than when he lived, for in 1895 or 1896, I was in

despair at the new breath of comedy that had begun to wither the beauty

that I loved, just when that beauty seemed about to unite itself to

mystery. I said to him once, "You have never done anything to equal your

Salome with the head of John the Baptist." I think, that for the moment he

was sincere when he replied, "Yes, yes; but beauty is so difficult." It

was for the moment only, for as the popular rage increased and his own

disease increased, he became more and more violent in his satire, or

created out of a spirit of mockery a form of beauty where his powerful

logical intellect eliminated every outline that suggested meditation or

even satisfied passion.

The distinction between the Image, between the apparition as it were, and

the personal action and desire, took a new form at the approach of death.

He made two or three charming and blasphemous designs; I think especially

of a Madonna and Child, where the Child has a foolish, doll-like face, and

an elaborate modern baby's dress; and of a St. Rose of Lima in an

expensive gown decorated with roses, ascending to Heaven upon the bosom of

the Madonna, her face enraptured with love, but with that form of it

which is least associated with sanctity. I think that his conversion to

Catholicism was sincere, but that so much of impulse as could exhaust

itself in prayer and ceremony, in formal action and desire, found itself

mocked by the antithetical image; and yet I am perhaps mistaken, perhaps

it was merely his recognition that historical Christianity had dwindled to

a box of toys, and that it might be amusing to empty the whole box on to

the counterpane.

XVII

I had been a good deal in Paris, though never very long at any time, my

later visits with a member of the Rhymer's Club whose curiosity or emotion

was roused by every pretty girl. He treated me with a now admiring, now

mocking wonder, because being in love, and in no way lucky in that love, I

had grown exceedingly puritanical so far as my immediate neighbourhood was

concerned. One night, close to the Luxembourg, a strange young woman in

bicycling costume, came out of a side street, threw one arm about his

neck, walked beside us in perfect silence for a hundred yards or so, and

then darted up another side street. He had a red and white complexion and

fair hair, but how she discovered that in the dark I could not understand.

I became angry and reproachful, but he defended himself by saying, "You

never meet a stray cat without caressing it: I have similar instincts."

Presently we found ourselves at some Cafe--the Cafe D'Harcourt, I

think--and when I looked up from my English newspaper, I found myself

surrounded with painted ladies and saw that he was taking vengeance. I

could not have carried on a conversation in French, but I was able to say,

"That gentleman over there has never refused wine or coffee to any lady,"

and in a little they had all settled about him like greedy pigeons.

I had put my ideal of those years, an ideal that passed away with youth,

into my description of _Proud Costello_. "He was of those ascetics of

passion, who keep their hearts pure for love or for hatred, as other men

for God, for Mary and for the Saints." My friend was not interested in

passion. A woman drew him to her by some romantic singularity in her

beauty or her circumstance, and drew him the more if the curiosity she

aroused were half intellectual. A little after the time I write of,

throwing himself into my chair after some visit to a music-hall or

hippodrome, he began, "O, Yeats, I was never in love with a

serpent-charmer before." He was objective. For him "the visible world

existed" as he was fond of quoting, and I suspect him of a Moon that had

entered its fourth quarter.

XVIII

At first I used to stay with Macgregor Mathers and his gracious young wife

near the Champ de Mars, or in the Rue Mozart, but later by myself in a

student's hotel in the Latin quarter, and I cannot remember always where I

stayed when this or that event took place. Macgregor Mathers, or

Macgregor, for he had now shed the "Mathers," would come down to breakfast

one day with his Horace, the next day with his Macpherson's Ossian, and

read out fragments during breakfast, considering both books of equal

authenticity. Once when I questioned that of Ossian, he got into a

rage--what right had I to take sides with the English enemy--and I found

that for him the eighteenth century controversy still raged. At night he

would dress himself in Highland dress, and dance the sword dance, and his

mind brooded upon the ramifications of clans and tartans. Yet I have at

moments doubted whether he had seen the Highlands, or even, until invited

there by some White Rose Society, Scotland itself. Every Sunday he gave to

the evocation of Spirits, and I noted that upon that day he would spit

blood. That did not matter, he said, because it came from his head, not

his lungs; what ailed him I do not know, but I think that he lived under

some great strain, and presently I noted that he was drinking neat brandy,

not to drunkenness, but to detriment of mind and body.

He began to foresee changes in the world, announcing in 1893 or 1894, the

imminence of immense wars, and was it in 1895 or 1896 that he learned

ambulance work, and made others learn it? He had a sabre wound on his

wrist--or perhaps his forehead, for my memory is not clear--got in some

student riot that he had mistaken for the beginning of war. It may have

been some talk of his that made me write the poem that begins:

"The dews drop slowly and dreams gather;

unknown spears

Suddenly hurtle before my dream awakened eyes,

And then the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries

Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears."

War was to bring, or be brought by, anarchy, but that would be a passing

stage, he declared, for his dreams were all Napoleonic. He certainly

foresaw some great role that he could play, had made himself an

acknowledged master of the war-game, and for a time taught it to French

officers for his living. He was to die of melancholia, and was perhaps

already mad at certain moments or upon certain topics, though he did not

make upon me that impression in those early days, being generous, gay, and

affable. I have seen none that lacked philosophy and trod _Hodos

Camelionis_ come to good there; and he lacked it but for a vague

affirmation, that he would have his friends affirm also, each for himself,

"There is no part of me that is not of the Gods." Once, when he had told

me that he met his Teachers in some great crowd, and only knew that they

were phantoms by a shock that was like an electric shock to his heart, I

asked him how he knew that he was not deceived or hallucinated. He said,

"I had been visited by one of them the other night, and I followed him

out, and followed him down that little lane to the right. Presently I fell

over the milk boy, and the milk boy got in a rage because he said that not

only I but the man in front had fallen over him." He like all that I have

known, who have given themselves up to images, and to the murmuring of

images, thought that when he had proved that an image could act

independently of his mind, he had proved also that neither it, nor what it

had murmured, had originated there. Yet had I need of proof to the

contrary, I had it while under his roof. I was eager for news of the

Spanish-American war, and went to the Rue Mozart before breakfast to buy a

_New York Herald_. As I went out past the young Normandy servant who was

laying breakfast, I was telling myself some schoolboy romance, and had

just reached a place where I carried my arm in a sling after some

remarkable escape. I bought my paper and returned, to find Macgregor on

the doorstep. "Why, you are all right," he said, "What did the Bonne mean

by telling me that you had hurt your arm and carried it in a sling."

Once when I met him in the street in his Highland clothes, with several

knives in his stocking, he said, "When I am dressed like this I feel like

a walking flame," and I think that everything he did was but an attempt to

feel like a walking flame. Yet at heart he was, I think, gentle, and

perhaps even a little timid. He had some impediment in his nose that gave

him a great deal of trouble, and it could have been removed had he not

shrunk from the slight operation; and once when he was left in a

mouse-infested flat with some live traps, he collected his captives into a

large birdcage, and to avoid the necessity of their drowning, fed them

there for weeks. Being a self-educated, un-scholarly, though learned man,

he was bound to express the fundamental antithesis in the most crude form,

and being arrogant, to prevent as far as possible that alternation between

the two natures which is, it may be, necessary to sanity. When the nature

turns to its spiritual opposite alone there can be no alternation, but

what nature is pure enough for that.

I see Paris in the Eighteen-nineties as a number of events separated from

one another, and without cause or consequence, without lot or part in the

logical structure of my life; I can often as little find their dates as I

can those of events in my early childhood. William Sharp, who came to see

me there, may have come in 1895, or on some visit four or five years

later, but certainly I was in an hotel in the Boulevard Raspail. When he

stood up to go he said, "What is that?" pointing to a geometrical form

painted upon a little piece of cardboard that lay upon my window sill. And

then before I could answer, looked out of the window saying, "There is a

funeral passing." I said, "That is curious, as the Death symbol is painted

upon the card." I did not look, but I am sure there was no funeral. A few

days later he came back and said, "I have been very ill; you must never

allow me to see that symbol again." He did not seem anxious to be

questioned, but years later he said, "I will now tell you what happened in

Paris. I had two rooms at my hotel, a front sitting-room and a bedroom

leading out of it. As I passed the threshold of the sitting-room, I saw a

woman standing at the bureau writing, and presently she went into my

bedroom. I thought somebody had got into the wrong room by mistake, but

when I went to the bureau I saw the sheet of paper she had seemed to write

upon, and there was no writing upon it. I went into my bed-room and I

found nobody, but as there was a door from the bedroom on to the stairs I

went down the stairs to see if she had gone that way. When I got out into

the street I saw her just turning a corner, but when I turned the corner

there was nobody there, and then I saw her at another corner. Constantly

seeing her and losing her like that I followed till I came to the Seine,

and there I saw her standing at an opening in the wall, looking down into

the river. Then she vanished, and I cannot tell why, but I went to the

opening in the wall and stood there, just as she had stood, taking just

the same attitude. Then I thought I was in Scotland, and that I heard a

sheep bell. After that I must have lost consciousness, for I knew nothing

till I found myself lying on my back, dripping wet, and people standing

all round. I had thrown myself into the Seine."

I did not believe him, and not because I thought the story impossible, for

I knew he had a susceptibility beyond that of any one I had ever known, to

symbolic or telepathic influence, but because he never told one anything

that was true; the facts of life disturbed him and were forgotten. The

story had been created by the influence but it had remained a reverie,

though he may in the course of years have come to believe that it happened

as an event. The affectionate husband of his admiring and devoted wife, he

had created an imaginary beloved, had attributed to her the authorship of

all his books that had any talent, and though habitually a sober man, I

have known him to get drunk, and at the height of his intoxication when

most men speak the truth, to attribute his state to remorse for having

been unfaithful to Fiona Macleod.

Paul Verlaine alternated between the two halves of his nature with so

little apparent resistance that he seemed like a bad child, though to read

his sacred poems is to remember perhaps that the Holy Infant shared His

first home with the beasts. In what month was it that I received a note

inviting me to "coffee and cigarettes plentifully," and signed "Yours

quite cheerfully, Paul Verlaine?" I found him at the top of a tenement

house in the Rue St. Jacques, sitting in an easy chair, his bad leg

swaddled in many bandages. He asked me, speaking in English, if I knew

Paris well, and added, pointing to his leg, that it had scorched his leg

for he know it "well, too well" and "lived in it like a fly in a pot of

marmalade." He took up an English dictionary, one of the few books in the

room, and began searching for the name of his disease, selecting after a

long search and with, as I understood, only comparative accuracy

"Erysipelas." Meanwhile his homely, middle-aged mistress made the coffee

and found the cigarettes; it was obviously she who had given the room its

character; her canaries in several cages hanging in the window, and her

sentimental lithographs nailed here and there among the nude drawings and

newspaper caricatures of her lover as various kinds of monkey, which he

had pinned upon the wall. A slovenly, ragged man came in, his trousers

belted with a piece of rope and an opera hat upon his head. She drew a box

over to the fire, and he sat down, now holding the opera hat upon his

knees, and I think he must have acquired it very lately for he kept

constantly closing and opening it. Verlaine introduced him by saying, "He

is a poor man, but a good fellow, and is so like Louis XI to look at that

we call him Louis the XIth." I remember that Verlaine talked of Victor

Hugo who was "a supreme poet, but a volcano of mud as well as of flame,"

and of Villiers de L'Isle Adam who was "exalte" and wrote excellent

French; and of _In Memoriam_, which he had tried to translate and could

not. "Tennyson is too noble, too Anglais; when he should have been

brokenhearted, he had many reminiscences."

At Verlaine's burial, but a few months after, his mistress quarrelled with

a publisher at the graveside as to who owned the sheet by which the body

had been covered, and Louis XI stole fourteen umbrellas that he found

leaning against a tree in the Cemetery.

XIX

I am certain of one date, for I have gone to much trouble to get it right.

I met John Synge for the first time in the Autumn of 1896, when I was one

and thirty, and he four and twenty. I was at the Hotel Corneille instead

of my usual lodging, and why I cannot remember for I thought it expensive.

Synge's biographer says that you boarded there for a pound a week, but I

was accustomed to cook my own breakfast, and dine at an anarchist

restaurant in the Boulevard S. Jacques for little over a shilling. Some

one, whose name I forget, told me there was a poor Irishman at the top of

the house, and presently introduced us. Synge had come lately from Italy,

and had played his fiddle to peasants in the Black Forest; six months of

travel upon fifty pounds; and was now reading French literature and

writing morbid and melancholy verse. He told me that he had learned Irish

at Trinity College, so I urged him to go to the Aran Islands and find a

life that had never been expressed in literature, instead of a life where

all had been expressed. I did not divine his genius, but I felt he needed

something to take him out of his morbidity and melancholy. Perhaps I would

have given the same advice to any young Irish writer who knew Irish, for I

had been that summer upon Inishmaan and Inishmore, and was full of the

subject. My friends and I had landed from a fishing boat to find ourselves

among a group of islanders, one of whom said he would bring us to the

oldest man upon Inishmaan. This old man, speaking very slowly, but with

laughing eyes, had said, "If any gentleman has done a crime, we'll hide

him. There was a gentleman that killed his father, and I had him in my

own house six months till he got away to America."

From that on I saw much of Synge, and brought him to Maude Gonne's, under

whose persuasion perhaps, he joined the "Young Ireland Society of Paris,"

the name we gave to half a dozen Parisian Irish, signed, but resigned

after a few months because "it wanted to stir up Continental nations

against England, and England will never give us freedom until she feels

she is safe," the one political sentence I ever heard him speak. Over a

year was to pass before he took my advice and settled for a while in an

Aran cottage, and became happy, having escaped at last, as he wrote, "from

the squalor of the poor and the nullity of the rich." I almost forget the

prose and verse he showed me in Paris, though I read it all through again

when after his death I decided, at his written request, what was to be

published and what not. Indeed, I have but a vague impression, as of a man

trying to look out of a window and blurring all that he sees by breathing

upon the window. According to my Lunar parable, he was a man of the

twenty-third Phase, a man whose subjective lives--for a constant return to

our life is a part of my dream--were over, who must not pursue an image,

but fly from it, all that subjective dreaming, that had once been power

and joy, now corrupting within him. He had to take the first plunge into

the world beyond himself, the first plunge away from himself that is

always pure technique, the delight in doing, not because one would or

should, but merely because one can do.

He once said to me, "a man has to bring up his family and be as virtuous

as is compatible with so doing, and if he does more than that he is a

puritan; a dramatist has to express his subject and to find as much

beauty as is compatible with that, and if he does more he is an aesthete,"

that is to say, he was consciously objective. Whenever he tried to write

drama without dialect he wrote badly, and he made several attempts,

because only through dialect could he escape self-expression, see all that

he did from without, allow his intellect to judge the images of his mind

as if they had been created by some other mind. His objectivity was,

however, technical only, for in those images paraded all the desires of

his heart. He was timid, too shy for general conversation, an invalid and

full of moral scruple, and he was to create now some ranting braggadocio,

now some tipsy hag full of poetical speech, and now some young man or girl

full of the most abounding health. He never spoke an unkind word, had

admirable manners, and yet his art was to fill the streets with rioters,

and to bring upon his dearest friends enemies that may last their

lifetime.

No mind can engender till divided into two, but that of a Keats or a

Shelley falls into an intellectual part that follows, and a hidden

emotional flying image, whereas in a mind like that of Synge the emotional

part is dreaded and stagnant, while the intellectual part is a clear

mirror-like technical achievement.

But in writing of Synge I have run far ahead, for in 1896 he was but one

picture among many. I am often astonished when I think that we can meet

unmoved some person, or pass some house, that in later years is to bear a

chief part in our life. Should there not be some flutter of the nerve or

stopping of the heart like that Macgregor experienced at the first meeting

with a phantom?

XX

Many pictures come before me without date or order. I am walking somewhere

near the Luxembourg Gardens when Synge, who seldom generalises and only

after much thought, says, "There are three things any two of which have

often come together but never all three; ecstasy, asceticism, austerity; I

wish to bring all three together."

* * * * *

I notice that Macgregor considers William Sharp vague and sentimental,

while Sharp is repelled by Macgregor's hardness and arrogance. William

Sharp met Macgregor in the Louvre, and said, "No doubt considering your

studies you live upon milk and fruit." And Macgregor replied, "No, not

exactly milk and fruit, but very nearly so;" and now Sharp has lunched

with Macgregor and been given nothing but brandy and radishes.

* * * * *

Macgregor is much troubled by ladies who seek spiritual advice, and one

has called to ask his help against phantoms who have the appearance of

decayed corpses, and try to get into bed with her at night. He has driven

her away with one furious sentence, "Very bad taste on both sides."

* * * * *

I am sitting in a Cafe with two French Americans, one in the morning,

while we are talking wildly, and some are dancing, there is a tap at the

shuttered window; we open it and three ladies enter, the wife of a man of

letters, who thought to find no one but a confederate, and her husband's

two young sisters whom she has brought secretly to some disreputable

dance. She is very confused at seeing us, but as she looks from one to

another understands that we have taken some drug and laughs; caught in our

dream we know vaguely that she is scandalous according to our code and to

all codes, but smile at her benevolently and laugh.

* * * * *

I am at Stuart Merrill's, and I meet there a young Jewish Persian scholar.

He has a large gold ring, seemingly very rough, made by some amateur, and

he shows me that it has shaped itself to his finger, and says, "That is

because it contains no alloy--it is alchemical gold." I ask who made the

gold, and he says a certain Rabbi, and begins to talk of the Rabbi's

miracles. We do not question him--perhaps it is true--perhaps he has

imagined at all--we are inclined to accept every historical belief once

more.

* * * * *

I am sitting in a Cafe with two French Americans, a German poet

Douchenday, and a silent man whom I discover to be Strindberg, and who is

looking for the Philosopher's Stone. The French American reads out a

manifesto he is about to issue to the Latin Quarter; it proposes to

establish a communistic colony of artists in Virginia, and there is a

footnote to explain why he selects Virginia, "Art has never flourished

twice in the same place. Art has never flourished in Virginia."

Douchenday, who has some reputation as a poet, explains that his poems are

without verbs, as the verb is the root of all evil in the world. He wishes

for an art where all things are immoveable, as though the clouds should be

made of marble. I turn over the page of one of his books which he shows

me, and find there a poem in dramatic form, but when I ask if he hopes to

have it played he says:--"It could only be played by actors before a black

marble wall, with masks in their hands. They must not wear the masks for

that would not express my scorn for reality."

* * * * *

I go to the first performance of Alfred Jarry's _Ubu Roi_, at the Theatre

de L'Oeuvre, with the Rhymer who had been so attractive to the girl in the

bicycling costume. The audience shake their fists at one another, and the

Rhymer whispers to me, "There are often duels after these performances,"

and he explains to me what is happening on the stage. The players are

supposed to be dolls, toys, marionettes, and now they are all hopping like

wooden frogs, and I can see for myself that the chief personage, who is

some kind of King, carries for Sceptre a brush of the kind that we use to

clean a closet. Feeling bound to support the most spirited party, we have

shouted for the play, but that night at the Hotel Corneille I am very sad,

for comedy, objectivity, has displayed its growing power once more. I say,

"After Stephane Mallarme, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after

Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our subtle colour and

nervous rhythm, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is

possible? After us the Savage God."