FOUR YEARS

BY

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS.

,■

P

0/

^

FOUR YEARS

BY

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS.

THECUALA PRESS

CHURCHTOWN

DUNDRUM

MCMXXI

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2007 with funding from

Microsoft Corporation

http://www.archive.org/details/fouryearsOOyeatrich

FOUR YEARS 1887-1891.

At the end of the eighties my father and mother,
my brother and sisters and myself, all newly arrived
from Dublin, were settled in Bedford Park in a red-
brick house with several wood mantlepieces copied
from marble mantlepieces by the brothers Adam, a
balcony, and a little garden shadowed by a great
horse-chestnut tree. Years before we had lived
there, when the crooked, ostentatiously pictur-
esque streets, with great trees casting great shad-
ows, had been a new enthusiasm: the Pre-Raphael-
ite movement at last affecting life. But now exag-
gerated criticism had taken the place of enthusi-
asm; the tiled roofs, the first in modern London,
were said to leak, which they did not, & the drains
to be bad, though that was no longer true; and I
imagine that houses were cheap. I remember feel-
ing disappointed because the co-operative stores,
with their little seventeenth century panes, were so
like any common shop; and because the public
house, called 'The Tabard' after Chaucer's Inn, was
so plainly a common public house; and because the
great sign of a trumpeter designed by Rooke, the
Pre-Raphaelite artist, had been freshened by some
inferior hand. The big red-brick church had never
pleased me, and I was accustomed, when I saw the
wooden balustrade that ran along the slanting edge
b

of the roof, where nobody ever walked or could
walk, to remember the opinion of some architect
friend of my father's, that it had been put there to
keep the birds from falling off. Still, however, it had
some village characters and helped us to feel not
wholly lost in the metropolis. I no longer went to
church as a regular habit, but go I sometimes did,
for one Sunday morning I saw these words painted
on a board in the porch: tThe congregation are re-
quested to kneel during prayers; the kneelers are
afterwards to be hung upon pegs provided for the
purpose. 'In front of every seat hung a little cushion,
and these cushions were called 'kneelers.' Presently
the joke ran through the community, where there
were many artists, who considered religion at best
an unimportant accessory to good architecture and
who disliked that particular church.

II

I could not understand where the charm had gone
that I had felt, when as a school-boy of twelve or
thirteen, I had played among the unfinished houses,
once leaving the marks of my two hands, blacked
by a fall among some paint, upon a white balustrade.
Sometimes I thought it was because these were real
houses, while my play had been among toy-houses
some day to be inhabited by imaginary people full

2

of the happiness that one can see in picture books.
I was in all things Pre-Raphaelite. When I was fif-
teen or sixteen, my father had told me about Ros-
setti and Blake and given me their poetry to read;
& once in Liverpool on my way to Sligo, "I had seen
'Dante's Dream' in the gallery there — a picture
painted when Rossctti had lost his dramatic power,
and to-day not very pleasing to me — and its colour,
its people, its romantic architecture had blotted all
other pictures away." It was a perpetual bewilder-
ment that my father, who had begun life as a Pre-
Raphaelite painter, now painted portraits of the
first comer, children selling newspapers, or a con-
sumptive girl with a basket offish upon her head,
and that when, moved perhaps by memory of his
youth, he chose some theme from poetic tradition,
he would soon weary and leave it unfinished. I had
seen the change coming bit by bit and its defence
elaborated by young men fresh from the Paris art-
schools. 'We must paint what is in front of us,' or
'A man must be of his own time/ they would say,
and if I spoke of Blake or Rossetti they would point
out his bad drawing and tell me to admire Carolus
Duran and Bastien-Lepage. Then, too, they were
very ignorant men; they read nothing, for nothing
mattered but 'Knowing how to paint,' being in re-
action against a generation that seemed to have

3

wasted its time upon so many things. I thought my-
self alone in hating these young men, now indeed
getting towards middle life, their contempt for the
past, their monopoly of the future, but in a few
months I was to discover others of my own age, who
thought as I did, for it is not true that youth looks
before it with the mechanical gaze of a well-drilled
soldier. Its quarrel is not with the past, but with the
present, where its elders are so obviously powerful,
and no cause seems lost if it seem to threaten that
power. Does cultivated youth ever really love the
future, where the eye can discover no persecuted
Royalty hidden among oak leaves, though from it
certainly does come so much proletarian rhetoric?
I was unlike others of my generation in one thing
only. I am very religious, and deprived by Huxley
and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the simple-mind-
ed religion of my childhood, I had made a new re-
ligion, almost an infallible church, out of poetic tra-
dition: a fardel of stories, and of personages, and of
emotions, a bundle of images and of masks passed
on from generation to generation by poets & paint-
ers with some help from philosophers and theolo-
gians. I wished for a world where I could discover
this tradition perpetually, and not in pictures and
in poems only, but in tiles round the chimney-piece
and in the hangings that kept out the draught. I had

4

even created a dogma: 'Because those imaginary
people are created out of the deepest instinct of
man, to be his measure and his norm, whatever I can
imagine those mouths speaking may be the nearest
I can go to truth.' When I listened they seemed al-
ways to speak of one thing only : they, their loves,
every incident of their lives, were steeped in the su-
pernatural. Could even Titian's 'Ariosto' that I
loved beyond other portraits, have its grave look, as
if waiting for some perfect final event, if the paint-
ers, before Titian,had not learned portraiture, while
painting into the corner of compositions, full of
saints and Madonnas, their kneeling patrons? At
seventeen years old I was already an old-fashioned
brass cannon full of shot, and nothing kept me from
going off but a doubt as to my capacity to shoot
straight.

Ill

I was not an industrious student and knew only what
I had found by accident, and I had found "nothing
I cared for after Titian — - and Titian I knew chiefly
from a copy of 'the supper of Emmaus' in Dublin —
till Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites ;" and among my
father's friends were no Pre-Raphaelites. Some in-
deed had come to Bedford Park in the enthusiasm

of the first building, and others to be near those that
had. There was Todhunter, a well-off man who had
bought my father's pictures while my father was
still Pre-Raphaelite. Once a Dublin doctor he was a
poet and a writer of poetical plays: a tall, sallow,
lank, melancholy man, a good scholar and a good
intellect ; and with him my father carried on a warm
exasperated friendship, fed I think by old memories
and wasted by quarrels over matters of opinion. Of
all the survivors he was the most dejected, and the
least estranged, and I remember encouraging him,
with a sense of worship shared, to buy a very expen-
sive carpet designed by Morris. He displayed it
without strong liking and would have agreed had
there been any to find fault. If he had liked anything
strongly he might have been a famous man, for a
few years later he was to write, under some casual
patriotic impulse, certain excellent verses now in all
Irish anthologies; but with him every book was a
new planting and not a new bud on an old bough.
He had I think no peace in himself. But my father's
chief friend was York Powell,a famous Oxford Pro-
fessor of history, a broad-built, broad-headed,
brown-bearded man, clothed in heavy blue cloth
and looking, but for his glasses and the dim sight of
a student, like some captain in the merchant service.
One often passed with pleasure from Todhunter's

6

company to that of one who was almost ostenta-
tiously at peace. He cared nothing for philosophy,
nothing for economics, nothing for the policy of
nations, for history, as he saw it, was a memory of
men who were amusing or exciting to think about.
He impressed all who met him & seemed to some a
man of genius, but he had not enough ambition to
shape his thought, or conviction to give rhythm to
his style, and remained always a poor writer. I was
too full of unfinished speculations and premature
convictions to value rightly his conversation, in-
formed by avast erudition, which would give itself
to every casual association of speech and company
precisely because he had neither cause nor design.
My father, however, found Powell's concrete nar-
rative manner a necessary completion of his own;
and when I asked him, in a letter many years later,
where he got his philosophy, replied 'From York
Poweir and thereon added, no doubt remembering
that Powell was without ideas, 'By looking at him/
Then there was a good listener, a painter in whose
hall hung a big picture, painted in his student days,
of Ulysses sailing home from the Phaeacian court,
an orangeand a skin of wine at his side, blue mount-
ains towering behind; but who lived by drawing
domestic scenes and lovers' meetings for a weekly
magazine that had an immense circulation among

7

the imperfectly educated. To escape the boredom
of work, which he never turned to but under pres-
sure of necessity, and usually late at night with the
publisher's messenger in the hall, he had half filled
his studio with mechanical toys of his own inven-
tion,and perpetually increased their number. A mo-
del railway train at intervals puffed its way along the
walls, passing several railway stations and signal
boxes; and on the floor lay a camp with attacking
and defending soldiers and a fortification that blew
up when the attackers fired a pea through a certain
window; while a large model of a Thames barge
hung from the ceiling. Opposite our house lived an
old artist who worked also for the illustrated papers
for a living, but painted landscapes for his pleasure,
and of him I remember nothing except that he had
outlived ambition, was a good listener, and that my
father explained his gaunt appearance by his descent
from Pocahontas. If all these men were a little like
becalmed ships, there was certainly one man whose
sails were full. Three or four doors off, on our side of
the road, lived a decorative artist in all the naive con-
fidence of popular ideals and the public approval.
He was our daily comedy. 'I myself and Sir Fred-
erick Leigh ton are the greatest decorative artists of
the age,' was among his sayings, & a great lych-gate,
bought from some country church-yard, reared its

8

thatched roof, meant to shelter bearers and coffin,
above the entrance to his front garden, to show that
he at any rate knew nothing of discouragement. In
this fairly numerous company — there were others
though no other face rises before me — my father
and York Powell found listeners for a conversation
that had no special loyalties, or antagonisms; while
I could only talk upon set topics, being in the heat
of my youth, and the topics that filled me with ex-
citement were never spoken of.

IV

Some quarter of an hour's walk from Bedford Park,
out on the high road to Richmond, lived W. E.
Henley, and I, like many others, began under him
my education. His portrait, a lithograph by Roth-
enstein,hangs over my mantlepiece among portraits
of other friends. He is drawn standing, but, because
doubtless of his crippled legs, he leans forward, rest-
ing his elbows upon some slightly suggested ob-
ject— a table or a window-sill. His heavy figure and
powerful head, the disordered hair standing up-
right, his short irregular beard and moustache, his
lined and wrinkled face, his eyes steadily fixed up-
on some object, in complete confidence and self-
possession, and yet as in half-broken reverie, all are
c 9

exactly as I remember him. I have seen other por-
traits and they too show him exactly as I remember
him, as though he had but one appearance and that
seen fully at the first glance and by all alike. He was
most human — human, I used to say, like one of
Shakespeare's characters — and yet pressed and
pummelled, as it were, into a single attitude, almost
into a gesture and a speech, as by some overwhelm-
ing situation. I disagreed with him about every-
thing, but I admired him beyond words. With the
exception of some early poems founded upon old
French models, I disliked his poetry, mainly because
he wrote Vers Libre, which I associated with Tyn-
dall andHuxley and Basticn-Lepage'sclownish peas-
ant staring with vacant eyes at her great boots; and
.filled it with unimpassioned description of an hos-
pital ward where his leg had been amputated. I wan-
ted the strongest passions, passions that had nothing
to do with observation, and metrical forms that
seemed old enough to be sung by men half-asleep or
riding upon a journey. Furthermore, Pre-Raphael-
itism affected him as some people are affected by a
cat in the room, and though he professed himself at
our first meeting without political interests or con-
victions, he soon grew into a violent unionist and
imperialist. I used to say when I spoke of his poems:
'He is like a great actor with a bad part; yet who

10

would look at Hamlet in the grave scene if Salvini
played the grave-digger?' and I might so have ex-
plained much that he said and did. I meant that he
was like a great actor of passion — character-acting
meant nothing to me for many years — and an actor
of passion will display some one quality of soul, per-
sonified again and again, just as a great poetical pain-
ter, Titian, Botticelli, Rossetti may depend for his
greatness upon a type of beauty which presently we
call by his name. Irving, the last of the sort on the
English stage, and in modern England and France
it is the rarest sort, never moved me but in the ex-
pression of intellectual pride; and though I saw Sal-
vini but once, I am convinced thatt: his genius was a
kind of animal nobility. Henley, half inarticulate —
'I am very costive,5 he would say — beset with per-
sonal quarrels, built up an image of power and mag-
nanimity till it became, at moments, when seen as it
were by lightning, his true self. Half his opinions
were the contrivance of a sub-consciousness that
sought always to bring life to the dramatic crisis,and
expression to that point of artifice where the true
self could find its tongue. Without opponents there
had been no drama, and in his youth Ruskinismand
Prc-Raphaelitism, for he was of my father's gener-
ation, were the only possible opponents. How could
one resent his prejudice when, that hchimself might

1 1

play a worthy part, he must find beyond the com-
mon rout, whom he derided and flouted daily, op-
ponents he could imagine moulded like himself?
Once he said to me in the height of his imperial
propaganda, cTell those young men in Ireland that
this great thing must go on. They say Ireland is not
fit for self-government but that is nonsense. It is as
fit as any other European country but we cannot
grant it.' And then he spoke of his desire to found
and edit a Dublin newspaper. It would have expoun-
ded the Gaelic propaganda then beginning, though
Dr. Hyde had as yet no league, our old stories, our
modern literature — everything that did not de-
mand any shred or patch of government. He dream-
ed of a tyranny but it was that of Cosimo de Medici.

V

We gathered on Sunday evenings in two rooms,
with folding doors between, & hung, I think, with
photographs from Dutch masters, and in one room
there was always, I think, a table with cold meat.
I can recall but one elderly man — Dunn his name
was — rather silent and full of good sense, an old
friend of Henley's. We were young men, none as
yet established in his own, or in the world's opinion,
and Henley was our leader and our confidant. One
evening I found him alone amused and exasperated.

12

He cried: 'Young A . . . has just been round to ask
my advice. Would I think it a wise thing if he bolt-
ed with Mrs. B. . . ? "Have you quite determined
todoit?"Iasked him. "Quite." "Well," I said, "in
that case I refuse to give you any advice." ' Mrs. B.
. . was a beautiful talented woman, who, as the
Welsh triad said of Guinevere, 'was much given
to being carried off.' I think we listened to him, and
often obeyed him, partly because he was quite plain-
ly not upon the side of our parents. We might have
a different ground of quarrel, but the result seemed
more important than the ground, and his confident
manner and speech made us believe, perhaps for the
first time, in victory. And besides, if he did de-
nounce, and in my case he certainly did, what we
held in secret reverence, he never failed to associate
it with things, or persons, that did not move us to
reverence. Once I found him just returned from
some art congress in Liverpool or in Manchester.
'The Salvation Army ism of art,' he called it, & gave
a grotesque description of some city councillor he
had found admiring Turner. Henley, who hated all
that Ruskin praised, thereupon derided Turner, and
finding the city councillor the next day on the other
side of the gallery, admiring some Pre-Raphaelite
there, derided that Pre-Raphaelite. The third day
Henley discovered the poor man on a chair in the

l3

middle of the room, staring disconsolately upon the
floor. He terrified us also, and certainly I did not
dare, and I think none of us dared, to speak our ad-
miration for book or picture he condemned, but he
made us feel always our importance, and no man
among us could do good work, or show the promise
of it, and lack his praise.

I can remember meeting of a Sunday night Charles
Whibley, Kenneth Grahame, author of cThe Gol-
den Age/ Barry Pain, now a well known novelist,
R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a famous talker,
George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and
Irish chief secretary, and Oscar Wilde, who was
some eight years or ten older than the rest. But faces
and names arc vague to me and, while faces that I
met but once may rise clearly before me, a face met
on many a Sunday has perhaps vanished. Kipling
came sometimes, I think, but I never met him ; and
Stepniak, the nihilist, whom I knew well elsewhere
but not there, said 'I cannot go more than once a
year, it is too exhausting.5 Henley got the best out
of us all, because he had made us accept him as our
judge and we knew that his judgment could neither
sleep, nor be softened, nor changed, nor turned
aside. When I think of him, the antithesis that is the
foundation of human nature being ever in my sight,

H

I see his crippled legs as though he were some Vul-
can perpetually forging swords for other men to use ;
and certainly I always thought of C. . ., a fine clas-
sical scholar, a pale and seemingly gentle man, as our
chief swordsman and bravo. When Henley founded
his weekly newspaper, first the 'Scots,' afterwards
'The National Observer,' this young man wrote ar-
ticles and reviews notorious for savage wit; and
years afterwards when 'The National Observer' was
dead, Henley dying & our cavern of outlaws empty,
I met him in Paris very sad and I think very poor.
'Nobody will employ me now,' he said. 'Your mas-
ter is gone,' I answered, 'and you are like the spear in
an old Irish story that had to be kept dipped in pop-
py-j uice that it might not go about killing people on
its own account.' I wrote my first good lyrics and
tolerable essays for 'The National Obsever'andas I
always signed my work could go my own road in
some measure. Henley often revised my lyrics, cros-
sing out a line or a stanza and writing in one of his
own, and I was comforted by my belief that he also
re- wrote Kiplingthen in thefirst flood of popularity.
At first, indeed, I was ashamed of being re- written
and thought that others were not, and only began
investigation when the editorial characteristics —
epigrams, archaisms and all — appeared in the ar-
ticle upon Paris fashions and in that upon opium by

*5

an Egyptian Pasha. I was not compelled to full con-
formity for verse is plainly stubborn; and in prose,
that I might avoid unacceptable opinions, I wrote
nothing but ghost or fairy stories, picked up from
my mother, or some pilot at Rosses Point, and Hen-
ley saw that I must needs mix a palette fitted to my
subject matter. But if he had changed every 'has'
into 'hath' I would have let him, for had not we
sunned ourselves in his generosity ? 'My young men
out-do me and they write better than I,' he wrote in
some letter praising Charles Whibley's work, and
to another friend with a copy of my 'Man who
dreamed of Fairyland:' 'See what a fine thing has
been written by one of my lads.'

VI

My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an aston-
ishment. I never before heard a man talking with
perfect sentences, as if he had written them all over
night with labour and yet all spontaneous. There
was present that night at Henley's, by right of
propinquity or of accident, a man full of the secret
spite of dullness, who interrupted from time to time
and always to check or disorder thought; and I no-
ticed with what mastery he was foiled and thrown.
I noticed, too, that the impression of artificiality
that I thinkall Wilde's listeners have recorded, came

16

from the perfect rounding of the sentences and from
the deliberation that made it possible. That very
impression helped him as the effect of metre, or of
the antithetical prose of the seventeenth century,
which is itself a true metre, helps a writer, for he
could pass without incongruity from some unfore-
seen swift stroke of wit to elaborate reverie. I heard
him say a few nights later : 'Give me "The Winter's
Tale," "Daffodils that come before the swallow
dare" but not "King Lear." What is "King Lear"
but poor life staggering in the fog?' and the slow ca-
dence, modulated with so great precision, sounded
natural to my ears. That first night he praised Wal-
ter Pater's 'Essays on the Renaissance:' 'It is my
golden book; I never travel anywhere without it;
but it is the very flower of decadence. The last trum-
pet should have sounded the moment it was writ-
ten.' 'But,' said the dull man, 'would you not have
given us time to read it?' 'Oh no,' was the retort,
'there would have been plenty of time afterwards —
in either world.' I think he seemed to us, baffled as
we were by youth, or by infirmity, a triumphant
figure, and to some of us a figure from another age,
an audacious Italian fifteenth century figure. A few
weeks before I had heard one of my father's friends,
an official in a publishing firm that had employed
both Wilde and Henley as editors, blaming Henley
d 17

who was 'no use except under control' and praising
Wilde, 'so indolent but such a genius;' and now the
firm became the topic of our talk. 'How often do
you go to the office?' said Henley. 'I used to go three
times a week,' said Wilde, 'for an hour a day but I
have since struck off one of the days.' 'My God,'
said Henley, 'I went five times a week for five hours
a day and when I wanted to strike offa day they had
a special committee meeting.' 'Furthermore,' was
Wilde's answer, 'I never answered their letters. I
have known men come to London full of bright pro-
spects and seen them complete wrecks in a few
months through a habit of answering letters.' He
too knew how to keep our elders in their place, and
his method was plainly the more successful for Hen-
ley had been dismissed. cNo he is not an aesthete,'
Henley commented later, being somewhat embar-
rassed by Wilde's Pre-Raphaelite entanglement.
'One soon finds that he is a scholar and a gentleman. '
And when I dined with Wilde a few days afterwards
he began at once,'I had to strain every nerve to equal
that man at all;' and I was too loyal to speak my
thought : 'You & not he' said all the brilliant things.
He like the rest of us had felt the strain of an inten-
sity that seemed to hold life at the point of drama.
He had said, on that first meeting, 'The basis of lit-
erary friendship is mixing the poisoned bowl;' and

18

for a few weeks Henley and he became close friends
till, the astonishment of their meeting over, diver-
sity of character and ambition pushed them apart,
and, with half the cavern helping, Henley began
mixing the poisoned bowl for Wilde. Yet Henley
never wholly lost that first admiration, for after
Wilde's downfall he said to me: 'Why did he do it?
I told my lads to attack him and yet we might have
fought under his banner.'

VII

It became the custom, both at Henley's and at Bed-
ford Park, to say that R. A. M. Stevenson, who
frequented both circles, was the better talker.
Wilde had been trussed up like a turkey by under-
graduates, dragged up and down a hill, his cham-
pagne emptied into the ice tub, hooted in the streets
of various towns and I think stoned, and no newspa-
per named him but in scorn; his manner had hard-
ened to meet opposition and at times he allowed one
to see an unpardonable insolence. His charm was ac-
quired and systematised, a mask which he wore only
when it pleased him, while the charm of Stevenson
belonged to him like the colour of his hair. If
Stevenson's talk became monologue we did not
know it, because our one object was to show by our
attention that he need never leave off. If thought

19

failed him we would not combat what he had said,
or start some new theme, but would encourage him
with a question ; and one felt that it had been always
so from childhood up.H is mind was full of phantasy
for phantasy's sake and he gave as good entertain-
ment in monologue as his cousin Robert Louis in
poem or story. He was always 'supposing : ' 'Suppose
you had two millions what would you do with it?'
and 'Suppose you were in Spain and in love how
would you propose?' I recall him one afternoon at
our house at Bedford Park, surrounded by my
brother and sisters and a little group of my father's
friends, describing proposals in half a dozen coun-
tries. There your father did it, dressed in such and
such a way with such and such words, and there a
friend must wait for the lady outside the chapel
door, sprinkle her with holy water and say 'My
friend Jones is dying for love of you.' But when it
was over, those quaint descriptions, so full of laugh-
ter and sympathy, faded or remained in the mem-
ory as something alien from one's own life like a
dance I once saw in a great house, where beautiful-
ly dressed children wound a long ribbon in and out
as they danced. I was not of Stevenson's party and
mainly I think because he had written a book in
praise of Velasquez, praise at that time universal
wherever Pre-Raphaelitism was accurst, and to my

20

mind, that had to pick its symbols where its ignor-
ance permitted, Velasquez seemed the first bored
celebrant of boredom. I was convinced, from some
obscure meditation, that Stevenson's conversational
method had joined him to my elders and to the in-
different world, as though it were right for old men,
and unambitious men and all women, to be content
with charm and humour. It was the prerogative of
youth to take sides and when Wilde said: 'Mr. Ber-
nard Shaw has no enemies but is intensely disliked
by all his friends,' I knew it to be a phrase I should
never forget, and felt revenged upon a notorious
hater of romance, whose generosity and courage I
could not fathom.

VIII

I saw a good deal of Wilde at that time — was it
1887 or 1888? — I have no way of fixing the date
except that I had published my first book 'The
Wanderings of Usheen' and that Wilde had not yet
published his 'Decay of Lying. 'He had, before our
first meeting, reviewed my book and despite its
vagueness of intention, and the inexactness of its
speech, praised without qualification ; and what was
worth more than any review had talked about it, and
now he asked me to eat my Xmas dinner with him,
believing, I imagine, that I was alone in London.

21

He had just renounced his velveteen, and even those
cuffs turned backward over the sleeves, and had be-
gun to dress very carefully in the fashion of the mo-
ment. He lived in a little house at Chelsea that the
architect Godwin had decorated with an elegance
that owed something to Whistler. There was no-
thing mediaeval, nor Pre-Raphaelite, no cupboard
door with figures upon flat gold, no peacock blue,
.no dark background. I remember vaguely a white
drawing room with Whistler etchings, 'let in' to
white panels, and a dining room all white: chairs,
walls, mantlepiece, carpet, except for a diamond-
shaped piece of red cloth in the middle of the table
under a terra cotta statuette,and I think a red shaded
lamp hanging from the ceiling to a little above the
statuette. It was perhaps too perfect in its unity,
his past of a few years before had gone too complet-
ely, and I remember thinking that the perfect har-
mony of his life there, with his beautiful wife and
his two young children, suggested some deliberate
artistic composition.

He commended, & dispraised himself, during din-
ner by attributing characteristics like his own to his
country: cWe Irish are too poetical to be poets; we
are a nation of brilliant failures,but we are the great-
est talkers since the Greeks.' When dinner was over
he read me from the proofs of 'The Decay of Lying'

22

and when he came to the sentence: 'Schopenhauer
has analysed the pessimism that characterises mod-
ern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The world
has become sad because a puppet was once melan-
choly,' I said, ' Why doyou change "sad" ^'melan-
choly?" ' He replied that he wanted a full sound at
the close of his sentence, and I thought it no excuse
and an example of the vague impressiveness that
spoilt his writing for me. Only when he spoke, or
when his writing was the mirror of his speech, or
in some simple fairytale, had he words exact en-
ough to hold a subtle ear. He alarmed me, though
not as Henley did for I never left his house think-
ing myself fool or dunce. He flattered the intellect
of every man he liked ; he made me tell him long
Irish stories and compared my art of story-telling
to Homer's; and once when he had described him-
self as writing in the census paper 'age 19, profes-
sion genius, infirmity talent5 the other guest, a
young journalist fresh from Oxford or Cambridge,
said 'What should I have written?' and was told that
it should have been 'profession talent, infirmity
genius.' When, however, I called, wearing shoes a
little too yellow — unblackened leather had just be-
come fashionable — I understood their extrava-
gence when I saw his eyes fixed upon them ; and an-
other day Wilde asked me to tell his little boy a fairy

23

story, and I had but got as far as 'Once upon a time
there was a giant' when the little boy screamed and
ran out of the room. Wilde looked grave and I was
plunged into the shame of clumsiness that afflicts
the young. When I asked for some literary gossip
for some provincial newspaper, that paid me a few
shillings a month, he explained very explicitly that
writing literary gossip was no job for a gentleman.
Though to be compared to Homer passed the time
pleasantly, I had not been greatly perturbed had he
stopped me with 'Is it a long story?' as Henley
would certainly have done. I was abashed before
him as wit and man of the world alone. I remember
that he deprecated the very general belief in his suc-
cess or his efficiency, and I think with sincerity.
One form of success had gone: he was no more the
lion of the season, and he had not discovered his gift
for writing comedy, yet I think I knew him at the
happiest moment of his life. No scandal had dark-
ened his fame, his fame as a talker was growing a-
mong his equals, & he seemed to live in the enjoy-
ment of his own spontaneity. One day he began: CI
have beeninventingaChristianheresy,'andhe told
a detailed story, in the style of some early father, of
how Christ recovered after the Crucifixion and,
escaping from the tomb, lived on for many years,
the one man upon earth who knew the falsehood of

24

Christianity. Once St. Paul visited his town and he
alone in the carpenters' quarter did not go to hear
him preach. The other carpenters noticed that
henceforth, for some unknown reason, he kept his
hands covered. A few days afterwards I found
Wilde, with smock frocks in various colours spread
out upon tlie floor in front of him, while a mission-
ary explained that he did not object to the heathen
going naked upon week days, but insisted upon
clothes in church. He had brought the smock
frocks in a cab that the only art-critic whose fame
had reached Central Africa might select a colour;
so Wilde sat there weighing all with a conscious
ecclesiastic solemnity.

VIII

Of late years I have often explained Wilde to my-
self by his family history. His father, was afriend or
acquaintance of my father's father and among my
family traditions there is an old Dublin riddle:
'Why are Sir William Wilde's nails so black?' An-
swer, 'Because he has scratched himself.' And there
is an old story still current in Dublin of Lady Wilde
saying to a servant. 'Why do you put the plates on
the coal-scuttle? What are the chairs meant for?'
They were famous people and there are many like
stories, and even a horrible folk story, the inven-
tion of some Connaught peasant, that tells how Sir
e 25

William Wilde took out the eyes of some men, who
had come to consult him as an oculist, and laid them
upon a plate, intending to replace them in a mo-
ment, and how the eyes were eaten by a cat. Asa cer-
tain friend of mine, who has made a prolonged study
of the nature of cats, said when he first heard the
tale, 'Cats love eyes.' The Wilde family was clearly
of the sort that fed the imagination of Charles Le-
ver, dirty, untidy, daring, and what Charles Lever,
who loved more normal activities, might not have
valued so highly, very imaginative and learned.
Lady Wilde, who when I knew her received her
friends with blinds drawn and shutters closed that
none might see her withered face, longed always
perhaps, though certainly amid much self mockery,
for some impossible splendour of character and cir-
cumstance. She lived near her son in level Chelsea,
but I have heard her say, 'I want to live on some
high place, Primrose Hill or Highgate, because I
was an eagle in my youth .' I think her son lived with
no self mockery at all an imaginary life; perpetually
performed a play which was in all things the oppos-
ite of all that he had known in childhood and early
youth ; never put off completely his wonder at open-
ing his eyes every morning on his own beautiful
house, and in remembering that he had dined yes-
terday with a duchess and that he delighted in Flau-
bert and Pater, read Homer in the original and not

26

as a school-master reads him for the grammar. I
think, too, that because of all that half-civilized
blood in his veins, he could not endure the sedentary-
toil of creative art and so remained a man of action?
exaggerating, for the sake of immediate effect,
every trick learned from his masters, turning their
easel painting into painted scenes. He was a par-
venu, but a parvenu whose whole bearing proved
that if he did dedicate every story in 'The House of
Pomegranates' to a lady of title, it was but to show
that he was Jack and the social ladder his panto-
mime beanstalk. "Did you ever hearhimsay 'Mar-
quess of Dimmesdale'?" a friend of his once asked
me. "He does not say 'the Duke of York' with any
pleasure."

He told me once that he had been offered a safe seat
in Parliament and, had he accepted, he might have
had a career like that of Beaconsfield, whose early
style resembles his, being meant for crowds, for ex-
citement, for hurried decisions, for immediate tri-
umphs. Such men get their sincerity, if at all, from
the contact of events; the dinner table was Wilde's
event and made him the greatest talker of his time,
and his plays and dialogues have what merit they
possess from being now an imitation, now a record,
of his talk. Even in those days I would often defend

27

him by saying that his very admiration for his pre-
decessors in poetry, for Browning, for Swinburne
and Rossetti, in their first vogue while he was a
very young man, made any success seem impossible
that could satisfy his immense ambition: never but
once before had the artist seemed so great, never
had the work of art seemed so difficult. I would
then compare him with Benvenuto Cellini who,
coming after Michael Angelo, found nothing left
to do so satisfactory as to turn bravo and assassinate
the man who broke Michael Angelo's nose.

IX

I cannot remember who first brought me to the old
stable beside Kelmscott House, William Morris*
house at Hammersmith, & to the debates held there
upon Sunday evenings by the socialist League. I was
soon of the little group who had supper with Morris
afterwards. I met at these suppers very constantly
Walter Crane, Emery Walker presently, in associa-
tion with Cobden Sanderson, the printer of many
fine books, and less constantly Bernard Shaw and
Cockerell, now of the museum of Cambridge, and
perhaps but once or twice Hyndman the socialist
and the anarchist Prince Krapotkin. There too one
always met certain more or less educated workmen,
rough of speech and manner, with a conviction to

28

meet every turn. I was told by one of them, on a
night when I had done perhaps more than my share
of the talking, that I had talked more nonsense in
one evening than he had heard in the whole course
of his past life. I had merely preferred Parnell, then
at the height of his career, to Michael Davitt who
had wrecked his Irish influence by international
politics. We sat round a long unpolished and un-
painted trestle table of new wood in a room where
hung Rossetti's 'Pomegranate/ a portrait of Mrs.
Morris, and where one wall and part of the ceiling
were covered by a great Persian carpet. Morris had
said somewhere or other that carpets were meant
for people who took their shoes off when they en-
tered a house, and were most in place upon a tent
floor. I was a little disappointed in the house, for
Morris was an old man content at last to gather
beautiful things rather than to arrange a beautiful
house. I saw the drawing-room once or twice and
there alone all my sense of decoration, founded up-
on the background of Rossetti's pictures, was sat-
isfied by a big cupboard painted with a scene from
Chaucer by Burne Jones, but even there were ob-
jects, perhaps a chair or a little table, that seemed
accidental, bought hurriedly perhaps, and with lit-
tle thought, to make wife or daughter comfortable.
I had read as a boy in books belonging to my father,
the third volume of 'The Earthly Paradise' and 'The

29

Defence of Guinevere/ which pleased me less, but
had not opened either for a long time. 'The man
who never laughed again' had seemed the most
wonderful of tales till my father had accused me of
preferring Morris to Keats, got angry about it and
put me altogether out of countenance. He had
spoiled my pleasure, for now I questioned while I
read and at last ceased to read ; nor had Morris writ-
ten as yet those prose romances that became, after
his death, so great a joy that they were the only
books I was ever to read slowly that I might not
come too quickly to the end. It was now Morris
himself that stirred my interest, and I took to him
first because of some little tricks of spepch and body
that reminded me of my old grandfather in Sligo,
but soon discovered his spontaneity and joy and
made him my chief of men. To-day I do not set his
poetry very high, but for an odd altogether won-
derful line, or thought; and yet, if some angel of-
fered me the choice, I would choose to live his life,
poetry and all, rather than my own or any other
man's. A reproduction of his portrait by Watts
hangs over my mantlepiece with Henley's, and
those of other friends. Its grave wide-open ey es,like
the eyes of some dreaming beast, remind me of the
open eyes of Titian's c Ariosto,' while the broad vig-
orous body suggests a mind that has no need of the

3°

intellect to remain sane, though it give itself to ev-
ery phantasy, the dreamer of the middle ages. It is
'the fool of fairy . . . wide and wild as a hill/ the res-
olute European image that yet half remembers
Buddha's motionless meditation, and has no trait in
common with the wavering, lean image of hungry
speculation, that cannot but fill the mind's eye be-
cause of certain famous Hamlets of our stage.
Shakespeare himself foreshadowed a symbolic
change, that shows a change in the whole temper-
ament of the world, for though he called his Hamlet
4fat, and scant of breath,' he thrust between his
fingers agile rapier and dagger.
The dream world of Morris was as much the anti-
thesis of daily life as with other men of genius, but
he was never conscious of the antithesis and so knew
nothing of intellectual suffering. His intellect, un-
exhausted by speculation or casuistry, was wholly
at the service of hand and eye, and whatever he
pleased he did with an unheard of ease and simplic-
ity, and if style and vocabulary were at times mon-
otonous, he could not have made them otherwise
without ceasing to be himself. Instead of the lang-
uage of Chaucer and Shakespeare, its warp fresh
from field and market, if the woof were learned, his
age offered him a speech, exhausted from abstrac-
tion, that only returned to its full vitality when writ-
ten learnedly and slowly.

3*

The roots of his antithetical dream were visible
enough : a never idle man of great physical strength
and extremely irascible — did he not fling a badly
baked plum pudding through the window upon
Xmas Day? — a man more joyous than any intel-
lectual man of our world, called himself 'the idle
singer of an empty day' created new forms of mel-
ancholy , and faint persons, like the knights & ladies
of Burne Jones, who are never, no, not once in forty
volumes, put out of temper. A blunderer, who had
said to the only unconverted man at a socialist pic-
nic in Dublin, to prove that equality came easy, CI
was brought up a gentleman and now, as you can
see, associate with all sorts,' and left wounds thereby
that rankled after twenty years, a man of whom I
have heard it said 'He is always afraid that he is
doing something wrong, and generally is,' wrote
long stories with apparently no other object than
that his persons might show one another, through
situations of poignant difficulty, the most exquisite
tact.

He did not project, like Henley or like Wilde, an
image of himself, because, having all his imagina-
tion set on making and doing, he had little self-
knowledge. He imagined instead new conditions
of making and doing; and, in the teeth of those sci-
entific generalisations that cowed my boyhood, I
can see some like imagining in every great change,

3*

believing that the first flying fish leaped, not because
it sought 'adaptation' to the air, but out of horror of
the sea.

X

Soon after I began to attend the lectures, a French
class was started in the old coach-house for certain
young socialists who planned a tour in France, and
I joined it and was for a time a model student con-
stantly encouraged by the compliments of the old
French mistress. I told my father of the class, and
he asked me to get my sisters admitted. I made dif-
ficulties and put off speaking of the matter, for I
knew that the new and admirable self I was making
would turn, under family eyes, into plain rag doll.
How could I pretendtobeindustrious,andevencar-
ry dramatization to the point of learning my lessons,
when my sisters were there and knew that I was no-
thing of the kind? But I had no argument I could
use and my sisters were admitted. They said nothing
unkind, so far as I can remember, but in a week or
two I was my old procrastinating idle self and had
soon left the class altogether. My elder sister stayed
on and became an embroidercss under Miss May
Morris, and the hangings round Morris's big bed
at Kelmscott House, Oxfordshire, with their verses
about lying happily in bed when 'all birds sing in

f 33

the town of the tree/ were from her needle though
not from her design. She worked for the first few
months at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, and in
my imagination I cannot always separate what I
saw and heard from her report, or indeed from the
report of that tribe or guild who lookedupto Morris
as to some worshipped mediaeval king. He had no
need for other people. I doubt if their marriage or
death made him sad or glad, and yet no man I have
known was so well loved; you saw him producing
everywhere organisation and beauty, seeming, al-
most in the same instant, helpless and triumphant;
and people loved him as children are loved. People
much in his neighbourhood became gradually oc-
cupied with him, or about his affairs, and without
any wish on his part, as simple people become oc-
cupied with children. I remember a man who was
proud and pleased because he had distracted Morris'
thoughts from an attack of gout by leading the con-
versation delicately to the hated name of Milton. He
began at Swinburne. 'Oh, Swinburne/said Morris,
4s a rhetorician; my masters have been Keats and
Chaucer for they make pictures/ 'Does not Mil-
ton make pictures ?' asked my informant. 'No/ was
the answer, 'Dante makes pictures, but Milton,
though he had a great earnest mind, expressed him-
self as a rhetorician.' 'Great earnest mind,' sounded

34

strange to mc and I doubt not that were his ques-
tioner not a simple man, Morris had been more vio-
lent. Another day the same man started by praising
Chaucer, but the gout was worse and Morris cursed
Chaucer for destroying the English language with
foreign words.

He had few detachable phrases and I can remem-
ber little of his speech, which many thought the
best of all good talk, except that it matched his burly
body and seemed within definite boundaries inex-
haustible in fact and expression. He alone of all the
men I have known seemed guided by some beast-
like instinct and never ate strange meat, 'Balzac I
Balzac V he said to me once, cOh, that was the man
the French bourgeoisie read so much a few years
ago.' I can remember him at supper praising wine:
'Why do people say it is prosaic to be inspired by
wine? Has it not been made by the sunlight and the
sap?' and his dispraising houses decorated by him-
self: 'Do you suppose I like that kind of house? I
would like a house like a big barn, where one ate in
one corner, cooked in another corner, slept in the
third corner & in the fourth received one's friends';
and his complaining of Ruskin's objection to the
underground railway: 'If you must have a railway
the best thing you can do with it is to put it in a tube
with a cork at each end.' I remember too that when

35

I asked what led up to his movement, he replied,
'Oh, Ruskin and Carly le,but somebody should have
been beside Carlyle and punched his head every five
minutes.' Though I remember little, I do not doubt
that, had I continued going there on Sunday even-
ings, I should have caught fire from his words and
turned my hand to some mediaeval work or other.
Just before I had ceased to go there I had sent my
4 Wanderings of Usheen' to his daughter, hopingof
course that it might meet his ey es,& soon after send-
ing it I came upon him by chance in Holborn. ' You
write my sort of poetry,' he said and began to praise
me and to promise to send his praise to 'The Com-
monwealth,'the League organ, and he would have
said more of a certainty had he not caught sight of
a new ornamental cast-iron lamp-post and got very
heated upon that subject.

I did not read economics, having turned socialist
because of Morris's lectures and pamphlets, and I
think it unlikely that Morris himself could read
economics. That old dogma of mine seemed ger-
mane to the matter. If the men and women imag-
ined by the poets were the norm, and if M orris had,
in, let us say, 'News from Nowhere,' then running
through 'The Commonwealth,' described such
men and women living under their natural condi-
tions or as thev would desire to live, then those

36

conditions themselves must be the norm, and could
we but get rid of certain institutions the world
would turn from eccentricity. Perhaps Morris him-
self justified himself in his own heart by as simple
an argument, and was, as the socialist D. . . said to
me one night walking home after some lecture,
'an anarchist without knowing it.' Certainly I and
all about me, including D. . . himself, were for
chopping up the old king for Medea's pot. Morris
had told us to have nothing to do with the parlia-
mentary socialists, represented for men in general
by the Fabian Society and Hyndman's Socialist
Democratic Federation and for us in particular by
D. . During the period of transition mistakes must
be made, and the discredit of these mistakes must be
left to 'the bourgeoisie;' and besides, when you be-
gin to talk of this measure or that other you lose
sight of the goal and see, to reverse Swinburne's
description of Tiresias, 'light on the way but dark-
ness on the goal.' By mistakes Morris meant vexa-
tious restrictions and compromises — 'If any man
puts me into a labour squad, I will lie on my back
and kick.' That phrase very much expresses our
idea of revolutionary tactics: we all intended to lie
upon our back and kick. D. . ., pale and sedentary,
did not dislike labour squads and we all hated him
with the left side of our heads, while admiring him

37

immensely with the right. He alone was invited to
entertain Mrs. Morris, having many tales of his
Irish uncles, more especially of one particular uncle
who had tried to commit suicide by shutting his
head into a carpet bag. At that time he was an ob-
scure man, known only for a witty speaker at street
corners and in Park demonstrations. He had, with
an assumed truculence and fury, cold logic, an uni-
versal gentleness, an unruffled courtesy, and yet
could never close a speech without beingdenounced
by a journeyman hatter with an Italian name. Con-
verted to socialism by D . . ., and to anarchism by
himself, with swinging arm and uplifted voice this
man perhaps exaggerated our scruple about parlia-
ment. 'I lack/ said D. . ., 'the bump of reverence;'
whereon the wild man shouted 'You 'ave a 'ole.'
There are moments when looking back I somewhat
confuse my own figure with that of the hatter, im-
age of our hysteria, for I too became violent with
the violent solemnity of a religious devotee. I can
even remember sitting behind D. . . and saying
some rude thing or other over his shoulder.
I don't remember why I gave it up but I did quite
suddenly ; and I think the push may have come from
a young workman who was educating himself be-
tween Morris and Karl Marx. He had planned a
history of the navy and when I had spoken of the

38

battleship of Nelson's day, had said: cOh, that
was the decadence of the battleship/ but if his
naval interests were mediaeval, his ideas about re-
ligion were pure Karl Marx, and we were soon in
perpetual argument. Then gradually the attitude
towards religion of almost everybody but Morris,
who avoided the subject altogether, got upon my
nerves, for I broke out after some lecture or other
with all the arrogance of raging youth. They at-
tacked religion, I said, or some such words, and yet
there must be a change of heart and only religion
could make it. What was the use of talking about
some near revolution putting all things right, when
the change must come, if come it did, with astro-
nomical slowness, like the cooling of the sun or, it
may have been, like the drying of the moon ? Morris
rang his chairman's bell, but I was too angry to list-
en, and he had to ring it a second time before I sat
down. He said that night at supper: 'Of course I
know there must be a change of heart, but it will
not come as slowly as all that. I rang my bell because
you were not being understood.' He did not show
any vexation, but I never returned after that night;
and yet I did not always believe what I had said and
only gradually gave up thinking of and planning
for some near sudden change for the better.

39

XI

I spent my days at the British Museum and must,
I think, have been delicate, for I remember often
putting off hour after hour consulting some neces-
sary book because I shrank from lifting the heavy
volumes of the catalogue; and yet to save money
for my afternoon coffee and roll I often walked the
whole way home to Bedford Park. I was compiling,
for a scries of shilling books, an anthology of Irish
fairy stories and, for an American publisher, a two
volume selectionfrom the Irish novelists that would
be somewhat dearer. I was not well paid, for each
book cost me more than three months' reading ; and
I was paid for the first some twelve pounds, (cO Mr.
E . . . ' said publisher to editor, 'you must never
again pay so much') and for the second, twenty ; but
I did not think myself badly paid, for I had chosen
the work for my own purposes.
Though I went to Sligo every summer, I was com-
pelled to live out of Ireland the greater part of every
year and was but keeping my mind upon what I
knew must be the subject matter of my poetry. I be-
lieved that if Morris had set his stories amid the
scenery of his own Wales (for I knew him to be of
Welsh extraction and supposed wrongly that he
had spent his childhood there) that if Shelley had
nailed his Prometheus or some equal symbol upon

40

some Welsh or Scottish rock, their art had entered
more intimately, more microscopically, as it were,
into our thought, and had given perhaps to modern
poetry a breadth and stability like that of ancient
poetry. The statues of Mausolus and Artemisia at
the British Museum, private, half animal, half di-
vine figures, all unlike the Grecian athletes and
Egyptian kings in their near neighbourhood, that
stand in the middle of the crowd's applause or sit
above measuring it out unpersuadable justice, be-
came to me, now or later, images of an unpremedi-
tated joyous energy, that neither I nor any other
man, racked by doubt and enquiry, can achieve ; and
that yet, if once achieved, might seem to men and
women of Connemaraor of Galway their very soul.
In our study of that ruined tomb,raised by a queen
to her dead lover, and finished by the unpaid labour
of great sculptors after her death from grief, or so
runs the tale, we cannot distinguish the handiworks
of Scopas and Praxiteles ; and I wanted tocreateonce
more an art, where the artist's handiwork would
hide as under those half anonymous chisels, or as we
find it in some old Scots ballads or in some twelfth
or thirteenth century Arthurian romance. That
handiwork assured, I had marty redno man for mod-
elling his own image upon Pallas Athena's buck-
ler; for I took great pleasure in certain allusions to

g 4i

the singer's life one finds in old romances and bal-
lads, and thought his presence there all the more
poignant because we discover it half lost, like portly
Chaucer riding behind his Maunciple and his Par-
doner. Wolfram von Eschenbach, singing his Ger-
man Parsival, broke off some description of a fam-
ished city to remember that in his own house at
home the very mice lacked food, and what old bal-
lad singer was it who claimed to have fought by day
in the very battle he sang by night? So masterful in-
deed was that instinct that when the minstrel knew
not who his poet was he must needs make up a man:
'When any stranger asks who is the sweetest of sing-
ers, answer with one voice : "A blind man ; he dwells
upon rocky Chios ; his songs shall be the most beau-
tiful for ever."' Elaborate modern psychology
sounds egotistical, I thought, when it speaks in the
first person, but not those simple emotions which
resemble the more, the more powerful they are,
everybody's emotion, and I was soon to write many
poems where an always personal emotion was wo-
ven into a -general pattern of myth and symbol.
When the Fenian poet says that his heart has grown
cold and callous, 'For thy hapless fate, dear Ireland,
and sorrows of my own,' he but follows tradition,
and if he does not move us deeply, it is because he
has no sensuous musical vocabulary that comes at

4*

need, without compelling him to sedentary toil and
so driving him out from his fellows. I thought to
create that sensuous, musical vocabulary, and not
for myself only but that I might leave it to later Irish
poets, much as a mediaeval Japanese painter left his
style as an inheritance to his family, and was careful
to use a traditional manner and matter; yet did
something altogether different, changed by that
toil, impelled by my share in Cain's curse, by all that
sterile modern complication, by my 'originality' as
the newspapers call it. Morris set out to make a re-
volution that the persons of his 'Well at the World's
End' or his 'Waters of the Wondrous Isles,' always,
to my mind, in the likeness of Artemisia and her
man, might walk his native scenery ; and I, that my
native scenery might find imaginary inhabitants,
half planned a new method and a new culture. My
mind began drifting vaguely towards that doctrine
of 'the mask' which has convinced me that every
passionate man (I have nothing to do with mechan-
ist, or philanthropist, or man whose eyes have no
preference) is, as it were, linked with another age,
historical or imaginary, where alone he finds images
that rouse his energy. Napoleon was never of his
own time, as the naturalistic writers and painters
bid all men be, but had some Roman Emperor's
image in his head and some condottiere's blood in

43

his heart; and when he crowned that head at Rome
with his own hands, he had covered, as may be seen
from David's painting, his hesitation with that Em-
peror's old suit.

XII

I had various women friends on whom I would call
towards five o'clock, mainly to discuss my thoughts
that I could not bring to a man without meeting
some competing thought, but partly because their
tea & toast saved my pennies for the 'bus ride home ;
but with women, apart from their intimate ex-
changes of thought, I was timid and abashed. I was
sitting on a seat infront of the British Museum feed-
ing pigeons, when a couple of girls sat near and be-
gan enticing my pigeons away, laughing and whis-
pering to one another, and I looked straight in front
of me, very indignant, and presently went into the
Museum without turning my head towards them.
Since then I have often wondered if they were pret-
ty or merely very young. Sometimes I told myself
very adventurous love stories with myself for hero,
and at other times I planned out a life of lonely aus-
terity, and at other times mixed the ideals and plan-
ned a life of lonely austerity mitigated by period-
ical lapses. I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo
in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on

44

Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when
walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard
a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop
window which balanced a little ball upon its jet
and began to remember lake water. From the sud-
den remembrance came my poem 'Innisfree/ my
first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own
music. I had begun to loosen rhythm as an escape
from rhetoric, and from that emotion of the crowd
that rhetoric brings,but I only understood vaguely
and occasionally that I must, formy special purpose,
use nothing but the common syntax. A couple of
years later I would not have written that first line
with its conventional archaism — 'Arise and go' —
nor the inversion in the last stanza. Passing another
day by the new Law Courts, a building that I ad-
mired because it was Gothic, — 'It isnot very good/
Morris had said, 'but it is better than anything else
they have got and so they hate it. ' — I grew sudden-
ly oppressed by the great weight of stone, and
thought, 'There are miles and miles of stone and
brick all round me/ and presently added, 'If John
the Baptist, or his like, were to come again and had
his mind set upon it, he could make all thesepeople
go out into some wilderness leaving their buildings
empty/ and that thought, which does not seem
very valuable now, so enlightened the day thA it is

45

still vividin the memory. I spent afcw days at Oxford
copying out a seventeenth century translation of
Poggws Liber Facetiarum or the Hypneroto-machia of
Poliphili Tor a publisher ; I forget which, for I copied
both ; and returned very pale to my troubled family.
I had lived upon bread and tea because I thought
that if antiquity found locust and wild honey nutri-
tive, my soul was strong enough to need no better.
I was always planning some great gesture, putting
the whole world into one scale of the balance and
my soul into the other, and imagini n g that the wh ole
world somehow kicked the beam. More than thirtv
years have passed and I have seen no forcible young
man of letters brave the metropolis without some
like stimulant; and all, after two or three, or twelve
or fifteenyears, according to obstinacy, have under-
stood that we achieve, if we do achieve, in little
diligent sedentary stitches as though we were mak-
ing lace. I had one unmeasured advantage from my
stimulant : I could ink my socks, that they might
not show through my shoes, with a most haughty
mind, imagining myself, and my torn tackle, some-
where else, in some far place 'under the canopy . . .
i' the city of kites and crows.'
In London I saw nothing good, and constantly re-
membered that Ruskin had said to some friend of
my father's — f As I go to my work at the British

46

Museum I see the faces of the people become daily
more corrupt/ I convinced myself for a time, that
on the same journey I saw but what he saw. Certain
old women's faces filled me with horror, faces that
are no longer there, or if they are, pass before me
unnoticed: the fat blotched faces, rising above
double chins, of women who have drunk too much
beer and eaten too much meat. In Dublin I had often
seen old women walking with erect heads and gaunt
bodies, talking to themselves in loud voices, mad
with drink and poverty, but they were different,
they belonged to romance : Da Vinci has drawn wo-
men who looked so and so carried their bodies.

XIII

I attempted to restore one old friend of my father's
to the practice of his youth, but failed though he,
unlike my father, had not changed his belief. My
father brought me to dine with Jack Nettleship at
Wigmore Street, once inventor of imaginative de-
signs and now a painter of melodramatic lions. At
dinner I had talked a great deal — too much, I im-
agine, for so young a man, or may be for any man
— and on the way home my father, who had been
plainly anxious that I should make a good impres-
sion, was very angry. He said I had talked for effect
and that talking for effect was precisely what one

47

must never do; he had always hated rhetoric and
emphasis and had made me hate it; and his anger
plunged me into great dejection. I called at Nettle-
ship's studio the next day to apologise and Nettle-
ship opened the door himself and received me with
enthusiasm. He had explained tosome woman guest
that I would probably talk well, being an Irishman,
but the reality had surpassed, etc., etc. I was not flat-
tered, though relieved at not having to apologise,
for I soon discovered that what he really admired
was my volubility, for he himself was very silent.
He seemed about sixty, had a bald head, a grey
beard, and a nose, as one of my father's friends used
to say, like an opera glass, and sipped cocoa all the
afternoon and evening from an enormous tea cup
that must have been designed for him alone, not
caring how cold the cocoa grew. Years before he
had been thrown from his horse while hunting
and broken his arm and, because it had been badly
set,sufferedgreatpainforalongtime.Alittle whisk-
ey would always stop the pain, and soon a little be-
came a great deal and he found himself a drunkard,
buthavingsignedhislibertyawayforcertainmonths
he was completely cured. He had acquired, how-
ever, the need of some liquid which he could sip
constantly. I brought him an admiration settled in
early boyhood, for my father had always said,

48

'George Wilson was our born painter but Nettle-
ship our genius/ and even had he shown me no-
thing I could care for, I had admired him still be-
cause my admiration was in my bones. He showed
me his early designs and they, though often badly
drawn, fulfilled my hopes. Something of Blake they
certainly did show, but had in place of Blake's joy-
ous intellectual energy a Saturnian passion and mel-
ancholy. 'God creating evil' the death-like head
with a woman and a tiger coming from the fore-
head, which Rossetti — or was it Browning? — had
described 'as the most sublime design of ancient or
modern art' had been lost, but there was another
version of the same thought and other designs nev-
er published or exhibited. They rise before me even
now in meditation, especially a blind Titan-like
ghost floating with groping hands above the tfee-
tops. I wrote a criticism, and arranged for repro-
ductions with the editor of an art magazine, but aft-
er it was written and accepted the proprietor, lift-
ing what I considered an obsequious caw in the
Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage
rookery, insisted upon its rejection. Nettleship did
not mind its rejection, saying, 'Who cares for such
things now? Not ten people,' but he did mind my
refusal to show him what I had written. Though
what I had written was all eulogy, I dreaded his
h 49

judgment for it was my first art criticism. I hated
his big lion pictures, where he attempted an art too
much concerned with the sense of touch, with the
softness or roughness, the minutely observed irreg-
ularity of surfaces, for his genius; and I think he
knew it. 'Rossetti used to call my pictures 'pot-boil-
ers,' he said, 'but they are all — all,' and he waved
his arms to the canvases, 'symbols.' When I want-
ed him to design gods and angels and lost spirits
once more, he always came back to the point, 'No-
body would be pleased.' 'Everybody should have
a raison d'etre* was one of his phrases. 'Mrs — 's
articles are not good but they are her raison d'etre?
I had but little knowledge of art, for there waslittle
scholarship in the Dublin Art School, so I overrated
the quality of anything that could be connected
with my general beliefs about the world. If I had
been able to give angelical, or diabolical names to
his lions I might have liked them also and I think
that Nettleship himself would have liked them bet-
ter, and liking them better have become a better
painter. We had the same kind of religious feeling,
but I could give a crude philosophical expression to
mine while he could only express his in action or
with brush and pencil. He often told me of certain
ascetic ambitions, very much like my own, for he
had kept all the moral ambition of youth with a

moral courage peculiar to himself, as for instance —
'Yeats, the other night I was arrested by a police-
man— was walking round Regent's Park barefoot-
ed to keep the flesh under — good sort of thing to
do — I was carrying my boots in my hand and he
thought I was a burglar ; and even when I explained
and gave him half a crown, he would not let me go
till I had promised to put on my boots before I met
the next policeman/

He was very proud and shy, and I could not imag-
ine anybody asking him questions, and so I was con-
tent to take these stories as they came, confirmations
of stories I had heard in boyhood. One story in par-
ticular had stirred my imagination, for, ashamed all
my boyhood of my lack of physical courage, I ad-
mired what was beyond my imitation. He thought
that any weakness, even a weakness of body, had the
character of sin, and while at breakfast with his
brother, with whom he shared a room on the third
floor of a corner house, he said that his nerves were
out of order. Presently heleft the table, and got out
through the window and on to a stone ledge that
ran along the wall under the windowsills. He sidled
along the ledge, and turning the corner with it, got
in at a different window and returned to the table.
'My nerves/ he said,' are better than I thought/

5*

XIV
Nettleship said to me: 'Has Edwin Ellis ever said
anything about the effect of drink upon my gen-
ius?' 'No/ I answered. *I ask/ he said, 'because I
have always thought that Ellis has some strange
medical insight.' Though I had answered cno/ Ellis
had only a few days before used these words: 'Net-
tleship drank his genius away.' Ellis, but lately re-
turned from Perugia, where he had lived many
years, was another old friend of my father's but some
years younger than Nettleship or my father. Net-
tleship had found his simplifying image, but in his
painting had turned away from it, while Ellis, the
sonof Alexander Ellis,aoncefamousmanof science,
who was perhaps the last man in England to run the
circle of the sciences without superficiality, had
never found that image at all. He was a painter and
poet, but his painting, which did not interest me,
showed no influence but that of Leighton. He had
started perhaps a couple of years too late for Pre-
Raphaelite influence, for no great Pre-Raphaelite
picture was painted after 1870, and left England
too soon for that of the French painters. He was,
however, sometimes moving as a poet and still more
often an astonishment. I have known him cast some-
thing just said into a dozen lines of musical verse,
without apparently ceasing to talk; but the work

52

once done he could not or would not amend it, and
my father thought he lacked all ambition. Yet he
had at times nobility of rhythm — an instinct for
grandeur — and after thirty years I still repeat to
myself his address to Mother Earth:

O mother of the hills, forgive our towers;
O mother of the clouds, forgive our dreams

and there are certain whole poems that I read from
time to time or try to make others read. There is
that poem where the manner is unworthy of the
matter, being loose and facile, describing Adam and
Eve fleeing from Paradise. Adam asks Eve what she
carries so carefully and Eve replies that it is a little
of the apple core kept for their children. There is
that vision of 'Christ the Less,' a too hurriedly
written ballad, where the half of Christ, sacrificed
to the divine half 'that fled to seek felicity,' wan-
ders wailing through Golgotha; and there is 'The
Saint and the Youth' in which I can discover no
fault at all. He loved complexities — 'seven silences
like candles round her face' is a line of his — and
whether he wrote well or ill had always a manner,
which I would have known from that of any other
poet. He would say to me, 'I am a mathematician
with the mathematics left out' — his father was a

53

great mathematician — or CA woman once said to
me, "Mr. Ellis why are your poems like sums?" '
and certainly he loved symbols and abstractions. He
said once, when I had asked him not to mention
something or other, 'Surely you have discovered by
this time that I know of no means whereby I can
mention a fact in conversation/
He had a passion for Blake, picked up in Pre-Raph-
aelite studios, and early in our acquaintance put into
my hands a scrap of note paper on which he had writ-
ten some years before an interpretation of the poem
that begins

The fields from Islington to Marylebone
To Primrose Hill and St. John's Wood
Were builded over with pillars of gold
And there Jerusalem's pillars stood.

The four quarters of London represented Blake's
four great mythological personages, the Zoas, and
also the four elements. These few sentences were
the foundation of all study of the philosophy of
William Blake, that requires an exact knowledge
foritspursuitand that tracestheconnection between
his system and that of Swcdenborg or of Boehme. I
recognised certain attributions, from what is some-
times called the Christian Cabala, of which Ellis

54

had never heard, and with this proof that his inter-
pretation was more than phantasy, he and I began
our four years' work upon the Prophetic Books of
William Blake. We took it as almost a sign of
Blake's personal help when we discovered that the
springof 1 889, whenwefirst joined our knowledge,
was one hundred years from the publication of 'The
Book of Thel,' the first published of the Prophetic
Books, as though it were firmly established that the
dead delight in anniversaries. After months of dis-
cussion and reading, we made a concordance of all
Blake's mystical terms, and there was much copy-
ing to be done in the Museum & at Red Hill, where
the descendants of Blake's friend and patron, the
landscape painter, John Linnell, had many manu-
scripts. The Linnells were narrow in their religious
ideas & doubtful of Blake's orthodoxy, whom they
held, however, in great honour, and I remember a
timid old lady who had known Blake when a child
saying: cHe had very wrong ideas, he did not be-
lieve in the historical Jesus.' One old man sat always
beside us ostensibly to sharpen our pencils, but per-
haps really to see that we did not steal the manu-
scripts, and they gave us very old port at lunch and
I have upon my dining room walls their present of
Blake's Dante engravings. Going thither and re-
turning Ellis would entertain me by philosophical

55

discussion, varied with improvised stories, at first
folk tales which he professed to have picked up in
Scotland ; and though I had read and collected many
folk tales, I did not see through the deceit. I have
a partial memory of two more elaborate tales, one of
an Italian conspirator flying barefoot from I forget
what adventure through I forget what Italian city,
in the early morning. Fearing to be recognised by
his bare feet, he slipped past the sleepy porter at an
hotel calling out 'number so and so' as if he were
some belated guest. Then passing from bedroom
door to door he tried on the boots, and just as he got
a pair to fit a voice cried from the room 'Who is
that?' 'Merely me, sir,5 he called back, 'taking your
boots.' The other was of a Martyr's Bible round
which the cardinal virtues had taken personal form
— this a fragment of Blake's philosophy. It was in
the possession of an old clergyman when a certain
jockey called upon him, and the cardinal virtues,
confused between jockey and clergyman, devoted
themselves to the jockey. As whenever he sinned a
cardinal virtue interfered and turned him back to
virtue, he lived in great credit and made, but for one
sentence, a very holy death. As his wife and family
knelt round inadmirationand grief, he suddenly said
'Damn.5 'O my dear/ said his wife, 'what a dreadful
expression.' He answered, 'I am going to heaven'

56

and straightway died. It was a long tale, for there
were all the jockey's vain attempts to sin, as well as
all the adventures of the clergyman, who became
very sinful indeed, but it ended happily, for when
the jockey died the cardinal virtues returned to the
clergyman. I think he would talk to any audience
that offered, one audience being the same as another
in his eyes, and it may have been for this reason that
my father called him unambitious. When he was a
young man he had befriended a reformed thief and
had asked the grateful thief to take him round the
thieves' quarters of London. The thief, however,
hurried him away from the worst saying, 'Another
minute and they would have found you out. If they
were not the stupidest men in London, they had
done so already.' Ellis had gone through a no doubt
romantic and witty account of all the houses he had
robbed, and all the throats he had cut in one short
life.

His conversation would often pass out of my com-
prehension, or indeed I think of any man's, into a
labyrinth of abstraction and subtil ty, and then sud-
denly return with some verbal conceit or turn of
wit. The mind is known to attain, in certain condi-
tions of trance, a quickness so extraordinary that we
are compelled at times to imagine a condition of
unendurable intellectual intensity, from which we

i 57

are saved by the merciful stupidity of the body ;& I
think that the mind of Edwin Ellis was constantly
upon the edge of trance. Once we were discussing
the symbolism of sex, in the philosophy of Blake,
and had been in disagreement all the afternoon. I
began talking with a new sense of conviction, and
after a moment Ellis, who was at his easel, threw
down his brush and said that he had just seen the
same explanation in a series of symbolic visions. 'In
another moment,' he said, 'I should have been off.'
We went into the open air and walked up and down
to get rid of that feeling, but presently we came in
again and I began again my explanation, Ellis lying
upon the sofa. I had been talking some time when
Mrs. Ellis came into the room and said: 'Why are
you sitting in the dark? ' Ellis answered, 'But we are
not,' and then added in a voice of wonder,'I thought
the lamp was lit and that I \sfas sitting up, and I find
I am in the dark and lying down.' I had seen a flicker
of light over the ceiling, but had thought it a reflec-
tion from some light outside the house, which may
have been the case.

XV

I had already met most of the poets of my genera-
tion. I had said, soon after the publication of 'The
Wanderings of Usheen,' to the editor of a series of

* 58

shilling reprints, who had set me to compile tales
of the Irish fairies, 'I am growing jealous of other
poets, and we will all grow jealous of each other
unless we know each other and so feel a share in
each other's triumph.' He was a Welshman, lately
a mining engineer, Ernest Rhys, a writer of Welsh
translations and original poems that have often
moved me greatly though I can think of no one else
who has read them. He was seven or eight years
older than myself and through his work as editor
knew everybody who would compile a book for
seven or eight pounds. Between us we founded 'The
Rhymers' Club' which for some years was to meet
every night in an upper room with a sanded floor
in an ancient eating house in the Strand called 4The
Cheshire Cheese.' Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson,
Victor Plarr, Ernest Radford, John Davidson,
Richard le Gallienne, T. W. Rolleston, Selwyn
Image and two men of an older generation, Edwin
Ellis and John Todhunter, came constantly for a
time, Arthur Symons and Herbert Homeless con-
stantly, while William Watson joined but never
came and Francis Thompson came once but never
joined; and sometimes, if we met in a private house,
which we did occasionally, Oscar Wilde came. It
had been useless to invite him to the 'Cheshire
Cheese' for he hated Bohemia. 'Olive Schreiner,'

59

he said once to me, 4is staying in the East End be-
cause that is the only place where people do not
wear masks upon their faces, but I have told her
that I live in the West End because nothing in life
interests me but the mask.'

We read our poems to one another and talked criti-
cism and drank a little wine. I sometimes say when
I speak of the club, 'We had such and such ideas,
such and such a quarrel with the great Victorians,
we set before us such and such aims,' as though we
had many philosophical ideas. I say thisbecause I am
ashamed to admit that I had these ideas and that
whenever I began to talk of them a gloomy silence
fell upon the room. A young Irish poet, who wrote
excellently but had the worst manners, was to say a
few years later, ' You do not talk like a poet, you talk
like a man of letters ; ' and if all the rhymers had not
been polite, if most of them had not been to Oxford
or Cambridge, they would have said the same thing,
I was full of thought, often very abstract thought,
longing all the while to be full of images, because I
had gone to the art school instead of a university.
Yet even if I had gone to a university, and learned
all the classical foundations of English literature
and English culture, all that great erudition which,
once accepted, frees the mind from restlessness, I
should have had to give up my Irish subject matter,

60

or attempt to found a new tradition. Lacking suf-
ficient recognised precedent I must needs find out
some reason for all I did. I knew almost from the
start that to overflow with reasons was to be not
quite well-born, and when I could I hid them, as
men hide a disagreeable ancestry ; and that there was
no help for it, seeing that my country was not born
at all. I was of those doomed to imperfect achieve-
ment, and under a curse, as it were, like some race
of birds compelled to spend the time, needed for the
making of the nest, in argument as to the conveni-
ence of moss and twig and lichen. Le Gallienne and
Davidson, and even Symons, were provincial at
their setting out, but their provincialism was cura-
ble, mine incurable ; while the one conviction shared
by all the younger men, but principally by Johnson
and Home, who imposed their personalities upon
us, was an opposition to all ideas, all generalisations
that can be explained and debated. E. . . fresh from
Paris would sometimes say — 'We are concerned
with nothing but impressions,' but that itself was
a generalisation and met but stony silence. Conver-
sation constantly dwindled into cDo you like so and
so's last book?' 4No, I prefer the book before it/ and
I think that but for its Irish members, who said
whatever came into their heads, the club would not
have survived its first difficult months. I knew —

6 1

now ashamed that I thought 'like a man of letters/
now exasperated at their indifference to the fashion
of their own river bed — that Swinburne in one way,
Browning in another, and Tennyson in a third, had
filled their work with what I called 'impurities/
curiosities about politics, about science, about his-
tory, about religion; and that we must create once
more the pure work.

Our clothes were for the most part unadventurous
like our conversation, though I indeed woreabrown
velveteen coat, a loose tie and a very old Inverness
cape, discarded by my father twenty years before
and preserved by my Sligo-born mother whose ac-
tions were unreasoningandhabitual like theseasons.
But no other member of the club, except Le Gal-
lienne, who wore a loose tie,andSymons, who had
an Inverness cape that was quite new & almost fash-
ionable, would have shown himself for the world
in any costume but 'that of an English gentleman.'
'One should be quite unnoticeable/ Johnson ex-
plained to me. Those whoconformed most carefully
to the fashion in their clothes generally departed
furthest from it in their hand-writing, which was
small, neat and studied, one poet — which I forget
— having founded his upon the handwriting of
George Herbert. Dowson and Symons I was to know
better in later years when Symons became a very

dear friend, and I never got behind John Davidson's
Scottish roughness and exasperation, though I saw
much of him, butfrom the first I devoted myself to
Lionel Johnson. He and Home and Image and one
or two others shared a man-servant and an old house
in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, typical figures
of transition, doing as an achievement of learning
and of exquisite taste what their predecessors did in
careless abundance. All were Pre-Raphaelite, and
sometimes one might meet in the rooms of one or
other a ragged figure, as of some fallen dynasty,
Simeon Solomon, the Pre-Raphaelite painter, once
the friend of Rossetti and of Swinburne, but fresh
now from some low public house. Condemned to a
long term of imprisonment for a criminal offence,
he had sunk into drunkenness and misery. Intro-
duced one night, however, to some man who mis-
took him, in the dim candle light, for another Sol-
omon, a successful academic painter and R. A., he
started to his feet in a rage with 'Sir, do you dare
to mistake me for that mountebank?' Though not
one had harkened to the feeblest caw, or been spat-
tered by the smallest dropping from any Huxley,
Tyndall,Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage bundle of
old twigs, I began by suspecting them of lukewarm-
ness, and even backsliding, and I owe it to that
suspicion that I neverbecame intimate with Home,

63

who lived to become the greatest English authority
upon Italian life in the fourteenth century and to
write the one standard work on Botticelli. Connois-
seur in several arts, he had designed a little church
in the manner of Inigo Jones for a burial ground
near the Marble Arch. Though I now think his lit-
tle church a masterpiece, its style was more than a
century too late to hit my fancy at two or three and
twenty; and I accused him of leaning towards that
eighteenth century

That taught a school
Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit
Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit,
Their verses tallied.

Another fanaticism delayed my friendship with
two men, who are now my friends and in certain
matters my chief instructors. Somebody, probably
Lionel Johnson, brought me to the studio of Charles
Ricketts and Charles Shannon, certainly heirs of
the great generation, and the first thing I saw was
a Shannon picture of a lady and child arrayed in
lace, silk and satin, suggesting that hated century.
My eyes were full of some more mythological mo-
ther and child and I would have none of it, and I
told Shannon that he had not painted a mother and

64

child but elegant people expecting visitors and I
thought that a great reproach. Somebody writing
in 'The Germ' had said that a picture of a pheasant
and an apple was merely a picture of something to
eat, and I was so angry with the indifference to sub-
ject, which was the commonplace of all art criticism
since Bastien-Lepage, that I could at times see no-
thing else but subject. I thought that, though it
might not matter to the man himself whether he
loved a white woman or a black,a female pickpocket
or a regular communicant of the Church of Eng-
land, if only he loved strongly, it certainly did mat-
ter to his relations and even under some circum-
stances to his whole neighbourhood. Sometimes
indeed, like some father in Moliere, I ignored the
lover's feelings altogether and even refused to admit
that a trace of the devil, perhaps a trace of colour,
may lend piquancy, especially if the connection be
not permanent.

Among these men, of whom so many of the great-
est talents were to live such passionate lives and die
such tragic deaths,one serene man,T. W. Rolleston,
seemed always out of place. It was I brought him
there, intending to set him to some work in Ireland
later on. I have known young Dublin working men
slip out of their workshop to see 'the second Thom-
as Davis' passing by, and even remember a conspir-
acy, by some three or four, to make him 'the leader

j 65

of the Irish race at home & abroad/ and all because
he had regular features; and when all is said, Alex-
ander the Great & Alcibiades were personable men,
and the Founder of the Christian religion was the
only man who was neither a little too tall nor a little
too short but exactly six feet high. We in Ireland
thought as do the plays and ballads, not understand-
ing that, from the first moment wherein nature fore-
saw the birth of Bastien-Lepage, she has only gran-
ted great creative power to men whose faces are con-
torted with extravagance or curiosity or dulled with
some protecting stupidity.

I had now met all those who were to make the nine-
ties of the last century tragic in the history of liter-
ature, but as yet we were all seemingly equal, wheth-
er in talent or in luck, and scarce even personalities
to one another. I remember saying one night at the
Cheshire Cheese, when more poets than usual had
come, 'None of us can say who will succeed, or even
who has or has not talent. The only thing certain
about us is that we are too many.'

XVI

I have described what image — always opposite to
the natural self or the natural world — Wilde, Hen-
ley, Morris copied or tried to copy, but I have not
said if I found an image for myself. I know very lit-
tle about myself and much less of that anti-self:

66

probably the woman who cooks my dinner or the
woman who sweeps out my study knows more than
I. It is perhaps because nature made me a gregarious
man, going hither and thither looking for conver-
sation, and ready to deny from fear or favour his
dearest conviction, that Hove proud and lonely im-
ages. When I was a child and went daily to the sex-
ton's daughter for writing lessons, I found one poem
in her School Reader that delighted me beyond all
others: a fragment of some metrical translation
from Aristophanes wherein the birds sing scorn up-
on mankind. In later years my mind gave itself to
gregarious Shelley's dream of ayoungman,his hair
blanched with sorrow studying philosophy in some
lonely tower, or of his old man, master of all human
knowledge, hidden from human sight in some shell-
strewn cavern on the Mediterranean shore. One
passage above all ran perpetually in my ears —

Some feign that he is Enoch: others dream
He was pre- Adamite, and has survived
Cycles of generation and of ruin.
The sage, in truth, by dreadful abstinence,
And conquering penance of the mutinous flesh,
Deep contemplation and unwearied study,
In years outstretched beyond the date of man,

67

May have attained to sovereignty and science
Over those strong and secret things and thoughts
Which others fear and know not.
MAHMUD I would talk

With this old Jew.

HASSAN Thy will is even now

Made known to him where he dwells in a sea-cavern
'Mid the Demonesi, less accessible
Than thou or God! He who would question him
Must sail alone at sunset where the stream
Of ocean sleeps around those foamless isles,
When the young moon is westering as now,
And evening airs wander upon the wave;
And, when the pines of that bee-pasturing isle,
Green Erebinthus, quench the fiery shadow
Of his gilt prow within the sapphire water,
Then must the lonely helmsman cry aloud
'AhasuerusP and the caverns round
Will answer 'AhasuerusP If his prayer
Be granted, a faint meteor will arise,
Lighting him over Marmora; and a wind
Will rush out of the sighing pine- forest,
And with the wind a storm of harmony
Unutterably sweet, and pilot him
Through the soft twilight to the Bosphorus:
Thence, at the hour and place and circumstance
Fit for the matter of their conference,

68

The Jew appears. Few dare, and few who dare
Win the desired communion.

Already in Dublin, I had been attracted to theTheo-
sophists because they had affirmed the real existence
of the Jew, or of his like; and, apart from whatever
might have been imagined by Huxley, Tyndall,
Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage, I saw nothing
against his reality. Presently having heard that Ma-
dame Blavatsky had arrived from France, or from
India, I thought it time to look the matter up. Cer-
tainly if wisdom existed anywhere in the world it
must be in some such lonely mind admitting no
duty to us, communing with God only, conceding
nothing from fear or favour. Have not all peoples,
while bound together in a single mind and taste, be-
lieved that such men existed and paid them that
honour, or paid it to their mere shadow, which they
have refused to philanthropists and to men of learn-
ing?

I found Madame Blavatsky in a little house at Nor-
wood, with but, as she said, three followers left —
the Society of Psychical Research had just report-
ed on her Indian phenomena — and as one of the
three followers sat in an outer room to keep out un-
desirable visitors, I was kept a long time kicking

69

my heels. Presently I was admitted and foundan old
woman in a plain loose dark dress: a sort of old Irish
peasant woman with an air of humour and auda-
cious power. I was still kept waiting, for she was
deep inconversation withawoman visitor. I strayed
through folding doors into the next room and stood,
in sheer idleness of mind, looking at a cuckoo clock.
It was certainly stopped, for the weights were off
and lying upon the ground, and yet as I stood there
the cuckoo came out and cuckooed at me. I inter-
rupted Madame Blavatsky to say. 'Your clock has
hooted me.' 'Itoftenhoots at a stranger,' shereplied.
cIs there a spirit in it?' I said. CI do not know,' she
said, 'I should have to be alone to know what is in
it.' I went back to the clock and began examining
it and heard her say 'Do not break my clock.' I won-
dered if there was some hidden mechanism, and I
should have been put out, I suppose, had I found
any, though Henley had said to me, 'Of course she
gets up fraudulent miracles, but a person of genius
has to do something; Sarah Bernhardt sleeps in her
coffin.' Presently the visitor went away and Ma-
dame Blavatsky explained that she was a propagan-
dist for women's rights who had called to find out
'why men were so bad.' 'What explanation did you
give her?' I said. 'That men were born bad but wo-
men made themselves so,' and then she explained

70

that I had been kept waiting because she had mis-
taken me for some man whose name resembledmine
and who wanted to persuade her of the flatness of
the earth.

When I next saw her she had moved into a house
at Holland Park, and some time must have passed
— probably I had been in Sligo where I returned
constantly for long visits — for she was surround-
ed by followers. She sat nightly before a little table
covered with green baize and on this green baize
she scribbled constantly with a piece of white chalk.
She would scribble symbols, sometimes humorous-
ly applied , and sometimes unintelligible figures, but
the chalk was intended to mark down her score
when she played patience. One saw in the next room
a large table where every night her followers and
guests, often a great number, sat down to their veg-
etarian meal, while she encouraged or mocked
through the folding doors. A great passionate na-
ture, a sort of female Dr. Johnson, impressive, I
think, to every man or woman who had themselves
any richness, she seemed impatient of the formal-
ism, of the shrill abstract idealism of those about
her, andthis impatience broke out inrailing & many
nicknames : cO you are a flapdoodle, but then you are
a theosophist and a brother. 'The most devout and
learned of all her followers said to me, <H. P. B. has

7*

just told me that there is another globe stuck on to
this at the north pole, so that the earth has really a
shape something like adumb-bell. ? I said, for I knew
that her imagination contained all the folklore
of the world, 'That must be some piece of Eastern
mythology.' 'O no it is not,' he said, 'of that I am
certain, and there must be something in it or she
would not have said it.' Her mockery was not kept
for her followers alone, and her voice would become
harsh, and her mockery lose phantasy and humour,
when she spoke of what seemed to her scientific
materialism. Once I saw this antagonism, guided
by some kind of telepathic divination, take a form
of brutal phantasy. I brought a very able Dublin
woman to see her and this woman had a brother, a
physiologist whose reputation, though known to
specialists alone, was European ; and, because of this
brother, a family pride in everything scientific and
modern. The Dublin woman scarcely opened her
mouth the whole evening and her name was certain-
ly unknown to Madame Blavatsky, yet I saw at once
in that wrinkled old face bent over the cards, and the
only time I ever saw it there, a personal hostility,
the dislike of one woman for another. Madame Bla-
vatsky seemed to bundle herself up, becoming all
primeval peasant, and began complaining of her ail-
ments, more especially of her bad leg. But of late her

72

master — her 'old Jew,' her 'Ahasuerus/ cured it, or
set it on the way to be cured. 'I was sitting here in
my chair/ she said, cwhen the master came in and
brought something with him which he put over my
knee, something warm which enclosed my knee —
it was a live dog which he had cut open.' I recog-
nised a cure used sometimes in mediaeval medicine.
She had two masters, and their portraits, ideal In-
dian heads, painted by some most incompetent art-
ist, stood upon either side of the folding doors. One
night, when talk was impersonal and general, I sat
gazing through the folding doors into the dimly
lighted dining-room beyond. I noticed a curious red
light shining upon a picture and got up to see where
the red light came from. It was the picture of an
Indian and as I came near it slowly vanished. When
I returned to my seat, Madame Blavatsky said,
'What did you see?' 'A picture/ 1 said. 'Tell it to go
away.' 'It is already gone.' 'So much the better/ she
said, 'I was afraid it was mediumship but it is only
clairvoyance.' 'What is the difference?' 'If it had
been mediumship, it would have stayed in spite of
you. Beware of mediumship ; it is a kind of madness ;
I know, for I have been through it.'
I found her almost always full of gaiety that, unlike
the occasional joking of those about her, was illog-
ical and incalculable and yet always kindly and tol-
erant. I had called one evening to find her absent,

k 73

but expected every moment. She had been some-
where at the seaside for her health and arrived with
a little suite of followers. She sat down at once in her
big chair, and began unfolding a brown paper par-
cel, while all looked on full of curiosity. It contained
a large family Bible. 'This is a present for my maid/
she said. 'What! A Bible and not even anointed!'
said some shocked voice. 'Well my children/ was
the answer, 'what is the good of giving lemons to
those who want oranges?' When I first began to fre-
quent her house, as I soon did very constantly, I no-
ticed a handsome clever woman of the world there,
who seemed certainly very much out of place, pen-
itent though she thought herself. Presently there
was much scandal and gossip, for the penitent was
plainly entangled with two young men, who were
expected to grow into ascetic sages. The scandal was
so great that Madame Blavatsky had to call the pen-
itent before her and to speak after this fashion, 'We
think that it is necessary to crush the animal nature ;
you should live in chastity in act and thought. In-
itiation is granted only to those who are entirely
chaste,' and so to run on for some time. However,
after some minutes in that vehement style, the pen-
itent standing crushed and shamed before her, she
had wound up, '1 cannot permit you more than
one.' She was quite sincere, but thought that noth-
ing mattered but what happened in the mind, and

74

that if we could not master the mind, our actions
were of little importance. One youngman filled her
with exasperation; for she thought that his settled
gloom came from his chastity. I had known him in
Dublin, where he had been accustomed to interrupt
long periods of asceticism, in which he would eat
vegetables and drink water, with brief outbreaks of
what he considered the devil. After an outbreak he
would for a few hours dazzle the imagination of the
members of the local theosophical society with
poetical rhapsodies about harlots and street lamps,
and then sink into weeks of melancholy. A fellow
theosophist once found him hanging from the win-
dow pole, but cut him down in the nick of time. I
said to the man who cut him down, c What did you
say to one another?' He said, 'We spent the night
telling comic stories and laughing a great deal. ' This
man, torn between sensuality and visionary ambi-
tion, was now the most devout of all, and told me
that in the middle of the night he could often hear
the ringing of the little 'astral bell' whereby Ma-
dame Blavatsky's master called her attention, and
that, although it was a low silvery sound it made
the whole house shake. Another night I found him
waiting in the hall to show in those who had the
right of entrance on some night when the discussion
was private, and as I passed he whispered into my

75

ear, 'Madame Blavatsky is perhaps not a real wo-
man at all. They say that her dead body was found
many years ago upon some Russian battlefield.' She
had two dominant moods, both of extreme activity,
but one calm and philosophic, and this was the
mood always on that night in the week, when she
answered questions upon her system; and as I look
back after thirty years I often ask myself 'Was her
speech automatic? Was she for one night, in every
week, a trance medium, or in some similar state?'
In the other mood she was full of phantasy and in-
consequent raillery. 'That is the Greek church, a tri-
angle like all true religion,' I recall her saying, as
she chalked out a triangle on the green baize, and
then, as she made it disappear in meaningless scrib-
bles 'it spread out and became a bramble- bush like
the Church of Rome.' Then rubbing it all out ex-
cept one straight line, 'Now they have lopped off
the branches and turned it into a broomstick and
that is Protestantism.' And so it was, night after
night, always varied and unforseen. I have observed
a like sudden extreme change in others, half whose
thought was supernatural, and Laurence Oliphant
records somewhere or other like observations. I can
remember only once finding her in a mood of rev-
erie; something had happened to damp her spirits,
some attack upon her movement, or upon herself.

. 76

She spoke of Balzac, whom she had seen but once,
of Alfred de Musset, whom she had known well
enough to dislike for his morbidity, and of George
Sand whom she had known so well that they had
dabbled in magic together of which 'neither knew
anything at all' in those days; and she ran on, as if
there was nobody there to overhear her, 'I used to
wonder at and pity the people who sell their souls to
the devil, but now I only pity them. They do it to
have somebody on their sides,' and added to that,
after some words I have forgotten, 'I write, write,
write as the Wandering Jew walks, walks, walks/
Besides the devotees, who came to listen and to turn
every doctrine into a new sanction for the puri-
tanical convictions of their Victorian childhood,
cranks came from half Europe and from all Amer-
ica, and they came that they might talk. One Amer-
ican said to me, 'She has become the most famous
woman in the world by sitting in a big chair and per-
mitting us to talk.' They talked and she played pa-
tience, and totted up her score on the green baize,
and generally seemed to listen, but sometimes she
would listen no more. There was a woman who
talked perpetually of 'the divine spark' within her,
until Madame Blavatsky stopped her with — 'Yes,
my dear, you have a divine spark within you, and if

77

you are not very careful you willhear it snore. 'A cer-
tain Salvation Army captain probably pleased her,
for, if vociferous and loud of voice, he had much
animation. He had known hardship and spoke of
his visions while starving in the streets and he was
still perhaps a little light in the head. I wondered
what he could preach to ignorant men, his head
ablaze with wild mysticism, till I met a man who
had heard him talking near Covent Garden to some
crowd in the street. 'My friends/ he was saying,
'you have the kingdom of heaven within you and
it would take a pretty big pill to get that out.'

XVII

Meanwhile I had not got any nearer to proving
that 'Ahasuerus dwells in a sea-cavern 'mid the
Demonesi,' but one conclusion I certainly did come
to, which I find written out in an old diary and
dated 1887. Madame Blavatsky's 'masters' were
'trance' personalities, but by 'trance personalities'
I meant something almost as exciting as ' Ahasuerus'
himself. Years before I had found, on a table in the
Royal Irish Academy, a pamphlet on Japanese art,
and read there of an animal painter so remarkable
that horses he had painted upon a temple wall had
stepped down after and trampled the neighbouring
fields of rice. Somebody had come to the temple in

78

the early morning, been startled by a shower of wa-
ter drops, looked up and seen a painted horse, still
wet from the dew-covered fields, but now 'tremb-
ling into stillness.' I thought that her masters were
imaginary forms created by suggestion, but whe-
ther that suggestion came from Madame Blavat-
sky's own mind or from some mind, perhaps at a
great distance, I did not know; and I believed that
these forms could pass from Madame Blavatsky's
mind to the minds of others, and even acquire ex-
ternal reality, and that it was even possible that they
talked and wrote. They were born in the imagina-
tion, where Blake had declared that all men live aft-
er death, and where 'every man is king or priest in
his own house. I Certainly the house at Holland Park
was a romantic place, where one heard of constant
apparitions and exchanged speculations like those
of the middle ages, and I did not separate myself
from it by my own will. The Secretary, an intelligent
and friendly man, asked me to come and see him,
and when I did, complained that I was causing dis-
cussion and disturbance, a certain fanatical hungry
face had been noticed red and tearful, & it was quite
plain that I was not in full agreement with their
method or their philosophy. 'I know,' he said, 'that
all these people become dogmatic and fanatical be-
cause they believe what they can never prove; that

79

their withdrawal from family life is to them a great
misfortune; but what are we to do? We have been
told that all spiritual influx into the society will
come to an end in 1897 for exactly one hundred
years. Before that date our fundamental ideas must
be spread through the world.' I knew the doctrine
and it had made me wonder why that old woman,
or rather 'the trance personalities' who directed
her and were her genius, insisted upon it, for influx
of some kind there must always be. Did they dread
heresy after the death of Madame Blavatsky, or
had they no purpose but the greatest possible im-
mediate effort?

XVIII
At the British Museum reading-room I often saw
a man of thirty-six or thirty-seven, in a brown vel-
veteen coat, with a gaunt resolute face, and an ath-
letic body, who seemed before I heard his name, or
knew the nature of his studies, a figure of romance.
Presently I was introduced, where or by what man
or woman I do not remember. He was Macgregor
Mathers, the author of the 'Kabbalas Unveiled,' &
his studies were two only — magic and the theory
of war, for he believed himself a born commander
and all but equal in wisdomand in powertothat old
Jew. He had copied many manuscripts on magic

80

ceremonial and doctrine in the British Museum,
and was to copy many more in continental li braries,
and it was through him mainly that I began certain
studies and experiences that were to convince me
that images well up before the mind's eye from a
deeper source than conscious or subconscious me-
mory. I believe that his mind in those early days did
not belie his face and body, though in later years it
became unhinged, for he kept a proud head amid
great poverty. One that boxed with him nightly
has told me that for many weeks he could knock
him down, though Macgregor was the stronger
man, and only knew long after that during those
weeks Macgregor starved. With him I met an old
white-haired Oxfordshire clergyman, the most
panic-stricken person I have ever known, though
Macgregor's introduction had been 'He unites us
to the great adepts of antiquity.' This old man took
me aside that he might say — 'I hope you never in-
voke spirits — that is a very dangerous thing to do.
I am told that even the planetary spirits turn upon
us in the end/ I said/Have you ever seen an appari-
tion?' 'O yes, once/ he said. 'I have my alchemical
laboratory in a cellar under my house where the
Bishop cannot see it. One day I was walking up &
down there when I heard another footstep walking
up and down beside me. I turned and saw a girl
1 81

I had been in love with when I was a young man,
but she died long ago. She wanted me to kiss her.
Oh no, I would not do that.' 'Why not?' I said.
'Oh, she might have got power over me.' 'Has your
alchemical research had any success?' I said. 'Yes,
I once made the elixir of life. A French alchemist
said it had the right smell and the right colour,' (The
alchemist may have been Elephas Levi, who visited
England in the sixties, & would have said anything)
'but the first effect of the elixir is that your nails fall
out and your hair falls off. I was afraid that I might
have made a mistake and that nothing else might
happen, so I put it away on a shelf. I meant to drink
it when I was an old man, but when I got it down
the other day it had all dried up.'

XIX

I generalized a great deal and was ashamed of it. I
thought that it was my business in life to be an artist
and a poet, and that there could be no business com-
parable to that. I refused to read books, and even to
meet people who excited me to generalization, but
all to no purpose. I said my prayers much as in child-
hood, though without the old regularity of hour
and place, and I began to pray that my imagination
might somehow be rescued from abstraction, and
become as pre-occupied with life as had been the

82

imagination of Chaucer. For ten or twelve years
more I suffered continual remorse, and only became
content when my abstractions had composed them-
selves into picture and dramatization. My very re-
morse helped to spoil my early poetry, giving it an
element of sentimentality through my refusal to
permit it any share of an intellect which I consider-
ed impure. Even in practical life I only very gra-
dually began to use generalizations, that have since
become the foundation of all I have done, or shall
do, in Ireland. For all I know, all men may have
been as timid; for I am persuaded that our intellects
at twenty contain all the truths we shall ever find,
but as yet we do not know truths that belong to us
from opinions caught up in casual irritation or mo-
mentary phantasy. As life goes on we discover that
certain thoughts sustain us in defeat, or give us vic-
tory, whether over ourselves or others, & it is these
thoughts, tested by passion, that we call convic-
tions. Among subjective men (in all those, that is,
who must spin a web out of their own bowels) the
victory is an intellectual daily recreation of all that
exterior fate snatches away, and so that fate's anti-
thesis; while what I have called 'The mask9 is an
emotional antithesis to all that comes out of their
internal nature. We begin to live when wc hare con-
ceived life as a tragedy.

83

XX

A conviction that the world was now but a bundle
of fragments possessed me without ceasing. I had
tried this conviction on 'The Rhymers,' thereby
plunging into greater silence an already too silent
evening. 'Johnson/ I was accustomed to say, 'you
are the only man I know whose silence has beak &
claw/ I had lectured on it to some London Irish
society, and I was to lecture upon it later on in Dub-
lin, but I never found but one interested man, an
official of the Primrose League, who was also an
active member of the Fenian Brotherhood. 'I am
an extreme conservative apart from Ireland,' I have
heard him explain; and I have no doubt that per-
sonal experience made him share the sight of any
eye that saw the world in fragments. I had been put
into a rage by the followers of Huxley, Tyndall,
Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage, who not only
asserted the unimportance of subject, whether in art
or literature, but the independence of the arts from
one another. Upon the other hand I delighted in
every age where poet and artist confined themselves
gladly to some inherited subject matter known to
the whole people, for I thought that in man and
race alike there is something called 'unity of being,'
using that term as Dante used it when he compared
beauty in the Convito to a perfectly proportioned

84

human body. My father, from whom I had learned
the term, preferred a comparison to a musical instru-
ment sostrong that if we touch a stringall the strings
murmur faintly. There is not more desire, he had
said, in lust than in true love; but in true love desire
awakens pity, hope, affection, admiration, and, giv-
en appropriate circumstance, every emotion pos-
sible to man. When I began, however, to apply this
thought to the State and to argue for a law-made
balance among trades and occupations, my father
displayed at once the violent free-trader and pro-
pagandist of liberty. I thought that the enemy of
this unity was abstraction, meaning by abstraction
not the distinction but the isolation of occupation,
or class or faculty —

'Call down the hawk from the air
Let him be hooded, or caged,
Till the yellow eye has grown mild,
For larder and spit are bare,
The old cook enraged,
The scullion gone wild/

I knew no mediaeval cathedral, arid Westminster,
being a part of abhorred London, did not interest
me; but I thought constantly of Homer and Dante
and the tombs of Mausolus and Artemisa, the great

8j

figures of King and Queen and the lesser figures of
Greek and Amazon, Centaur and Greek. I thought
that all art should be a Centaur finding in the pop-
ular lore its back and its strong legs. I got great plea-
sure too from remembering that Homer was sung,
and from that tale of Dante hearing a common man
sing some stanza from 'The Divine Comedy/ and
from Don Quixote's meeting with some common
man that sang Ariosto. Morris had never seemed to
care for any poet later than Chaucer; and though I
preferred Shakespeare to Chaucer I begrudged my
own preference. Had not Europe shared one mind
and heart, until both mind and heart began to break
into fragments a little before Shakespeare's birth?
Music and verse began to fall apart when Chaucer
robbed verse of its speed that he might give it great-
er meditation, though for another generation or so
minstrels were to sing his long elaborated 'Troilus
and Cressida;' painting parted from religion in the
later Renaissance that it might study effects of tan-
gibility undisturbed ; while, that it might character-
ise, where it had once personified, it renounced, in
our own age, all that inherited subject matter which
we have named poetry. Presently I was indeed to
number character itself among the abstractions, en-
couraged by Congrcve's saying that 'passions are
too powerful in the fair sex to let humour/ or as we

86

say character, 'have its course.' Nor have we fared
better under the common daylight, for pure reason
has notoriously made but light of practical reason,
and has been made but light of in its turn, from that
morning when Descartes discovered that he could
think better in his bed than out of it; nor needed I
original thought to discover, being so late of the
school of Morris, that machinery had not separated
from handicraft wholly for the world's good; nor to
notice that the distinction of classes had become
their isolation. If the London merchants of our day
competed together in writing lyrics they would
not, like the Tudor merchants, dance in the open
street before the house of the victor; nor do the
great ladies of London finish their balls on the pave-
ment before their doors as did the great Venetian
ladies even in the eighteenth century, conscious of
an all enfolding sympathy. Doubtless because frag-
ments broke into even smaller fragments we saw one
another in a light of bitter comedy, and in the arts,
where now one technical element reigned and now
another, generation hated generation, and accom-
plished beauty was snatched away when it had most
engaged our affections. One thing I did not foresee,
not having the courage of my own thought— the
growing murderousness of the world.

87

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocenee is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

XXI

The Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien-Le-
page coven asserted that an artist or a poet must
paint or write in the style of his own day, and this
with 'The Fairy Queen/ and 'Lyrical Ballads/ and
Blake's early poems in its ears, and plain to the eyes, *
in book or gallery, those great masterpieces of later
Egypt, founded upon that work of the Ancient
Kingdom already further in time from later Egypt
than later Egypt is from us. I knew that I could
choose my style where I pleased, that no man can
deny to the human mind any power, that power
once achieved ; and yet I did not wish to recover the
first simplicity. If I must be but a shepherd build-
ing his hut among the ruins of some fallen city, I
might take porphyry or shaped marble, if it lay
ready to my hand, instead of the baked clay of the

88

first builders. If Chaucer's personages had disen-
gaged themselves from Chaucer's crowd, forgotten
their common goal and shrine, and after sundry
magnifications become, each in his turn, the centre
of some Elizabethan play, and a few years later split
into their elements, and so given birth to romantic
poetry, I need not reverse the cinematograph. I
could take those separated elements, all that abstract
love and melancholy, and give them a symbolical
or mythological coherence. Not Chaucer's rough-
tongued riders, but some procession of the Gods! a
pilgrimage no more but perhaps a shrine! Might I
not, with health and good luck to aid me, create
some new 4Prometheus Unbound,' Patrick or Col-
umbcille, Oisin or Fion, in Prometheus's stead,
and, instead of Caucasus, Croagh-Patrick or Ben
Bulben? Have not all races had their first unity from
a polytheism that marries them to rock and hill?
We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which the
uneducated classes knew and even sang, and might
we not make those stories current among the edu-
cated classes, re-discovering for the work's sake
what I have called' the applied arts of literature,' the
association of literature, that is, with music, speech
and dance; and at last, it might be, so deepen the
political passion of thenation that all, artist and poet,
craftsman and day labourer would accept a common
m 89

design? Perhaps even these images, once created
and associated with river and mountain, might
move of themselves, and with some powerful even
turbulent life, like those painted horses that tramp-
led the rice fields of Japan.

XXII

I used to tell the few friends to whom I could speak
these secret thoughts that I would make the attempt
in Ireland but fail, for our civilisation, its elements
multiplying by divisions like certain low forms of
life, was all powerful; but in reality I had the wild-
est hopes. To-day I add to that first conviction, to
that first desire for unity, this other conviction,
long a mere opinion vaguely or intermittently ap-
prehended; Nations, races and individual men are
unified by an image, or bundle of related images,
symbolical or evocative of the state of mind, which
is of all states of mind not impossible, the most dif-
ficult to that man, race or nation; because only the
greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without
despair rouses the will to full intensity.
A powerful class by terror, rhetoric, and organised
sentimentality, may drive their people to war, but
the day draws near when they cannot keep them
there; and how shall they face the pure nations of
the East when the day comes to do it with but equal

90

arms? I had seen Ireland in my own time turn from
the bragging rhetoric and gregarious humour of
O'Connell's generation and school, and offer her-
self to the solitary and proud Parnell as to her anti-
self, buskin following hard on sock ; and I had begun
to hope, or to half-hope, that we might be the first
in Europe to seek unity as deliberately as it had been
sought by theologian, poet, sculptor, architect from
the eleventh to the thirteenth century. Doubtless
we must seek it differently, no longer considering
it convenient to epitomise all human knowledge,
but find it we well might, could we first find philo-
sophy and a little passion.

XXIII

It was the death of Parnell that convinced me that
the moment had come for work in Ireland, for I
knew that for a time the imagination of young men
would turn from politics. There was a little Irish
patriotic society of young people, clerks,shop-boys,
shop-girls, and the like, called the Southwark Irish
Literary Society. It had ceased to meet because each
member of the committee had lectured so many
times that the girls got the giggles whenever he
stood up. I invited the committee to my father's
house at Bedford Park and there proposed a new
organisation. After a few months spent in founding,

9*

with the help of T. W. Rolleston, who came to that
first meeting and had a knowledge of committee
work I lacked, the Irish Literary Society, which
soon included every London Irish author and jour-
nalist, I went to Dublin and founded there a similar
society.

W. B. Yeats.

Here ends 'Four Years/ written by
William Butler Yeats. Four hun-
dred copies of this book have been
printed and published by Elizabeth
C. Yeats on paper made in Ireland,
at the Cuala Press, Churchtown,
Dundrum, in the County of Dublin,
Ireland. Finished on All Hallows'
Eve, in the year nineteen hundred
and twenty one.