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The Trembling of the Veil

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Title: The Trembling of the Veil

Author: W. B. Yeats


        
Release date: August 23, 2010 [eBook #33505]

Language: English

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_THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL_




  PRIVATELY PRINTED BOOKS

  (_Uniform with this Volume_)

  THE STORY-TELLER'S HOLIDAY (_George Moore_)         _July 1918_

  AVOWALS (_George Moore_)                            _September 1919_

  ESTHER WATERS (_George Moore_)                      _October 1920_

  THE COMING OF GABRIELLE (_George Moore_)            _December 1920_

  HELOISE AND ABELARD (_George Moore_)                _February 1921_

  NINE TALES FROM "LES CONTES DROLATIQUES" OF BALZAC
    (_Translated by Robert Crawford_)                 _November 1921_

  A PORTRAIT OF GEORGE MOORE IN A STUDY OF HIS WORK
    (_John Freeman_)                                  _May 1922_

  THE CAULDRON OF ANNWN (_Thomas Evelyn Ellis_)       _June 1922_




[Illustration: _Emery Walker Ph.oc. From a picture by Charles Shannon_]




  THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL


  By W. B. YEATS


  LONDON
  PRIVATELY PRINTED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY BY
  T. WERNER LAURIE, LTD.
  1922




  _To_
  JOHN QUINN
  _my friend and helper,
  and friend and helper of certain people
  mentioned in this book_.


  GIFT

  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN




  THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL

  _This edition consists of one thousand copies numbered and signed._

  _This is No._ 24




PREFACE


_I have found in an old diary a quotation from Stephane Mallarme, saying
that his epoch was troubled by the trembling of the veil of the Temple. As
those words were still true, during the years of my life described in this
book, I have chosen The Trembling of the Veil for its title._

_Except in one or two trivial details, where I have the warrant of old
friendship, I have not, without permission, quoted conversation or
described occurrence from the private life of named or recognisable
persons. I have not felt my freedom abated, for most of the friends of my
youth are dead and over the dead I have an historian's rights. They were
artists and writers and certain among them men of genius, and the life of
a man of genius, because of his greater sincerity, is often an experiment
that needs analysis and record. At least my generation so valued
personality that it thought so. I have said all the good I know and all
the evil: I have kept nothing back necessary to understanding._

_W. B. YEATS._


  _May, 1922.
    Thoor Ballylee._




CONTENTS


                                              PAGE

  BOOK I FOUR YEARS 1887-1891                    3

  BOOK II IRELAND AFTER THE FALL OF PARNELL     83

  BOOK III HODOS CAMELIONIS                    135

  BOOK IV THE TRAGIC GENERATION                157

  BOOK V THE STIRRING OF THE BONES             225




BOOK I FOUR YEARS--1887-1891




THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL




_FOUR YEARS_ 1887-1891


I

At the end of the 'eighties my father and mother, my brother and sisters
and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were settled in Bedford Park in
a red-brick house with several mantelpieces of wood, copied from marble
mantelpieces designed by the brothers Adam, a balcony and a little garden
shadowed by a great horse-chestnut tree. Years before we had lived there,
when the crooked ostentatiously picturesque streets with great trees
casting great shadows had been a new enthusiasm: the Pre-Raphaelite
movement at last affecting life. But now exaggerated criticism had taken
the place of enthusiasm, the tiled roofs, the first in modern London, were
said to leak, which they did not, and the drains to be bad, though that
was no longer true; and I imagine that houses were cheap. I remember
feeling disappointed because the co-operative stores, with their little
seventeenth century panes, had lost the romance they had when I had passed
them still unfinished on my way to school; and because the public house,
called The Tabard after Chaucer's Inn, was so plainly a common public
house; and because the great sign of a trumpeter designed by Rooke, the
Pre-Raphaelite artist, had been freshened by some inferior hand. The big
red-brick church had never pleased me, and I was accustomed, when I saw
the wooden balustrade that ran along the slanting edge of the roof where
nobody ever walked or could walk, to remember the opinion of some
architect friend of my father's, that it had been put there to keep the
birds from falling off. Still, however, it had some village characters and
helped us to feel not wholly lost in the metropolis. I no longer went to
church as a regular habit, but go I sometimes did, for one Sunday morning
I saw these words painted on a board in the porch: "The congregation are
requested to kneel during prayers; the kneelers are afterwards to be hung
upon pegs provided for the purpose." In front of every seat hung a little
cushion and these cushions were called "kneelers." Presently the joke ran
through the community, where there were many artists who considered
religion at best an unimportant accessory to good architecture and who
disliked that particular church.


II

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

I was in all things Pre-Raphaelite. When I was fifteen or sixteen my
father had told me about Rossetti and Blake and given me their poetry to
read; and once at Liverpool on my way to Sligo I had seen Dante's Dream in
the gallery there, a picture painted when Rossetti had lost his dramatic
power and to-day not very pleasing to me, and its colour, its people, its
romantic architecture had blotted all other pictures away. It was a
perpetual bewilderment that my father, who had begun life as a
Pre-Raphaelite painter, now painted portraits of the first comer, children
selling newspapers, or a consumptive girl with a basket of fish upon her
head, and that when, moved perhaps by some memory of his youth, he chose
some theme from poetic tradition, he would soon weary and leave it
unfinished. I had seen the change coming bit by bit and its defence
elaborated by young men fresh from the Paris art-schools. "We must paint
what is in front of us," or "A man must be of his own time," they would
say, and if I spoke of Blake or Rossetti they would point out his bad
drawing and tell me to admire Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage. Then, too,
they were very ignorant men; they read nothing, for nothing mattered but
"knowing how to paint," being in reaction against a generation that seemed
to have wasted its time upon so many things. I thought myself alone in
hating these young men, now indeed getting towards middle life, their
contempt for the past, their monopoly of the future, but in a few months I
was to discover others of my own age, who thought as I did, for it is not
true that youth looks before it with the mechanical gaze of a well-drilled
soldier. Its quarrel is not with the past, but with the present, where its
elders are so obviously powerful and no cause seems lost if it seem to
threaten that power. Does cultivated youth ever really love the future,
where the eye can discover no persecuted Royalty hidden among oak leaves,
though from it certainly does come so much proletarian rhetoric?

I was unlike others of my generation in one thing only. I am very
religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the
simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion, almost
an infallible church out of poetic tradition: a fardel of stories, and of
personages, and of emotions, inseparable from their first expression,
passed on from generation to generation by poets and painters with some
help from philosophers and theologians. I wished for a world, where I
could discover this tradition perpetually, and not in pictures and in
poems only, but in tiles round the chimney-piece and in the hangings that
kept out the draught. I had even created a dogma: "Because those imaginary
people are created out of the deepest instinct of man, to be his measure
and his norm, whatever I can imagine those mouths speaking may be the
nearest I can go to truth." When I listened they seemed always to speak of
one thing only: they, their loves, every incident of their lives, were
steeped in the supernatural. Could even Titian's "Ariosto" that I loved
beyond other portraits have its grave look, as if waiting for some perfect
final event, if the painters before Titian had not learned portraiture,
while painting into the corner of compositions full of saints and
Madonnas, their kneeling patrons? At seventeen years old I was already an
old-fashioned brass cannon full of shot, and nothing had kept me from
going off but a doubt as to my capacity to shoot straight.


III

I was not an industrious student and knew only what I had found by
accident and I found nothing I cared for after Titian, and Titian I knew
from an imitation of his _Supper of Emmaus_ in Dublin, till Blake and the
Pre-Raphaelites; and among my father's friends were no Pre-Raphaelites.
Some indeed had come to Bedford Park in the enthusiasm of the first
building and others to be near those that had. There was Todhunter, a
well-off man who had bought my father's pictures while my father was still
Pre-Raphaelite; once a Dublin doctor he was now a poet and a writer of
poetical plays; a tall, sallow, lank, melancholy man, a good scholar and a
good intellect; and with him my father carried on a warm exasperated
friendship, fed I think by old memories and wasted by quarrels over
matters of opinion. Of all the survivors he was the most dejected and the
least estranged, and I remember encouraging him, with a sense of worship
shared, to buy a very expensive carpet designed by Morris. He displayed it
without strong liking and would have agreed had there been any to find
fault. If he had liked anything strongly he might have been a famous man,
for a few years later he was to write, under some casual patriotic
impulse, certain excellent verses now in all Irish anthologies; but with
him every book was a new planting, and not a new bud on an old bough. He
had I think no peace in himself. But my father's chief friend was York
Powell, a famous Oxford Professor of history, a broad-built, broad-headed,
brown-bearded man clothed in heavy blue cloth and looking, but for his
glasses and the dim sight of a student, like some captain in the merchant
service. One often passed with pleasure from Todhunter's company to that
of one who was almost ostentatiously at peace. He cared nothing for
philosophy, nothing for economics, nothing for the policy of nations; for
history, as he saw it, was a memory of men who were amusing or exciting to
think about. He impressed all who met him, and seemed to some a man of
genius, but he had not enough ambition to shape his thought, or conviction
to give rhythm to his style and remained always a poor writer. I was too
full of unfinished speculations and premature convictions to value rightly
his conversation, informed by a vast erudition, which would give itself to
every casual association of speech and company, precisely because he had
neither cause nor design. My father, however, found Powell's concrete
narrative manner in talk a necessary completion of his own, and when I
asked him in a letter many years later where he got his philosophy replied
"from York Powell" and thereon added, no doubt remembering that Powell was
without ideas, "by looking at him." Then there was a good listener, a
painter in whose hall hung a big picture painted in his student days of
Ulysses sailing home from the Phaeacian court, an orange and a skin of
wine at his side, blue mountains towering behind; but who lived by drawing
domestic scenes and lovers' meetings for a weekly magazine that had an
immense circulation among the imperfectly educated. To escape the boredom
of work, which he never turned to but under pressure of necessity and
usually late at night, with the publisher's messenger in the hall, he had
half-filled his studio with mechanical toys, of his own invention, and
perpetually increased their number. A model railway train at intervals
puffed its way along the walls, passing several railway stations and
signal boxes; and on the floor lay a camp with attacking and defending
soldiers and a fortification that blew up when the attackers fired a pea
through a certain window; while a large model of a Thames barge hung from
the ceiling. Opposite our house lived an old artist who worked also for
the illustrated papers for a living, but painted landscapes for his
pleasure, and of him I remember nothing except that he had outlived
ambition, was a good listener, and that my father explained his gaunt
appearance by his descent from Pocahontas. If all these men were a little
like becalmed ships, there was certainly one man whose sails were full.
Three or four doors off on our side of the road lived a decorative artist
in all the naive confidence of popular ideals and the public approval. He
was our daily comedy. "I myself and Sir Frederick Leighton are the
greatest decorative artists of the age," was among his sayings, and a
great Lych-gate, bought from some country church-yard, reared its thatched
roof, meant to shelter bearers and coffin, above the entrance to his front
garden to show that he at any rate knew nothing of discouragement. In this
fairly numerous company--there were others though no other face rises
before me--my father and York Powell found listeners for a conversation
that had no special loyalties, or antagonisms; while I could only talk
upon set topics, being in the heat of my youth, and the topics that filled
me with excitement were never spoken of.


IV

Bedford Park had a red brick clubhouse with a little theatre that began to
stir my imagination. I persuaded Todhunter to write a pastoral play and
have it performed there.

A couple of years before, while we were still in Dublin, he had given at
Hengler's Circus, remodelled as a Greek Theatre, a most expensive
performance of his _Helena of Troas_, an oratorical Swinburnian play which
I had thought as unactable as it was unreadable. Since I was seventeen I
had constantly tested my own ambition with Keats's praise of him who "left
great verses to a little clan," so it was but natural that I should spend
an evening persuading him that we had nothing to do with the great public,
that it should be a point of honour to be content with our own little
public, that he should write of shepherds and shepherdesses because people
would expect them to talk poetry and move without melodrama. He wrote his
_Sicilian Idyll_, which I have not looked at for thirty years, and never
rated very high as poetry, and had the one unmistakable success of his
life. The little theatre was full for twice the number of performances
intended, for artists, men of letters and students had come from all over
London.

I made through these performances a close friend and a discovery that was
to influence my life. Todhunter had engaged several professional actors
with a little reputation, but had given the chief woman's part to Florence
Farr, who had qualities no contemporary professional practice could have
increased, the chief man's part to an amateur, Heron Allen, solicitor,
fiddler and popular writer on palmistry. Heron Allen and Florence Farr
read poetry for their pleasure. While they were upon the stage no one else
could hold an eye or an ear. Their speech was music, the poetry acquired a
nobility, a passionate austerity that made it seem akin for certain
moments to the great poetry of the world. Heron Allen, who had never
spoken in public before except to lecture upon the violin, had the wisdom
to reduce his acting to a series of poses, to be the stately shepherd with
not more gesture than was needed to "twitch his mantle blue" and to let
his grace be foil to Florence Farr's more impassioned delivery. When they
closed their mouths, and some other player opened his, breaking up the
verse to make it conversational, jerking his body or his arms that he
might seem no austere poetical image but very man, I listened in raging
hatred. I kept my seat with difficulty, I searched my memory for insulting
phrases, I even muttered them to myself that the people about might hear.
I had discovered for the first time that in the performance of all drama
that depends for its effect upon beauty of language, poetical culture may
be more important than professional experience.

Florence Farr lived in lodgings some twenty minutes' walk away at Brook
Green, and I was soon a constant caller, talking over plays that I would
some day write her. She had three great gifts, a tranquil beauty like that
of Demeter's image near the British Museum reading room door, and an
incomparable sense of rhythm and a beautiful voice, the seeming natural
expression of the image. And yet there was scarce another gift that she
did not value above those three. We all have our simplifying image, our
genius, and such hard burden does it lay upon us that, but for the praise
of others, we would deride it and hunt it away. She could only express
hers through an unfashionable art, an art that has scarce existed since
the seventeenth century, and so could only earn unimportant occasional
praise. She would dress without care or calculation as if to hide her
beauty and seem contemptuous of its power. If a man fell in love with her
she would notice that she had seen just that movement upon the stage or
had heard just that intonation and all seemed unreal. If she read out some
poem in English or in French all was passion, all a traditional splendour,
but she spoke of actual things with a cold wit or under the strain of
paradox. Wit and paradox alike sought to pull down whatever had tradition
or passion and she was soon to spend her days in the British Museum
reading room and become erudite in many heterogeneous studies moved by an
insatiable, destroying curiosity. I formed with her an enduring friendship
that was an enduring exasperation--"why do you play the part with a bent
back and a squeak in the voice? How can you be a character actor, you who
hate all our life, you who belong to a life that is a vision?" But
argument was no use, and some Nurse in Euripedes must be played with all
an old woman's infirmities and not as I would have it, with all a Sybil's
majesty, because "it is no use doing what nobody wants," or because she
would show that she "could do what the others did."

I used in my rage to compare her thoughts, when her worst mood was upon
her, to a game called Spillikens which I had seen played in my childhood
with little pieces of bone that you had to draw out with a hook from a
bundle of like pieces. A bundle of bones instead of Demeter's golden
sheaf! Her sitting room at the Brook Green lodging house was soon a
reflection of her mind, the walls covered with musical instruments, pieces
of oriental drapery, and Egyptian gods and goddesses painted by herself in
the British Museum.


V

Presently a hansom drove up to our door at Bedford Park with Miss Maud
Gonne, who brought an introduction to my father from old John O'Leary, the
Fenian leader. She vexed my father by praise of war, war for its own sake,
not as the creator of certain virtues but as if there were some virtue in
excitement itself. I supported her against my father, which vexed him the
more, though he might have understood that, apart from the fact that
Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage were somehow involved, a man so young as
I could not have differed from a woman so beautiful and so young. To-day,
with her great height and the unchangeable lineaments of her form, she
looks the Sybil I would have had played by Florence Farr, but in that day
she seemed a classical impersonation of the Spring, the Virgilian
commendation "She walks like a goddess" made for her alone. Her complexion
was luminous, like that of apple blossom through which the light falls,
and I remember her standing that first day by a great heap of such
blossoms in the window. In the next few years I saw her always when she
passed to and fro between Dublin and Paris, surrounded, no matter how
rapid her journey and how brief her stay at either end of it, by cages
full of birds, canaries, finches of all kinds, dogs, a parrot, and once a
full-grown hawk from Donegal. Once when I saw her to her railway carriage
I noticed how the cages obstructed wraps and cushions and wondered what
her fellow travellers would say, but the carriage remained empty. It was
years before I could see into the mind that lay hidden under so much
beauty and so much energy.


VI

Some quarter of an hour's walk from Bedford Park, out on the high road to
Richmond, lived W. E. Henley, and I, like many others, began under him my
education. His portrait, a lithograph by Rothenstein, hangs over my
mantelpiece among portraits of other friends. He is drawn standing, but
because doubtless of his crippled legs he leans forward, resting his
elbows upon some slightly suggested object--a table or a window-sill. His
heavy figure and powerful head, the disordered hair standing upright, his
short irregular beard and moustache, his lined and wrinkled face, his eyes
steadily fixed upon some object, in complete confidence and
self-possession, and yet as in half-broken reverie, all are there exactly
as I remember him. I have seen other portraits and they too show him
exactly as I remember him, as though he had but one appearance and that
seen fully at the first glance and by all alike. He was most human--human
I used to say like one of Shakespeare's characters--and yet pressed and
pummelled, as it were, into a single attitude, almost into a gesture and a
speech as by some overwhelming situation. I disagreed with him about
everything, but I admired him beyond words. With the exception of some
early poems founded upon old French models I disliked his poetry, mainly
because he wrote in _vers libre_, which I associated with Tyndall and
Huxley, and Bastien-Lepage's clownish peasant staring with vacant eyes at
her great boots; and filled it with unimpassioned description of an
hospital ward where his leg had been amputated. I wanted the strongest
passions, passions that had nothing to do with observation, sung in
metrical forms that seemed old enough to be sung by men half-asleep or
riding upon a journey. Furthermore, Pre-Raphaelism affected him as some
people are affected by a cat in the room, and though he professed himself
at our first meeting without political interests or convictions, he soon
grew into a violent unionist and imperialist. I used to say when I spoke
of his poems: "He is like a great actor with a bad part; yet who would
look at Hamlet in the grave scene if Salvini played the grave-digger?" and
I might so have explained much that he said and did. I meant that he was
like a great actor of passion--character-acting meant nothing to me for
many years--and an actor of passion will display some one quality of soul,
personified again and again, just as a great poetical painter, Titian,
Botticelli, Rossetti, may depend for his greatness upon a type of beauty
which presently we call by his name. Irving, the last of the sort on the
English stage, and in modern England and France it is the rarest sort,
never moved me but in the expression of intellectual pride and though I
saw Salvini but once I am convinced that his genius was a kind of animal
nobility. Henley, half inarticulate--"I am very costive," he would
say--beset with personal quarrels, built up an image of power and
magnanimity till it became, at moments, when seen as it were by lightning,
his true self. Half his opinions were the contrivance of a
sub-consciousness that sought always to bring life to the dramatic crisis
and expression to that point of artifice where the true self could find
its tongue. Without opponents there had been no drama, and in his youth
Ruskinism and Pre-Raphaelitism, for he was of my father's generation, were
the only possible opponents. How could one resent his prejudice when, that
he himself might play a worthy part, he must find beyond the common rout,
whom he derided and flouted daily, opponents he could imagine moulded like
himself? Once he said to me in the height of his imperial propaganda,
"Tell those young men in Ireland that this great thing must go on. They
say Ireland is not fit for self-government, but that is nonsense. It is as
fit as any other European country, but we cannot grant it." And then he
spoke of his desire to found and edit a Dublin newspaper. It would have
expounded the Gaelic propaganda then beginning, though Dr Hyde had, as
yet, no league, our old stories, our modern literature--everything that
did not demand any shred or patch of government. He dreamed of a tyranny,
but it was that of Cosimo de' Medici.


VII

We gathered on Sunday evenings in two rooms, with folding doors between,
and hung, I think, with photographs from Dutch masters, and in one room
there was always, I think, a table with cold meat. I can recall but one
elderly man--Dunn his name was--rather silent and full of good sense, an
old friend of Henley's. We were young men, none as yet established in his
own, or in the world's opinion, and Henley was our leader and our
confidant. One evening, I found him alone amused and exasperated: "Young
A----," he cried "has just been round to ask my advice. Would I think it a
wise thing if he bolted with Mrs B----? 'Have you quite determined to do
it?' I asked him. 'Quite.' 'Well,' I said, 'in that case I refuse to give
you any advice.'" Mrs B---- was a beautiful talented woman, who, as the
Welsh Triad said of Guinievere, "was much given to being carried off." I
think we listened to him, and often obeyed him, partly because he was
quite plainly not upon the side of our parents. We might have a different
ground of quarrel, but the result seemed more important than the ground,
and his confident manner and speech made us believe, perhaps for the first
time, in victory. And besides, if he did denounce, and in my case he
certainly did, what we held in secret reverence, he never failed to
associate it with things or persons that did not move us to reverence.
Once I found him just returned from some art congress in Liverpool or in
Manchester. "The salvation armyism of art," he called it, and gave a
grotesque description of some city councillor he had found admiring
Turner. Henley, who hated all that Ruskin praised, thereupon derided
Turner, and finding the city councillor the next day on the other side of
the gallery, admiring some Pre-Raphaelite there, derided that
Pre-Raphaelite. The third day Henley discovered the poor man on a chair in
the middle of the room staring disconsolately upon the floor. He terrified
us also and certainly I did not dare, and I think none of us dared, to
speak our admiration for book or picture he condemned, but he made us feel
always our importance, and no man among us could do good work, or show the
promise of it, and lack his praise. I can remember meeting of a Sunday
night Charles Whibley, Kenneth Grahame, author of _The Golden Age_, Barry
Pain, now a well-known novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a
famous talker, George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chief
secretary, and now or later Oscar Wilde, who was some ten years older than
the rest of us. But faces and names are vague to me and while faces that
I met but once may rise clearly before me, a face met on many a Sunday has
perhaps vanished. Kipling came sometimes, I think, but I never met him;
and Stepniak, the Nihilist, whom I knew well elsewhere but not there,
said--"I cannot go more than once a year, it is too exhausting." Henley
got the best out of us all, because he had made us accept him as our judge
and we knew that his judgment could neither sleep, nor be softened, nor
changed, nor turned aside. When I think of him, the antithesis that is the
foundation of human nature being ever in my sight, I see his crippled legs
as though he were some Vulcan perpetually forging swords for other men to
use; and certainly I always thought of C----, a fine classical scholar, a
pale and seemingly gentle man, as our chief swordsman and bravo. When
Henley founded his weekly newspaper, first _The Scots_, afterwards _The
National Observer_, this young man wrote articles and reviews notorious
for savage wit; and years afterwards when _The National Observer_ was
dead, Henley dying, and our cavern of outlaws empty, I met him in Paris
very sad and I think very poor. "Nobody will employ me now," he said.
"Your master is gone," I answered, "and you are like the spear in an old
Irish story that had to be kept dipped in poppy-juice that it might not go
about killing people on its own account." I wrote my first good lyrics and
tolerable essays for _The National Observer_, and as I always signed my
work could go my own road in some measure. Henley often revised my lyrics,
crossing out a line or a stanza and writing in one of his own, and I was
comforted by my belief that he also rewrote Kipling then in the first
flood of popularity. At first, indeed, I was ashamed of being rewritten
and thought that others were not, and only began investigation when the
editorial characteristics--epigrams, archaisms, and all--appeared in the
article upon Paris fashions and in that upon opium by an Egyptian Pasha. I
was not compelled to full conformity for verse is plainly stubborn; and in
prose, that I might avoid unacceptable opinions, I wrote nothing but ghost
or fairy stories, picked up from my mother or some pilot at Rosses Point
and Henley saw that I must needs mix a palette fitted to my subject
matter. But if he had changed every "has" into "hath" I would have let
him, for had not we sunned ourselves in his generosity? "My young men
outdo me and they write better than I," he wrote in some letter praising
Charles Whibley's work, and to another friend with a copy of my _Man Who
Dreamed of Fairyland_: "See what a fine thing has been written by one of
my lads."


VIII

My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never before
heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all
over night with labour and yet all spontaneous. There was present that
night at Henley's, by right of propinquity or of accident, a man full of
the secret spite of dulness, who interrupted from time to time, and always
to check or disorder thought; and I noticed with what mastery he was
foiled and thrown. I noticed, too, that the impression of artificiality
that I think all Wilde's listeners have recorded came from the perfect
rounding of the sentences and from the deliberation that made it possible.
That very impression helped him, as the effect of metre, or of the
antithetical prose of the seventeenth century, which is itself a true
metre, helped its writers, for he could pass without incongruity from some
unforeseen, swift stroke of wit to elaborate reverie. I heard him say a
few nights later: "Give me _The Winter's Tale_, 'Daffodils that come
before the swallow dare' but not _King Lear_. What is _King Lear_ but poor
life staggering in the fog?" and the slow, carefully modulated cadence
sounded natural to my ears. That first night he praised Walter Pater's
_Studies in the History of the Renaissance_: "It is my golden book; I
never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of decadence:
the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written." "But,"
said the dull man, "would you not have given us time to read it?" "Oh no,"
was the retort, "there would have been plenty of time afterwards--in
either world." I think he seemed to us, baffled as we were by youth, or by
infirmity, a triumphant figure, and to some of us a figure from another
age, an audacious Italian fifteenth century figure. A few weeks before I
had heard one of my father's friends, an official in a publishing firm
that had employed both Wilde and Henley as editors, blaming Henley who was
"no use except under control" and praising Wilde, "so indolent but such a
genius"; and now the firm became the topic of our talk. "How often do you
go to the office?" said Henley. "I used to go three times a week," said
Wilde, "for an hour a day but I have since struck off one of the days."
"My God," said Henley, "I went five times a week for five hours a day and
when I wanted to strike off a day they had a special committee meeting."
"Furthermore," was Wilde's answer, "I never answered their letters. I have
known men come to London full of bright prospects and seen them complete
wrecks in a few months through a habit of answering letters." He too knew
how to keep our elders in their place, and his method was plainly the more
successful, for Henley had been dismissed. "No he is not an aesthete,"
Henley commented later, being somewhat embarrassed by Wilde's
Pre-Raphaelite entanglement; "one soon finds that he is a scholar and a
gentleman." And when I dined with Wilde a few days afterwards he began at
once, "I had to strain every nerve to equal that man at all"; and I was
too loyal to speak my thought: "You and not he said all the brilliant
things." He like the rest of us had felt the strain of an intensity that
seemed to hold life at the point of drama. He had said on that first
meeting "The basis of literary friendship is mixing the poisoned bowl";
and for a few weeks Henley and he became close friends till, the
astonishment of their meeting over, diversity of character and ambition
pushed them apart, and, with half the cavern helping, Henley began mixing
the poisoned bowl for Wilde. Yet Henley never wholly lost that first
admiration, for after Wilde's downfall he said to me: "Why did he do it? I
told my lads to attack him and yet we might have fought under his banner."


IX

It became the custom, both at Henley's and at Bedford Park, to say that R.
A. M. Stevenson, who frequented both circles, was the better talker. Wilde
had been trussed up like a turkey by undergraduates, dragged up and down a
hill, his champagne emptied into the ice tub, hooted in the streets of
various towns, and I think stoned, and no newspaper named him but in
scorn; his manner had hardened to meet opposition and at times he allowed
one to see an unpardonable insolence. His charm was acquired and
systematized, a mask which he wore only when it pleased him, while the
charm of Stevenson belonged to him like the colour of his hair. If
Stevenson's talk became monologue we did not know it, because our one
object was to show by our attention that he need never leave off. If
thought failed him we would not combat what he had said, or start some new
theme, but would encourage him with a question; and one felt that it had
been always so from childhood up. His mind was full of phantasy for
phantasy's sake and he gave as good entertainment in monologue as his
cousin Robert Louis in poem or story. He was always "supposing"; "Suppose
you had two millions what would you do with it?" and "Suppose you were in
Spain and in love how would you propose?" I recall him one afternoon at
our house at Bedford Park, surrounded by my brother and sisters and a
little group of my father's friends, describing proposals in half a dozen
countries. There your father did it, dressed in such and such a way with
such and such words, and there a friend must wait for the lady outside the
chapel door, sprinkle her with holy water and say, "My friend Jones is
dying for love of you." But when it was over those quaint descriptions, so
full of laughter and sympathy, faded or remained in the memory as
something alien from one's own life, like a dance I once saw in a great
house, where beautifully dressed children wound a long ribbon in and out
as they danced. I was not of Stevenson's party and mainly I think because
he had written a book in praise of Velasquez, praise at that time
universal wherever Pre-Raphaelism was accurst, and to my mind, that had
to pick its symbols where its ignorance permitted, Velasquez seemed the
first bored celebrant of boredom. I was convinced from some obscure
meditation that Stevenson's conversational method had joined him to my
elders and to the indifferent world, as though it were right for old men,
and unambitious men and all women, to be content with charm and humour. It
was the prerogative of youth to take sides and when Wilde said: "Mr
Bernard Shaw has no enemies but is intensely disliked by all his friends,"
I knew it to be a phrase I should never forget, and felt revenged upon a
notorious hater of romance, whose generosity and courage I could not
fathom.


X

I saw a good deal of Wilde at that time--was it 1887 or 1888?--I have no
way of fixing the date except that I had published my first book _The
Wanderings of Usheen_ and that Wilde had not yet published his _Decay of
Lying_. He had, before our first meeting, reviewed my book and despite its
vagueness of intention, and the inexactness of its speech, praised without
qualification; and what was worth more than any review he had talked about
it and now he asked me to eat my Christmas dinner with him believing, I
imagine, that I was alone in London. He had just renounced his velveteen,
and even those cuffs turned backward over the sleeves, and had begun to
dress very carefully in the fashion of the moment. He lived in a little
house at Chelsea that the architect Godwin had decorated with an elegance
that owed something to Whistler. There was nothing mediaeval, nor
Pre-Raphaelite, no cupboard door with figures upon flat gold, no peacock
blue, no dark background. I remember vaguely a white drawing room with
Whistler etchings, "let in" to white panels, and a dining room all white,
chairs, walls, mantelpiece, carpet, except for a diamond-shaped piece of
red cloth in the middle of the table under a terra-cotta statuette, and I
think a red shaded lamp hanging from the ceiling to a little above the
statuette. It was perhaps too perfect in its unity, his past of a few
years before had gone too completely, and I remember thinking that the
perfect harmony of his life there, with his beautiful wife and his two
young children, suggested some deliberate artistic composition.

He commended and dispraised himself during dinner by attributing
characteristics like his own to his country: "We Irish are too poetical to
be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest
talkers since the Greeks." When dinner was over he read me from the proofs
of _The Decay of Lying_ and when he came to the sentence: "Schopenhauer
has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet
invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once
melancholy," I said, "Why do you change 'sad' to 'melancholy'?" He replied
that he wanted a full sound at the close of his sentence, and I thought it
no excuse and an example of the vague impressiveness that spoilt his
writing for me. Only when he spoke, or when his writing was the mirror of
his speech, or in some simple fairy tale, had he words exact enough to
hold a subtle ear. He alarmed me, though not as Henley did, for I never
left his house thinking myself fool or dunce. He flattered the intellect
of every man he liked; he made me tell him long Irish stories and
compared my art of storytelling to Homer's; and once when he had described
himself as writing in the census paper "age 19, profession genius,
infirmity talent" the other guest, a young journalist fresh from Oxford or
Cambridge, said, "What should I have written?" and was told that it should
have been "profession talent, infirmity genius." When, however, I called,
wearing shoes a little too yellow--unblackened leather had just become
fashionable--I realized their extravagance when I saw his eyes fixed upon
them; and another day Wilde asked me to tell his little boy a fairy story,
and I had but got as far as "Once upon a time there was a giant" when the
little boy screamed and ran out of the room. Wilde looked grave and I was
plunged into the shame of clumsiness that afflicts the young. When I asked
for some literary gossip for some provincial newspaper, that paid me a few
shillings a month, he explained very explicitly that writing literary
gossip was no job for a gentleman.

Though to be compared to Homer passed the time pleasantly, I had not been
greatly perturbed had he stopped me with: "Is it a long story?" as Henley
would certainly have done. I was abashed before him as wit and man of the
world alone. I remember that he deprecated the very general belief in his
success or his efficiency, and I think with sincerity. One form of success
had gone: he was no more the lion of the season and he had not discovered
his gift for writing comedy, yet I think I knew him at the happiest moment
of his life. No scandal had touched his name, his fame as a talker was
growing among his equals, and he seemed to live in the enjoyment of his
own spontaneity. One day he began: "I have been inventing a Christian
heresy," and he told a detailed story, in the style of some early father,
of how Christ recovered after the Crucifixion, and escaping from the tomb,
lived on for many years, the one man upon earth who knew the falsehood of
Christianity. Once St Paul visited his town and he alone in the
carpenters' quarter did not go to hear him preach. The other carpenters
noticed that henceforth, for some unknown reason, he kept his hands
covered. A few days afterwards I found Wilde with smock frocks in various
colours spread out upon the floor in front of him, while a missionary
explained that he did not object to the heathen going naked upon week
days, but insisted upon clothes in church. He had brought the smock frocks
in a cab that the only art-critic whose fame had reached Central Africa
might select a colour; so Wilde sat there weighing all with a conscious
ecclesiastic solemnity.


XI

Of late years I have often explained Wilde to myself by his family
history. His father was a friend or acquaintance of my father's father and
among my family traditions there is an old Dublin riddle: "Why are Sir
William Wilde's nails so black?" Answer, "Because he has scratched
himself." And there is an old story still current in Dublin of Lady Wilde
saying to a servant, "Why do you put the plates on the coal-scuttle? What
are the chairs meant for?" They were famous people and there are many like
stories; and even a horrible folk story, the invention of some Connaught
peasant, that tells how Sir William Wilde took out the eyes of some men,
who had come to consult him as an oculist, and laid them upon a plate,
intending to replace them in a moment, and how the eyes were eaten by a
cat. As a certain friend of mine, who has made a prolonged study of the
nature of cats, said when he first heard the tale, "Cats love eyes." The
Wilde family was clearly of the sort that fed the imagination of Charles
Lever, dirty, untidy, daring, and what Charles Lever, who loved more
normal activities, might not have valued so highly, very imaginative and
learned. Lady Wilde, who when I knew her received her friends with blinds
drawn and shutters closed that none might see her withered face, longed
always perhaps, though certainly amid much self-mockery, for some
impossible splendour of character and circumstance. She lived near her son
in level Chelsea, but I have heard her say, "I want to live on some high
place, Primrose Hill or Highgate, because I was an eagle in my youth." I
think her son lived with no self-mockery at all an imaginary life;
perpetually performed a play which was in all things the opposite of all
that he had known in childhood and early youth; never put off completely
his wonder at opening his eyes every morning on his own beautiful house,
and in remembering that he had dined yesterday with a duchess, and that he
delighted in Flaubert and Pater, read Homer in the original and not as a
schoolmaster reads him for the grammar. I think, too, that because of all
that half-civilized blood in his veins he could not endure the sedentary
toil of creative art and so remained a man of action, exaggerating, for
the sake of immediate effect, every trick learned from his masters,
turning their easel painting into painted scenes. He was a parvenu, but a
parvenu whose whole bearing proved that if he did dedicate every story in
_The House of Pomegranates_ to a lady of title, it was but to show that he
was Jack and the social ladder his pantomime beanstalk. "Did you ever
hear him say 'Marquess of Dimmesdale'?" a friend of his once asked me. "He
does not say 'the Duke of York' with any pleasure."

He told me once that he had been offered a safe seat in Parliament and,
had he accepted, he might have had a career like that of Beaconsfield,
whose early style resembles his, being meant for crowds, for excitement,
for hurried decisions, for immediate triumphs. Such men get their
sincerity, if at all, from the contact of events; the dinner table was
Wilde's event and made him the greatest talker of his time, and his plays
and dialogues have what merit they possess from being now an imitation,
now a record, of his talk. Even in those days I would often defend him by
saying that his very admiration for his predecessors in poetry, for
Browning, for Swinburne and Rossetti, in their first vogue while he was a
very young man, made any success seem impossible that could satisfy his
immense ambition: never but once before had the artist seemed so great,
never had the work of art seemed so difficult. I would then compare him
with Benvenuto Cellini who, coming after Michael Angelo, found nothing
left to do so satisfactory as to turn bravo and quarrel with the man who
broke Michael Angelo's nose.


XII

I cannot remember who first brought me to the old stable beside Kelmscott
House, William Morris's house at Hammersmith, and to the debates held
there upon Sunday evenings by the Socialist League. I was soon of the
little group who had supper with Morris afterwards. I met at these
suppers very constantly Walter Crane, Emery Walker, in association with
Cobden Sanderson, the printer of many fine books, and less constantly
Bernard Shaw and Cockerell, now of the Museum of Cambridge, and perhaps
but once or twice Hyndman the Socialist and the Anarchist Prince
Kropotkin. There, too, one always met certain more or less educated
workmen, rough of speech and manner, with a conviction to meet every turn.
I was told by one of them, on a night when I had done perhaps more than my
share of the talking, that I had talked more nonsense in one evening than
he had heard in the whole course of his past life. I had merely preferred
Parnell, then at the height of his career, to Michael Davitt, who had
wrecked his Irish influence by international politics. We sat round a long
unpolished and unpainted trestle table of new wood in a room where hung
Rossetti's _Pomegranate_, a portrait of Mrs. Morris, and where one wall
and part of the ceiling were covered by a great Persian carpet. Morris had
said somewhere or other that carpets were meant for people who took their
shoes off when they entered a house and were most in place upon a tent
floor. I was a little disappointed in the house, for Morris was an old man
content at last to gather beautiful things rather than to arrange a
beautiful house. I saw the drawing-room once or twice, and there alone all
my sense of decoration, founded upon the background of Rossetti's
pictures, was satisfied by a big cupboard painted with a scene from
Chaucer by Burne-Jones; but even there were objects, perhaps a chair or a
little table, that seemed accidental, bought hurriedly perhaps and with
little thought, to make wife or daughter comfortable. I had read as a boy,
in books belonging to my father, the third volume of _The Earthly
Paradise_, and _The Defence of Guenevere_, which pleased me less, but had
not opened either for a long time. _The Man Who Never Laughed Again_ had
seemed the most wonderful of tales till my father had accused me of
preferring Morris to Keats, got angry about it, and put me altogether out
of countenance. He had spoiled my pleasure, for now I questioned while I
read and at last ceased to read; nor had Morris written as yet those prose
romances that became after his death so great a joy that they were the
only books I was ever to read slowly that I might not come too quickly to
the end. It was now Morris himself that stirred my interest, and I took to
him first because of some little tricks of speech and body that reminded
me of my old grandfather in Sligo, but soon discovered his spontaneity and
joy and made him my chief of men. To-day I do not set his poetry very
high, but for an odd altogether wonderful line, or thought; and yet, if
some angel offered me the choice, I would choose to live his life, poetry
and all, rather than my own or any other man's. A reproduction of his
portrait by Watts hangs over my mantelpiece with Henley's, and those of
other friends. Its grave wide-open eyes, like the eyes of some dreaming
beast, remind me of the open eyes of Titian's "Ariosto," while the broad
vigorous body suggests a mind that has no need of the intellect to remain
sane, though it give itself to every phantasy: the dreamer of the middle
ages. It is "the fool of fairy ... wide and wild as a hill," the resolute
European image that yet half remembers Buddha's motionless meditation, and
has no trait in common with the wavering, lean image of hungry
speculation, that cannot but fill the mind's eye because of certain famous
Hamlets of our stage. Shakespeare himself foreshadowed a symbolic change,
that shows a change in the whole temperament of the world, for though he
called his Hamlet "fat" and even "scant of breath," he thrust between his
fingers agile rapier and dagger.

The dream world of Morris was as much the antithesis of daily life as with
other men of genius, but he was never conscious of the antithesis and so
knew nothing of intellectual suffering. His intellect, unexhausted by
speculation or casuistry, was wholly at the service of hand and eye, and
whatever he pleased he did with an unheard of ease and simplicity, and if
style and vocabulary were at times monotonous, he could not have made them
otherwise without ceasing to be himself. Instead of the language of
Chaucer and Shakespeare, its warp fresh from field and market, if the woof
were learned, his age offered him a speech, exhausted from abstraction,
that only returned to its full vitality when written learnedly and slowly.

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

He did not project like Henley or like Wilde, an image of himself, because
having all his imagination set upon making and doing he had little self
knowledge. He imagined instead new conditions of making and doing; and in
the teeth of those scientific generalizations that cowed my boyhood, I can
see some like imagining in every great change, believing that the first
flying fish first leaped, not because it sought "adaptation" to the air,
but out of horror of the sea.


XIII

Soon after I began to attend the lectures a French class was started in
the old coach-house for certain young Socialists who planned a tour in
France, and I joined it, and was for a time a model student constantly
encouraged by the compliments of the old French mistress. I told my father
of the class, and he asked me to get my sisters admitted. I made
difficulties and put off speaking of the matter, for I knew that the new
and admirable self I was making would turn, under family eyes, into plain
rag-doll. How could I pretend to be industrious, and even carry
dramatisation to the point of learning my lessons, when my sisters were
there and knew that I was nothing of the kind? But I had no argument I
could use, and my sisters were admitted. They said nothing unkind, so far
as I can remember, but in a week or two I was my old procrastinating idle
self and had soon left the class altogether. My elder sister stayed on
and became an embroideress under Miss May Morris, and the hangings round
Morris's big bed at Kelmscott House, Oxfordshire, with their verses about
lying happily in bed when "all birds sing in the town of the tree," were
from her needle, though not from her design. She worked for the first few
months at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, and in my imagination I cannot
always separate what I saw and heard from her report, or indeed from the
report of that tribe or guild who looked up to Morris as to some
worshipped mediaeval king. He had no need for other people. I doubt if
their marriage or death made him sad or glad, and yet no man I have known
was so well loved; you saw him producing everywhere organisation and
beauty, seeming, almost in the same instant, helpless and triumphant; and
people loved him as children are loved. People much in his neighbourhood
became gradually occupied with him or about his affairs, and, without any
wish on his part, as simple people become occupied with children. I
remember a man who was proud and pleased because he had distracted
Morris's thoughts from an attack of gout by leading the conversation
delicately to the hated name of Milton. He began at Swinburne: "O,
Swinburne," said Morris, "is a rhetorician; my masters have been Keats and
Chaucer, for they make pictures." "Does not Milton make pictures?" asked
my informant. "No," was the answer, "Dante makes pictures, but Milton,
though he had a great earnest mind, expressed himself as a rhetorician."
"Great earnest mind" sounded strange to me, and I doubt not that were his
questioner not a simple man Morris had been more violent. Another day the
same man started by praising Chaucer, but the gout was worse, and Morris
cursed Chaucer for destroying the English language with foreign words.

He had few detachable phrases, and I can remember little of his speech,
which many thought the best of all good talk, except that it matched his
burly body and seemed within definite boundaries inexhaustible in fact and
expression. He alone of all the men I have known seemed guided by some
beast-like instinct and never ate strange meat. "Balzac! Balzac!" he said
to me once, "oh, that was the man the French Bourgeoisie read so much a
few years ago." I can remember him at supper praising wine: "Why do people
say it is prosaic to be inspired by wine? Has it not been made by the
sunlight and the sap?" and his dispraising houses decorated by himself:
"Do you suppose I like that kind of house? I would like a house like a big
barn, where one ate in one corner, cooked in another corner, slept in the
third corner, and in the fourth received one's friends"; and his
complaining of Ruskin's objection to the underground railway: "If you must
have a railway the best thing you can do with it is to put it in a tube
with a cork at each end." I remember, too, that when I asked what led up
to his movement, he replied: "Oh, Ruskin and Carlyle, but somebody should
have been beside Carlyle and punched his head every five minutes." Though
I remember little, I do not doubt that, had I continued going there on
Sunday evenings, I should have caught fire from his words and turned my
hand to some mediaeval work or other.

Just before I had ceased to go there I had sent my _Wanderings of Usheen_
to his daughter, hoping of course that it might meet his eyes, and soon
after sending it I came upon him by chance in Holborn--"You write my sort
of poetry," he said and began to praise me and to promise to send his
praise to _The Commonwealth_, the League organ, and he would have said
more had he not caught sight of a new ornamental cast-iron lamp post and
got very heated upon that subject.

I did not read economics, having turned socialist because of Morris's
lectures and pamphlets, and I think it unlikely that Morris himself could
read economics. That old dogma of mine seemed germane to the matter. If
the men and women imagined by the poets were the norm, and if Morris had,
in let us say "News from Nowhere," then running through _The
Commonwealth_, described such men and women, living under their natural
conditions, or as they would desire to live, then those conditions
themselves must be the norm and could we but get rid of certain
institutions the world would turn from eccentricity. Perhaps Morris
himself justified himself in his own heart by as simple an argument, and
was, as the socialist D---- said to me one night, walking home after some
lecture, "an anarchist without knowing it." Certainly I and all about me,
including D---- himself, were for chopping up the old king for Medea's
pot. Morris had told us to have nothing to do with the parliamentary
socialists, represented for men in general by the Fabian Society and
Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation and for us in particular by D----.
During the period of transition mistakes must be made, and the discredit
of these mistakes must be left to "the Bourgeoisie"; and besides, when you
begin to talk of this measure, or that other, you lose sight of the goal,
and see, to reverse Swinburne's description of Tiresias, "Light on the way
but darkness on the goal." By mistakes Morris meant vexatious restrictions
and compromises--"If any man puts me into a labour squad, I will lie on
my back and kick." That phrase very much expresses our idea of
revolutionary tactics: we all intended to lie upon our back and kick.
D----, pale and sedentary, did not dislike labour squads and we all hated
him with the left side of our heads, while admiring him immensely with the
right side. He alone was invited to entertain Mrs Morris, having many
tales of his Irish uncles, more especially of one particular uncle who had
tried to commit suicide by shutting his head into a carpet-bag. At that
time he was an obscure man, known only for a witty speaker at street
corners and in Park demonstrations. He had, with an assumed truculence and
fury, cold logic, an invariable gentleness, an unruffled courtesy, and yet
could never close a speech without being denounced by a journeyman hatter,
with an Italian name. Converted to socialism by D----, and to anarchism by
himself, with swinging arm and uplifted voice, this man put, and perhaps,
exaggerated our scruple about Parliament. "I lack," said D----, "the bump
of reverence"; whereon the wild man shouted: "You 'ave a 'ole." There are
moments when looking back I somewhat confuse my own figure with that of
the hatter, image of our hysteria, for I too became violent with the
violent solemnity of a religious devotee. I can even remember sitting
behind D---- and saying some rude thing or other over his shoulder.

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


XIV

I spent my days at the British Museum and must, I think, have been
delicate, for I remember often putting off hour after hour consulting some
necessary book because I shrank from lifting the heavy volumes of the
catalogue; and yet to save money for my afternoon coffee and roll I often
walked the whole way home to Bedford Park. I was compiling, for a series
of shilling books, an anthology of Irish fairy-stories and, for an
American publisher, a two-volume selection from the Irish novelists that
would be somewhat dearer. I was not well paid, for each book cost me more
than three months' reading; and I was paid for the first some twelve
pounds ("O, Mr. E.," said publisher to editor, "you must never again pay
so much!") and for the second twenty, but I did not think myself badly
paid, for I had chosen the work for my own purposes.

Though I went to Sligo every summer, I was compelled to live out of
Ireland the greater part of every year, and was but keeping my mind upon
what I knew must be the subject-matter of my poetry. I believed that if
Morris had set his stories amid the scenery of his own Wales, for I knew
him to be of Welsh extraction and supposed wrongly that he had spent his
childhood there, that if Shelley had nailed his _Prometheus_, or some
equal symbol, upon some Welsh or Scottish rock, their art had entered more
intimately, more microscopically, as it were, into our thought and had
given perhaps to modern poetry a breadth and stability like that of
ancient poetry. The statues of Mausolus and Artemisia at the British
Museum, private, half-animal, half-divine figures, all unlike the Grecian
athletes and Egyptian kings in their near neighbourhood, that stand in the
middle of the crowd's applause, or sit above measuring it out
unpersuadable justice, became to me, now or later, images of an
unpremeditated joyous energy, that neither I nor any other man, racked by
doubt and inquiry, can achieve; and that yet, if once achieved, might seem
to men and women of Connemara or of Galway their very soul. In our study
of that ruined tomb raised by a queen to her dead lover, and finished by
the unpaid labour of great sculptors, after her death from grief, or so
runs the tale, we cannot distinguish the handiworks of Scopas and
Praxiteles; and I wanted to create once more an art where the artist's
handiwork would hide as under those half anonymous chisels, or as we find
it in some old Scots ballads, or in some twelfth or thirteenth century
Arthurian Romance. That handiwork assured, I had martyred no man for
modelling his own image upon Pallas Athena's buckler; for I took great
pleasure in certain allusions to the singer's life, one finds in old
romances and ballads, and thought his presence there all the more poignant
because we discover it half lost, like portly Chaucer, behind his own
maunciple and pardoner upon the Canterbury roads. Wolfram von Eschenbach,
singing his German Parsifal, broke off some description of a famished city
to remember that in his own house at home the very mice lacked food, and
what old ballad singer was it who claimed to have fought by day in the
very battle he sang by night? So masterful indeed was that instinct that
when the minstrel knew not who his poet was, he must needs make up a man:
"When any stranger asks who is the sweetest of singers, answer with one
voice: 'a blind man; he dwells upon rocky Chios; his songs shall be the
most beautiful for ever.'" Elaborate modern psychology sounds egotistical,
I thought, when it speaks in the first person, but not those simple
emotions which resemble the more, the more powerful they are, everybody's
emotion, and I was soon to write many poems where an always personal
emotion was woven into a general pattern of myth and symbol. When the
Fenian poet says that his heart has grown cold and callous--"For thy
hapless fate, dear Ireland, and sorrows of my own"--he but follows
tradition and if he does not move us deeply, it is because he has no
sensuous musical vocabulary that comes at need, without compelling him to
sedentary toil and so driving him out from his fellows. I thought to
create that sensuous, musical vocabulary, and not for myself only, but
that I might leave it to later Irish poets, much as a mediaeval Japanese
painter left his style as an inheritance to his family, and was careful to
use a traditional manner and matter, yet did something altogether
different, changed by that toil, impelled by my share in Cain's curse, by
all that sterile modern complication, by my "originality," as the
newspapers call it. Morris set out to make a revolution that the persons
of his _Well at the World's End_ or his _Waters of the Wondrous Isles_,
always, to my mind, in the likeness of Artemisia and her man, might walk
his native scenery; and I, that my native scenery might find imaginary
inhabitants, half-planned a new method and a new culture. My mind began
drifting vaguely towards that doctrine of "the mask" which has convinced
me that every passionate man (I have nothing to do with mechanist, or
philanthropist, or man whose eyes have no preference) is, as it were,
linked with another age, historical or imaginary, where alone he finds
images that rouse his energy. Napoleon was never of his own time, as the
naturalistic writers and painters bid all men be, but had some Roman
emperor's image in his head and some condottiere blood in his heart; and
when he crowned that head at Rome with his own hands he had covered, as
may be seen from David's painting, his hesitation with that emperor's old
suit.


XV

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 and toast
saved my pennies for the 'bus ride home; but with women, apart from their
intimate exchanges of thought, I was timid and abashed. I was sitting on a
seat in front of the British Museum feeding pigeons when a couple of girls
sat near and began enticing my pigeons away, laughing and whispering to
one another, and I looked straight in front of me, very indignant, and
presently went into the Museum without turning my head towards them. Since
then I have often wondered if they were pretty or merely very young.
Sometimes I told myself very adventurous love-stories with myself for
hero, and at other times I planned out a life of lonely austerity, and at
other times mixed the ideals and planned a life of lonely austerity
mitigated by periodical lapses. I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo
in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little
island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick
I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which
balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water.
From the sudden remembrance came my poem _Innisfree_, my first lyric with
anything in its rhythm of my own music. I had begun to loosen rhythm as an
escape from rhetoric and from that emotion of the crowd that rhetoric
brings, but I only understood vaguely and occasionally that I must for my
special purpose use nothing but the common syntax. A couple of years
later I would not have written that first line with its conventional
archaism--"Arise and go"--nor the inversion in the last stanza. Passing
another day by the new Law Courts, a building that I admired because it
was Gothic--"It is not very good," Morris had said, "but it is better than
anything else they have got and so they hate it"--I grew suddenly
oppressed by the great weight of stone, and thought, "There are miles and
miles of stone and brick all round me," and presently added, "If John the
Baptist or his like were to come again and had his mind set upon it, he
could make all these people go out into some wilderness leaving their
buildings empty," and that thought, which does not seem very valuable now,
so enlightened the day that it is still vivid in the memory. I spent a few
days at Oxford copying out a seventeenth century translation of Poggio's
_Liber Facetiarum_ or the _Hypneroto-machia_ of Poliphili for a publisher;
I forget which, for I copied both; and returned very pale to my troubled
family. I had lived upon bread and tea because I thought that if antiquity
found locust and wild honey nutritive, my soul was strong enough to need
no better. I was always planning some great gesture, putting the whole
world into one scale of the balance and my soul into the other and
imagining that the whole world somehow kicked the beam. More than thirty
years have passed and I have seen no forcible young man of letters brave
the metropolis, without some like stimulant; and all after two or three,
or twelve or fifteen years, according to obstinacy, have understood that
we achieve, if we do achieve, in little sedentary stitches as though we
were making lace. I had one unmeasured advantage from my stimulant: I
could ink my socks, that they might not show through my shoes, with a most
haughty mind, imagining myself, and my torn tackle, somewhere else, in
some far place "under the canopy ... i' the city of kites and crows."

In London I saw nothing good and constantly remembered that Ruskin had
said to some friend of my father's--"As I go to my work at the British
Museum I see the faces of the people become daily more corrupt." I
convinced myself for a time, that on the same journey I saw but what he
saw. Certain old women's faces filled me with horror, faces that are no
longer there, or if they are pass before me unnoticed: the fat blotched
faces, rising above double chins, of women who have drunk too much beer
and eaten much meat. In Dublin I had often seen old women walking with
erect heads and gaunt bodies, talking to themselves with loud voices, mad
with drink and poverty, but they were different, they belonged to romance.
Da Vinci had drawn women who looked so and so carried their bodies.


XVI

I attempted to restore one old friend of my father's to the practice of
his youth, but failed, though he, unlike my father, had not changed his
belief. My father brought me to dine with Jack Nettleship at Wigmore
Street, once inventor of imaginative designs and now a painter of
melodramatic lions. At dinner I had talked a great deal--too much, I
imagine, for so young a man, or maybe for any man--and on the way home my
father, who had been plainly anxious that I should make a good impression,
was very angry. He said I had talked for effect and that talking for
effect was precisely what one must never do; he had always hated rhetoric
and emphasis and had made me hate it; and his anger plunged me into great
dejection. I called at Nettleship's studio the next day to apologise, and
Nettleship opened the door himself and received me with enthusiasm. He had
explained to some woman guest that I would probably talk well, being an
Irishman, but the reality had surpassed, etc., etc. I was not flattered,
though relieved at not having to apologise, for I soon discovered that
what he really admired was my volubility, for he himself was very silent.
He seemed about sixty, had a bald head, a grey beard, and a nose, as one
of my father's friends used to say, like an opera-glass, and sipped cocoa
all the afternoon and evening from an enormous tea-cup that must have been
designed for him alone, not caring how cold the cocoa grew. Years before
he had been thrown from his horse, while hunting, and broke his arm, and
because it had been badly set suffered great pain for a long time. A
little whisky would always stop the pain, and soon a little became a great
deal and he found himself a drunkard, but having signed his liberty away
for certain months he was completely cured. He had acquired, however, the
need of some liquid which he could sip constantly. I brought him an
admiration settled in early boyhood, for my father had always said,
"George Wilson was our born painter, but Nettleship our genius," and even
had he shown me nothing I could care for, I had admired him still because
my admiration was in my bones. He showed me his early designs, and they,
though often badly drawn, fulfilled my hopes. Something of Blake they
certainly did show, but had in place of Blake's joyous, intellectual
energy a Saturnian passion and melancholy. "God Creating Evil," the
death-like head with a woman and a tiger coming from the forehead, which
Rossetti--or was it Browning?--had described "as the most sublime design
of ancient or modern art," had been lost, but there was another version of
the same thought, and other designs never published or exhibited. They
rise before me even now in meditation, especially a blind Titan-like ghost
floating with groping hands above the tree-tops. I wrote a criticism, and
arranged for reproductions with the editor of an art magazine, but after
it was written and accepted the proprietor, lifting what I considered an
obsequious caw in the Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage
rookery, insisted upon its rejection. Nettleship did not mind its
rejection, saying, "Who cares for such things now? Not ten people," but he
did mind my refusal to show him what I had written. Though what I had
written was all eulogy, I dreaded his judgment for it was my first art
criticism. I hated his big lion pictures, where he attempted an art too
much concerned with the sense of touch, with the softness or roughness,
the minutely observed irregularity of surfaces, for his genius; and I
think he knew it. "Rossetti used to call my pictures pot-boilers," he
said, "but they are all--all"--and he waved his arm to the
canvasses--"symbols." When I wanted him to design gods, and angels, and
lost spirits once more, he always came back to the point "Nobody would be
pleased." "Everybody should have a _raison d'etre_" was one of his
phrases. "Mrs ----'s articles are not good but they are her _raison
d'etre_." I had but little knowledge of art for there was little
scholarship in the Dublin art school, so I overrated the quality of
anything that could be connected with my general beliefs about the world.
If I had been able to give angelical or diabolical names to his lions I
might have liked them also and I think that Nettleship himself would have
liked them better and liking them better have become a better painter. We
had the same kind of religious feeling, but I could give a crude
philosophical expression to mine while he could only express his in action
or with brush and pencil. He often told me of certain ascetic ambitions,
very much like my own, for he had kept all the moral ambition of youth, as
for instance--"Yeats, the other night I was arrested by a policeman--was
walking round Regent's Park barefooted to keep the flesh under--good sort
of thing to do. I was carrying my boots in my hand and he thought I was a
burglar and even when I explained and gave him half a crown, he would not
let me go till I had promised to put on my boots before I met the next
policeman."

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

Nettleship said to me: "Has Edwin Ellis ever said anything about the
effect of drink upon my genius?" "No," I answered. "I ask," he said,
"because I have always thought that Ellis has some strange medical
insight." Though I had answered no, Ellis had only a few days before used
these words: "Nettleship drank his genius away." Ellis, but lately
returned from Perugia where he had lived many years, was another old
friend of my father's but some years younger than Nettleship or my father.
Nettleship had found his simplifying image, but in his painting had turned
away from it, while Ellis, the son of Alexander Ellis, a once famous man
of science, who was perhaps the last man in England to run the circle of
the sciences without superficiality, had never found that image at all. He
was a painter and poet, but his painting, which did not interest me,
showed no influence but that of Leighton. He had started perhaps a couple
of years too late for Pre-Raphaelite influence, for no great
Pre-Raphaelite picture was painted after 1870, and left England too soon
for that of the French painters. He was, however, sometimes moving as a
poet and still more often an astonishment. I have known him cast something
just said into a dozen lines of musical verse, without apparently ceasing
to talk; but the work once done he could not or would not amend it, and my
father thought he lacked all ambition. Yet he had at times nobility of
rhythm--an instinct for grandeur, and after thirty years I still repeat to
myself his address to Mother Earth--

  "O mother of the hills, forgive our towers,
  O mother of the clouds forgive our dreams."

And there are certain whole poems that I read from time to time or try to
make others read. There is that poem where the manner is unworthy of the
matter, being loose and facile, describing Adam and Eve fleeing from
Paradise. Adam asks Eve what she carries so carefully, and Eve replies
that it is a little of the apple-core kept for their children. There is
that vision concerning _Christ the Less_, a too hurriedly written ballad,
where the half of Christ sacrificed to the divine half "that fled to seek
felicity" wanders wailing through Golgotha, and there is _The Saint and
the Youth_, in which I can discover no fault at all. He loved
complexities--"Seven silences like candles round her face" is a line of
his--and whether he wrote well or ill had always a manner which I would
have known from that of any other poet. He would say to me, "I am a
mathematician with the mathematics left out"--his father was a great
mathematician--or "A woman once said to me, 'Mr Ellis, why are your poems
like sums?'" And certainly he loved symbols and abstractions. He said
once, when I had asked him not to mention something or other, "Surely you
have discovered by this time that I know of no means whereby I can mention
a fact in conversation."

He had a passion for Blake, picked up in Pre-Raphaelite studios, and early
in our acquaintance put into my hands a scrap of notepaper on which he had
written some years before an interpretation of the poem that begins

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

The four quarters of London represented Blake's four great mythological
personages, the Zoas, and also the four elements. These few sentences were
the foundation of all study of the philosophy of William Blake that
requires an exact knowledge for its pursuit and that traces the
connection between his system and that of Swedenborg or of Boehme. I
recognised certain attributions, from what is sometimes called the
Christian Cabbala, of which Ellis had never heard, and with this proof
that his interpretation was more than fantasy he and I began our four
years' work upon the Prophetic Books of William Blake. We took it as
almost a sign of Blake's personal help when we discovered that the spring
of 1889, when we first joined our knowledge, was one hundred years from
the publication of _The Book of Thel_, the first published of the
Prophetic Books, as though it were firmly established that the dead
delight in anniversaries. After months of discussion and reading we made a
concordance of all Blake's mystical terms, and there was much copying to
be done in the Museum and at Red Hill, where the descendants of Blake's
friend and patron, the landscape painter John Linnell, had many
manuscripts. The Linnells were narrow in their religious ideas and
doubtful of Blake's orthodoxy, whom they held, however, in great honour,
and I remember a timid old lady who had known Blake when a child saying,
"He had very wrong ideas, he did not believe in the historical Jesus." One
old man sat always beside us, ostensibly to sharpen our pencils but
perhaps really to see that we did not steal the manuscripts, and they gave
us very old port at lunch, and I have upon my dining-room walls their
present of Blake's Dante engravings. Going thither and returning Ellis
would entertain me by philosophical discussion varied with improvised
stories, at first folk-tales which he professed to have picked up in
Scotland, and, though I had read and collected many folk tales, I did not
see through the deceit. I have a partial memory of two more elaborate
tales, one of an Italian conspirator flying barefoot, from I forget what
adventure through I forget what Italian city, in the early morning.
Fearing to be recognised by his bare feet, he slipped past the sleepy
porter at an hotel, calling out "number so and so" as if he were some
belated guest. Then passing from bedroom door to door he tried on the
boots, and just as he got a pair to fit, a voice cried from the room: "Who
is that?" "Merely me, sir," he called back, "taking your boots." The other
was of a martyr's Bible, round which the cardinal virtues had taken
personal form--this a fragment of Blake's philosophy. It was in the
possession of an old clergyman when a certain jockey called upon him, and
the cardinal virtues, confused between jockey and clergyman, devoted
themselves to the jockey. As whenever he sinned a cardinal virtue
interfered and turned him back to virtue, he lived in great credit, and
made, but for one sentence, a very holy death. As his wife and family
knelt round in admiration and grief he suddenly said "damn." "O my dear,"
said his wife, "what a dreadful expression." He answered, "I am going to
heaven," and straightway died. It was a long tale, for there were all the
jockey's vain attempts to sin, as well as all the adventures of the
clergyman, who became very sinful indeed, but it ended happily for when
the jockey died the cardinal virtues returned to the clergyman. I think he
would talk to any audience that offered, one audience being the same as
another in his eyes, and it may have been for this reason that my father
called him unambitious. When he was a young man he had befriended a
reformed thief and had asked the grateful thief to take him round the
thieves' quarters of London. The thief, however, hurried him away from the
worst saying, "Another minute and they would have found you out. If they
were not the stupidest of men in London, they had done so already." Ellis
had gone through a detailed, romantic and witty account of all the houses
he had robbed and all the throats he had cut in one short life.

His conversation would often pass out of my comprehension, or indeed I
think of any man's, into a labyrinth of abstraction and subtlety and then
suddenly return with some verbal conceit or turn of wit. The mind is known
to attain in certain conditions of trance a quickness so extraordinary
that we are compelled at times to imagine a condition of unendurable
intellectual intensity from which we are saved by the merciful stupidity
of the body, and I think that the mind of Edwin Ellis was constantly upon
the edge of trance. Once we were discussing the symbolism of sex in the
philosophy of Blake and had been in disagreement all the afternoon. I
began talking with a new sense of conviction and after a moment Ellis, who
was at his easel, threw down his brush and said that he had just seen the
same explanation in a series of symbolic visions. "In another moment," he
said, "I should have been off." We went into the open air and walked up
and down to get rid of that feeling, but presently we came in again and I
began again my explanation, Ellis lying upon the sofa. I had been talking
some time when Mrs Ellis came into the room and said, "Why are you sitting
in the dark?" Ellis answered, "But we are not," and then added in a voice
of wonder, "I thought the lamp was lit, and that I was sitting up, and
now I find that I am lying down and that we are in darkness." I had seen a
flicker of light over the ceiling but thought it a reflection from some
light outside the house, which may have been the case.


XVII

I had already met most of the poets of my generation. I had said, soon
after the publication of _The Wanderings of Usheen_, to the editor of a
series of shilling reprints, who had set me to compile tales of the Irish
fairies, "I am growing jealous of other poets and we will all grow jealous
of each other unless we know each other and so feel a share in each
other's triumph." He was a Welshman, lately a mining engineer, Ernest
Rhys, a writer of Welsh translations and original poems, that have often
moved me greatly though I can think of no one else who has read them. He
was perhaps a dozen years older than myself and through his work as editor
knew everybody who would compile a book for seven or eight pounds. Between
us we founded The Rhymers' Club, which for some years was to meet every
night in an upper room with a sanded floor in an ancient eating house in
the Strand called The Cheshire Cheese. Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson,
Victor Plarr, Ernest Radford, John Davidson, Richard le Gallienne, T. W.
Rolleston, Selwyn Image, Edwin Ellis, and John Todhunter came constantly
for a time, Arthur Symons and Herbert Home, less constantly, while William
Watson joined but never came and Francis Thompson came once but never
joined; and sometimes if we met in a private house, which we did
occasionally, Oscar Wilde came. It had been useless to invite him to The
Cheshire Cheese for he hated Bohemia. "Olive Schreiner," he said once to
me, "is staying in the East End because that is the only place where
people do not wear masks upon their faces, but I have told her that I live
in the West End because nothing in life interests me but the mask."

We read our poems to one another and talked criticism and drank a little
wine. I sometimes say when I speak of the club, "We had such and such
ideas, such and such a quarrel with the great Victorians, we set before us
such and such aims," as though we had many philosophical ideas. I say this
because I am ashamed to admit that I had these ideas and that whenever I
began to talk of them a gloomy silence fell upon the room. A young Irish
poet, who wrote excellently but had the worst manners, was to say a few
years later, "You do not talk like a poet, you talk like a man of
letters," and if all the Rhymers had not been polite, if most of them had
not been to Oxford or Cambridge, the greater number would have said the
same thing. I was full of thought, often very abstract thought, longing
all the while to be full of images, because I had gone to the art school
instead of a university. Yet even if I had gone to a university, and
learned all the classical foundations of English literature and English
culture, all that great erudition which once accepted frees the mind from
restlessness, I should have had to give up my Irish subject matter, or
attempt to found a new tradition. Lacking sufficient recognized precedent
I must needs find out some reason for all I did. I knew almost from the
start that to overflow with reasons was to be not quite well-born, and
when I could I hid them, as men hide a disagreeable ancestry; and that
there was no help for it seeing that my country was not born at all. I was
of those doomed to imperfect achievement, and under a curse, as it were,
like some race of birds compelled to spend the time, needed for the making
of the nest, in argument as to the convenience of moss and twig and
lichen. Le Gallienne and Davidson, and even Symons, were provincial at
their setting out, but their provincialism was curable, mine incurable;
while the one conviction shared by all the younger men, but principally by
Johnson and Home, who imposed their personalities upon us, was an
opposition to all ideas, all generalizations that can be explained and
debated. E---- fresh from Paris would sometimes say--"We are concerned
with nothing but impressions," but that itself was a generalization and
met but stony silence. Conversation constantly dwindled into "Do you like
so and so's last book?" "No, I prefer the book before it," and I think
that but for its Irish members, who said whatever came into their heads,
the club would not have survived its first difficult months. I saw--now
ashamed that I saw "like a man of letters," now exasperated at their
indifference to the fashion of their own river-bed--that Swinburne in one
way, Browning in another, and Tennyson in a third, had filled their work
with what I called "impurities," curiosities about politics, about
science, about history, about religion; and that we must create once more
the pure work.

Our clothes were, for the most part unadventurous like our conversation,
though I indeed wore a brown velveteen coat, a loose tie, and a very old
inverness cape, discarded by my father twenty years before and preserved
by my Sligo-born mother whose actions were unreasoning and habitual like
the seasons. But no other member of the club, except Le Gallienne, who
wore a loose tie, and Symons, who had an inverness cape that was quite new
and almost fashionable, would have shown himself for the world in any
costume but "that of an English gentleman." "One should be quite
unnoticeable," Johnson explained to me. Those who conformed most carefully
to the fashion in their clothes, generally departed furthest from it in
their handwriting, which was small, neat, and studied, one poet--which, I
forget--having founded his upon the handwriting of George Herbert. Dowson
and Symons I was to know better in later years when Symons became a very
dear friend, and I never got behind John Davidson's Scottish roughness and
exasperation, though I saw much of him, but from the first I devoted
myself to Lionel Johnson. He and Horne and Image and one or two others,
shared a man-servant and an old house in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square,
typical figures of transition, doing as an achievement of learning and of
exquisite taste what their predecessors did in careless abundance. All
were Pre-Raphaelite, and sometimes one might meet in the rooms of one or
other a ragged figure, as of some fallen dynasty, Simeon Solomon the
Pre-Raphaelite painter, once the friend of Rossetti and of Swinburne, but
fresh now from some low public house. Condemned to a long term of
imprisonment for a criminal offence, he had sunk into drunkenness and
misery. Introduced one night, however, to some man who mistook him, in the
dim candle light, for another Solomon, a successful academic painter and
R.A., he started to his feet in a rage with, "Sir, do you dare to mistake
me for that mountebank?" Though not one had hearkened to the feeblest
caw, or been spattered by the smallest dropping from any Huxley, Tyndall,
Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage bundle of old twigs I began by suspecting
them of lukewarmness, and even backsliding, and I owe it to that suspicion
that I never became intimate with Horne, who lived to become the greatest
English authority upon Italian life in the fourteenth century and to write
the one standard work on Botticelli. Connoisseur in several arts, he had
designed a little church in the manner of Inigo Jones for a burial ground
near the Marble Arch. Though I now think his little church a masterpiece,
its style was more than a century too late to hit my fancy, at two or
three and twenty; and I accused him of leaning towards that eighteenth
century

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

Another fanaticism delayed my friendship with two men, who are now my
friends and in certain matters my chief instructors. Somebody, probably
Lionel Johnson, brought me to the studio of Charles Ricketts and Charles
Shannon, certainly heirs of the great generation, and the first thing I
saw was a Shannon picture of a lady and child, arrayed in lace silk and
satin, suggesting that hated century. My eyes were full of some more
mythological mother and child and I would have none of it and I told
Shannon that he had not painted a mother and child, but elegant people
expecting visitors and I thought that a great reproach. Somebody writing
in _The Germ_ had said that a picture of a pheasant and an apple was
merely a picture of something to eat and I was so angry with the
indifference to subject, which was the commonplace of all art criticism
since Bastien-Lepage, that I could at times see nothing else but subject.
I thought that, though it might not matter to the man himself whether he
loved a white woman or a black, a female pickpocket or a regular
communicant of the Church of England, if only he loved strongly, it
certainly did matter to his relations and even under some circumstances to
his whole neighbourhood. Sometimes indeed, like some father in Moliere, I
ignored the lover's feelings altogether and even refused to admit that a
trace of the devil, perhaps a trace of colour, may lend piquancy,
especially if the connection be not permanent.

Among these men, of whom so many of the greatest talents were to live such
passionate lives and die such tragic deaths, one serene man, T. W.
Rolleston, seemed always out of place; it was I brought him there,
intending to set him to some work in Ireland later on. I have known young
Dublin working men slip out of their workshop to see the second Thomas
Davis passing by, and even remember a conspiracy, by some three or four,
to make him "the leader of the Irish race at home and abroad," and all
because he had regular features; and when all is said Alexander the Great
and Alcibiades were personable men, and the Founder of the Christian
religion was the only man who was neither a little too tall nor a little
too short, but exactly six feet high. We in Ireland thought as do the
plays and ballads, not understanding that, from the first moment wherein
nature foresaw the birth of Bastien-Lepage, she has only granted great
creative power to men whose faces are contorted with extravagance or
curiosity, or dulled with some protecting stupidity.

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


XVIII

I have described what image--always opposite to the natural self or the
natural world--Wilde, Henley, Morris, copied or tried to copy, but I have
not said if I found an image for myself. I know very little about myself
and much less of that anti-self: probably the woman who cooks my dinner or
the woman who sweeps out my study knows more than I. It is perhaps because
nature made me a gregarious man, going hither and thither looking for
conversation, and ready to deny from fear or favour his dearest
conviction, that I love proud and lonely things. When I was a child and
went daily to the sexton's daughter for writing lessons, I found one poem
in her School Reader that delighted me beyond all others: a fragment of
some metrical translation from Aristophanes wherein the birds sing scorn
upon mankind. In later years my mind gave itself to gregarious Shelley's
dream of a young man, his hair blanched with sorrow, studying philosophy
in some lonely tower, or of his old man, master of all human knowledge,
hidden from human sight in some shell-strewn cavern on the Mediterranean
shore. One passage above all ran perpetually in my ears--

  "Some feign that he is Enoch: others dream
  He was pre-Adamite, and has survived
  Cycles of generation and of ruin.
  The sage, in truth, by dreadful abstinence,
  And conquering penance of the mutinous flesh,
  Deep contemplation and unwearied study,
  In years outstretched beyond the date of man,
  May have attained to sovereignty and science
  Over those strong and secret things and thoughts
  Which others fear and know not.
  _Mahmud._                     I would talk
  With this old Jew.
  _Hassan._        Thy will is even now
  Made known to him where he dwells in a sea-cavern
  'Mid the Demonesi, less accessible
  Than thou or God! He who would question him
  Must sail alone at sunset where the stream
  Of ocean sleeps around those foamless isles,
  When the young moon is westering as now,
  And evening airs wander upon the wave;
  And, when the pines of that bee-pasturing isle,
  Green Erebinthus, quench the fiery shadow
  Of his gilt prow within the sapphire water,
  Then must the lonely helmsman cry aloud
  'Ahasuerus!' and the caverns round
  Will answer 'Ahasuerus!' If his prayer
  Be granted, a faint meteor will arise,
  Lighting him over Marmora; and a wind
  Will rush out of the sighing pine-forest,
  And with the wind a storm of harmony
  Unutterably sweet, and pilot him
  Through the soft twilight to the Bosphorus:
  Thence, at the hour and place and circumstance
  Fit for the matter of their conference,
  The Jew appears. Few dare, and few who dare
  Win the desired communion."

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


XIX

I found Madame Blavatsky in a little house at Norwood, with but, as she
said, three followers left--the Society of Psychical Research had just
reported on her Indian phenomena--and as one of the three followers sat in
an outer room to keep out undesirable visitors, I was kept a long time
kicking my heels. Presently I was admitted and found an old woman in a
plain loose dark dress: a sort of old Irish peasant woman with an air of
humour and audacious power. I was still kept waiting, for she was deep in
conversation with a woman visitor. I strayed through folding doors into
the next room and stood, in sheer idleness of mind, looking at a cuckoo
clock. It was certainly stopped, for the weights were off and lying upon
the ground, and yet, as I stood there the cuckoo came out and cuckooed at
me. I interrupted Madame Blavatsky to say, "Your clock has hooted me."
"It oftens hoots at a stranger," she replied. "Is there a spirit in it?" I
said. "I do not know," she said, "I should have to be alone to know what
is in it." I went back to the clock and began examining it and heard her
say: "Do not break my clock." I wondered if there was some hidden
mechanism and I should have been put out, I suppose, had I found any,
though Henley had said to me, "Of course she gets up fraudulent miracles,
but a person of genius has to do something; Sarah Bernhardt sleeps in her
coffin." Presently the visitor went away and Madame Blavatsky explained
that she was a propagandist for women's rights who had called to find out
"why men were so bad." "What explanation did you give her?" I said. "That
men were born bad, but women made themselves so," and then she explained
that I had been kept waiting because she had mistaken me for some man,
whose name resembled mine and who wanted to persuade her of the flatness
of the earth.

When I next saw her she had moved into a house at Holland Park, and some
time must have passed--probably I had been in Sligo where I returned
constantly for long visits--for she was surrounded by followers. She sat
nightly before a little table covered with green baize and on this green
baize she scribbled constantly with a piece of white chalk. She would
scribble symbols, sometimes humorously explained, and sometimes
unintelligible figures, but the chalk was intended to mark down her score
when she played patience. One saw in the next room a large table where
every night her followers and guests, often a great number, sat down to
their vegetable meal, while she encouraged or mocked through the folding
doors. A great passionate nature, a sort of female Dr Johnson, impressive
I think to every man or woman who had themselves any richness, she seemed
impatient of the formalism of the shrill abstract idealism of those about
her, and this impatience broke out in railing and many nicknames: "O you
are a flap-doodle, but then you are a theosophist and a brother." The most
devout and learned of all her followers said to me, "H. P. B. has just
told me that there is another globe stuck on to this at the north pole, so
that the earth has really a shape something like a dumb-bell." I said, for
I knew that her imagination contained all the folklore of the world, "That
must be some piece of Eastern mythology." "O no it is not," he said, "of
that I am certain, and there must be something in it or she would not have
said it." Her mockery was not kept for her followers alone, and her voice
would become harsh, and her mockery lose fantasy and humour, when she
spoke of what seemed to her scientific materialism. Once I saw this
antagonism, guided by some kind of telepathic divination, take a form of
brutal fantasy. I brought a very able Dublin woman to see her and this
woman had a brother, a physiologist whose reputation, though known to
specialists alone, was European, and because of this brother a family
pride in everything scientific and modern. The Dublin woman scarcely
opened her mouth the whole evening and her name was certainly unknown to
Madame Blavatsky, yet I saw at once in that wrinkled old face bent over
the cards, and the only time I ever saw it there, a personal hostility,
the dislike of one woman for another. Madame Blavatsky seemed to bundle
herself up, becoming all primeval peasant, and began complaining of her
ailments, more especially of her bad leg. But of late her master--her
"old Jew," her "Ahasuerus"--cured it, or set it on the way to be cured. "I
was sitting here in my chair," said she, "when the master came in and
brought something with him which he put over my knee, something warm which
enclosed my knee--it was a live dog which he had cut open." I recognized a
cure used sometimes in mediaeval medicine. She had two masters and their
portraits, ideal Indian heads, painted by some most incompetent artist,
stood upon either side of the folding doors. One night when talk was
impersonal and general, I sat gazing through the folding doors into the
dimly lighted dining room beyond. I noticed a curious red light shining
upon a picture and got up to see where the red light came from. It was the
picture of an Indian and as I came near it slowly vanished. When I
returned to my seat, Madame Blavatsky said, "What did you see?" "A
picture," I said. "Tell it to go away." "It is already gone." "So much the
better," she said, "I was afraid it was mediumship. But it is only
clairvoyance." "What is the difference?" "If it had been mediumship, it
would have stayed in spite of you. Beware of mediumship; it is a kind of
madness; I know for I have been through it."

I found her almost always full of gaiety that, unlike the occasional
joking of those about her, was illogical and incalculable and yet always
kindly and tolerant. I had called one evening to find her absent but
expected every moment. She had been somewhere at the seaside for her
health and arrived with a little suite of followers. She sat down at once
in her big chair, and began unfolding a brown paper parcel while all
looked on full of curiosity. It contained a large family Bible. "This is a
present for my maid," she said. "What a Bible and not even annotated!"
said some shocked voice. "Well, my children," was the answer, "what is the
good of giving lemons to those who want oranges?" When I first began to
frequent her house, as I soon did very constantly, I noticed a handsome
clever woman of the world there, who seemed certainly very much out of
place, penitent though she thought herself. Presently there was much
scandal and gossip for the penitent was plainly entangled with two young
men, who were expected to grow into ascetic sages. The scandal was so
great that Madame Blavatsky had to call the penitent before her and to
speak after this fashion, "We think that it is necessary to crush the
animal nature; you should live in chastity in act and thought. Initiation
is granted only to those who are entirely chaste," and so it ran on for
some time. However, after some minutes in that vehement style, the
penitent standing crushed and shamed before her, she had wound up, "I
cannot permit you more than one." She was quite sincere but thought that
nothing mattered but what happened in the mind, and that if we could not
master the mind our actions were of little importance. One young man
filled her with exasperation for she thought that his settled gloom came
from his chastity. I had known him in Dublin where he had been accustomed
to interrupt long periods of asceticism, in which he would eat vegetables
and drink water, with brief outbreaks of what he considered the devil.
After an outbreak he would for a few hours dazzle the imagination of the
members of the local theosophical society with poetical rhapsodies about
harlots and street lamps, and then sink into weeks of melancholy. A
fellow-theosophist once found him hanging from the windowpole, but cut him
down in the nick of time. I said to the man who cut him down, "What did
you say to each other?" He said, "We spent the night telling comic stories
and laughing a great deal." This man, torn between sensuality and
visionary ambition, was now the most devout of all, and told me that in
the middle of the night he could often hear the ringing of the little
"astral bell" whereby Madame Blavatsky's master called her attention, and
that, although it was a silvery low tone, it made the whole house shake.
Another night I found him waiting in the hall to show in those who had
right of entrance, on some night when the discussion was private, and as I
passed he whispered into my ear, "Madame Blavatsky is perhaps not a real
woman at all. They say that her dead body was found many years ago upon
some Russian battlefield." She had two dominant moods, both of extreme
activity, one calm and philosophic, and this was the mood always on that
night in the week when she answered questions upon her system, and as I
look back after thirty years I often ask myself, "Was her speech
automatic? Was she a trance medium, or in some similar state, one night in
every week?" In the other mood she was full of fantasy and inconsequent
raillery. "That is the Greek Church, a triangle like all true religion," I
recall her saying, as she chalked out a triangle on the green baize, and
then as she made it disappear in meaningless scribbles, "it spread out and
became a bramble bush like the Church of Rome." Then rubbing it all out
except one straight line, "Now they have lopped off the branches and
turned it into a broomstick and that is protestantism." And so it was
night after night always varied and unforeseen. I have observed a like
sudden extreme change in others, half whose thought was supernatural and
Lawrence Oliphant records somewhere or other like observations. I can
remember only once finding her in a mood of reverie, something had
happened to damp her spirits, some attack upon her movement, or upon
herself. She spoke of Balzac, whom she had seen but once, of Alfred de
Musset, whom she had known well enough to dislike for his morbidity, and
George Sand, whom she had known so well that they had dabbled in magic
together of which "neither knew anything at all" in those days; and she
ran on, as if there was nobody there to overhear her, "I used to wonder at
and pity the people who sell their souls to the devil, but now I only pity
them. They do it to have somebody on their side," and added to that, after
some words I have forgotten, "I write, write, write as the Wandering Jew
walks, walks, walks."

Besides the devotees, who came to listen and to turn every doctrine into a
new sanction for the puritanical convictions of their Victorian childhood,
cranks came from half Europe and from all America, and they came that they
might talk. One American said to me, "She has become the most famous woman
in the world by sitting in a big chair and permitting us to talk." They
talked and she played patience, and totted up her score on the green
baize, and generally seemed to listen, but sometimes she would listen no
more. There was a woman who talked perpetually of "the divine spark"
within her, until Madame Blavatsky stopped her with--"Yes, my dear, you
have a divine spark within you and if you are not very careful you will
hear it snore." A certain Salvation Army captain probably pleased her, for
if vociferous and loud of voice, he had much animation. He had known
hardship and spoke of his visions while starving in the streets and he
was still perhaps a little light in the head. I wondered what he could
preach to ignorant men, his head ablaze with wild mysticism, till I met a
man who had heard him talking near Covent Garden to some crowd in the
street. "My friends," he was saying, "you have the kingdom of heaven
within you and it would take a pretty big pill to get that out."

Meanwhile I had got no nearer to proving that the sage Ahasuerus "dwells
in a sea cavern 'mid the Demonesi," nor did I learn any more of those
"Masters" whose representative Madame Blavatsky claimed to be. All there
seemed to feel their presence, and all spoke of them as if they were more
important than any visible inhabitant of the house. When Madame Blavatsky
was more silent, less vivid than usual, it was "because her Masters were
angry;" they had rebuked her because of some error, and she professed
constant error. Once I seemed in their presence, or that of some messenger
of theirs. It was about nine at night, and half a dozen of us sat round
her big table cloth, when the room seemed to fill with the odour of
incense. Somebody came from upstairs, but could smell nothing--had been
outside the influence it seems--but to myself and the others, it was very
strong. Madame Blavatsky said it was a common Indian incense, and that
some pupil of her master's was present; she seemed anxious to make light
of the matter and turned the conversation to something else. Certainly it
was a romantic house, and I did not separate myself from it by my own
will. I had learned from Blake to hate all abstraction, and, affected by
the abstraction of what were called "esoteric teachings," I began a series
of experiments. Some book or magazine published by the society had quoted
from that essay of magic, which Sibley, the eighteenth century astrologer,
had bound up with his big book upon astrology. If you burnt a flower to
ashes and put the ashes under, I think, the receiver of an air pump, and
stood the receiver in the moonlight for so many nights, the ghost of the
flower would appear hovering over its ashes. I got together a committee
which performed this experiment without results. The "esoteric teachings"
had declared that a certain very pure kind of indigo was the symbol of one
of the seven principles into which they divided human nature. I got with
some difficulty a little of this pure indigo, and gave portions of it to
members of the committee, and asked them to put it under their pillows at
night and record their dreams. I argued that all natural scenery must be
divided into seven types according to these principles, and by their study
we could rid the mind of abstraction. Presently a secretary, a friendly,
intelligent man, asked me to come and see him, and, when I did, complained
that I was causing discussion and disturbance. A certain fanatical hungry
face had been noticed red and tearful, and it was quite plain that I was
not in agreement with their methods or their philosophy. "We have certain
definite ideas," he said, "and we have but one duty, to spread them
through the world. I know that all these people become dogmatic, that they
believe what they can never prove, that their withdrawal from family life
is for them a great misfortune, but what are we to do? We have been told
that all spiritual influx into the society will come to an end in 1897 for
exactly one hundred years; before that date our fundamental ideas must be
spread in all countries." I knew the doctrine, and it made me wonder why
that old woman, or the "masters" from whom, whatever they were or were
not, her genius had come, insisted upon it; for influx of some kind there
must always be. Did they dread heresy, or had they no purpose but the
greatest possible immediate effect?


XX

At the British Museum reading room I often saw a man of thirty-six, or
thirty-seven, in a brown velveteen coat, with a gaunt resolute face, and
an athletic body, who seemed before I heard his name, or knew the nature
of his studies, a figure of romance. Presently I was introduced, where or
by what man or woman I do not remember. He was called Liddle Mathers, but
would soon, under the touch of "The Celtic Movement," become Macgregor
Mathers, and then plain Macgregor. He was the author of _The Kabbala
Unveiled_, and his studies were two only--magic and the theory of war, for
he believed himself a born commander and all but equal in wisdom and in
power to that old Jew. He had copied many manuscripts on magic ceremonial
and doctrine in the British Museum, and was to copy many more in
Continental libraries, and it was through him mainly that I began certain
studies and experiences, that were to convince me that images well up
before the mind's eye from a deeper source than conscious or subconscious
memory. I believe that his mind in those early days did not belie his face
and body, though in later years it became unhinged, for he kept a proud
head amid great poverty. One that boxed with him nightly has told me that
for many weeks he could knock him down, though Mathers was the stronger
man, and only knew long after that during those weeks Mathers starved.
With him I met an old white-haired Oxfordshire clergyman, the most
panic-stricken person I have ever known, though Mathers' introduction had
been "he unites us to the great adepts of antiquity." This old man took me
aside that he might say--"I hope you never invoke spirits--that is a very
dangerous thing to do. I am told that even the planetary spirits turn upon
us in the end." I said, "Have you ever seen an apparition?" "O yes, once,"
he said. "I have my alchemical laboratory in a cellar under my house where
the Bishop cannot see it. One day I was walking up and down there when I
heard another footstep walking up and down beside me. I turned and saw a
girl I had been in love with when I was a young man, but she died long
ago. She wanted me to kiss her. O no, I would not do that." "Why not?" I
said. "O she might have got power over me." "Has your alchemical research
had any success?" I said. "Yes, I once made the elixir of life. A French
alchemist said it had the right smell and the right colour" (the alchemist
may have been Eliphas Levi, who visited England in the 'sixties, and would
have said anything) "but the first effect of the elixir is that your nails
fall out and your hair falls off. I was afraid that I might have made a
mistake and that nothing else might happen, so I put it away on a shelf. I
meant to drink it when I was an old man, but when I got it down the other
day it had all dried up."

Soon after my first meeting with Mathers he emerged into brief prosperity,
becoming for two or three years Curator of a private museum at Forest
Hill, and marrying a young and beautiful wife, the sister of the
philosopher, Henri Bergson. His house at Forest Hill was soon a romantic
place to a little group, Florence Farr, myself, and some dozen fellow
students. I think that it was she, her curiosity being insatiable, who
first brought news of that house and that she brought it in mockery and in
wonder. Mathers had taken her for a walk through a field of sheep and had
said, "Look at the sheep. I am going to imagine myself a ram," and at once
all the sheep ran after him; another day he had tried to quell a thunder
storm by making symbols in the air with a masonic sword, but the storm had
not been quelled; and then came the crowning wonder. He had given her a
piece of cardboard on which was a coloured geometrical symbol and had told
her to hold it to her forehead and she had found herself walking upon a
cliff above the sea, seagulls shrieking overhead. I did not think the ram
story impossible, and even tried half a dozen times to excite a cat by
imagining a mouse in front of its nose, but still some chance movement of
the flock might have deceived her. But what could have deceived her in
that final marvel? Then another brought a like report, and presently my
own turn came. He gave me a cardboard symbol and I closed my eyes. Sight
came slowly, there was not that sudden miracle as if the darkness had been
cut with a knife, for that miracle is mostly a woman's privilege, but
there rose before me mental images that I could not control: a desert and
black Titan raising himself up by his two hands from the middle of a heap
of ancient ruins. Mathers explained that I had seen a being of the order
of Salamanders because he had shown me their symbol, but it was not
necessary even to show the symbol, it would have been sufficient that he
imagined it. I had already written in my diary, under some date in 1887,
that Madame Blavatsky's Masters were "trance personalities," and I must
have meant such beings as my black Titan, only more lasting and more
powerful. I had found when a boy in Dublin on a table in the Royal Irish
Academy a pamphlet on Japanese art and read there of an animal painter so
remarkable that horses he had painted upon a Temple wall, had slipped down
after dark and trampled the neighbours' fields of rice. Somebody had come
into the temple in the early morning, had been startled by a shower of
water drops, had looked up and seen painted horses still wet from the
dew-covered fields, but now "trembling into stillness."

I had soon mastered Mathers' symbolic system, and discovered that for a
considerable minority--whom I could select by certain unanalysable
characteristics--the visible world would completely vanish, and that
world, summoned by the symbol, take its place. One day when alone in a
third-class carriage, in the very middle of the railway bridge that
crosses the Thames near Victoria, I smelt incense. I was on my way to
Forest Hill; might it not come from some spirit Mathers had called up? I
had wondered when I smelt it at Madame Blavatsky's--if there might be some
contrivance, some secret censer, but that explanation was no longer
possible. I believed that Salamander of his but an image, and presently I
found analogies between smell and image. It must be from thought but what
certainty had I, that what had taken me by surprise, could be from my own
thought, and if a thought could affect the sense of smell, why not the
sense of touch? Then I discovered among that group of students that
surrounded Macgregor, a man who had fought a cat in his dreams and awaked
to find his breast covered with scratches. Was there an impassable
barrier between those scratches and the trampled fields of rice? It would
seem so, and yet all was uncertainty. What fixed law would our experiments
leave to our imagination?

Mathers had learning but no scholarship, much imagination and imperfect
taste, but if he made some absurd statement, some incredible claim, some
hackneyed joke, we would half consciously change claim, statement or joke,
as though he were a figure in a play of our composition. He was a
necessary extravagance, and he had carried further than anyone else, a
claim implicit in the romantic movement from the time of Shelley and of
Goethe; and in body and in voice at least he was perfect; so might Faust
have looked at the end of his hundred years. In the credulity of our youth
we secretly wondered if he had not met with, perhaps even been taught by
some old man who had found the elixir. Nor did he undeceive us. "If you
find the elixir," he was accustomed to say, "you always look a few years
younger than the age at which you found it. If you find it at sixty you
will look fifty for a hundred years." None of us would have admitted that
we believed in stone or elixir, the old Oxfordshire clergyman excited no
belief, yet one among us certainly laboured with crucible or athanor. Ten
years ago I called upon an elderly solicitor, on some business, but at his
private house, and I remembered whose pupil he had been when I found among
the ashes of the hearth a little earthen pot. He pretended that he studied
alchemy that he might some day write its history, and I found when I
questioned others, that for twenty years there had been just such a little
pot among the ashes.


XXI

I generalized a great deal and was ashamed of it. I thought it was my
business in life to be an artist and a poet, and that there could be no
business comparable to that. I refused to read books and even to meet
people who excited me to generalization, all to no purpose. I said my
prayers much as in childhood, though without the old regularity of hour
and place, and I began to pray that my imagination might somehow be
rescued from abstraction and became as preoccupied with life as had been
the imagination of Chaucer. For ten or twelve years more I suffered
continual remorse, and only became content when my abstractions had
composed themselves into picture and dramatization. My very remorse helped
to spoil my early poetry, giving it an element of sentimentality through
my refusal to permit it any share of an intellect which I considered
impure. Even in practical life I only very gradually began to use
generalizations, that have since become the foundation of all I have done,
or shall do, in Ireland. For all I know all men may have been so timid,
for I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we
shall ever find, but as yet we do not know truths that belong to us from
opinions, caught up in casual irritation or momentary fantasy. As life
goes on we discover that certain thoughts sustain us in defeat, or give us
victory, whether over ourselves or others, and it is these thoughts,
tested by passion, that we call convictions. Among subjective men (in all
those, that is, who must spin a web out of their own bowels) the victory
is an intellectual daily recreation of all that exterior fate snatches
away, and so that fate's antithesis; while what I have called "the Mask"
is an emotional antithesis to all that comes out of their internal nature.
We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy.


XXII

A conviction that the world was now but a bundle of fragments possessed me
without ceasing. I had tried this conviction on the Rhymers, thereby
plunging into greater silence an already too silent evening. "Johnson," I
was accustomed to say, "you are the only man I know whose silence has beak
and claw." I had lectured on it to some London Irish society, and I was to
lecture upon it later on in Dublin, but I never found but one interested
man, an official of the Primrose League, who was also an active member of
the Fenian Brotherhood. "I am an extreme conservative apart from Ireland,"
I have heard him explain; and I have no doubt that personal experience
made him share the sight of any eye that saw the world in fragments. I had
been put into a rage by the followers of Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran,
and Bastien-Lepage, who not only asserted the unimportance of subject
whether in art or literature, but the independence of the arts from one
another. Upon the other hand, I delighted in every age where poet and
artist confined themselves gladly to some inherited subject matter known
to the whole people, for I thought that in man and race alike there is
something called "Unity of Being," using that term as Dante used it when
he compared beauty in the _Convito_ to a perfectly proportioned human
body. My father, from whom I had learned the term, preferred a comparison
to a musical instrument so strung that if we touch a string all the
strings murmur faintly. There is not more desire, he had said, in lust
than in true love, but in true love desire awakens pity, hope, affection,
admiration, and, given appropriate circumstance, every emotion possible to
man. When I began, however, to apply this thought to the state and to
argue for a law-made balance among trades and occupations my father
displayed at once the violent free trader and propagandist of liberty. I
thought that the enemy of this unity was abstraction, meaning by
abstraction not the distinction but the isolation of occupation, or class
or faculty--

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

I knew no mediaeval cathedral, and Westminster, being a part of abhorred
London, did not interest me, but I thought constantly of Homer and Dante,
and the tombs of Mausolus and Artemisia, the great figures of King and
Queen and the lesser figures of Greek and Amazon, Centaur and Greek. I
thought that all art should be a Centaur finding in the popular lore its
back and its strong legs. I got great pleasure too from remembering that
Homer was sung, and from that tale of Dante hearing a common man sing some
stanza from _The Divine Comedy_, and from Don Quixote's meeting with some
common man that sang Ariosto. Morris had never seemed to care greatly for
any poet later than Chaucer and though I preferred Shakespeare to Chaucer
I begrudged my own preference. Had not Europe shared one mind and heart,
until both mind and heart began to break into fragments a little before
Shakespeare's birth? Music and verse began to fall apart when Chaucer
robbed verse of its speed that he might give it greater meditation, though
for another generation or so minstrels were to sing his lengthy elaborated
_Troilus and Criseyde_; painting parted from religion in the later
Renaissance that it might study effects of tangibility undisturbed; while,
that it might characterize, where it had once personified, it renounced,
in our own age, all that inherited subject matter which we have named
poetry. Presently I was indeed to number character itself among the
abstractions, encouraged by Congreve's saying that "passions are too
powerful in the fair sex to let humour," or as we say character, "have its
course." Nor have we fared better under the common daylight, for pure
reason has notoriously made but light of practical reason, and has been
made light of in its turn from that morning when Descartes discovered that
he could think better in his bed than out of it; nor needed I original
thought to discover, being so late of the school of Morris, that machinery
had not separated from handicraft wholly for the world's good, nor to
notice that the distinction of classes had become their isolation. If the
London merchants of our day competed together in writing lyrics they would
not, like the Tudor merchants, dance in the open street before the house
of the victor; nor do the great ladies of London finish their balls on the
pavement before their doors as did the great Venetian ladies, even in the
eighteenth century, conscious of an all enfolding sympathy. Doubtless
because fragments broke into ever smaller fragments we saw one another in
a light of bitter comedy, and in the arts, where now one technical element
reigned and now another, generation hated generation, and accomplished
beauty was snatched away when it had most engaged our affections. One
thing I did not foresee, not having the courage of my own thought: the
growing murderousness of the world.

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


XXIII

If abstraction had reached, or all but reached its climax, escape might be
possible for many, and if it had not, individual men might still escape.
If Chaucer's personages had disengaged themselves from Chaucer's crowd,
forgot their common goal and shrine, and after sundry magnifications
became each in turn the centre of some Elizabethan play, and had after
split into their elements and so given birth to romantic poetry, must I
reverse the cinematograph? I thought that the general movement of
literature must be such a reversal, men being there displayed in casual,
temporary, contact as at the Tabard door. I had lately read Tolstoy's
_Anna Karenina_ and thought that where his theoretical capacity had not
awakened there was such a turning back: but a nation or an individual with
great emotional intensity might follow the pilgrims as it were to some
unknown shrine, and give to all those separated elements and to all that
abstract love and melancholy, a symbolical, a mythological coherence. Not
Chaucer's rough tongued riders, but rather an ended pilgrimage, a
procession of the Gods! Arthur Symons brought back from Paris stories of
Verhaeren and Maeterlinck, and so brought me confirmation, as I thought,
and I began to announce a poetry like that of the Sufi's. I could not
endure, however, an international art, picking stories and symbols where
it pleased. Might I not, with health and good luck to aid me, create some
new _Prometheus Unbound_; Patrick or Columbkil, Oisin or Fion, in
Prometheus' stead; and, instead of Caucasus, Cro-Patric or Ben Bulben?
Have not all races had their first unity from a polytheism, that marries
them to rock and hill? We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which the
uneducated classes knew and even sang, and might we not make those stories
current among the educated classes, rediscovering for the work's sake what
I have called "the applied arts of literature," the association of
literature, that is, with music, speech, and dance; and at last, it might
be, so deepen the political passion of the nation that all, artist and
poet, craftsman and day-labourer would accept a common design? Perhaps
even these images, once created and associated with river and mountain,
might move of themselves and with some powerful, even turbulent life, like
those painted horses that trampled the rice fields of Japan.


XXIV

I used to tell the few friends to whom I could speak these secret thoughts
that I would make the attempt in Ireland but fail, for our civilization,
its elements multiplying by division like certain low forms of life, was
all-powerful; but in reality I had the wildest hopes. To-day I add to that
first conviction, to that first desire for unity, this other conviction,
long a mere opinion vaguely or intermittently apprehended: Nations, races,
and individual men are unified by an image, or bundle of related images,
symbolical or evocative of the state of mind, which is of all states of
mind not impossible, the most difficult to that man, race, or nation;
because only the greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without
despair, rouses the will to full intensity.

A powerful class by terror, rhetoric, and organized sentimentality, may
drive their people to war but the day draws near when they cannot keep
them there; and how shall they face the pure nations of the East when the
day comes to do it with but equal arms? I had seen Ireland in my own time
turn from the bragging rhetoric and gregarious humour of O'Connell's
generation and school, and offer herself to the solitary and proud Parnell
as to her anti-self, buskin following hard on sock, and I had begun to
hope, or to half hope, that we might be the first in Europe to seek unity
as deliberately as it had been sought by theologian, poet, sculptor,
architect, from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. Doubtless we must
seek it differently, no longer considering it convenient to epitomize all
human knowledge, but find it we well might could we first find philosophy
and a little passion.




BOOK II

IRELAND AFTER THE FALL OF PARNELL





_IRELAND AFTER THE FALL OF PARNELL_


I

A couple of years before the death of Parnell, I had wound up my
introduction to those selections from the Irish novelists with the
prophecy of an intellectual movement at the first lull in politics, and
now I wished to fulfil my prophecy. I did not put it in that way, for I
preferred to think that the sudden emotion that now came to me, the sudden
certainty that Ireland was to be like soft wax for years to come, was a
moment of supernatural insight. How could I tell, how can I tell even now?

There was a little Irish Society of young people, clerks, shop boys, and
shop girls, called "The Southwark Irish Literary Society," and it had
ceased to meet because the girls got the giggles when any member of the
Committee got up to speak. Every member of it had said all he had to say
many times over. I had given them a lecture about the falling asunder of
the human mind, as an opening flower falls asunder, and all had professed
admiration because I had made such a long speech without quotation or
narrative; and now I invited the Committee to my father's house at Bedford
Park, and there proposed a new organization, "The Irish Literary Society."
T. W. Rolleston came to that first meeting, and it was because he had much
tact, and a knowledge of the technical business of committees, that a
society was founded which was joined by every London-Irish author and
journalist. In a few months somebody had written its history, and
published that history, illustrated by our portraits, at a shilling. When
it was published I was in Dublin, founding a society there called "The
National Literary Society," and affiliating it with certain Young Ireland
Societies in country towns which seemed anxious to accept its leadership.
I had definite plans; I wanted to create an Irish Theatre; I was finishing
my _Countess Cathleen_ in its first meagre version, and thought of a
travelling company to visit our country branches; but before that there
must be a popular imaginative literature. I arranged with Mr. Fisher Unwin
and his reader, Mr Edward Garnett--a personal friend of mine--that when
our organization was complete Mr Fisher Unwin was to publish for it a
series of books at a shilling each. I told only one man of this
arrangement, for after I had made my plans I heard an alarming rumour. Old
Sir Charles Gavan Duffy was coming from Australia to start an Irish
publishing house, and publish a series of books, and I did not expect to
agree with him, but knew that I must not seek a quarrel. The two societies
were necessary because their lectures must take the place of an educated
popular press, which we had not, and have not now, and create a standard
of criticism. Irish literature had fallen into contempt; no educated man
ever bought an Irish book; in Dublin Professor Dowden, the one man of
letters with an international influence, was accustomed to say that he
knew an Irish book by its smell, because he had once seen some books whose
binding had been fastened together by rotten glue; and Standish O'Grady's
last book upon ancient Irish history--a book rather wild, rather too
speculative, but forestalling later research--had not been reviewed by any
periodical or newspaper in England or in Ireland.

At first I had great success, for I brought with me a list of names
written down by some member of the Southwark Irish Literary Society, and
for six weeks went hither and thither appealing and persuading. My first
conversation was over a butter-tub in some Dublin back street, and the man
agreed with me at once; everybody agreed with me; all felt that something
must be done, but nobody knew what. Perhaps they did not understand me,
perhaps I kept back my full thoughts, perhaps they only seemed to listen;
it was enough that I had a plan, and was determined about it. When I went
to lecture in a provincial town, a workman's wife, who wrote patriotic
stories in some weekly newspaper, invited me to her house, and I found all
her children in their Sunday best. She made a little speech, very formal
and very simple, in which she said that what she wrote had no merit, but
that it paid for her children's schooling; and she finished her speech by
telling her children never to forget that they had seen me. One man
compared me to Thomas Davis, another said I could organise like Davitt,
and I thought to succeed as they did, and as rapidly. I did not examine
this applause, nor the true thoughts of those I met, nor the general
condition of the country, but I examined myself a great deal, and was
puzzled at myself. I knew that I was shy and timid, that I would often
leave some business undone, or purchase unmade, because I shrank from
facing a strange office or a shop a little grander than usual, and yet,
here was I delightedly talking to strange people every day. It was many
years before I understood that I had surrendered myself to the chief
temptation of the artist, creation without toil. Metrical composition is
always very difficult to me, nothing is done upon the first day, not one
rhyme is in its place; and when at last the rhymes begin to come, the
first rough draft of a six-line stanza takes the whole day. At that time I
had not formed a style, and sometimes a six-line stanza would take several
days, and not seem finished even then; and I had not learnt, as I have
now, to put it all out of my head before night, and so the last night was
generally sleepless, and the last day a day of nervous strain. But now I
had found the happiness that Shelley found when he tied a pamphlet to a
fire balloon.


II

At first I asked no help from prominent persons, and when some clerk or
shop-assistant would say "Dr So-and-so or Professor So-and-so will have
nothing to do with us" I would answer, "When we prove we can gather sheep
shepherds will come." Presently, come they did, old, middle-aged, or but
little older than myself, but all with some authority in their town: John
O'Leary, John F. Taylor, and Douglas Hyde, and Standish O'Grady, and of
these much presently; Dr. Sigerson who has picked a quarrel with me and of
whom I shall say nothing that he may not pick another; Count Plunkett,
Sinn Feiner of late and Minister of Dail Eireann; Dr. Coffey, now head of
the National University; George Coffey, later on Curator of the Irish
Antiquities at the Museum of the Royal Dublin Society; Patrick J. McCall,
poet and publican of Patrick Street, and later member of corporation;
Richard Ashe King, novelist and correspondent of _Truth_, a gentle,
intelligent person, typical of nothing; and others, known or unknown. We
were now important, had our Committee room in the Mansion House, and I
remember that the old Mansion House butler recognised our importance so
fully, that he took us into his confidence once in every week, while we
sat waiting for a quorum. He had seen many Lord Mayors, and remembered
those very superior Lord Mayors who lived before the extension of the
municipal franchise, and spoke of his present masters with contempt. Among
our persons of authority, and among the friends and followers they had
brought, there were many who at that time found it hard to refuse if
anybody offered for sale a pepper-pot shaped to suggest a round tower with
a wolf-dog at its foot, and who would have felt it inappropriate to
publish an Irish book, that had not harp and shamrock and green cover, so
completely did their minds move amid Young Ireland images and metaphors,
and I thought with alarm of the coming of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy; while
here and there I noticed that smooth, smiling face that we discover for
the first time in certain pictures by Velasquez; all that hungry,
mediaeval speculation vanished, that had worn the faces of El Greco and in
its place a self-complacent certainty that all had been arranged, provided
for, set out in clear type, in manual of devotion or of doctrine. These,
however, were no true disciples of Young Ireland, for Young Ireland had
sought a nation unified by political doctrine, a subservient art and
letters aiding and abetting. The movement of thought, which had in the
'fifties and 'fourties at Paris and London and Boston, filled literature,
and especially poetical literature with curiosities about science, about
history about politics, with moral purpose and educational
fervour--abstractions all--had created a new instrument for Irish
politics, a method of writing that took its poetical style from Campbell,
Scott, Macauley, and Beranger, with certain elements from Gaelic, and its
prose style--in John Mitchell, the only Young Ireland prose writer who had
a style at all--from Carlyle. To recommend this method of writing as
literature without much reservation and discrimination I contended was to
be deceived or to practice deception. If one examined some country
love-song, one discovered that it was not written by a man in love, but by
a patriot who wanted to prove that we did indeed possess, in the words of
Daniel O'Connell, "the finest peasantry upon earth." Yet one well-known
anthology was introduced by the assertion that such love-poetry was
superior to "affected and artificial" English love-songs like "Drink to me
only with thine eyes"--"affected and artificial," the very words used by
English Victorians who wrote for the newspapers to discourage capricious,
personal writing. However, the greater number even of those who thought
our famous anthology, _The Spirit of the Nation_, except for three or four
songs, but good election rhyme, looked upon it much as certain enlightened
believers look upon the story of Adam and Eve and the apple, or that of
Jonah and the whale, which they do not question publicly, because such
stories are an integral part of religion to simple men and women. I, upon
the other hand, being in the intemperance of my youth, denied, as publicly
as possible, merit to all but a few ballads translated from Gaelic
writers, or written out of a personal and generally tragic experience.


III

The greater number of those who joined my society had come under the seal
of Young Ireland at that age when we are all mere wax; the more ambitious
had gone daily to some public library to read the bound volumes of Thomas
Davis's old newspaper, and tried to see the world as Davis saw it. No
philosophic speculation, no economic question of the day, disturbed an
orthodoxy which, unlike that of religion had no philosophic history, and
the religious bigot was glad that it should be so. Some few of the younger
men were impatient, and it was these younger men, more numerous in the
London than in the Dublin Society, who gave me support; and we had been
joined by a few older men--some personal friends of my own or my
father--who had only historical interest in Thomas Davis and his school.
Young Ireland's prose had been as much occupied with Irish virtue, and
more with the invader's vices, than its poetry, and we were soon mired and
sunk into such problems as to whether Cromwell was altogether black, the
heads of the old Irish clans altogether white, the Danes mere robbers and
church burners (they tell me at Rosses Point that the Danes keep to this
day the maps of the Rosses fields they were driven out of in the 9th
century, and plot their return) and as to whether we were or were not once
the greatest orators in the world. All the past had been turned into a
melodrama with Ireland for blameless hero and poet, novelist and historian
had but one object, that we should hiss the villain, and only a minority
doubted that the greater the talent the greater the hiss. It was all the
harder to substitute for that melodrama a nobler form of art, because
there really had been, however different in their form, villain and
victim; yet fight that rancour I must, and if I had not made some head
against it in 1892 and 1893 it might have silenced in 1907 John Synge, the
greatest dramatic genius of Ireland. I am writing of disputes that
happened many years ago, that led in later years to much bitterness, and I
may exaggerate their immediate importance and violence, but I think I am
right in saying that disputes about the merits of Young Ireland so often
interrupted our discussion of rules, or of the merit of this or that
lecturer, and were so aggravated and crossed by the current wrangle
between Parnellite and anti-Parnellite that they delayed our public
appearance for a year. Other excited persons, doubtless, seeing that we
are of a race intemperate of speech, had looked up from their rancours to
the dead Lord Mayors upon the wall, superior men whose like we shall not
see again, but never, I think, from rancours so seemingly academic. I was
preparing the way without knowing it for a great satirist and master of
irony, for master works stir vaguely in many before they grow definite in
one man's mind, and to help me I had already flitting through my head,
jostling other ideas and so not yet established there, a conviction that
we should satirize rather than praise, that original virtue arises from
the discovery of evil. If we were, as I had dreaded, declamatory, loose,
and bragging, we were but the better fitted, that once declared and
measured, to create unyielding personality, manner at once cold and
passionate, daring long premeditated act; and if bitter beyond all the
people of the world, we might yet lie, that too declared and measured,
nearest the honeyed comb:--

  "Like the clangour of a bell
  Sweet and harsh, harsh and sweet,
  That is how he learnt so well
  To take the roses for his meat."


IV

There were others with followers of their own, and too old or indifferent
to join our society. Old men who had never accepted Young Ireland, or
middle-aged men kept by some family tradition to the school of thought
before it arose, to the Ireland of Daniel O'Connell and of Lever and of
Thomas Moore, convivial Ireland with the traditional tear and smile. They
sang Moore's _Melodies_, admitted no poetry but his, and resented Young
Ireland's political objections to it as much as my generation's objection
to its artificial and easy rhythm; one, an old commercial traveller, a
Gaelic scholar who kept an erect head and the animal vigour of youth,
frequented the houses of our leading men, and would say in a loud voice,
"Thomas Moore, sir, is the greatest heroic poet of ancient or modern
times." I think it was the Fire Worshippers in _Lalla Rookh_ that he
preferred to Homer; or, jealous for the music of the _Melodies_, denounce
Wagner, then at the top of his vogue; "I would run ten miles through a bog
to escape him," he would cry. Then there was a maker of tombstones of whom
we had heard much but had seen little, an elderly fighting man, lately
imprisoned for beating a wine-merchant. A young member of the London
society, afterwards librarian to the National University, D. J. O'Donohue,
who had published a dictionary of the Irish poets, containing, I think,
two thousand names, had come to Dublin and settled there in a fit of
patriotism. He had been born in London, and spoke the most Cockney dialect
imaginable, and had picked up--probably from London critics--a dislike for
the poetry of Thomas Moore. The tombstone maker invited him to tea, and he
arrived with a bundle of books, which he laid beside him upon the table.
During tea he began expounding that dislike of his; his host was silent,
but he went on, for he was an obstinate little man. Presently the
tombstone-maker rose, and having said solemnly, "I have never permitted
that great poet to be slandered in my presence," seized his guest by the
back of the collar, and flung him out into the street, and after that
flung out the books one after another. Meanwhile the guest--as he himself
told the tale--stood in the middle of the street repeating, "Nice way to
treat a man in your own 'ouse."


V

I shared a lodging full of old books and magazines, covered with dirt and
dust, with the head of the Fenian Brotherhood, John O'Leary. "In this
country," he had said to me, "a man must have upon his side the Church or
the Fenians, and you will never have the Church." He had been converted to
nationality by the poems of Davis, and he wished for some analogous
movement to that of Davis, but he had known men of letters, had been the
friend of Whistler, and knew the faults of the old literature. We had made
him the President of our Society, and without him I could do nothing, for
his long imprisonment and longer exile, his magnificent appearance, and,
above all, the fact that he alone had personality, a point of view not
made for the crowd's sake, but for self-expression, made him magnetic to
my generation. He and I had long been friends, he had stayed with us at
Bedford Park, and my father had painted his portrait, but if I had not
shared his lodging he would have opposed me. He was an old man, and my
point of view was not that of his youth, and it often took me half the day
to make him understand--so suspicious he was of all innovation--some
simple thing that he would presently support with ardour. He had grown up
in a European movement when the revolutionist thought that he, above all
men, must appeal to the highest motive, be guided by some ideal principle,
be a little like Cato or like Brutus, and he had lived to see the change
Dostoievsky examined in _The Possessed_. Men who had been of his
party--and oftener their sons--preached assassination and the bomb; and,
worst of all, the majority of his countrymen followed after constitutional
politicians who practised opportunism, and had, as he believed, such low
morals that they would lie, or publish private correspondence, if it might
advance their cause. He would split every practical project into its
constituent elements, like a clerical casuist, to find if it might not
lead into some moral error; but, were the project revolutionary, he would
sometimes temper condemnation with pity. Though he would cast off his
oldest acquaintance did he suspect him of rubbing shoulders with some
carrier of bombs, I have heard him say of a man who blew himself up in an
attempt to blow up Westminster Bridge, "He was not a bad man, but he had
too great a moral nature for his intellect, not that he lacked intellect."
He did not explain, but he meant, I suppose, that the spectacle of
injustice might madden a good man more quickly than some common man. Such
men were of his own sort, though gone astray, but the constitutional
politicians he had been fighting all his life, and all they did displeased
him. It was not that he thought their aim wrong, or that they could not
achieve it; he had accepted Gladstone's Home Rule Bill; but that in his
eyes they degraded manhood. "If England has been brought to do us justice
by such men," he would say, "that is not because of our strength, but
because of her weakness." He had a particular hatred for the rush of
emotion that followed the announcement of Gladstone's conversion, for what
was called "The Union of Hearts," and derided its sentimentality; "Nations
may respect one another," he would say, "they cannot love." His ancestors
had probably kept little shops, or managed little farms in County
Tipperary, yet he hated democracy, though he never used the word either
for praise or blame, with more than feudal hatred. "No gentleman can be a
socialist," he said, and then, with a thoughtful look, "He might be an
anarchist." He had no philosophy, but things distressed his palate, and
two of those things were International propaganda and the Organised State,
and Socialism aimed at both, nor could he speak such words as
"philanthropy," "humanitarianism," without showing by his tone of voice
that they offended him. The Church pleased him little better; there was an
old Fenian quarrel there, and he would say, "My religion is the old
Persian, to pull the bow and tell the truth." He had no
self-consciousness, no visible pride, and would have hated anything that
could have been called a gesture, was indeed scarce artist enough to
invent a gesture; yet he would never speak of the hardship of his prison
life--though abundantly enough of its humours--and once, when I pressed
him, replied, "I was in the hands of my enemy, why should I complain?" A
few years ago I heard that the Governor of the prison had asked why he did
not report some unnecessary discomfort, and O'Leary had said, "I did not
come here to complain." Now that he is dead, I wish that I could question
him, and perhaps discover whether in early youth he had come across some
teacher who had expounded Roman virtue, but I doubt if I would have learnt
anything, for I think the wax had long forgotten the seal--if seal there
were. The seal was doubtless made before the eloquent humanitarian
'forties and 'fifties, and was one kind with that that had moulded the
youthful mind of Savage Landor. Stephens, the founder of Fenianism, had
discovered him searching the second-hand bookstalls for rare editions, and
enrolled him in his organization. "You have no chance of success," O'Leary
had said "but it will be good for the _morale_ of the country" (_morale_
was his great word), "and I will join on the condition that I am never
asked to enrol anybody." He still searched the second-hand bookstalls, and
had great numbers of books, especially of Irish history and literature,
and when I, exhausted over our morning's casuistry, would sit down to my
day's work (I was writing _The Secret Rose_) he would make his tranquil
way to the Dublin Quays. In the evening, over his coffee, he would write
passages for his memoirs upon postcards and odd scraps of paper, taking
immense trouble with every word and comma, for the great work must be a
masterpiece of style. When it was finished, it was unreadable, being dry,
abstract, and confused; no picture had ever passed before his mind's eye.
He was a victim, I think, of a movement where opinions stick men together,
or keep them apart, like a kind of bird lime, and without any relation to
their natural likes and tastes, and where men of rich nature must give
themselves up to an irritation which they no longer recognise because it
is always present. I often wonder why he gave me his friendship, why it
was he who found almost all the subscribers for my _Wanderings of Usheen_,
and why he now supported me in all I did, for how could he like verses
that were all picture, all emotion, all association, all mythology? He
could not have approved my criticism either, for I exalted Mask and Image
above the 18th century logic which he loved, and set experience before
observation, emotion before fact. Yet he would say, "I have only three
followers, Taylor, Yeats, and Rolleston," and presently he cast out
Rolleston--"Davitt wants to convert thousands, but I want two or three." I
think that perhaps it was because he no more wished to strengthen Irish
Nationalism by second-rate literature than by second-rate morality, and
was content that we agreed in that. "There are things a man must not do to
save a Nation," he had once told me, and when I asked what things, had
said, "To cry in public," and I think it probable that he would have
added, if pressed, "To write oratorical or insincere verse."

O'Leary's movements and intonations were full of impulse, but John F.
Taylor's voice in private discussion had no emotional quality except in
the expression of scorn; if he moved an arm it moved from the shoulder or
elbow alone, and when he walked he moved from the waist only, and seemed
an automaton, a wooden soldier, as if he had no life that was not dry and
abstract. Except at moments of public oratory, he lacked all personality,
though when one saw him respectful and gentle with O'Leary, as with some
charming woman, one saw that he felt its fascination. In letters, or in
painting, it repelled him unless it were harsh and obvious, and,
therefore, though his vast erudition included much art and letters, he
lacked artistic feeling, and judged everything by the moral sense. He had
great ambition, and had he joined some established party, or found some
practicable policy, he might have been followed, might have produced even
some great effect, but he must have known that in defeat no man would
follow him, as they followed O'Leary, as they followed Parnell. His
oratory was noble, strange, even beautiful, at moments the greatest I have
ever listened to; but, the speech over, where there had been, as it
seemed, so little of himself, all coming from beyond himself, we saw
precisely as before an ungainly body in unsuitable, badly-fitting clothes,
and heard an excited voice speaking ill of this man or that other. We knew
that he could never give us that one price we would accept, that he would
never find a practicable policy; that no party would admit, no government
negotiate with, a man notorious for a temper, that, if it gave him genius,
could at times carry him to the edge of insanity.

Born in some country town, the son of some little watchmaker, he had been
a shop assistant, put himself to college and the bar, learned to speak at
temperance meetings and Young Ireland societies, and was now a Queen's
Counsel famous for his defence of country criminals, whose cases had
seemed hopeless--Taylor's boys, their neighbours called them or they
called themselves. He had shaped his style and his imagination from
Carlyle, the chief inspirer of self-educated men in the 'eighties and
early 'nineties. "I prefer Emerson's _Oversoul_," the Condalkin cobbler
said to me, "but I always read Carlyle when I am wild with the
neighbours"; but he used his master's style, as Mitchell had done before,
to abase what his master loved, to exalt what his master scorned. His
historical erudition seemed as vast as that of York Powell, but his
interests were not Powell's, for he had no picture before the mind's eye,
and had but one object--a plea of not guilty--entered in his country's
name before a jury which he believed to be packed. O'Leary cared nothing
for his country's glory, its individuality alone seemed important in his
eyes; he was like some man, who serves a woman all his life without asking
whether she be good or bad, wise or foolish; but Taylor cared for nothing
else; he was so much O'Leary's disciple that he would say in conversation,
"We are demoralised, what case for change if we are not?" for O'Leary
admitted no ground for reform outside the moral life, but when he spoke to
the great plea he would make no admission. He spoke to it in the most
obscure places, in little halls in back streets where the white-washed
walls are foul with grease from many heads, before some audience of
medical students or of shop assistants, for he was like a man under a
curse, compelled to hide his genius, and compelled to show in conspicuous
places his ill judgment and his temper.

His distaste for myself, broken by occasional tolerance, in so far as it
was not distaste for an imagination that seemed to him aesthetic rather
than ethical, was because I had published Irish folk-lore in English
reviews to the discredit, as he thought, of the Irish peasantry, and
because, England within earshot, I found fault with the Young Ireland
prose and poetry. He would have hated _The Playboy of the Western World_,
and his death a little before its performance was fortunate for Synge and
myself. His articles are nothing, and his one historical work, a life of
Hugh O'Neill, is almost nothing, lacking the living voice; and now, though
a most formidable man, he is forgotten, but for the fading memory of a few
friends, and for what an enemy has written here and elsewhere. Did not
Leonardo da Vinci warn the imaginative man against pre-occupation with
arts that cannot survive his death?


VI

When Carleton was dying in 1870, he said there would be nothing more about
Irish Literature for twenty years, and his words were fulfilled, for the
land war had filled Ireland with its bitterness; but imagination had begun
to stir again. I had the same confidence in the future that Lady Gregory
and I had eight or nine years later, when we founded an Irish Theatre,
though there were neither, as it seemed, plays or players. There were
already a few known men to start my popular series, and to keep it popular
until the men, whose names I did not know, had learnt to express
themselves. I had met Dr. Douglas Hyde when I lived in Dublin, and he was
still an undergraduate. I have a memory of meeting in college rooms for
the first time a very dark young man, who filled me with surprise, partly
because he had pushed a snuffbox towards me, and partly because there was
something about his vague serious eyes, as in his high cheek bones, that
suggested a different civilization, a different race. I had set him down
as a peasant, and wondered what brought him to college, and to a
Protestant college, but somebody explained that he belonged to some branch
of the Hydes of Castle Hyde, and that he had a Protestant Rector for
father. He had much frequented the company of old countrymen, and had so
acquired the Irish language, and his taste for snuff, and for moderate
quantities of a detestable species of illegal whiskey distilled from the
potato by certain of his neighbours. He had already--though intellectual
Dublin knew nothing of it--considerable popularity as a Gaelic poet,
mowers and reapers singing his songs from Donegal to Kerry. Years
afterwards I was to stand at his side and listen to Galway mowers singing
his Gaelic words without knowing whose words they sang. It is so in India,
where peasants sing the words of the great poet of Bengal without knowing
whose words they sing, and it must often be so where the old imaginative
folk life is undisturbed, and it is so amongst schoolboys who hand their
story books to one another without looking at the title page to read the
author's name. Here and there, however, the peasants had not lost the
habit of Gaelic criticism, picked up, perhaps, from the poets who took
refuge among them after the ruin of the great Catholic families, from men
like that O'Rahilly, who cries in a translation from the Gaelic that is
itself a masterpiece of concentrated passion--

  "The periwinkle and the tough dog-fish
  Towards evening time have got into my dish."

An old rascal was kept in food and whiskey for a fortnight by some
Connaught village under the belief that he was Craoibhin Aoibhin, "the
pleasant little branch," as Doctor Hyde signed himself in the newspapers
where the villagers had found his songs. The impostor's thirst only
strengthened belief in his genius, for the Gaelic song-writers have had
the infirmities of Robert Burns, "It is not the drink but the company,"
one of the last has sung. Since that first meeting Doctor Hyde and I had
corresponded, and he had sent me in manuscript the best tale in my _Faery
and Folk Tales_, and I think I had something to do with the London
publication of his _Beside the Fire_, a book written in the beautiful
English of Connaught, which is Gaelic in idiom and Tudor in vocabulary,
and indeed, the first book to use it in the expression of emotion and
romance, for Carleton and his school had turned it into farce. Henley had
praised him, and York Powell had said, "If he goes on as he has begun, he
will be the greatest folk-loreist who has ever lived"; and I know no first
book of verse of our time that is at once so romantic and so concrete as
his Gaelic _Abhla de'n Craoibh_; but in a few years Dublin was to laugh
him, or rail him, out of his genius. He had no critical capacity, having
indeed for certain years the uncritical folk-genius, as no educated Irish
or Englishman has ever had it, writing out of an imitative sympathy like
that of a child catching a tune and leaving it to chance to call the tune;
and the failure of our first attempt to create a modern Irish literature
permitted the ruin of that genius. He was to create a great popular
movement, far more important in its practical results than any movement I
could have made, no matter what my luck, but, being neither quarrelsome
nor vain, he will not be angry if I say--for the sake of those who come
after us--that I mourn for the "greatest folk-loreist who ever lived,"
and for the great poet who died in his youth. The Harps and Pepperpots got
him and the Harps and Pepperpots kept him till he wrote in our common
English--"It must be either English or Irish," said some patriotic editor,
Young Ireland practice in his head--that needs such sifting that he who
would write it vigorously must write it like a learned language, and took
for his model the newspaper upon his breakfast table, and became for no
base reason beloved by multitudes who should never have heard his name
till their schoolmasters showed it upon his tomb. That very incapacity for
criticism made him the cajoler of crowds, and of individual men and women;
"He should not be in the world at all," said one admiring elderly woman,
"or doing the world's work"; and for certain years young Irish women were
to display his pseudonym, "Craoibhin Aoibhin," in gilt letters upon their
hat bands.

  "Dear Craoibhin Aoibhin,......impart to us,
  We'll keep the secret, a new trick to please;
  Is there a bridle for this Proteus
  That turns and changes like his draughty seas,
  Or is there none, most popular of men,
  But, when they mock us, that we mock again?"


VII

Standish O'Grady, upon the other hand, was at once all passion and all
judgment. And yet those who knew him better than I assured me he could
find quarrel in a straw; and I did know that he had quarrelled a few years
back with Jack Nettleship. Nettleship's account had been, "My mother
cannot endure the God of the Old Testament, but likes Jesus Christ;
whereas I like the God of the Old Testament, and cannot endure Jesus
Christ; and we have got into the way of quarrelling about it at lunch; and
once, when O'Grady lunched with us, he said it was the most disgraceful
spectacle he had ever seen, and walked out." Indeed, I wanted him among my
writers, because of his quarrels, for, having much passion and little
rancour, the more he quarrelled, the nobler, the more patched with
metaphor, the more musical his style became, and if he were in his turn
attacked, he knew a trick of speech that made us murmur, "We do it wrong,
being so majestical, to offer it the show of violence." Sometimes he
quarrelled most where he loved most. A Unionist in politics, a
leader-writer on _The Daily Express_, the most Conservative paper in
Ireland, hater of every form of democracy, he had given all his heart to
the smaller Irish landowners, to whom he belonged, and with whom his
childhood had been spent, and for them he wrote his books, and would soon
rage over their failings in certain famous passages that many men would
repeat to themselves like poets' rhymes. All round us people talked or
wrote for victory's sake, and were hated for their victories--but here was
a man whose rage was a swan-song over all that he had held most dear, and
to whom for that very reason every Irish imaginative writer owed a portion
of his soul. In his unfinished _History of Ireland_ he had made the old
Irish heroes, Fion, and Oisin, and Cuchullan, alive again, taking them,
for I think he knew no Gaelic, from the dry pages of O'Curry and his
school, and condensing and arranging, as he thought Homer would have
arranged and condensed. Lady Gregory has told the same tales, but keeping
closer to the Gaelic text, and with greater powers of arrangement and a
more original style, but O'Grady was the first, and we had read him in our
'teens. I think that, had I succeeded, a popular audience could have
changed him little, and that his genius would have stayed, as it had been
shaped by his youth in some provincial society, and that to the end he
would have shown his best in occasional thrusts and parries. But I do
think that if, instead of that one admirable little book _The Bog of
Stars_, we had got all his histories and imaginative works into the hands
of our young men, he might have brought the imagination of Ireland nearer
the Image and the honeycomb.

Lionel Johnson was to be our critic, and above all our theologian, for he
had been converted to Catholicism, and his orthdoxy, too learned to
question, had accepted all that we did, and most of our plans. Historic
Catholicism, with all its counsels and its dogmas, stirred his passion
like the beauty of a mistress, and the unlearned parish priests who
thought good literature or good criticism dangerous were in his eyes "all
heretics." He belonged to a family that had called itself Irish some
generations back, and its recent English generations but enabled him to
see as one single sacred tradition Irish nationality and Catholic
religion. How should he fail to know the Holy Land? Had he not been in
Egypt? He had joined our London Irish Literary Society, attended its
committee meetings, and given lectures in London, in Dublin, and in
Belfast, on Irish novelists and Irish poetry, reading his lectures always,
and yet affecting his audience as I, with my spoken lectures, could not,
perhaps because Ireland had still the shape it had received from the
eighteenth century, and so felt the dignity, not the artifice, of his
elaborate periods. He was very little, and at a first glance he seemed
but a schoolboy of fifteen. I remember saying one night at the Rhymers',
when he spoke of passing safely, almost nightly, through Seven Dials, then
a dangerous neighbourhood, "Who would expect to find anything in your
pockets but a pegtop and a piece of string?" But one never thought of his
small stature when he spoke or read. He had the delicate strong features
of a certain filleted head of a Greek athlete in the British Museum, an
archaistic Graeco-Roman copy of a masterpiece of the fourth century, and
that resemblance seemed symbolic of the austere nobility of his verse. He
was now in his best years, writing with great ease and power; neither I,
nor, I think, any other, foresaw his tragedy.

He suffered from insomnia, and some doctor, while he was still at the
University, had recommended alcohol, and he had, in a vain hope of sleep,
increased the amount, as Rossetti had increased his doses of chloral, and
now he drank for drinking's sake. He drank a great deal too much, and,
though nothing could, it seemed, disturb his calm or unsteady his hand or
foot, his doctrine, after a certain number of glasses, would become more
ascetic, more contemptuous of all that we call human life. I have heard
him, after four or five glasses of wine, praise some church father who
freed himself from sexual passion by a surgical operation, and deny with
scorn, and much historical evidence, that a gelded man lost anything of
intellectual power. Even without stimulant his theology conceded nothing
to human weakness, and I can remember his saying with energy, "I wish
those people who deny the eternity of punishment could realise their
unspeakable vulgarity."

Now that I know his end, I see him creating, to use a favourite adjective
of his, "marmorean" verse, and believing the most terrible doctrines to
keep down his own turbulence. One image of that stay in Dublin is so clear
before me that it has blotted out most other images of that time. He is
sitting at a lodging-house table, which I have just left at three in the
morning, and round him lie or sit in huddled attitudes half-a-dozen men in
various states of intoxication: and he is looking straight before him with
head erect, and one hand resting upon the table. As I reach the stairs I
hear him say, in a clear, unshaken voice, "I believe in nothing but the
Holy Roman Catholic Church." He sometimes spoke of drink as something
which he could put aside at any moment, and his friends believed, and I
think he liked us to believe, that he would shortly enter a monastery. Did
he deceive us deliberately? Did he himself already foresee the moment when
he would write _The Dark Angel_? I am almost certain that he did, for he
had already written _Mystic and Cavalier_, where the historical setting
is, I believe, but masquerade.

  "Go from me: I am one of those, who fall.
  What! hath no cold wind swept your heart at all,
  In my sad company? Before the end,
        Go from me, dear my friend!

  Yours are the victories of light: your feet
  Rest from good toil, where rest is brave and sweet.
  But after warfare in a mourning gloom
        I rest in clouds of doom.

       *       *       *       *       *

  Seek with thine eyes to pierce this crystal sphere:
  Canst read a fate there, prosperous and clear?
  Only the mists, only the weeping clouds:
        Dimness, and airy shrouds.

       *       *       *       *       *

  O rich and sounding voices of the air!
  Interpreters and prophets of despair:
  Priests of a fearful sacrament! I come
        To make with you my home."


VIII

Sir Charles Gavan Duffy arrived. He brought with him much manuscript, the
private letters of a Young Ireland poetess, a dry but informing
unpublished historical essay by Davis, and an unpublished novel by William
Carleton, into the middle of which he had dropped a hot coal, so that
nothing remained but the borders of every page. He hired a young man to
read him, after dinner, Carlyle's _Heroes and Hero-Worship_, and before
dinner was gracious to all our men of authority and especially to our
Harps and Pepperpots. Taylor compared him to Odysseus returning to Ithaca,
and every newspaper published his biography. He was a white-haired old
man, who had written the standard history of Young Ireland, had emigrated
to Australia, had been the first Australian Federalist, and later Prime
Minister, but, in all his writings, in which there is so much honesty, so
little rancour, there is not one sentence that has any meaning when
separated from its place in argument or narrative, not one distinguished
because of its thought or music. One imagined his youth in some little
gaunt Irish town, where no building or custom is revered for its
antiquity; and there speaking a language where no word, even in solitude,
is ever spoken slowly and carefully because of emotional implication; and
of his manhood of practical politics, of the dirty piece of orange-peel in
the corner of the stairs as one climbs up to some newspaper office; of
public meetings where it would be treacherous amid so much geniality to
speak, or even to think of anything that might cause a moment's
misunderstanding in one's own party. No argument of mine was intelligible
to him, and I would have been powerless, but that fifty years ago he had
made an enemy, and though that enemy was long dead, his school remained.
He had attacked, why or with what result I do not remember, the only Young
Ireland politician who had music and personality, though rancorous and
devil-possessed. At some public meeting of ours, where he spoke amid great
applause, in smooth, Gladstonian periods, of his proposed Irish publishing
firm, one heard faint hostile murmurs, and at last a voice cried,
"Remember Newry," and a voice answered, "There is a grave there!" and a
part of the audience sang, "Here's to John Mitchell that is gone, boys,
gone; Here's to the friends that are gone." The meeting over, a group of
us, indignant that the meeting we had called for his welcome should have
contained those malcontents, gathered about him to apologize. He had
written a pamphlet, he explained: he would give us copies. We would see
that he was in the right, how badly Mitchell had behaved. But in Ireland
personality, if it be but harsh and hard, has lovers, and some of us, I
think, may have gone home muttering, "How dare he be in the right if
Mitchell is in the wrong?"


IX

He wanted "to complete the Young Ireland movement"--to do all that had
been left undone because of the Famine, or the death of Davis, or his own
emigration; and all the younger men were upon my side in resisting that.
They might not want the books I wanted, but they did want books written by
their own generation, and we began to struggle with him over the control
of the company. Taylor became very angry, and I can understand what I
looked like in his eyes, when I remember Edwin Ellis's seriously-intended
warning, "It is bad manners for a man under thirty to permit himself to be
in the right." But John O'Leary supported me throughout.

When Gavin Duffy had gone to London to draw up articles of association for
his company, for which he had found many shareholders in Dublin, the
dispute became very fierce. One night members of the general public
climbed the six flights of stairs to our committee room, now no longer in
the Mansion House, and found seats for themselves just behind our chairs.
We were all too angry to send them away, or even to notice their presence,
for I was accused of saying at a public meeting in Cork, "Our books," when
I should have said, "Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's books." I was not Taylor's
match with the spoken word, and barely matched him with the written word.
At twenty-seven or twenty-eight I was immature and clumsy, and O'Leary's
support was capricious, for, being but a spectator of life, he would
desert me if I used a bad argument, and would not return till I found a
good one; and our chairman, Dr. Hyde, "most popular of men," sat dreaming
of his old white cockatoo in far-away Roscommon. Our very success had been
a misfortune, for an opposition which had been literary and political, now
that it had spread to the general public, brought religious prejudice to
its aid. Suddenly, when the company seemed all but established, and a
scheme had been thought out which gave some representation on its
governing board to contemporary Irish writers, Gavan Duffy produced a
letter from Archbishop Walsh, and threw the project up. The letter had
warned him that after his death the company would fall under a dangerous
influence. At this moment the always benevolent friend, to whom I had
explained in confidence, when asking his support, my arrangements with my
publisher, went to Gavan Duffy and suggested that they should together
offer Mr Fisher Unwin a series of Irish books, and Mr Fisher Unwin and his
reader accepted the series under the belief that it was my project that
they accepted. I went to London to find the contract signed, and that all
I could do was to get two sub-editors appointed, responsible to the two
societies. Two or three good books were published, especially Dr. Hyde's
_Short History of Gaelic Literature_, and Standish O'Grady's _Bog of
Stars_; but the series was killed by its first volume, Thomas Davis's dry
but informing historical essay. So important had our movement seemed that
ten thousand copies had been sold before anybody had time to read it, and
then came a dead stop.

Gavan Duffy knew nothing of my plans, and so was guiltless, and my friend
had heard me discuss many things that evening. I had perhaps dispraised
the humanitarian Stephen Phillips, already in his first vogue, and praised
Francis Thompson, but half-rescued from his gutter; or flouted his belief
in the perpetual marriage of genius and virtue by numbering the vices of
famous men; this man's venery, that man's drink. He could not be expected
to remember that where I had said so much of no account, I said one
thing, and he had made no reply, that I thought of great account. He died
a few months ago, and it would have surprised and shocked him if any man
had told him that he was unforgiven; had he not forgotten all about it
long ago? A German doctor has said that if we leave an umbrella at a
friend's house it is because we have a sub-conscious desire to re-visit
that house; and he had perhaps a sub-conscious desire that my too
tumultuous generation should not have its say.


X

I was at Sligo when I received a letter from John O'Leary, saying that I
could do no more in Dublin, for even the younger men had turned against
me, were "jealous," his letter said, though what they had to be jealous of
God knows. He said further that it was all my own fault, that he had
warned me what would happen if I lived on terms of intimacy with those I
tried to influence. I should have kept myself apart and alone. It was all
true; through some influence from an earlier generation, from Walt
Whitman, perhaps, I had sat talking in public bars, had talked late into
the night at many men's houses, showing all my convictions to men that
were but ready for one, and used conversation to explore and discover
among men who looked for authority. I did not yet know that intellectual
freedom and social equality are incompatible; and yet, if I had, could
hardly have lived otherwise, being too young for silence. The trouble came
from half a dozen obscure young men, who having nothing to do attended
every meeting and were able to overturn a project, that seemed my only
bridge to other projects, including a travelling theatre. We had planned
small libraries of Irish literature in connection with our country
branches; we collected books and money, sending a lecturer to every branch
and taking half the proceeds of that lecture to buy books. Maud Gonne,
whose beauty could draw a great audience in any country town, had been the
lecturer. The scheme was very nearly self-supporting, and six or seven
bundles of books, chosen after much disputation by John O'Leary, J. F.
Taylor, and myself, had been despatched to some six or seven branches.
"The country will support this work" Taylor had said somewhere on some
public platform, "because we are the most inflammable people on God's
earth," his harsh voice giving almost a quality of style to Carlylian
commonplace; but we are also a very jealous people. The half-a-dozen young
men, if a little jealous of me, were still more jealous of those country
branches which were getting so much notice, and where there was so much of
that peasant mind their schoolmasters had taught them to despise. One must
be English or Irish, they would have said. I returned to find a great box
of books appropriated for some Dublin purpose and the whole scheme
abandoned. I know that it was a bitter moment because I remember with
gratitude words spoken not to my ear, but for my ear, by a young man who
had lately joined our Society, Mr. Stephen McKenna, now well-known amongst
scholars for his distinguished translations of Plotinus, and I seem to
remember that I lost through anger what gift of persuasion I may possess,
and that I was all the more helpless because I felt that even the best of
us disagreed about everything at heart. I began to feel that I needed a
hostess more than a society, but that I was not to find for years to
come. I tried to persuade Maud Gonne to be that hostess, but her social
life was in Paris, and she had already formed a new ambition, the turning
of French public opinion against England. Without intellectual freedom
there can be no agreement, and in Nationalist Dublin there was not--indeed
there still is not--any society where a man is heard by the right ears,
but never overheard by the wrong, and where he speaks his whole mind
gaily, and is not the cautious husband of a part; where phantasy can play
before matured into conviction; where life can shine and ring, and lack
utility. Mere life lacking the protection of wealth or rank, or some
beauty's privilege of caprice cannot choose its company, taking up and
dropping men merely because it likes, or dislikes, their manners and their
looks, and in its stead opinion crushes and rends, and all is hatred and
bitterness: wheel biting upon wheel, a roar of steel or iron tackle, a
mill of argument grinding all things down to mediocrity. If, as I think,
minds and metals correspond the goldsmiths of Paris foretold the French
Revolution when they substituted steel for that unserviceable gold in the
manufacture of the more expensive jewel work, and made those large, flat
steel buttons for men of fashion whereby the card players were able to
cheat by studying the reflections of the cards.


XI

No country could have more natural distaste for equality, for in every
circle there was some man ridiculous for posing as the type of some
romantic or distinguished quality. One of our friends, a man of talent
and of learning, whose ancestors had come, he believed, from Denmark in
the ninth century, looked and talked the distinguished foreigner so
perfectly that a patriotic newspaper gave particulars of his supposed
relations in contemporary Denmark! A half-mad old man who had served for a
few months in the Pope's army, many years before, still rode an old white
warhorse in all national processions, and, if their enemies were not
lying, one Town Councillor had challenged another to a duel by flinging
his glove upon the floor; while a popular Lord Mayor had boasted in a
public speech that he never went to bed at night without reading at least
twelve pages of _Sappho_. Then, too, in those conversations of the small
hours, to which O'Leary had so much objected, whenever we did not speak of
art and letters, we spoke of Parnell. We told each other that he had
admitted no man to his counsel; that when some member of his party found
himself in the same hotel by chance, that member would think to stay there
a presumption, and move to some other lodging; and, above all, we spoke of
his pride, that made him hide all emotion while before his enemy. Once he
had seemed callous and indifferent to the House of Commons, Foster had
accused him of abetting assassination, but when he came among his
followers his hands were full of blood, because he had torn them with his
nails. What excitement there would have been, what sense of mystery would
have stirred all our hearts, and stirred hearts all through the country,
where there was still, and for many years to come, but one overmastering
topic, had we known the story Mrs. Parnell tells of that scene on Brighton
Pier. He and the woman that he loved stood there upon a night of storm,
when his power was at its greatest height, and still unthreatened. He
caught her from the ground and held her at arm's length out over the water
and she lay there motionless, knowing that, had she moved, he would have
drowned himself and her. Perhaps unmotived self-immolation, were that
possible, or else at mere suggestion of storm and night, were as great
evidence as such a man could give of power over self, and so of the
expression of the self.


XII

When I look back upon my Irish propaganda of those years I can see little
but its bitterness. I never met with, or but met to quarrel with, my
father's old family acquaintance; or with acquaintance I myself might have
found, and kept, among the prosperous educated class, who had all the
great appointments at University or Castle; and this I did by deliberate
calculation. If I must attack so much that seemed sacred to Irish
nationalist opinion, I must, I knew, see to it that no man suspect me of
doing it to flatter Unionist opinion. Whenever I got the support of some
man who belonged by birth and education to University or Castle, I would
say, "Now you must be baptized of the gutter." I chose Royal visits
especially for demonstrations of disloyalty, rolling up with my own hands
the red carpet spread by some elderly Nationalist, softened or weakened by
time, to welcome Viceroyalty; and threatening, if the London Society drank
to the King's health, that my friends and I would demonstrate against it
by turning our glasses upside down; and was presently to discover that one
can grow impassioned and fanatical about opinions, which one has chosen
as one might choose a side upon the football field; and I thought many a
time of the pleasant Dublin houses that would never ask me to dine; and
the still pleasanter houses with trout-streams near at hand, that would
never ask me upon a visit. I became absurdly sensitive, glancing about me
in certain public places, the private view of our Academy, or the like, to
discover imagined enemies; and even now, after twenty or thirty years, I
feel at times that I have not recovered my natural manner. Yet it was in
those pleasant houses, among the young men and the young girls, that we
were to make our converts. When we loathe ourselves or our world, if that
loathing but turn to intellect, we see self or world and its anti-self as
in one vision; when loathing remains but loathing, world or self consumes
itself away, and we turn to its mechanical opposite. Popular Nationalism
and Unionism so changed into one another, being each but the other's
headache. The Nationalist abstractions were like the fixed ideas of some
hysterical woman, a part of the mind turned into stone, and all the rest a
seething and burning; and Unionist Ireland had re-acted from that seething
and burning to a cynical indifference, and from those fixed ideas to
whatever might bring the most easy and obvious success.

I remember Taylor at some public debate, stiff of body and tense of voice;
and the contrasting figure of Fitzgibbon, the Lord Justice of Appeal of
the moment and his calm, flowing sentences, satisfactory to hear and
impossible to remember. Taylor speaks of a little nation of antiquity,
which he does not name, "set between the great Empire of Persia and the
great Empire of Rome." Into the mouths of those great Empires he puts the
arguments of Fitzgibbon, and such as he, "Join with our greatness! What
in comparison to that is your little, beggarly nationality?" And then I
recall the excitement, the shiver of the nerves, as his voice rose to an
ecstatic cry, "Out of that nation came the salvation of the world." I
remember, too, and grow angry, as it were yesterday, a letter from that
Lord Justice of Appeal, who had changed his politics for advancement's
sake, recommending a correspondent to avoid us, because we dissuaded
people from the study of "Shakespeare and Kingsley."

Edward Dowden, my father's old friend, with his dark romantic face, the
one man of letters Dublin Unionism possessed, was withering in that barren
soil. Towards the end of his life he confessed to a near friend that he
would have wished before all things to have been the lover of many women;
and some careless lecture, upon the youthful Goethe, had in early life
drawn down upon him the displeasure of the Protestant Archbishop. And yet
he turned Shakespeare into a British Benthamite, flattered Shelley but to
hide his own growing lack of sympathy, abandoned for like reason that
study of Goethe that should have been his life-work, and at last cared but
for Wordsworth, the one great poet who, after brief blossom, was cut and
sawn into planks of obvious utility. I called upon him from time to time
out of gratitude for old encouragements, and because, among the Dublin
houses open to me, his alone was pleasant to the eye, with its many books
and its air of scholarship. But when O'Grady had declared, rancorous for
once but under substantial provocation, that he had "a bad head and a
worse heart," I found my welcome troubled and called no more.


XIII

The one house where nobody thought or talked politics was a house in Ely
Place, where a number of young men lived together, and, for want of a
better name, were called Theosophists. Beside the resident members, other
members dropped in and out during the day, and the reading-room was a
place of much discussion about philosophy and about the arts. The house
had been taken in the name of the engineer to the Board of Works, a
black-bearded young man, with a passion for Manichean philosophy, and all
accepted him as host; and sometimes the conversation, especially when I
was there, became too ghostly for the nerves of his young and delicate
wife, and he would be made angry. I remember young men struggling, with
inexact terminology and insufficient learning, for some new religious
conception, on which they could base their lives; and some few strange or
able men.

At the top of the house lived a medical student who read Plato and took
haschisch, and a young Scotchman who owned a vegetarian restaurant, and
had just returned from America, where he had gone as the disciple of the
Prophet Harris, and where he would soon return in the train of some new
prophet. When one asked what set him on his wanderings, he told of a young
Highlander, his friend in boyhood, whose cap was always plucked off at a
certain twist in the road, till the fathers of the village fastened it
upon his head by recommending drink and women. When he had gone, his room
was inherited by an American hypnotist, who had lived among the Zuni
Indians with the explorer Cushant, and told of a Zuni Indian who,
irritated by some white man's praise of telephone and telegraph, cried
out, "Can they do that?" and cast above his head two handfuls of sand that
burst into flame, and flamed till his head seemed wrapped in fire. He
professed to talk the philosophy of the Zuni Indians, but it seemed to me
the vague Platonism that all there talked, except that he spoke much of
men passing in sleep into the heart of mountains; a doctrine that was
presently incorporated in the mythology of the house, to send young men
and women hither and thither inquiring for sacred places. On a lower floor
lived a strange red-haired girl, all whose thoughts were set upon painting
and poetry, conceived as abstract images like Love and Penury in the
_Symposium_; and to these images she sacrificed herself with Asiatic
fanaticism. The engineer had discovered her starving somewhere in an
unfurnished or half-furnished room, and that she had lived for many weeks
upon bread and shell-cocoa, so that her food never cost her more than a
penny a day. Born into a county family, who were so haughty that their
neighbours called them the Royal Family, she had quarrelled with a mad
father, who had never, his tenants declared, "unscrewed the top of his
flask with any man," because she wished to study art, had ran away from
home, had lived for a time by selling her watch, and then by occasional
stories in an Irish paper. For some weeks she had paid half-a-crown a week
to some poor woman to see her to the art schools and back, for she
considered it wrong for a woman to show herself in public places
unattended; but of late she had been unable to afford the school fees. The
engineer engaged her as a companion for his wife, and gave her money
enough to begin her studies once more. She had talent and imagination, a
gift for style; but, though ready to face death for painting and poetry,
conceived as allegorical figures, she hated her own genius, and had not
met praise and sympathy early enough to overcome the hatred. Face to face
with paint and canvas, pen and paper, she saw nothing of her genius but
its cruelty, and would have scarce arrived before she would find some
excuse to leave the schools for the day, if indeed she had not invented
over her breakfast some occupation so laborious that she could call it a
duty, and so not go at all. Most watched her in mockery, but I watched in
sympathy; composition strained my nerves and spoiled my sleep; and yet, as
far back as I could trace--and in Ireland we have long memories--my
paternal ancestors had worked at some intellectual pursuit, while hers had
shot and hunted. She could at any time, had she given up her profession,
which her father had raged against, not because it was art, but because it
was a profession, have returned to the common comfortable life of women.
When, a little later, she had quarrelled with the engineer or his wife,
and gone back to bread and shell-cocoa I brought her an offer from some
Dublin merchant of fairly well paid advertisement work, which would have
been less laborious than artistic creation; but she said that to draw
advertisements was to degrade art, thanked me elaborately, and did not
disguise her indignation. She had, I believe, returned to starvation with
joy, for constant anaemia would shortly give her an argument strong enough
to silence her conscience when the allegorical images glared upon her,
and, apart from that, starvation and misery had a large share in her
ritual of worship.


XIV

At the top of the house and at the time I remember best, in the same room
with the young 

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