At school I had been well grounded as regards Latin and Greek, therefore the ordinary college examinations gave me no trouble. In my last year I read for honours in metaphysics and logic, but on the days of the examination I was ill with rheumatic fever. Possibly had I read sternly for these courses I should have turned away to the abstract side of life and deserted, for good and all, the concrete world of colour and of images. After taking my degree I won a prize in political economy, and became acquainted with the works of J. S. Mill, and I began to think; but though Capua vanished, I do not think that I thereby became a better man. Certainly I was more disagreeable, for I wanted to quarrel with everyone, making the mistake, common among polemical minded people, of thinking that when I was severe to other people and the world generally, I was severe to myself, although in reality I was acquiring the most disagreeable of qualities, picking up the habits of dictatorial emphasis & dogmatism, which I shall now never get rid of. This was not due to Mill's teaching. Mill must have been the most persuasive man, while I in my crudeness must have been the most dissuasive. Never would he have allowed any authoritative self-conceit to come between him and the truth. I once had the good fortune to hear him make a speech to workingmen, and I thought that both as a speaker and a man he was of all men the most winning. His audience did not cheer, they laughed as with an intensity of enjoyment. At the time I compared the laughter in my own mind to the sound made by the stringing of Ulysses' bow when he was about to shoot the suitors, which Homer likened to the singing of swallows. My own excuse for myself is that I lived for six years under that severe Scotch school-master, who was all authority and self-assertion, and that man is essentially an imitative animal. When I began to think for myself I walked in the footsteps of my school-master.
With my uncle lived three old ladies, his mother who died when ninety three, and her two sisters who lived to be over eighty. After the death of these old people he continued to live alone in Sandymount and hoped to die, as they did, in the odours of a well approved and well-tested worldliness, but fickle and cruel fortune ruled otherwise. He lost his money. How it went I don't know, I don't believe he himself knew, and when he died an old man broken by creeping paralysis, there were some debts whereof his assets sufficed to pay fifteen shillings in the pound, his assets consisting of a collection of pictures, china and silver, very valuable had Dublin only known it.
A sort of incrustation of legend had gathered about my uncle. One was that he was an old Peninsular officer who had seen battles and sieges. As a fact, his nearest approach to actual war was that, when quartered in Hastings, he had had living with him a prisoner of war, a French officer. Very pleasantly they lived together, going to a great many parties and picnics, neither knowing the other's language, so there was no possibility of disputes. Of that friendship the only trace remaining was that my uncle always pronounced the word 'presentiment' with a French accent.
Perhaps in the councils of the Eternal, or whatever you call the Providence who shapes our ends, no time is lost and nothing whatever wasted. Looking back on my uncle's long and pleasant life, ending in a close so sombre, I will pass no judgement on the ways of Providence, beyond saying that he was by nature a good man and deserved to be happy to the end. He was fond of his friends, and wished to be only good to them, and with his money he benefited hundreds. There are people who if they do anything for you do thereby fix a hook in your jaws which you can never get rid of. I think when he did you a kindness he forgot about it and wished you to forget it. Of course his sympathies were extremely narrow and did not extend beyond his relations and friends. Humanitarism, which I had learned from Mill's philosophy, I would not have dared speak of in his presence. Theory was my uncle's aversion; an old Tory, he regarded theory as the Enemy. He was extraordinarily fond of children. When we lived in the North of Ireland, his advent among us was a radiant event. I can remember that one late winter's evening, when with my mother and father he had just left for the mail coach that was to take him to Dublin, out of pure affection and loneliness I went over to the table and drank out of his tea-cup.
Having now spoken of the master of Sandymount Castle, let me now speak of one whom my eldest sister called the Deputy Master, old Michael, who for more than forty years was my uncle's butler. It was my mother who hired him when he was a young man with black hair and blue eyes. Some weeks afterwards he was found drunk. He at once, at my uncle's demand, took the pledge, and never after broke it, even though we youngsters, out of pure mischief, often tried to tempt him. I remember him as a man of white hair with an amusing resemblance to John Stuart Mill—I say amusing because Michael was short in stature and sturdily built, whereas we all know J. S. M. was tall and slender. Before coming to my uncle he had been butler to an English general whom he left because 'the Mistress had insulted his religion,' which so distressed the general that he had insisted on Michael driving from the house in the family carriage. Michael himself told me this, and that when he had got to some distance from the house, he transferred himself to a Dublin jaunting-car. He was a perfect servant, yet I never knew a man of greater self-respect. The Irish make good servants and their gentry make good masters, because both are still mediævalists, and belong to an age when it was accepted by everybody from the king to the peasant that to serve is honourable. My uncle's manner with all his servants was brief and authoritative, as though he could still send them to the guardroom, and these relations with Michael never relaxed during all the forty years. All the same Michael was Deputy Master. Sometimes when we were at dinner and Michael attending us, he would say 'Mr. So-and-So called to day' & my uncle would invariably reply 'Did you ask him to dinner?' 'Yes Sir'. My Uncle came to see me in London, a few years before his death, and after he had left Sandymount, and said 'When I told Michael of my intention, I declare to God I don't know which of us should have been most pitied.' When last I saw Michael he was ill and visibly failing. He came from his bed-room with a blanket around his shoulders but his bright blue eyes were the same as ever and he told me one of the old stories.
'Did I ever tell you, Mr. Johnnie, the story of Mr. O'Connell and the officer?'
I had heard it at least fifty times, but I said it was new to me. The officer was a witness called in some law case in which O'Connell was employed.
'Mr. Soldier' said O'Connell, 'what do you know of this matter?'
'I am not a soldier, I am an officer' said the witness. 'Then' said Mr. O'Connell 'Mr. Officer and no soldier, what do you know of this matter?'
Shortly before I left Ireland and law, to go to London and study art, and while my uncle was still at Sandymount, Michael told me a conversation he had with Butt. He said he was standing at the side door when he saw Butt at a distance, and that Butt came over to him and shook hands with him, and that he brought Butt into the oak room, and gave him luncheon and wine, and that Butt talked to him of many things and that finally Michael had said 'Now Sir, Mr. Johnnie is a Barrister, and you ought to do something for him,' and Butt answered 'Michael, I will.' And he did, in a way that, because of my resolution to go to England, was vain, but it would have been a substantial help to me.
At that time my uncle and Butt had not been on speaking terms for some years. In Butt's magnanimous mind and imagination were tides of feeling and of old memory connected with Sandymount and with those that had been its inmates that no quarrel could stand against. That was Butt all over. In the old days he and his family constantly came to Sandymount, and while his wife & children would scatter over the gardens and ground, he would stay inside talking to the old ladies. They liked especially playing backgammon with him. His reckless way of leaving blots stimulated their imagination and made them feel that he really was a man of genius. At this time he was the opponent of O'Connell and the hope of the Tories, and Disraeli had walked in the lobby of the House of Commons with his arm through his and said, 'Butt we must get you into the Cabinet.' Afterwards, when Butt had gone over to the Nationalists, my grandmother would say, 'I have a sneaking regard for Isaac Butt,' and her sister would say, 'Indeed I know you have.'
There was a something in Butt, was it poetical genius or intellectual power, was it the head or the heart, or was it merely primeval goodness, that no one could resist. It followed him everywhere, and it followed him into Court. I have seen a jury listening in constrained attitude of painful attention, with the air of men resolved to do their duty at any cost. Then the other Lawyer would cease to speak, and Butt would rise, and every man of them would smile, like watchers by a sick bed who at last saw arrive a great doctor who could work miracles, and Butt would explain things in a language so simple that the dullest brain among them would understand. It was part of his genius that he understood simple people. It was well-known among solicitors that in a case in which his feelings were not concerned he was no better than any other barrister, but that where they were concerned he was irresistible. My father was present at a dinner where there were assembled all the magnates of the Irish Bar, and one and all declared that they never knew how a case would go until they had heard Butt's speech, and, if I remember rightly. Butt at this time was not over thirty years of age. There had been a murder in County Donegal of which Butt was a native, and the family did not wish him to take a part in the defence. Friends of the accused called on him and, to put them off, he asked what he thought was an impossible fee. They went away disappointed. Butt's imagination caught fire from what they told him, and all night he walked his library thinking about it, and when, contrary to his expectations, the men called in the morning with the money, he had convinced himself and undertook the defence, and so moving was his speech, that the jury, all of them Presbyterians, when they left the Court and entered the Jury Room, fell on their knees and prayed for guidance and help. The man was acquitted. A friend of mine living in London, who had been a Dublin solicitor in large practice, told me the following story. The Dublin Corporation at the time he spoke of was composed of Protestants, and in a very important case, for which my friend was solicitor, wanted to employ Butt. He and his clients sought him everywhere and could not find him. There was Sir This and Sir That—men whose names he spoke with a kind of awe, yet neither he nor they could find Butt. Then, receiving certain hints and rumours, they took cars and cabs and drove many miles out of Dublin into the country & did at last find Butt, down on his hands and knees in a field, studying a water-course, all on the behalf of the poor ragged man who was standing beside him—a case, said my friend, for which he wouldn't get five pounds, and at this time Butt was a Tory politician, pledged to the service of the rich and powerful. My friend was a big, heavily-built man, with a wheezy voice and irritable eyes, punctiliously honest and truthful. He hated Home Rule and he loathed the Catholic Church, a bitter Protestant of the Cromwellian type, yet he liked to talk about Butt, and would rail against the people who deserted him. I have often heard him say 'Of all the men I've ever known. Butt had the best qualities.' The relation between these two men was like that between Timon of Athens and his steward. With Flavius my friend might have said:
'O MonumentAnd wonder of good deeds evilly bestowed'
Archer Butler, in his day a famous Platonist, once said in my father's hearing, 'Butt, I leave you to the God who made you.' And so said all men, the reason being, I think, that in Butt himself was such a fountain of naturalness and humanity that people said 'This is the thing itself, compared to which our moral codes are only the scaffolding.'
Archer Butler had just been appointed, by the Board of Trinity College, Professor of Moral Philosophy. Butt knew that he had written an erotic poem, very mild for these days but very terrible in those Victorian days, and he went to congratulate him, bringing a copy of the Dublin University Review with this identical poem inserted. Butt said to him 'Why on earth did you do such a thing as publish this poem?' Butler was in consternation and believed himself lost. At this time the magazine was very famous and widely read, publishing, as it did, the stories of Lever and Carleton. It was of course a joke, for the copy showed to Butler was the only one that contained the poem, and all contrived by Butt who at that time was editor of the magazine. When Butt was Member for Harwich, and the hope of the Tories, being as yet untouched by any Irish heresies, Mrs. Butt, my father and mother, uncle Robert Corbet, a cousin and I, all went in a body to visit Madame Tussaud's Wax-work Exhibition. As we passed along among these figures, ghastly by an imitation of life which seemed to be its sad mockery, Butt constituted himself our guide, telling strange histories, partly true but mostly imaginary. At all times Butt shone in this kind of inventions. A crowd of strangers drew near, among them a little Clergyman particularly active and vociferous in his applause and encouragement, and Butt was in his element. Mrs. Butt at this time was young, as were all the party, and the situation amused her so much that she sat down on a chair, the better to enjoy her laughter. Seeing this Butt made pointed and appealing allusions, and the crowd gave her black looks, which only increased her merriment. My matter of fact cousin did not know that a joke was in progress, and when the little Clergyman approached him and said 'What a remarkable guide they keep in this establishment' he was shocked and said 'He's not a guide, he is the member for Harwich.' The crowd melted away, and Butt was indignant. 'Why' he said 'I meant to have got sixpence apiece all round.'
The Irish spurn convention and are called cynical, and the English make of it a religion and for their pains are called hypocrites. The fact being that, while the English like the beaten way, we prefer the untrodden way that leads to the surprising.
Trinity College Dublin did very little for me, which is entirely my own fault, neither did Trinity College Dublin inspire me with affection, and that was the fault of Trinity College Dublin. One night, in the College park, walking under the stars with that brilliant scientist George Fitzgerald, I saw him look round at some new buildings just erected and with a snap of satisfaction he said, 'No ornament, that is one good thing.' I made the obvious retort 'How is Trinity College Dublin to inspire affection, if it is not made beautiful in its buildings, its quadrangle, its trees and its park.' He gave a grunting assent. Had he not been in a controversial mood, and ascetic for severe science, he would have responded generously; for he was a true scientist, that is, a poet as well. Trinity College inspires no love; outside what it has done for learning and mathematics and things purely intellectual it has a lean history. Still youth is youth, and the time of youth is pleasant to look back upon. Fitzgerald, I have said, had a poetical mind, and that means among other things that he took humanity in the lump. Indeed I never knew any of that distinguished family that did not love the sinner as much as they deplored the sin, & in this surely they showed themselves to be Irish of the Irish. I leave it to others to explain, for it is a quality which is not English or Scotch. Think of it, to love the sinner! What a reach of mind it demands and what patience and long practice in the right kind of sensibilities; remember Thomas Carlyle and how he hated the sinner, being a sort of Public Executioner everywhere and anywhere. I recall that when he died in the fullness of his glory and success, and we all praised him, it was old Baron Fitzgerald, the uncle of George Fitzgerald, who shocked us by calling out at his dinner-table. 'The great Sham is dead, what is to be done with the great Sham?' Yet Carlyle's hatred for the sinner was not sham but an active quality of fierce anger for the encouragement of which and its sustenance he had ransacked history and philosophy. I once saw him in the flesh in London, in the Chelsea district, an old man, tottering along very rapidly, wearing a blue frock coat with a large red rose in his buttonhole. Instantly I saw who it was and stopped and turned round to watch him as he receded, and he also turned round and looked at me, and I saw his face, his ruddy cheeks and blue eyes, charged I thought with a smouldering irascibility, and yet I could see the benevolence that, had it not been Scotch and further infected by Prussian rigours, would have brought pity and tenderness to drown that wrath. Yet it was wrath, and bore no resemblance to the cold and treacherous cruelty of Froude, in whose long horse-face was neither irascibility nor pity. While I stood there watching the old sage, a British workman passed, his bag of tools over his shoulder, and said in an aside—'A rare old file that!'
There was a man named Thomas Allingham, a brother to the poet who mentions him somewhere, as a man who had won a great reputation in Trinity College Dublin but who was without any creative ability. If he could not create he could write imitations of his brother's poems and publish them with the poet's initials in the country newspaper of Ballyshannon where these brothers were born. The poet was extraordinary fastidious and exacting in all matters of style, never satisfied with anything he wrote, and he was much the elder brother, claiming all the rights of an elder brother who is fastidious about style. I knew Thomas and was often in his rooms and very soon became aware of the spirit of mischief that dwelt behind his gray eyes and half-closed heavy eyelids. A Ballyshannon paper was declining, and its editor was a friend of Allingham's. Allingham returning to College sought out a congenial spirit named Green, and together they started to revive the paper by an acrimonious controversy over the words 'telegram' and 'telegraph.' One wrote a letter to that paper saying it should be 'telegraph' & the other that it should be 'telegram.' I've seen them sitting together over Allingham's fire, concocting lying paragraphs and offensive epithets to be used against each other. Returning to Ballyshannon for his vacation Allingham sowed in the general ear whispers and rumours as to impending law suits. His next transformation was to become evangelical and pious. He was a man of extraordinary mental power and this was all that he made of it. Perhaps too much education is as bad as none at all. The poet probably had none but what he picked up for himself. A well-stored memory is something like too much orthodoxy. It captures the whole man and arrests the dreaming faculty and inhibits initiative.
There is yet another memory which comes to me from Trinity College and comes pleasantly. I lost my orthodoxy. I was reading Butler's Analogy, that delectable book which, by my fathers account he, and some other man alone understood, when I suddenly amazed myself by coming to the conclusion that revealed religion was myth and fable. My father had himself pushed me into the way of thinking for myself; and my Scotch school-master, who had lived on his own resources since he was twelve years old, acquiring thereby a bold and independent spirit, had unconsciously assisted in the process. Thus it came about that I had the courage to reject the Bishop's teachings, drawing an entirely different conclusion from the premises he placed before his reader, and with it went also my worldly-minded uncle's hope that some day I should be a respectable, Episcopalian clergyman. Everything now was gone, my mind a contented negation. At school my ethics had been based on fear of the school-master and now was gone fear of God and God's justice. I went to Church when I couldn't help it, that is once every Sunday. I do not know how it is now-a-days, but at that time Churches were so crowded that young men, unable to find a seat, remained the whole service through standing in the aisle. This exactly suited my inclinations, especially in one of the Kingstown churches down by the sea, for there I could stand all the two hours at the front door, half within and half without, so that while listening to the clergyman I could at the same time comfort my eye and soothe my spirit by looking toward the sea and sky. The Reverend Hugh Hamilton, Dean of Dromore, reckoned the most learned man in the Diocese, had determined that my father should, on presenting himself for ordination, be rejected because of his love for hunting, shooting and fishing and I may add, dancing, but was so impressed by his profound knowledge and understanding of Butler's Analogy that he became and continued from that hour on his constant friend. Yet this book that made my father a proudly orthodox man had shattered all my orthodoxy, so that I preferred sea & sky and floating clouds to the finest pulpit oratory of the Reverend Richard Brooke, father of the brilliantly successful Stopford. Yet I dared not say so, poetic and artistic intuitions not having reached at that time the dignity of any sort of opinion, theory, or doctrine. The finest feelings are nothing if you cannot bulwark them with opinions about which men wrangle and fight. Looking back I am convinced that I might have talked with my father, that he would have met me and come with me half way, but only half way. On a perilous journey one is more apt to quarrel with the man who accompanies you for part of the way and then stops, than with him who refuses even to set out on the journey. My father, a rector of the Episcopalian Church and at one time an eloquent preacher of the Evangelical form of doctrine, could not have come all the way. My aunt, dear old Mickey, would not have said a word in opposition, but would have been greatly distressed and prayed her hardest in secret communion with God. My uncle Robert, would have been amused and, on worldly grounds, somewhat alarmed.
I used to know pretty well an intellectual and cultivated priest and we had many talks together. I said to him that I liked so much. Catholic philosophy and was so attracted by his Church's stupendous history, and high pomp of good and evil that I would join it but for one difficulty; and when with some eagerness he asked what that was, I answered: 'How could I ever believe in the supernatural? Give that up,' I said, 'and I will join you.' I was much amused to notice that he seemed to hesitate, as if he thought there was something in what I said, and that with some adroitness a concession might be granted. Then he threw up his arms and shouted in his deep Kerry voice: 'No, impossible; we should collapse altogether.'
Some weeks after this conversation I was lunching with my friend John Dowden and told him of what I said to the priest. 'What did he reply?' he asked looking very much alive. 'That it was impossible, for without the supernatural you would collapse altogether.' 'Of course we would, of course we would,' he repeated in a musing, grumbling kind of voice; & to myself I laughed thinking many things which I did not utter aloud.
Now and again I went down to the pretty village of Monasterevan in County Kildare, thirty miles from Dublin, to stay with my uncle John Yeats, the County Surveyor. There was a house full of children, blue-eyed fair-haired, all gay and all lively, like a crystal fountain welling out of a rock, for there was little money and no pleasure and excitement. All these little people had just to depend on themselves for instruction and amusement and were yet happy, being like canaries in a cage who, having been born there, know no other life; partly also because of a certain inexhaustible vitality and its natural accompaniment, good temper and kindness. I loved to be with these people, little and big: merely to be in the same room with my uncle or to be in the same field (for he was a sort of amateur farmer) was happiness. He was very clever and, if he was ever unhappy, it was when he remembered that no one knew how clever he was: but I knew all about his cleverness and relished his laconic and fragmentary talk on men and things. In his eyes to be happy was to be good, and yet he had some reasons for being uneasy.
The County Grand Juries will not hold an honoured place in Irish history, particularly when, as in Kildare, made up of rich men. One of these landlords wrote to my uncle, asking him to pass the account of a certain contractor engaged in mending the road, stating frankly that if that account was not passed the landlord's rent would not be forthcoming. This letter was written politely, addressed on the envelope to 'John Yeats, Esq.' commencing with the usual 'Dear Mr. Yeats.' The work was not well done and my uncle did not pass the account. Thereupon my uncle received another letter addressed to 'Mr. Yeats,' the letter itself commencing with the formal unfriendly 'Dear Sir' and containing an angry complaint that the trees near the writer's park gate were not kept pruned, so that his coachman's hat had been knocked off. The rich Irish landlords were a banditti whom the laws safe-guarded, since it was supposed that upon their allegiance depended the safety of the English connection, and if some were good and kind from the spirit of order many of them were like the man who wrote that impertinent note to my uncle; some indeed were good and kind in themselves but forced to be rapacious and cruel because of the mortgagees who had them in their grip. These mortgagees themselves were often kind old ladies who read their Protestant Bibles and were as gentle as their necessities and piety would permit them to be.
Not for worlds, not for anything you could reasonably offer would I revisit Monasterevan. The stones in the walls and the very twisting of the roads would bring back to me all that lost happiness & my Uncle and Aunt & all the little children so innocent and so clever. Perhaps their cleverness was of little avail because of their innocence. To be cut off from sin and evil is to be cut off from so much that, entering into our intricate being, is necessary to mental power and effectiveness. These people lived for other people. To be with them was to find yourself among those to whom your happiness was all that mattered. And I may add that they had great nervous energy, an incessant activity, as the law of their existence. I remember also that they were physically intrepid. The eldest son would ride the wildest horses over the biggest jumps, each time taking his life in his hand, for he never learned to ride well, had some natural incapacity for it which nothing would overcome. The four sons are all dead and gone, happy to the last and unsuccessful. One of the girls is now an old maid, shut away from everyone by some kind of religion of which no one but herself can make head or tail. All these people were merry because they asked nothing for themselves. Yet asking nothing for themselves they got nothing, for so are things constituted.
Civilization is always putting people into positions where no one can remain good except by becoming heroically virtuous. No one expected our Irish landlords to be heroes. For one thing they had no country. England disowned them and they disowned Ireland. There are so many bad angels that one needs all the good angels to fight against them, and one of these good angels has always been for Irishmen a love of his native land. The Englishman is proud of his empire on which the sun never sets. The good Irishman loves Ireland as in Shakespeare's day the Englishman loved England, affection not vanity the essence of the relation. The historic sense, which is so fatally lacking in America, abounds among the Irish peasants when they gather in their cottages and talk together and scheme, and hope intensifies this affection. The American, like the Englishman, is very proud of his vast country, its wealth and its millions of people. The Irishman has nothing to boast of except that his country's history is sorrowful and lovable. In life there are a few great rhythms; there is friendship and domestic affection, and conjugal love and the feeling of a youth for a maiden; sovereign over all is patriotism, compared to which internationalism is cold and abstract like a mathematical formula, intelligible only to the ideologue, who is himself a bloodless person, a Rousseau dropping his five children into the foundling basket. I think the Irishman, unspoiled by too much contact with the Englishman, has the charm of being natural. Sir Walter Scott, after making amusing comparisons between him and the English and the Scotch, wrote that, given his chance, the Irishman would be 'the best of the triune.' Of course it was this naturalness, this constant and most potent spontaneity that won the heart of the great writer. It is our second thoughts that lead us astray; first thoughts in conduct are right, as Blake says they are in art.
There is one idealism always present and alive in the Irish peasant-heart, war with England. The soil is volcanic with it, so that if you scratch the surface it is ready to blaze forth. When my brother-in-law and I were out shooting, we met an old man, and looking into an empty barn, my brother-in-law asked how many men it would accommodate as sleeping quarters? He gave us a sharp look and said, 'When you bring yer men, we will find a better place than that for them.' I think this anecdote would please Sir Walter Scott and be a mere foolishness to George Bernard Shaw and his teacher Sam Butler. I am now writing of the Island that used to be, when poverty, conversation, and idleness kept company with each other around the turf fire in the winter, or on the hillside in summer, an ancient spirituality was always present there and a kind of humour, sometimes gentle like Goldsmith's and often, especially in the cities, iconoclastic like Swift's, or like Tim Healy's when he was first in Parliament. The soul of Ireland was partly pagan and that was good for lovers and for sensuous poetry; partly Catholic and Christian and that was good for the sorrowful and for lovers also; and partly patriotic and that was good for the courageous, whether young or old.
My niece writes to me of the 'appalling commonness of the Australian mind.' The Irish peasant mind is not common, is indeed so interesting that the peasants in the west of Ireland can enjoy themselves in solitude, poetized, if I may use such a word, by their religion, by their folk lore, and by their national history, and by living under a changeable sky which, from north to south and from west to east is a perpetual decoration like the scenery in some vast theatre. Synge, spiritually the most fastidious man I ever knew and the proudest, who turned away from modern French literature, told me that he preferred their society to the comforts of the best hotel. They are so happy in themselves and in each other's conversation that they are conservative, as conservative as the people behind the barriers of privilege. It is, the people with 'common minds' who quarrel with themselves and with life, and are a homeless people and seek for change, for experiment and for progress. It is the unhappy people who make the world go round. Yet these happy people might also help progress if the impossible should take place and we could teach them the technique of the arts. Perhaps they might not think it worth the trouble? Yet it is among people of this sort, whose imagination is vivid and whose will has been broken by dreams & visions, that the arts have always flourished. And remember if these peasants have not the will power which has made the dull people of Belfast such an edifying success, all the same they have their own intensity, and I myself and there are more like me, would rather listen to a Mayo man whistling a tune, or telling a fairy tale or ghost story, than to the greatest man out of Belfast or Liverpool, talking of his commercial triumphs. Synge spoke of their poetical language, and ranked it above any written in his plays. I heard of a servant girl who on her master the priest's return from America told him that she was glad to see him back for there had been the 'colour of loneliness' in the air. I fancy that in Shakespeare's age I can find three things: conversation, freedom of thought and idleness, and there was a fourth—the soul of romance and of laughter. In my youth, Ireland possessed all of these except freedom of thought. The last she now has; may she be allowed to keep it. The others are under sentence to quit, if they are not already gone, the passion for material success, and the remorseless logic it inculcates, will have none of them. It is as if a flower garden, enjoyed by women and children and simple souls had been turned into a cabbage patch. I suppose the change is pleasing to G. B. Shaw and to reformers generally. Reformers must work with public opinion and public opinion has gross appetites.
Let me now tell a story of the city and therefore unlovely. Before the police came, Dublin and towns generally were in the guardianship of watchmen nicknamed 'Charlies', and a state of war existed between them and the young men. My uncle, Arthur Corbet, has told me some of the tricks he and his friends used to play on these old rascals, such as bundling one of them into a cab and carrying him off into the country and leaving him there to find his way back, and to explain to his superior why he was absent from his post. But the old rascals could sometimes retaliate. One morning before dawn my uncle was walking with dog and gun through the quiet streets toward the open country for a day's shooting. As my uncle hurried through the dark, noiseless morning mist, he was confronted by a 'Charlie,' and the 'Charlie' flung himself down on the pavement & sprung his rattle & roared for help. My uncle was well aware of the diabolical nature of the 'Charlie' mind; he himself and others had done the best to make it so, therefore he did not delay, but without a word ran with his dog by another street, parallel to the one where he was stopped, until he got away a good distance and then in the foggy misty light cautiously crossed the street. At its far end he could see the 'Charlie' standing among a crowd of other 'Charlies.' My uncle indulged in many such escapades in his youth. It was considered good style and was no doubt a tradition; but I think these things afterwards burthened my uncle's memory when he was old and was trying to comfort his chilly and solitary bachelor existence with Bible Christianity. He was a disappointed man. He stammered in his speech. All his brothers became officers in the Army. For him this was impossible because of his stammer. He became a clerk in the Bank of Ireland, yet could not be promoted because of his stammer. Luck in every way was against him. He had great gifts as a caricaturist, and would sometimes compliment his friends by doing pictures of them which turned them into enemies. I think he disapproved of me, yet on fishing or shooting expeditions he was the pleasantest of companions. He was both affectionate and cranky, but in the open country, the day fine and the fishing good, he was companionable and affectionate and no longer cranky.
In my post graduate year I won the prize in Political Economy. It was ten pounds and my first earnings, and with that money in my pocket I visited Sligo and stayed with my old school friend, George Pollexfen. At that time you reached Sligo by taking the train to Enniskillen and then by public car to Sligo. To catch that train I had to rise early, and on such occasions the family trusted in my father, he was our alarm clock, which never failed. I remember that on that morning he said to me 'I see you are very sleepy, I will return a little later,' and his tall, white figure flitted from the room. When dressed and ready I sat for some time at his bedroom door, and as he lay in bed he talked of Sligo, which he had not seen since his father died in 1846, and of how he would like to go there, and take a car early some morning, and visit all the places that he had known and then get away before any one was awake. Only thus would he visit a place where he had been so happy and young, his heart of course too full for company.
I have never forgotten the first evening of my arrival in Sligo. Five miles from the town, at the mouth of the river, is a village called Rosses Point, and the Pollexfens were staying there for the summer. George and I walked on the sand hills which were high above the sea. The sign of happiness in the Pollexfens has always been a great talkativeness,—I suppose birds sing and children chatter for a similar reason. George talked endlessly—what about I forget, excepting that he several times sang one of Moore's melodies, which he had lately heard at a concert. Indeed, I think the talk was mostly about that concert. The place was strange to me and very beautiful in the deepening twilight. A little way from us, and far down from where we talked, the Atlantic kept up its ceaseless tumult, foaming around the rocks called Dead Man's Point. Dublin and my uneasy life there & Trinity College, though but a short day's journey, were obliterated, and I was again with my school friend, the man self-centered and tranquil and on that evening so companionable. I had been extraordinarily fond of him at school where I was passive in his hands. I have sometimes an amused curiosity in thinking whether he cared for me at all, or how much he cared, but it has been only curiosity. I was always quite content with my own liking for him.
In my family, and in the society which I frequented in Dublin, the master desire was for enjoyment. Yet do not mistake me; it was not pleasure, which is animalism efflorescent. By enjoyment I mean the gratification of the affections and the sympathies and of the spirit of hopefulness. We lived in the sunlight and did our very best to keep there. It was demoralizing but all the same delightful, and from a moral point of view it had its good side. We solved all our doubts in matters of conduct by thinking well of our fellow creatures, which is exactly the opposite of what the puritans do, and we prided ourselves upon it; we considered it a gentlemanly trait. Our censorious neighbours, who thought badly of each other, we dismissed from our minds as vulgar people. Or rather we considered that the puritan conception of human nature was admirably adapted to the kind of people who believed in it, but was never intended for us or for our friends. It was a shock to pass from a society, where people enjoy themselves and laugh gaily, not being at all concerned about moral issues, to a society where no one thought of enjoyment, and if they laughed did so with a grim humour that was not always good-natured, where the air itself was heavy with moral disapprobation of the world generally and of themselves in particular. Yet in my bones I felt it to be something salutary. At home and among my friends everyone did as they liked, provided that they were tactful and sympathetic with each other. We were a city without rules, and might verge at times into being a city of misrule. Here on the contrary was rule and strictest order.
A man, suddenly come amongst my wife's relations, would think that they were a people of strong primitive instinct, and great natural kindliness, all smothered in business. I very quickly came to a different conclusion for I had known intimately my old friend George. The master principle in that family was what I may describe as self-loyalty, each member of that family a concrete embodiment of Shakespearean teaching:
'To thine own self be true;And it must follow as the night the day,Thou canst not then be false to any man.'
In my society we were loyal to the social principle. We lived for society and worshipped its pleasant needs, and for reward we had our social conceit. This conceit was a feather in our caps, which we wore gallantly and lightly, not at all flauntingly. In this, and in all matters, we escaped the vice of pretension. Our wit and humour for instance, and that of Dublin society generally, was wit for wit's sake; and with delighted superiority we thought of the English, who would incorporate their dull morality into the most trivial actions and words. We ridiculed and criticised each other with great freedom, and with French malice, but since we had no mission to reform anybody we would keep the joke to ourselves, the victim knowing nothing of it. Thus we spared his feelings and the joke was all the better. It was, perhaps, demoralizing, because in our pursuit of enjoyment we put aside what did not quite suit us; we never, for one thing, looked into the lower abysses of human nature. We did not absolutely deny that there were such things as hatred and rage and unbridled appetite and lust, but we forgot all about them. Indeed, it was not good form to mention such things. Thus we lived pleasantly, but falsely, and yet we did believe in human nature, at least inourhuman nature, in parental affection & in conjugal faith and loyalty between friends. On this matter we had a trustfulness that was at once romantic and robust. Parents and children and husbands and Wives and friends and comrades, at least in our circles, would have stood by each other to the death. As regards Ireland our feelings were curious, and though exceedingly selfish not altogether so. We intended as good Protestants and Loyalists to keep the papists under our feet. We impoverished them, though we loved them, and their religion by its doctrine of submission and obedience unintentionally helped us, yet we were convinced that an Irishman, whether a Protestant or Catholic, was superior to every Englishman, that he was a better comrade and physically stronger and of greater courage. My mother's family had been for generations officers in the English army and I fancy drew that strong faith from their experience in many military campaigns. I might in my youthful impudence have sneered at many things and nobody would have taken the trouble to contradict me, but I did not venture to doubt the superiority of Irishmen to everybody in England.
At Sligo, I was the social man where it was individual man that counted. It is a curious fact that entering this sombre house of stern preoccupation with business I for the first time in my life felt my self to be a free man, and that I was invited by the example of everyone around me to be my very self, thereby receiving the most important lesson in my life. The malady of puritanism is self-exaggeration, 'self-saturation' is the medical term. Even Shakespeare had experience of it, if we interpret as personal and literal the first line in one of his sonnets: 'Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye.'
That is the malady, the excess, and there's plenty of it in puritan middle-class England, but the good side is that the puritan belongs to himself, whereas the votary of the religion of social enjoyment belongs to his neighbours and to society, so that not even on his death-bed can he return to himself. The Pollexfen charm was in their entire sincerity, John Pollexfen the seaman once told me, he was greatly troubled because it took him so long to make up his mind. Napoleon might have made a similar admission. This slow vacillation is always characteristic of entire sincerity. The man of society possesses a quick facility in making up his mind. He does not belong to himself, and the rules of society are written on his heart and brain. He is what is called well-bred. The individual man of entire sincerity has to wrestle with himself, unless transported by rage or passion; he has so much mind to make up, with none to help him and no guide except his conscience; and conscience after all, is but a feeble glimmer in a labyrinthine cavern of darkness.
I think it was Shakespeare the poet, and not the thinking Shakespeare or the wise Shakespeare, who made that discovery about the importance of self-loyalty, for it is the root of every kind of poetical distinction, and without distinction poetry is of little avail. It is reported that Swinburne in some fit of petulance said that he and Shelley were better poets than anybody else because they were gentlemen. My criticism is that both these poets are lacking in the entire sincerity of the greatest poets, that because Keats has this entire sincerity he is better than either. I find, indeed, in Shelley and Swinburne activity, animation, eloquence. I find in Keats force as of mother nature. 'What man,' says the Bible, 'by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?'
Yet let any young poet stay for a while among the puritans and practise all the restraints of self-loyalty, and he will turn his sociable activity and animated sympathy into something which is much better, namely force. It is a foolish question, yet I wonder did Shakespeare undergo that kind of discipline?
It is evident from what I have written that to live amongst my people was pleasanter, but that to live amongst the Pollexfens was good training. Which of these two civilizations was best for the human product I have never, in my own mind, been able to decide. What we all seek is neither happiness nor pleasure but to be ourselves through and through. The man born or made sorrowful would go on being sorrowful, and the man who is joyous would be more joyous, & the spiritually minded man more spiritual, and the materialistic more materialistic. Thus like the plants & the animals we would grow, each after its own kind. It is obvious that the puritan doctrine of self-loyalty is serviceable to this kind of growth. Yet the puritan doctrine would cut off the sunshine of enjoyment and pleasure and easy relaxation, and the poet or artist, though self-loyalty be the condition of every excellence, must have enjoyment. He must have tears and laughter & romance and vision and relaxation and ease, otherwise his soul for poetry and beauty withers and dies away. Among my friends and in their type of civilization we made enjoyment of first importance, and for that reason we were eager for art and poetry, which are all made of enjoyment. Yet it was bound to come to nothing, because we had not that deep sincerity, which is another name for what may be indifferently called human force or, better still, genius. Inarticulate as the sea cliffs were the Pollexfen heart and brain, lying buried under mountains of silence. They were released from bondage by contact with the joyous amiability of my family, and of my bringing up, and so all my four children are articulate, and yet with the Pollexfen force.
Commerce is war, each man watching to take the bread out of his neighbour's mouth, and puritanism with the doctrine of the inherent badness of human nature is well calculated to hearten the fighters.
My old friend George, as full of human nature as an egg is of meat, held the puritan doctrine. He condemned all his neighbours impartially; he had not however like the ordinary man any self-complacent acrimony, no, that was not his way. He was an indulgent and compassionate puritan, because a consistent puritan. If he condemned others he condemned himself also, and he sadly saw himself in those predestined sinners and transgressors and backsliders. Now he was a chief of story tellers. I remember the late York Powell, that Savant who by some strange accident was also a man of genius, praising one of his stories, saying it was the best he had ever listened to. He would tell a story that would take at least two hours in the telling and it would be about nothing at all, yet as it grew and developed, the mere nothing became everything, because he would mass together such richness of significant detail. Long ago at school he slept in a room known as number twelve, and in it slept all the bigger boys of the school. There was a rule that every boy should keep perfectly silent once in bed and the gas turned out. George would keep all that room awake—sleepy schoolboys though they were—telling them in a whisper long stories made in the fashion of Dumas & Fenimore Cooper. All his life he delighted compassionately in the foibles of dandies from the time of Dumas down to our own times, especially if they were military. He had a gift for every kind of indulgence. He never showed capacity for any religions or poetic ecstasy. I could not conceive his reading Shelley with understanding, yet Keats would have pleased him. He was pitiful for men and women and animals and the very plants in the garden. He was as pitiful as St. Francis of Assisi. In this I do not in the least exaggerate. A convinced puritan, holding the doctrine as profoundly as he held all his beliefs, he was naturally a melancholy man. His doctor said of him after his death that he was by no means a delicate man, 'but very low spirited.' The ordinary puritan, in the buoyant strength of high animal spirits, reacts against every kind of depression. He is pessimist as regards other men, as regards himself a confirmed optimist. My old friend, because of his uncheered solitary existence in a small town under a rainy sky beside the sad sea wave, suffered in some degree from what I have called the puritan malady self-exaggeration. He was full of himself and that self all doubt and dreariness, yet among genial friends who loved him it soon passed away. When he came to my house he would invariably dedicate the first evening, or part of it, to this kind of sorrowful personal preoccupation, sighing and shaking his head, complaining aloud of everything, and we who knew him would wait, and be outwardly sympathetic, while inwardly we smiled. At hand grips with hard times we were naturally a little incredulous of the sorrows of an old bachelor who was exceedingly well off and knew how to take care of his money. He had small eyes, very blue, and straight eyebrows and a long skull stretching far back such as I have always found in conjunction with a marked capacity for detail. He was at the same time an exceedingly good listener, and well as he talked I think he preferred listening. Had the destinies permitted he might have become a great student and a recluse and buried himself in a university. His expression was strangely wistful, his eyes seemed to peep at you like stars in the early twilight. Although a successful trader he said that his success and I believe him—wasdue entirely to his chief clerk and an elder brother's advice. He did not look as if he belonged to the actual world. Indeed he had become the denizen of another world. My stammering uncle tried to comfort his latter years with Bible Christianity and an occasional prayer meeting. George chose better, he studied books on magic and he practised in the ancient science of astrology. It was my son W. B. Yeats who put him on the track of these wonders, and what was in some degree only occasional with my son was to my friend the passion of his life. I think my son looks a poet; I know George looked an astrologer. His eyes were the eyes of second sight. I think indeed he knew the future better than he knew the present and the past. He had a scared look, as if he saw ghosts that no one else could see, & his horoscopes as many can testify were verified. He foresaw and predicted almost to the day, and certainly to the week, when my friend York Powell would die, and he did this more than a year before, when York Powell was in perfect health. When the London 'Times' announced that York Powell was making good recovery, 'No' said George 'the stars are still there.' The last weeks of his life were characteristic. My eldest daughter always spent her summer holidays with him. Arriving one evening she was surprised to find him in bed and he at once said to her, 'Lily I think I am going'. He lived on for six weeks spending his time calmly reading novels for which she searched the country. He would read only what is called serious fiction, and not once again did he speak of death till two days before the end, when he gave her minute directions as to certain things she was to do after his death, how she was to distribute certain small sums of money which she would find in his pockets. He died at day-break while the Banshee, heard by my daughter and two nurses, was wailing around the house. Business men cried when told of his death; they said he had an attractive personality.
Puritans claim to be fervent Christians who draw all their wisdom from the Bible. In my mind they have no Christianity at all. They cling to their creed of the badness of human nature, because it helps them in their unnatural war of commercial selfishness. As you would get the better of your opponents, and to the commercial mind all the neighbours are opponents except here and there a fellow conspirator, it is a mighty encouragement to be able religiously to believe the worst of them; that is why puritanism flourishes among traders. This combination of selfishness and religion results in the belief, implied rather than expressed, that a successful man is a sort of a secular saint, and it lay like a heavy stone on George's conscience. He tried to cast it from him; he expressed his scorn of it; I've heard him do so again and again; yet he could not altogether get rid of the obstruction. At any rate I cannot otherwise account for the fact that I myself, who was his oldest and indeed his only friend, was in the latter years of his life an exile from his affections. But my son was the pride of his life. (Ah, if he had only been called Pollexfen instead of Yeats.) An applauded poet is better after all than a rich trader, a more conspicuous success. He would have liked to have kept him always with him, that he might watch over him as he did over his race-horses. My son tells me that dining with him was like taking a doctor's prescription, so careful was George that he should eat the right food and chew it properly. The racing men of Sligo, when in the evening they visited the old bachelor to benefit by his knowledge of the racing world, always opened operations by inquiring about the nephew, & when he had exhausted this subject which took some time and must have bored them terribly, those poor fellows who cared as much for poetry as they did for Sanscrit, would artfully lead him to the other subject of his affections. After which they would depart and make their bets. He himself never made a bet. I think indeed he once lost or won, I forget which, ten shillings. He has told me with perfect sincerity, indeed with shame and contrition of spirit, that he disliked making money because it put him to so much trouble, and yet he was most careful of it, and though he would lend money to a friend and ask no security, he had to be perfectly satisfied in the most meticulous way as to the nature of the demand so that he might lend on some ascertained principle. The same sense of order, the same physical moral and mental neatness kept him a lonely bachelor. In his eyes marriage and domestic entanglements were things disorderly, all chance and change, a sort of wild experiment. More than once he had expressed to me his wonder, that sensible men would incur such risks.
Now what would have happened had this man been born into conditions that were not puritanical? It is my belief that he would have become a writer of note and power. At school his education was backward. His commercial family and he himself had attached no importance to things of the mind. When I entered the university I implored him to remain on at school, and prepare himself for Trinity College, and I remember that my father became greatly interested, butDis aliter visum—he entered his father's office and began his dreary and uncongenial pilgrimage remote from books & intellectual companionship.
Here ends 'EARLY MEMORIES: SOME CHAPTERS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY BY JOHN BUTLER YEATS.' Five hundred copies of this book have been printed and published by Elizabeth C. Yeats at the Cuala Press, Churchtown, Dundrum, in the County of Dublin Ireland. Finished in the last week of July nineteen hundred and twenty three, the second year of THE IRISH FREE STATE.