FOUR YEARS

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS. 

FOUR YEARS 1887-1891. 

At the end of the eighties my father and mother, my brother andsisters and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were settled inBedford Park in a red-brick house with several wood mantlepiecescopied from marble mantlepieces by the brothers Adam, a balcony, and a little garden shadowed by a great horse-chestnut tree. Yearsbefore we had lived there, when the crooked, ostentatiouslypicturesque streets, with great trees casting great shadows, hadbeen anew enthusiasm: the Pre-Raphaelite movement at lastaffecting life. But now exaggerated criticism had taken the placeof enthusiasm; the tiled roofs, the first in modern London, weresaid to leak, which they did not, & the drains to be bad, thoughthat was no longer true; and I imagine that houses were cheap. Iremember feeling disappointed because the co-operative stores, with their little seventeenth century panes, were so like anycommon shop; and because the public house, called 'The Tabard'after Chaucer's Inn, was so plainly a common public house; andbecause the great sign of a trumpeter designed by Rooke, the Pre-Raphaelite artist, had been freshened by some inferior hand. Thebig red-brick church had never pleased me, and I was accustomed, when I saw the wooden balustrade that ran along the slanting edgeof the roof, where nobody ever walked or could walk, to rememberthe opinion of some architect friend of my father's, that it hadbeen put there to keep the birds from falling off. Still, however, it had some village characters and helped us to feel not whollylost in the metropolis. I no longer went to church as a regularhabit, but go I sometimes did, for one Sunday morning I saw thesewords painted on a board in the porch: 'The congregation arerequested to kneel during prayers; the kneelers are afterwards tobe hung upon pegs provided for the purpose. ' In front of everyseat hung a little cushion, and these cushions were called'kneelers. ' Presently the joke ran through the community, wherethere were many artists, who considered religion at best anunimportant accessory to good architecture and who disliked thatparticular 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 theunfinished houses, once leaving the marks of my two hands, blackedby a fall among some paint, upon a white balustrade. Sometimes Ithought it was because these were real houses, while my play hadbeen among toy-houses some day to be inhabited by imaginary peoplefull of the happiness that one can see in picture books. I was inall things Pre-Raphaelite. When I was fifteen or sixteen, myfather had told me about Rossetti and Blake and given me theirpoetry to read; & once in Liverpool on my way to Sligo, "I hadseen 'Dante's Dream' in the gallery there--a picture painted whenRossetti had lost his dramatic power, and to-day not very pleasingto me--and its colour, its people, its romantic architecture hadblotted all other pictures away. " It was a perpetual bewildermentthat my father, who had begun life as a Pre-Raphaelite painter, now painted portraits of the first comer, children sellingnewspapers, or a consumptive girl with a basket offish upon herhead, and that when, moved perhaps by memory of his youth, hechose some theme from poetic tradition, he would soon weary andleave it unfinished. I had seen the change coming bit by bit andits defence elaborated by young men fresh from the Paris art-schools. 'We must paint what is in front of us, ' or 'A man must beof his own time, ' they would say, and if I spoke of Blake orRossetti they would point out his bad drawing and tell me toadmire Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage. Then, too, they were veryignorant men; they read nothing, for nothing mattered but 'Knowinghow to paint, ' being in reaction against a generation that seemedto have wasted its time upon so many things. I thought myselfalone in hating these young men, now indeed getting towards middlelife, their contempt for the past, their monopoly of the future, but in a few months I was to discover others of my own age, whothought as I did, for it is not true that youth looks before itwith the mechanical gaze of a well-drilled soldier. Its quarrel isnot with the past, but with the present, where its elders are soobviously powerful, and no cause seems lost if it seem to threatenthat power. Does cultivated youth ever really love the future, where the eye can discover no persecuted Royalty hidden among oakleaves, though from it certainly does come so much proletarianrhetoric? I was unlike others of my generation in one thing only. I am very religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom Idetested, of the simple-minded religion of my childhood, I hadmade a new religion, almost an infallible church, out of poetictradition: a fardel of stories, and of personages, and ofemotions, a bundle of images and of masks passed on fromgeneration to generation by poets & painters with some help fromphilosophers and theologians. I wished for a world where I coulddiscover this tradition perpetually, and not in pictures and inpoems only, but in tiles round the chimney-piece and in thehangings that kept out the draught. I had even created a dogma:'Because those imaginary people are created out of the deepestinstinct of man, to be his measure and his norm, whatever I canimagine those mouths speaking may be the nearest I can go totruth. ' When I listened they seemed always to speak of one thingonly: they, their loves, every incident of their lives, weresteeped in the supernatural. Could even Titian's 'Ariosto' that Iloved beyond other portraits, have its grave look, as if waitingfor some perfect final event, if the painters, before Titian, hadnot learned portraiture, while painting into the corner ofcompositions, full of saints and Madonnas, their kneeling patrons?At seventeen years old I was already an old-fashioned brass cannonfull of shot, and nothing kept me from going off but a doubt as tomy capacity to shoot straight. 

III

I was not an industrious student and knew only what I had found byaccident, and I had found "nothing I cared for after Titian--andTitian I knew chiefly from a copy of 'the supper of Emmaus' inDublin--till Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites;" and among my father'sfriends were no Pre-Raphaelites. Some indeed had come to BedfordPark in the enthusiasm of the first building, and others to benear those that had. There was Todhunter, a well-off man who hadbought my father's pictures while my father was still Pre-Raphaelite. Once a Dublin doctor he was a poet and a writer ofpoetical plays: a tall, sallow, lank, melancholy man, a goodscholar and a good intellect; and with him my father carried on awarm exasperated friendship, fed I think by old memories andwasted by quarrels over matters of opinion. Of all the survivorshe was the most dejected, and the least estranged, and I rememberencouraging him, with a sense of worship shared, to buy a veryexpensive carpet designed by Morris. He displayed it withoutstrong liking and would have agreed had there been any to findfault. If he had liked anything strongly he might have been afamous man, for a few years later he was to write, under somecasual patriotic impulse, certain excellent verses now in allIrish anthologies; but with him every book was a new planting andnot 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 OxfordProfessor of history, a broad-built, broad-headed, brown-beardedman, clothed in heavy blue cloth and looking, but for his glassesand the dim sight of a student, like some captain in the merchantservice. One often passed with pleasure from Todhunter's companyto that of one who was almost ostentatiously at peace. He carednothing for philosophy, nothing for economics, nothing for thepolicy of nations, for history, as he saw it, was a memory of menwho were amusing or exciting to think about. He impressed all whomet him & seemed to some a man of genius, but he had not enoughambition to shape his thought, or conviction to give rhythm to hisstyle, and remained always a poor writer. I was too full ofunfinished speculations and premature convictions to value rightlyhis conversation, in-formed by a vast erudition, which would giveitself to every casual association of speech and company preciselybecause he had neither cause nor design. My father, however, foundPowell's concrete narrative manner a necessary completion of hisown; and when I asked him, in a letter many years later, where hegot his philosophy, replied 'From York Powell' and thereon added, no doubt remembering that Powell was without ideas, 'By looking athim. ' Then there was a good listener, a painter in whose hall hunga big picture, painted in his student days, of Ulysses sailinghome from the Phaeacian court, an orange and a skin of wine at hisside, blue mountains towering behind; but who lived by drawingdomestic scenes and lovers' meetings for a weekly magazine thathad an immense circulation among the imperfectly educated. Toescape the boredom of work, which he never turned to but underpressure of necessity, and usually late at night with thepublisher's messenger in the hall, he had half filled his studiowith mechanical toys of his own invention, and perpetuallyincreased their number. A model railway train at intervals puffedits way along the walls, passing several railway stations andsignal boxes; and on the floor lay a camp with attacking anddefending soldiers and a fortification that blew up when theattackers fired a pea through a certain window; while a largemodel of a Thames barge hung from the ceiling. Opposite our houselived an old artist who worked also for the illustrated papers fora living, but painted landscapes for his pleasure, and of him Iremember nothing except that he had outlived ambition, was a goodlistener, and that my father explained his gaunt appearance by hisdescent from Pocahontas. If all these men were a little likebecalmed ships, there was certainly one man whose sails were full. Three or four doors off, on our side of the road, lived adecorative artist in all the naive confidence of popular idealsand the public approval. He was our daily comedy. 'I myself andSir Frederick Leighton are the greatest decorative artists of theage, ' was among his sayings, & a great lych-gate, bought from somecountry church-yard, reared its thatched roof, meant to shelterbearers and coffin, above the entrance to his front garden, toshow that he at any rate knew nothing of discouragement. In thisfairly numerous company--there were others though no other facerises before me--my father and York Powell found listeners for aconversation that had no special loyalties, or antagonisms; whileI could only talk upon set topics, being in the heat of my youth, and the topics that filled me with excitement were never spokenof. 

IV

Some quarter of an hour's walk from Bedford Park, out on the highroad to Richmond, lived W. E. Henley, and I, like many others, began under him my education. His portrait, a lithograph byRothenstein, hangs over my mantlepiece among portraits of otherfriends. He is drawn standing, but, because doubtless of hiscrippled legs, he leans forward, resting his elbows upon someslightly suggested object--a table or a window-sill. His heavyfigure and powerful head, the disordered hair standing upright, his short irregular beard and moustache, his lined and wrinkledface, his eyes steadily fixed upon some object, in completeconfidence and self-possession, and yet as in half-broken reverie, all are exactly as I remember him. I have seen other portraits andthey too show him exactly as I remember him, as though he had butone appearance and that seen fully at the first glance and by allalike. He was most human--human, I used to say, like one ofShakespeare's characters--and yet pressed and pummelled, as itwere, into a single attitude, almost into a gesture and a speech, as by some overwhelming situation. I disagreed with him abouteverything, but I admired him beyond words. With the exception ofsome early poems founded upon old French models, I disliked hispoetry, mainly because he wrote _Vers Libre_, which I associatedwith Tyndall and Huxley and Bastien-Lepage's clownish peasantstaring with vacant eyes at her great boots; and filled itwith unimpassioned description of an hospital ward where his leghad been amputated. I wanted the strongest passions, passions thathad nothing to do with observation, and metrical forms that seemedold enough to be sung by men half-asleep or riding upon a journey. Furthermore, Pre-Raphaelitism affected him as some people areaffected by a cat in the room, and though he professed himself atour first meeting without political interests or convictions, hesoon grew into a violent unionist and imperialist. I used to saywhen I spoke of his poems: 'He is like a great actor with a badpart; yet who would look at Hamlet in the grave scene if Salviniplayed the grave-digger?' and I might so have explained much thathe said and did. I meant that he was like a great actor ofpassion--character-acting meant nothing to me for many years--andan 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 atype of beauty which presently we call by his name. Irving, thelast of the sort on the English stage, and in modern England andFrance it is the rarest sort, never moved me but in the expressionof intellectual pride; and though I saw Salvini but once, I amconvinced that his genius was a kind of animal nobility. Henley, half inarticulate--'I am very costive, ' he would say--beset withpersonal quarrels, built up an image of power and magnanimity tillit became, at moments, when seen as it were by lightning, his trueself. Half his opinions were the contrivance of a sub-consciousnessthat sought always to bring life to the dramatic crisis, andexpression to that point of artifice where the true self couldfind its tongue. Without opponents there had been no drama, and in his youth Ruskinism and Pre-Raphaelitism, for he wasof my father's generation, were the only possible opponents. Howcould one resent his prejudice when, that he himself might play aworthy part, he must find beyond the common rout, whom he deridedand flouted daily, opponents he could imagine moulded likehimself? Once he said to me in the height of his imperialpropaganda, 'Tell those young men in Ireland that this great thingmust go on. They say Ireland is not fit for self-government butthat is nonsense. It is as fit as any other European country butwe cannot grant it. ' And then he spoke of his desire to found andedit a Dublin newspaper. It would have expounded the Gaelicpropaganda then beginning, though Dr. Hyde had as yet no league, our old stories, our modern literature--everything that did notdemand any shred or patch of government. He dreamed of a tyrannybut it was that of Cosimo de Medici. 

V

We gathered on Sunday evenings in two rooms, with folding doorsbetween, & hung, I think, with photographs from Dutch masters, andin one room there was always, I think, a table with cold meat. Ican recall but one elderly man--Dunn his name was--rather silentand full of good sense, an old friend of Henley's. We were youngmen, none as yet established in his own, or in the world'sopinion, and Henley was our leader and our confidant. One eveningI found him alone amused and exasperated. 

He cried: 'Young A... Has just been round to ask my advice. WouldI think it a wise thing if he bolted with Mrs. B... ? "Have youquite determined to do it?" I asked him. "Quite. " "Well, " I said, "in that case I refuse to give you any advice. "' Mrs. B... Was abeautiful talented woman, who, as the Welsh triad said ofGuinevere, 'was much given to being carried off. ' I think welistened to him, and often obeyed him, partly because he was quiteplainly not upon the side of our parents. We might have adifferent ground of quarrel, but the result seemed more importantthan the ground, and his confident manner and speech made usbelieve, perhaps for the first time, in victory. And besides, ifhe did denounce, and in my case he certainly did, what we held insecret reverence, he never failed to associate it with things, orpersons, that did not move us to reverence. Once I found him justreturned from some art congress in Liverpool or in Manchester. 'The Salvation Armyism of art, ' he called it, & gave a grotesquedescription of some city councillor he had found admiring Turner. Henley, who hated all that Ruskin praised, thereupon deridedTurner, and finding the city councillor the next day on the otherside of the gallery, admiring some Pre-Raphaelite there, deridedthat Pre-Raphaelite. The third day Henley discovered the poor manon a chair in the middle of the room, staring disconsolately uponthe floor. He terrified us also, and certainly I did not dare, andI think none of us dared, to speak our admiration for book orpicture 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, KennethGrahame, author of 'The Golden Age, ' Barry Pain, now a well knownnovelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a famous talker, George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chiefsecretary, and Oscar Wilde, who was some eight years or ten olderthan the rest. But faces and names are vague to me and, whilefaces that I met but once may rise clearly before me, a face meton many a Sunday has perhaps vanished. Kipling came sometimes, Ithink, but I never met him; and Stepniak, the nihilist, whom Iknew well elsewhere but not there, said 'I cannot go more thanonce a year, it is too exhausting. ' Henley got the best out of usall, because he had made us accept him as our judge and we knewthat his judgment could neither sleep, nor be softened, norchanged, nor turned aside. When I think of him, the antithesisthat is the foundation of human nature being ever in my sight, Isee his crippled legs as though he were some Vulcan perpetuallyforging swords for other men to use; and certainly I alwaysthought of C... , a fine classical scholar, a pale and seeminglygentle man, as our chief swordsman and bravo. When Henley foundedhis weekly newspaper, first the 'Scots, ' afterwards 'The NationalObserver, ' this young man wrote articles and reviews notorious forsavage wit; and years afterwards when 'The National Observer' wasdead, Henley dying & our cavern of outlaws empty, I met him inParis very sad and I think very poor. 'Nobody will employ me now, 'he said. 'Your master is gone, ' I answered, 'and you are like thespear in an old Irish story that had to be kept dipped in poppy-juice that it might not go about killing people on its ownaccount. ' I wrote my first good lyrics and tolerable essays for'The National Obsever' and as I always signed my work could go myown road in some measure. Henley often revised my lyrics, crossingout a line or a stanza and writing in one of his own, and I wascomforted by my belief that he also re-wrote Kipling then in thefirst flood of popularity. At first, indeed, I was ashamed ofbeing re-written and thought that others were not, and only beganinvestigation when the editorial characteristics--epigrams, archaisms and all--appeared in the article upon Paris fashions andin that upon opium by an Egyptian Pasha. I was not compelled tofull conformity for verse is plainly stubborn; and in prose, thatI might avoid unacceptable opinions, I wrote nothing but ghost orfairy stories, picked up from my mother, or some pilot at RossesPoint, and Henley saw that I must needs mix a palette fitted to mysubject matter. But if he had changed every 'has' into 'hath' Iwould have let him, for had not we sunned ourselves in hisgenerosity? 'My young men out-dome and they write better than I, 'he wrote in some letter praising Charles Whibley's work, and toanother friend with a copy of my 'Man who dreamed of Fairyland:''See what a fine thing has been written by one of my lads. '

VI

My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I neverbefore heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he hadwritten them all over night with labour and yet all spontaneous. There was present that night at Henley's, by right of propinquityor of accident, a man full of the secret spite of dullness, whointerrupted from time to time and always to check or disorderthought; and I noticed with what mastery he was foiled and thrown. I noticed, too, that the impression of artificiality that I thinkall Wilde's listeners have recorded, came from the perfectrounding of the sentences and from the deliberation that made itpossible. That very impression helped him as the effect of metre, or of the antithetical prose of the seventeenth century, which isitself a true metre, helps a writer, for he could pass withoutincongruity from some unforeseen swift stroke of wit to elaboratereverie. I heard him say a few nights later: 'Give me "TheWinter's Tale, " "Daffodils that come before the swallow dare" butnot "King Lear. " What is "King Lear" but poor life staggering inthe fog?' and the slow cadence, modulated with so great precision, sounded natural to my ears. That first night he praised WalterPater's 'Essays on the Renaissance:' 'It is my golden book; Inever travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower ofdecadence. The last trumpet should have sounded the moment it waswritten. ' 'But, ' said the dull man, 'would you not have given ustime to read it?' 'Oh no, ' was the retort, 'there would have beenplenty of time afterwards--in either world. ' I think he seemed tous, baffled as we were by youth, or by infirmity, a triumphantfigure, and to some of us a figure from another age, an audaciousItalian fifteenth century figure. A few weeks before I had heardone of my father's friends, an official in a publishing firm thathad employed both Wilde and Henley as editors, blaming Henley whowas 'no use except under control' and praising Wilde, 'so indolentbut 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 gothree times a week, ' said Wilde, 'for an hour a day but I havesince struck off one of the days. ' 'My God, ' said Henley, 'I wentfive times a week for five hours a day and when I wanted to strikeoff a day they had a special committee meeting. ' 'Furthermore, 'was Wilde's answer, 'I never answered their letters. I have knownmen come to London full of bright prospects and seen them completewrecks in a few months through a habit of answering letters. ' Hetoo knew how to keep our elders in their place, and his method wasplainly the more successful for Henley had been dismissed. 'No heis not an aesthete, ' Henley commented later, being somewhatembarrassed by Wilde's Pre-Raphaelite entanglement. 'One soonfinds that he is a scholar and a gentleman. ' And when I dined withWilde a few days afterwards he began at once, 'I had to strainevery nerve to equal that man at all;' and I was too loyal tospeak my thought: 'You & not he' said all the brilliant things. Helike the rest of us had felt the strain of an intensity thatseemed to hold life at the point of drama. He had said, on thatfirst meeting, 'The basis of literary friendship is mixing thepoisoned bowl;' and for a few weeks Henley and he became closefriends till, the astonishment of their meeting over, diversity ofcharacter and ambition pushed them apart, and, with half thecavern helping, Henley began mixing the poisoned bowl for Wilde. Yet Henley never wholly lost that first admiration, for afterWilde's downfall he said to me: 'Why did he do it? I told my ladsto attack him and yet we might have fought under his banner. '

VII

It became the custom, both at Henley's and at Bedford Park, to saythat R. A. M. Stevenson, who frequented both circles, was thebetter talker. Wilde had been trussed up like a turkey byundergraduates, dragged up and down a hill, his champagne emptiedinto the ice tub, hooted in the streets of various towns and Ithink stoned, and no newspaper named him but in scorn; his mannerhad hardened to meet opposition and at times he allowed one to seean unpardonable insolence. His charm was acquired and systematised, a mask which he wore only when it pleased him, while the charmof Stevenson belonged to him like the colour of his hair. IfStevenson's talk became monologue we did not know it, becauseour one object was to show by our attention that he need neverleave off. If thought failed him we would not combat what hehad said, or start some new theme, but would encourage him with aquestion; and one felt that it had been always so from childhoodup. His mind was full of phantasy for phantasy's sake and he gaveas good entertainment in monologue as his cousin Robert Louis inpoem or story. He was always 'supposing:' 'Suppose you had twomillions what would you do with it?' and 'Suppose you were inSpain and in love how would you propose?' I recall him oneafternoon at our house at Bedford Park, surrounded by my brotherand sisters and a little group of my father's friends, describingproposals in half a dozen countries. There your father did it, dressed in such and such a way with such and such words, and therea friend must wait for the lady outside the chapel door, sprinkleher with holy water and say 'My friend Jones is dying for love ofyou. ' But when it was over, those quaint descriptions, so full oflaughter and sympathy, faded or remained in the memory assomething alien from one's own life like a dance I once saw in agreat house, where beautifully dressed children wound a longribbon in and out as they danced. I was not of Stevenson's partyand mainly I think because he had written a book in praise ofVelasquez, praise at that time universal wherever Pre-Raphaelitismwas accurst, and to my mind, that had to pick its symbols whereits ignorance permitted, Velasquez seemed the first boredcelebrant of boredom. I was convinced, from some obscuremeditation, that Stevenson's conversational method had joined himto my elders and to the indifferent world, as though it were rightfor old men, and unambitious men and all women, to be content withcharm and humour. It was the prerogative of youth to take sidesand when Wilde said: 'Mr. Bernard Shaw has no enemies but isintensely disliked by all his friends, ' I knew it to be a phrase Ishould never forget, and felt revenged upon a notorious hater ofromance, whose generosity and courage I could not fathom. 

VIII

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

He had just renounced his velveteen, and even those cuffs turnedbackward over the sleeves, and had begun to dress very carefullyin the fashion of the moment. He lived in a little house atChelsea that the architect Godwin had decorated with an elegancethat owed something to Whistler. There was nothing mediaeval, norPre-Raphaelite, no cupboard door with figures upon flat gold, nopeacock blue, no dark background. I remember vaguely a whitedrawing room with Whistler etchings, 'let in' to white panels, anda dining room all white: chairs, walls, mantlepiece, carpet, except for a diamond-shaped piece of red cloth in the middle ofthe table under a terra cotta statuette, and I think a red shadedlamp hanging from the ceiling to a little above the statuette. Itwas perhaps too perfect in its unity, his past of a few yearsbefore had gone too completely, and I remember thinking that theperfect harmony of his life there, with his beautiful wife and histwo young children, suggested some deliberate artistic composition. 

He commended, & dispraised himself, during dinner by attributingcharacteristics like his own to his country: 'We Irish are toopoetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, butwe are the greatest talkers since the Greeks. ' When dinner wasover he read me from the proofs of 'The Decay of Lying' and whenhe came to the sentence: 'Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimismthat characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. Theworld has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy, ' Isaid, 'Why do you change "sad" to "melancholy?"' He replied thathe wanted a full sound at the close of his sentence, and I thoughtit no excuse and an example of the vague impressiveness thatspoilt his writing for me. Only when he spoke, or when his writingwas the mirror of his speech, or in some simple fairytale, had hewords exact enough to hold a subtle ear. He alarmed me, though notas Henley did for I never left his house thinking myself fool ordunce. He flattered the intellect of every man he liked; he mademe tell him long Irish stories and compared my art of story-tellingto Homer's; and once when he had described himself as writing inthe 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 shouldhave been 'profession talent, infirmity genius. ' When, however, I called, wearing shoes a little too yellow--unblackened leatherhad just become fashionable--I understood their extravagence whenI saw his eyes fixed upon them; an another day Wilde asked me totell 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 screamedand ran out of the room. Wilde looked grave and I was plunged intothe shame of clumsiness that afflicts the young. When I asked forsome literary gossip for some provincial newspaper, that paid mea few shillings a month, he explained very explicitly that writingliterary gossip was no job for a gentleman. Though to be comparedto Homer passed the time pleasantly, I had not been greatlyperturbed had he stopped me with 'Is it a long story?' asHenley would certainly have done. I was abashed before him as witand man of the world alone. I remember that he deprecated the verygeneral belief in his success or his efficiency, and I think withsincerity. One form of success had gone: he was no more the lionof the season, and he had not discovered his gift for writingcomedy, yet I think I knew him at the happiest moment of his life. No scandal had darkened his fame, his fame as a talker was growingamong his equals, & he seemed to live in the enjoyment of his ownspontaneity. One day he began: 'I have been inventing a Christianheresy, ' and he told a detailed story, in the style of some earlyfather, of how Christ recovered after the Crucifixion and, escaping from the tomb, lived on for many years, the one man uponearth who knew the falsehood of Christianity. Once St. Paulvisited his town and he alone in the carpenters' quarter did notgo to hear him preach. The other carpenters noticed thathenceforth, for some unknown reason, he kept his hands covered. Afew days afterwards I found Wilde, with smock frocks in variouscolours spread out upon the floor in front of him, while amissionary explained that he did not object to the heathen goingnaked upon week days, but insisted upon clothes in church. He hadbrought the smock frocks in a cab that the only art-critic whosefame had reached Central Africa might select a colour; so Wildesat there weighing all with a conscious ecclesiastic solemnity. 

VIII

Of late years I have often explained Wilde to myself by his familyhistory. His father, was a friend or acquaintance of my father'sfather and among my family traditions there is an old Dublinriddle: 'Why are Sir William Wilde's nails so black?' Answer, 'Because he has scratched himself. ' And there is an old storystill current in Dublin of Lady Wilde saying to a servant. 'Why doyou put the plates on the coal-scuttle? What are the chairs meantfor?' They were famous people and there are many like stories, andeven a horrible folk story, the invention of some Connaughtpeasant, that tells how Sir William Wilde took out the eyes ofsome men, who had come to consult him as an oculist, and laid themupon a plate, intending to replace them in a moment, and how theeyes were eaten by a cat. As a certain friend of mine, who hasmade a prolonged study of the nature of cats, said when he firstheard the tale, 'Catslove eyes. ' The Wilde family was clearly ofthe 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 blindsdrawn 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. Shelived near her son in level Chelsea, but I have heard her say, 'Iwant to live on some high place, Primrose Hill or Highgate, because I was an eagle in my youth. ' I think her son lived with noself mockery at all an imaginary life; perpetually performed aplay which was in all things the opposite of all that he had knownin childhood and early youth; never put off completely his wonderat opening his eyes every morning on his own beautiful house, andin remembering that he had dined yesterday with a duchess and thathe delighted in Flaubert and Pater, read Homer in the original andnot as a school-master reads him for the grammar. I think, too, that because of all that half-civilized blood in his veins, hecould not endure the sedentary toil of creative art and soremained a man of action, exaggerating, for the sake of immediateeffect, every trick learned from his masters, turning their easelpainting into painted scenes. He was a parvenu, but a parvenuwhose whole bearing proved that if he did dedicate every story in'The House of Pomegranates' to a lady of title, it was but to showthat he was Jack and the social ladder his pantomime beanstalk. "Did you ever hear him say 'Marquess of Dimmesdale'?" a friend ofhis once asked me. "He does not say 'the Duke of York' with anypleasure. "

He told me once that he had been offered a safe seat in Parliamentand, had he accepted, he might have had a career like that ofBeaconsfield, whose early style resembles his, being meant forcrowds, for excitement, for hurried decisions, for immediatetriumphs. Such men get their sincerity, if at all, from thecontact of events; the dinner table was Wilde's event and made himthe greatest talker of his time, and his plays and dialogues havewhat merit they possess from being now an imitation, now a record, of his talk. Even in those days I would often defend him by sayingthat his very admiration for his predecessors in poetry, forBrowning, for Swinburne and Rossetti, in their first vogue whilehe was a very young man, made any success seem impossible thatcould satisfy his immense ambition: never but once before had theartist seemed so great, never had the work of art seemed sodifficult. I would then compare him with Benvenuto Cellini who, coming after Michael Angelo, found nothing left to do sosatisfactory as to turn bravo and assassinate the man who brokeMichael Angelo's nose. 

IX

I cannot remember who first brought me to the old stable besideKelmscott House, William Morris' house at Hammersmith, & to thedebates held there upon Sunday evenings by the socialist League. Iwas soon of the little group who had supper with Morrisafterwards. I met at these suppers very constantly Walter Crane, Emery Walker presently, in association with Cobden Sanderson, theprinter of many fine books, and less constantly Bernard Shaw andCockerell, now of the museum of Cambridge, and perhaps but once ortwice Hyndman the socialist and the anarchist Prince Krapotkin. There too one always met certain more or less educated workmen, rough of speech and manner, with a conviction to meet every turn. I was told by one of them, on a night when I had done perhaps morethan my share of the talking, that I had talked more nonsense inone evening than he had heard in the whole course of his pastlife. I had merely preferred Parnell, then at the height of hiscareer, to Michael Davitt who had wrecked his Irish influence byinternational politics. We sat round a long unpolished andunpainted trestle table of new wood in a room where hungRossetti's 'Pomegranate, ' a portrait of Mrs. Morris, and where onewall and part of the ceiling were covered by a great Persiancarpet. Morris had said somewhere or other that carpets were meantfor people who took their shoes off when they entered a house, andwere most in place upon a tent floor. I was a little disappointedin the house, for Morris was an old man content at last to gatherbeautiful things rather than to arrange a beautiful house. I sawthe drawing-room once or twice and there alone all my sense ofdecoration, founded upon the background of Rossetti's pictures, was satisfied by a big cupboard painted with a scene from Chaucerby Burne Jones, but even there were objects, perhaps a chair or alittle table, that seemed accidental, bought hurriedly perhaps, and with little thought, to make wife or daughter comfortable. Ihad read as a boy in books belonging to my father, the thirdvolume of 'The Earthly Paradise' and 'The Defence of Guinevere, 'which pleased me less, but had not opened either for a long time. 'The man who never laughed again' had seemed the most wonderful oftales till my father had accused me of preferring Morris to Keats, got angry about it and put me altogether out of countenance. Hehad spoiled my pleasure, for now I questioned while I read and atlast ceased to read; nor had Morris written as yet those proseromances that became, after his death, so great a joy that theywere the only books I was ever to read slowly that I might notcome too quickly to the end. It was now Morris himself thatstirred my interest, and I took to him first because of somelittle tricks of speech and body that reminded me of my oldgrandfather in Sligo, but soon discovered his spontaneity and joyand made him my chief of men. To-day I do not set his poetry veryhigh, but for an odd altogether wonderful line, or thought; andyet, if some angel offered me the choice, I would choose to livehis life, poetry and all, rather than my own or any other man's. Areproduction of his portrait by Watts hangs over my mantlepiecewith Henley's, and those of other friends. Its grave wide-openeyes, like the eyes of some dreaming beast, remind me of the openeyes of Titian's' Ariosto, ' while the broad vigorous body suggestsa mind that has no need of the intellect to remain sane, though itgive itself to every phantasy, the dreamer of the middle ages. Itis 'the fool of fairy ... Wide and wild as a hill, ' the resoluteEuropean image that yet half remembers Buddha's motionlessmeditation, and has no trait in common with the wavering, leanimage of hungry speculation, that cannot but fill the mind's eyebecause of certain famous Hamlets of our stage. Shakespearehimself foreshadowed a symbolic change, that shows a change in thewhole temperament of the world, for though he called his Hamlet'fat, and scant of breath, ' he thrust between his fingers agilerapier and dagger. 

The dream world of Morris was as much the antithesis of daily lifeas with other men of genius, but he was never conscious of theantithesis and so knew nothing of intellectual suffering. Hisintellect, unexhausted by speculation or casuistry, was wholly atthe service of hand and eye, and whatever he pleased he did withan unheard of ease and simplicity, and if style and vocabularywere at times monotonous, he could not have made them otherwisewithout ceasing to be himself. Instead of the language of Chaucerand Shakespeare, its warp fresh from field and market, if the woofwere learned, his age offered him a speech, exhausted fromabstraction, that only returned to its full vitality when writtenlearnedly and slowly. The roots of his antithetical dream werevisible enough: a never idle man of great physical strength andextremely irascible--did he not fling a badly baked plum puddingthrough the window upon Xmas Day?--a man more joyous than anyintellectual man of our world, called himself 'the idle singer ofan empty day' created new forms of melancholy, and faint persons, like the knights & ladies of Burne Jones, who are never, no, notonce in forty volumes, put out of temper. A blunderer, who hadsaid to the only unconverted man at a socialist picnic in Dublin, to prove that equality came easy, 'I was brought up a gentlemanand now, as you can see, associate with all sorts, ' and leftwounds thereby that rankled after twenty years, a man of whom Ihave heard it said 'He is always afraid that he is doing somethingwrong, and generally is, ' wrote long stories with apparently noother object than that his persons might show one another, throughsituations of poignant difficulty, the most exquisite tact. 

He did not project, like Henley or like Wilde, an image ofhimself, because, having all his imagination set on making anddoing, he had little self-knowledge. He imagined instead newconditions of making and doing; and, in the teeth of thosescientific generalisations that cowed my boyhood, I can see somelike imagining in every great change, believing that the firstflying fish leaped, not because it sought 'adaptation' to the air, but out of horror of the sea. 

X

Soon after I began to attend the lectures, a French class wasstarted in the old coach-house for certain young socialists whoplanned a tour in France, and I joined it and was for a time amodel student constantly encouraged by the compliments of the oldFrench mistress. I told my father of the class, and he asked me toget my sisters admitted. I made difficulties and put off speakingof the matter, for I knew that the new and admirable self I wasmaking would turn, under family eyes, into plain rag doll. Howcould I pretend to be industrious, and even carry dramatization tothe point of learning my lessons, when my sisters were there andknew that I was nothing of the kind? But I had no argument I coulduse and my sisters were admitted. They said nothing unkind, so faras I can remember, but in a week or two I was my old procrastinatingidle self and had soon left the class altogether. My elder sisterstayed 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 needlethough not from her design. She worked for the first few monthsat Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, and in my imagination I cannotalways separate what I saw and heard from her report, or indeedfrom the report of that tribe or guild who looked up to Morrisas to some worshipped mediaeval king. He had no need for otherpeople. 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 himproducing everywhere organisation and beauty, seeming, almost inthe same instant, helpless and triumphant; and people loved him aschildren are loved. People much in his neighbourhood becamegradually occupied with him, or about his affairs, and without anywish on his part, as simple people become occupied with children. I remember a man who was proud and pleased because he haddistracted Morris' thoughts from an attack of gout by leading theconversation delicately to the hated name of Milton. He began atSwinburne. 'Oh, Swinburne, ' said Morris, 'is a rhetorician; mymasters have been Keats and Chaucer for they make pictures. ' 'Doesnot Milton make pictures?' asked my informant. 'No, ' was theanswer, 'Dante makes pictures, but Milton, though he had a greatearnest mind, expressed himself as a rhetorician. ' 'Great earnestmind, ' sounded strange to me and I doubt not that were hisquestioner not a simple man, Morris had been more violent. Anotherday the same man started by praising Chaucer, but the gout wasworse and Morris cursed Chaucer for destroying the Englishlanguage with foreign words. 

He had few detachable phrases and I can remember little of hisspeech, which many thought the best of all good talk, except thatit matched his burly body and seemed within definite boundariesinexhaustible in fact and expression. He alone of all the men Ihave known seemed guided by some beast-like instinct and never atestrange meat. 'Balzac! Balzac!' he said to me once, 'Oh, that wasthe man the French bourgeoisie read so much a few years ago. ' Ican remember him at supper praising wine: 'Why do people say it isprosaic to be inspired by wine? Has it not been made by thesunlight and the sap?' and his dispraising houses decorated byhimself: 'Do you suppose I like that kind of house? I would like ahouse like a big barn, where one ate in one corner, cooked inanother corner, slept in the third corner & in the fourth receivedone's friends'; and his complaining of Ruskin's objection to theunderground railway: 'If you must have a railway the best thingyou can do with it is to put it in a tube with a cork at eachend. ' I remember too that when I asked what led up to hismovement, he replied, 'Oh, Ruskin and Carlyle, but somebody shouldhave been beside Carlyle and punched his head every five minutes. 'Though I remember little, I do not doubt that, had I continuedgoing there on Sunday evenings, I should have caught fire from hiswords and turned my hand to some mediaeval work or other. Justbefore I had ceased to go there I had sent my 'Wanderings ofUsheen' to his daughter, hoping of course that it might meet hiseyes, & soon after sending it I came upon him by chance inHolborn. 'You write my sort of poetry, ' he said and began topraise me and to promise to send his praise to 'The Commonwealth, 'the League organ, and he would have said more of a certainty hadhe not caught sight of a new ornamental cast-iron lamp-post andgot very heated upon that subject. 

I did not read economics, having turned socialist because ofMorris's lectures and pamphlets, and I think it unlikely that Morrishimself could read economics. That old dogma of mine seemed germaneto the matter. If the men and women imagined by the poets were thenorm, and if Morris had, in, let us say, 'News from Nowhere, ' thenrunning through 'The Commonwealth, ' described such men and womenliving under their natural conditions or as they would desire tolive, then those conditions themselves must be the norm, and couldwe but get rid of certain institutions the world would turn fromeccentricity. Perhaps Morris himself justified himself in his ownheart by as simple an argument, and was, as the socialist D... Saidto me one night walking home after some lecture, 'an anarchistwithout knowing it. ' Certainly I and all about me, including D... Himself, were for chopping up the old king for Medea's pot. Morrishad told us to have nothing to do with the parliamentary socialists, represented for men in general by the Fabian Society and Hyndman'sSocialist Democratic Federation and for us in particular by D... During the period of transition mistakes must be made, and thediscredit of these mistakes must be left to 'the bourgeoisie;' andbesides, when you begin to talk of this measure or that other youlose sight of the goal and see, to reverse Swinburne's descriptionof Tiresias, 'light on the way but darkness on the goal. ' Bymistakes Morris meant vexatious restrictions and compromises--'Ifany man puts me into a labour squad, I will lie on my back andkick. ' That phrase very much expresses our idea of revolutionarytactics: we all intended to lie upon our back and kick. D... , paleand sedentary, did not dislike labour squads and we all hated himwith the left side of our heads, while admiring him immensely withthe right. He alone was invited to entertain Mrs. Morris, havingmany tales of his Irish uncles, more especially of one particularuncle who had tried to commit suicide by shutting his head into acarpet bag. At that time he was an obscure man, known only for awitty speaker at street corners and in Park demonstrations. He had, with an assumed truculence and fury, cold logic, an universalgentleness, an unruffled courtesy, and yet could never close aspeech without being denounced by a journeyman hatter with anItalian name. Converted to socialism by D... , and to anarchism byhimself, with swinging arm and uplifted voice this man perhapsexaggerated our scruple about parliament. 'I lack, ' said D... , 'thebump of reverence;' whereon the wild man shouted 'You 'ave a 'ole. 'There are moments when looking back I somewhat confuse my own figurewith that of the hatter, image of our hysteria, for I too becameviolent with the violent solemnity of a religious devotee. I caneven remember sitting behind D... And saying some rude thing orother over his shoulder. I don't remember why I gave it up but I didquite suddenly; and I think the push may have come from a youngworkman who was educating himself between Morris and Karl Marx. Hehad planned a history of the navy and when I had spoken of thebattleship of Nelson's day, had said: 'Oh, that was the decadence ofthe battleship, ' but if his naval interests were mediaeval, hisideas about religion were pure Karl Marx, and we were soon inperpetual argument. Then gradually the attitude towards religion ofalmost everybody but Morris, who avoided the subject altogether, gotupon my nerves, for I broke out after some lecture or other with allthe arrogance of raging youth. They attacked religion, I said, orsome such words, and yet there must be a change of heart and onlyreligion could make it. What was the use of talking about some nearrevolution putting all things right, when the change must come, ifcome it did, with astronomical slowness, like the cooling of the sunor, it may have been, like the drying of the moon? Morris rang hischairman's bell, but I was too angry to listen, and he had to ringit 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 notcome as slowly as all that. I rang my bell because you were notbeing understood. ' He did not show any vexation, but I neverreturned after that night; and yet I did not always believe what Ihad said and only gradually gave up thinking of and planning forsome near sudden change for the better. 

XI

I spent my days at the British Museum and must, I think, have beendelicate, for I remember often putting off hour after hourconsulting some necessary book because I shrank from lifting theheavy volumes of the catalogue; and yet to save money for myafternoon coffee and roll I often walked the whole way home toBedford Park. I was compiling, for a series of shilling books, ananthology of Irish fairy stories and, for an American publisher, atwo volume selection from the Irish novelists that would besomewhat dearer. I was not well paid, for each book cost me morethan three months' reading; and I was paid for the first sometwelve pounds, ('O Mr. E... ' said publisher to editor, 'you mustnever again pay so much') and for the second, twenty; but I didnot think myself badly paid, for I had chosen the work for my ownpurposes. 

Though I went to Sligo every summer, I was compelled to live out ofIreland the greater part of every year and was but keeping my mindupon what I knew must be the subject matter of my poetry. I believedthat 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 thathe had spent his childhood there) that if Shelley had nailed hisPrometheus or some equal symbol upon some Welsh or Scottish rock, their art had entered more intimately, more microscopically, as itwere, into our thought, and had given perhaps to modern poetry abreadth and stability like that of ancient poetry. The statues ofMausolus and Artemisia at the British Museum, private, half animal, half divine figures, all unlike the Grecian athletes and Egyptiankings in their near neighbourhood, that stand in the middle of thecrowd's applause or sit above measuring it out unpersuadablejustice, became to me, now or later, images of an unpremeditatedjoyous energy, that neither I nor any other man, racked by doubt andenquiry, can achieve; and that yet, if once achieved, might seem tomen and women of Connemara or of Galway their very soul. In ourstudy of that ruined tomb, raised by a queen to her dead lover, andfinished by the unpaid labour of great sculptors after her deathfrom grief, or so runs the tale, we cannot distinguish thehandiworks of Scopas and Praxiteles; and I wanted to create oncemore an art, where the artist's handiwork would hide as under thosehalf anonymous chisels, or as we find it in some old Scots balladsor in some twelfth or thirteenth century Arthurian romance. Thathandiwork assured, I had martyred no man for modelling his own imageupon Pallas Athena's buckler; for I took great pleasure in certainallusions to the singer's life one finds in old romances andballads, and thought his presence there all the more poignantbecause we discover it half lost, like portly Chaucer riding behindhis Maunciple and his Pardoner. Wolfram von Eschenbach, singing hisGerman Parsival, broke off some description of a famished city toremember 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 dayin the very battle he sang by night? So masterful indeed was thatinstinct that when the minstrel knew not who his poet was he mustneeds make up a man: 'When any stranger asks who is the sweetest ofsingers, answer with one voice: "A blind man; he dwells upon rockyChios; his songs shall be the most beautiful for ever. "' Elaboratemodern psychology sounds egotistical, I thought, when it speaks inthe first person, but not those simple emotions which resemble themore, the more powerful they are, everybody's emotion, and I wassoon to write many poems where an always personal emotion was woveninto a general pattern of myth and symbol. When the Fenian poet saysthat his heart has grown cold and callous, 'For thy hapless fate, dear Ireland, and sorrows of my own, ' he but follows tradition, andif he does not move us deeply, it is because he has no sensuousmusical vocabulary that comes at need, without compelling him tosedentary toil and so driving him out from his fellows. I thought tocreate that sensuous, musical vocabulary, and not for myself onlybut that I might leave it to later Irish poets, much as a mediaevalJapanese painter left his style as an inheritance to his family, andwas careful to use a traditional manner and matter; yet didsomething altogether different, changed by that toil, impelled by myshare in Cain's curse, by all that sterile modern complication, bymy 'originality' as the newspapers call it. Morris set out to make arevolution that the persons of his 'Well at the World's End' or his'Waters of the Wondrous Isles, ' always, to my mind, in the likenessof Artemisia and her man, might walk his native scenery; and I, thatmy native scenery might find imaginary inhabitants, half planned anew method and a new culture. My mind began drifting vaguely towardsthat doctrine of 'the mask' which has convinced me that everypassionate man (I have nothing to do with mechanist, orphilanthropist, or man whose eyes have no preference) is, as itwere, linked with another age, historical or imaginary, where alonehe finds images that rouse his energy. Napoleon was never of his owntime, as the naturalistic writers and painters bid all men be, buthad some Roman Emperor's image in his head and some condottiere'sblood in his heart; and when he crowned that head at Rome with hisown hands, he had covered, as may be seen from David's painting, hishesitation with that Emperor's old suit. 

XII

I had various women friends on whom I would call towards fiveo'clock, mainly to discuss my thoughts that I could not bring to aman without meeting some competing thought, but partly because theirtea & toast saved my pennies for the 'bus ride home; but with women, apart from their intimate exchanges of thought, I was timid andabashed. I was sitting on a seat in front of the British Museumfeeding pigeons, when a couple of girls sat near and began enticingmy pigeons away, laughing and whispering to one another, and Ilooked straight in front of me, very indignant, and presently wentinto the Museum without turning my head towards them. Since then Ihave often wondered if they were pretty or merely very young. Sometimes I told myself very adventurous love stories with myselffor hero, and at other times I planned out a life of lonelyausterity, and at other times mixed the ideals and planned a life oflonely austerity mitigated by periodical lapses. I had still theambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation ofThoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and whenwalking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkleof water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a littleball upon its jet and began to remember lake water. From the suddenremembrance came my poem 'Innisfree, ' my first lyric with anythingin its rhythm of my own music. I had begun to loosen rhythm as anescape from rhetoric, and from that emotion of the crowd thatrhetoric brings, but I only understood vaguely and occasionally thatI must, for my special purpose, use nothing but the common syntax. Acouple of years later I would not have written that first line withits conventional archaism--'Arise and go'--nor the inversion in thelast stanza. Passing another day by the new Law Courts, a buildingthat I admired because it was Gothic, --'It is not very good, ' Morrishad said, 'but it is better than any thing else they have got and sothey hate it. '--I grew suddenly oppressed by the great weight ofstone, and thought, 'There are miles and miles of stone and brickall round me, ' and presently added, 'If John the Baptist, or hislike, were to come again and had his mind set upon it, he could makeall these people go out into some wilderness leaving their buildingsempty, ' and that thought, which does not seem very valuable now, soenlightened the day that it is still vivid in the memory. I spent afew 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 returnedvery pale to my troubled family. I had lived upon bread and teabecause I thought that if antiquity found locust and wild honeynutritive, my soul was strong enough to need no better. I was alwaysplanning some great gesture, putting the whole world into one scaleof the balance and my soul into the other, and imagining that thewhole world somehow kicked the beam. More than thirty years havepassed and I have seen no forcible young man of letters brave themetropolis without some like stimulant; and all, after two or three, or twelve or fifteen years, according to obstinacy, have understoodthat we achieve, if we do achieve, in little diligent sedentarystitches as though we were making lace. I had one unmeasuredadvantage from my stimulant: I could ink my socks, that they mightnot show through my shoes, with a most haughty mind, imaginingmyself, and my torn tackle, somewhere else, in some far place 'underthe canopy ... I' the city of kites and crows. '

In London I saw nothing good, and constantly remembered thatRuskin had said to some friend of my father's--'As I go to my workat the British Museum I see the faces of the people become dailymore corrupt. ' I convinced myself for a time, that on the samejourney I saw but what he saw. Certain old women's faces filled mewith horror, faces that are no longer there, or if they are, passbefore me unnoticed: the fat blotched faces, rising above doublechins, of women who have drunk too much beer and eaten too muchmeat. In Dublin I had often seen old women walking with erectheads and gaunt bodies, talking to themselves in loud voices, madwith drink and poverty, but they were different, they belonged toromance: Da Vinci has drawn women who looked so and so carriedtheir bodies. 

XIII

I attempted to restore one old friend of my father's to thepractice of his youth, but failed though he, unlike my father, hadnot changed his belief. My father brought me to dine with JackNettleship at Wigmore Street, once inventor of imaginative designsand now a painter of melodramatic lions. At dinner I had talked agreat deal--too much, I imagine, for so young a man, or may be forany man--and on the way home my father, who had been plainlyanxious that I should make a good impression, was very angry. Hesaid I had talked for effect and that talking for effect wasprecisely what one must never do; he had always hated rhetoric andemphasis and had made me hate it; and his anger plunged me intogreat dejection. I called at Nettleship's studio the next day toapologise and Nettleship opened the door himself and received mewith enthusiasm. He had explained to some woman guest that I wouldprobably talk well, being an Irishman, but the reality hadsurpassed, etc. , etc. I was not flattered, though relieved at nothaving to apologise, for I soon discovered that what he reallyadmired was my volubility, for he himself was very silent. Heseemed about sixty, had a bald head, a grey beard, and a nose, asone of my father's friends used to say, like an opera glass, andsipped cocoa all the afternoon and evening from an enormous teacup that must have been designed for him alone, not caring howcold the cocoa grew. Years before he had been thrown from hishorse while hunting and broken his arm and, because it had beenbadly set, suffered great pain for along time. A little whiskeywould always stop the pain, and soon a little became a great dealand he found himself a drunkard, but having signed his libertyaway for certain months he was completely cured. He had acquired, however, the need of some liquid which he could sip constantly. Ibrought him an admiration settled in early boyhood, for my fatherhad always said, 'George Wilson was our born painter butNettleship our genius, ' and even had he shown me nothing I couldcare for, I had admired him still because my admiration was in mybones. He showed me his early designs and they, though often badlydrawn, fulfilled my hopes. Something of Blake they certainly didshow, but had in place of Blake's joyous intellectual energy aSaturnian passion and melancholy. 'God creating evil' the death-like head with a woman and a tiger coming from the forehead, whichRossetti--or was it Browning?--had described 'as the most sublimedesign of ancient or modern art' had been lost, but there wasanother version of the same thought and other designs neverpublished or exhibited. They rise before me even now inmeditation, especially a blind Titan-like ghost floating withgroping hands above the treetops. I wrote a criticism, andarranged for reproductions with the editor of an art magazine, butafter it was written and accepted the proprietor, lifting what Iconsidered an obsequious caw in the Huxley, Tyndall, CarolusDuran, Bastien-Lepage rookery, insisted upon its rejection. Nettleship did not mind its rejection, saying, 'Who cares for suchthings now? Not ten people, ' but he did mind my refusal to showhim what I had written. Though what I had written was all eulogy, I dreaded his judgment for it was my first art criticism. I hatedhis big lion pictures, where he attempted an art too muchconcerned 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 armsto the canvases, 'symbols. ' When I wanted him to design gods andangels and lost spirits once more, he always came back to thepoint, 'Nobody would be pleased. ' 'Everybody should have a_raison d'etre_' was one of his phrases. 'Mrs--'s articlesare not good but they are her _raison d'etre_. ' I had butlittle knowledge of art, for there was little scholarship in theDublin Art School, so I overrated the quality of anything thatcould be connected with my general beliefs about the world. If Ihad been able to give angelical, or diabolical names to his lionsI might have liked them also and I think that Nettleship himselfwould have liked them better, and liking them better have become abetter painter. We had the same kind of religious feeling, but Icould give a crude philosophical expression to mine while he couldonly express his in action or with brush and pencil. He often toldme of certain ascetic ambitions, very much like my own, for he hadkept all the moral ambition of youth with a moral courage peculiarto himself, as for instance--'Yeats, the other night I wasarrested by a policeman--was walking round Regent's Parkbarefooted to keep the flesh under--good sort of thing to do--Iwas 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 notlet me go till I had promised to put on my boots before I met thenext policeman. '

He was very proud and shy, and I could not imagine anybody askinghim questions, and so I was content to take these stories as theycame, confirmations of stories I had heard in boyhood. One storyin particular had stirred my imagination, for, ashamed all myboyhood of my lack of physical courage, I admired what was beyondmy imitation. He thought that any weakness, even a weakness ofbody, had the character of sin, and while at breakfast with hisbrother, with whom he shared a room on the third floor of a cornerhouse, he said that his nerves were out of order. Presently heleft the table, and got out through the window and on to a stoneledge that ran along the wall under the windowsills. He sidledalong the ledge, and turning the corner with it, got in at adifferent window and returned to the table. 'My nerves, ' he said, 'are better than I thought. '

XIV

Nettleship said to me: 'Has Edwin Ellis ever said anything aboutthe effect of drink upon my genius?' 'No, ' I answered. 'I ask, ' hesaid, 'because I have always thought that Ellis has some strangemedical insight. ' Though I had answered 'no, ' Ellis had only a fewdays before used these words: 'Nettleship drank his genius away. 'Ellis, but lately returned from Perugia, where he had lived manyyears, was another old friend of my father's but some yearsyounger than Nettleship or my father. Nettleship had found hissimplifying image, but in his painting had turned away from it, while Ellis, the son of Alexander Ellis, a once famous man ofscience, who was perhaps the last man in England to run the circleof the sciences without superficiality, had never found that imageat all. He was a painter and poet, but his painting, which did notinterest me, showed no influence but that of Leighton. He hadstarted perhaps a couple of years too late for Pre-Raphaeliteinfluence, for no great Pre-Raphaelite picture was painted after1870, and left England too soon for that of the French painters. He was, however, sometimes moving as a poet and still more oftenan astonishment. I have known him cast something just said into adozen lines of musical verse, without apparently ceasing to talk;but the work once done he could not or would not amend it, and myfather thought he lacked all ambition. Yet he had at timesnobility of rhythm--an instinct for grandeur--and after thirtyyears 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 ortry to make others read. There is that poem where the manner isunworthy of the matter, being loose and facile, describing Adamand Eve fleeing from Paradise. Adam asks Eve what she carries socarefully and Eve replies that it is a little of the apple corekept for their children. There is that vision of 'Christ theLess, ' 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 theYouth' in which I can discover no fault at all. He lovedcomplexities--'seven silences like candles round her face' is aline 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 sayto me, 'I am a mathematician with the mathematics left out'--hisfather was a great mathematician--or 'A woman once said to me, "Mr. Ellis why are your poems like sums?"' and certainly he lovedsymbols and abstractions. He said once, when I had asked him notto mention something or other, 'Surely you have discovered by thistime that I know of no means whereby I can mention a fact inconversation. '

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 interpretationof 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 greatmythological personages, the Zoas, and also the four elements. These few sentences were the foundation of all study of thephilosophy of William Blake, that requires an exact knowledge forits pursuit and that traces the connection between his system andthat of Swedenborg or of Boehme. I recognised certain attributions, from what is sometimes called the Christian Cabala, of which Ellishad never heard, and with this proof that his interpretation wasmore than phantasy, he and I began our four years' work upon theProphetic Books of William Blake. We took it as almost a sign ofBlake's personal help when we discovered that the spring of 1889, when we first joined our knowledge, was one hundred years from thepublication of 'The Book of Thel, ' the first published of theProphetic Books, as though it were firmly established that the deaddelight in anniversaries. After months of discussion and reading, wemade a concordance of all Blake's mystical terms, and there was muchcopying to be done in the Museum & at Red Hill, where thedescendants of Blake's friend and patron, the landscape painter, John Linnell, had many manuscripts. The Linnellswere narrow intheir religious ideas & doubtful of Blake's orthodoxy, whom theyheld, however, in great honour, and I remember a timid old lady whohad known Blake when a child saying: 'He had very wrong ideas, hedid not believe in the historical Jesus. ' One old man sat alwaysbeside us ostensibly to sharpen our pencils, but perhaps really tosee that we did not steal the manuscripts, and they gave us very oldport at lunch and I have upon my dining room walls their present ofBlake's Dante engravings. Going thither and returning Ellis wouldentertain me by philosophical discussion, varied with improvisedstories, at first folk tales which he professed to have picked up inScotland; and though I had read and collected many folk tales, I didnot see through the deceit. I have a partial memory of two moreelaborate tales, one of an Italian conspirator flying barefoot fromI forget what adventure through I forget what Italian city, in theearly morning. Fearing to be recognised by his bare feet, he slippedpast the sleepy porter at an hotel calling out 'number so and so' asif he were some belated guest. Then passing from bedroom door todoor he tried on the boots, and just as he got a pair to fit a voicecried from the room 'Who is that?' 'Merely me, sir, ' he called back, 'taking your boots. ' The other was of a Martyr's Bible round whichthe cardinal virtues had taken personal form--this a fragment ofBlake's philosophy. It was in the possession of an old clergymanwhen a certain jockey called upon him, and the cardinal virtues, confused between jockey and clergyman, devoted themselves to thejockey. As whenever he sinned a cardinal virtue interfered andturned him back to virtue, he lived in great credit and made, butfor one sentence, a very holy death. As his wife and family kneltround in admiration and grief, he suddenly said 'Damn. ' 'O my dear, 'said his wife, 'what a dreadful expression. ' He answered, 'I amgoing to heaven' and straightway died. It was a long tale, for therewere all the jockey's vain attempts to sin, as well as all theadventures of the clergyman, who became very sinful indeed, but itended happily, for when the jockey died the cardinal virtuesreturned to the clergyman. I think he would talk to any audiencethat offered, one audience being the same as another in his eyes, and it may have been for this reason that my father called himunambitious. When he was a young man he had befriended a reformedthief and had asked the grateful thief to take him round thethieves' quarters of London. The thief, however, hurried him awayfrom the worst saying, 'Another minute and they would have found youout. If they were not the stupidest men in London, they had done soalready. ' Ellis had gone through a no doubt romantic and wittyaccount of all the houses he had robbed, and all the throats he hadcut in one short life. 

His conversation would often pass out of my comprehension, orindeed I think of any man's, into a labyrinth of abstraction andsubtilty, and then suddenly return with some verbal conceit orturn of wit. The mind is known to attain, in certain conditions oftrance, a quickness so extraordinary that we are compelled attimes to imagine a condition of unendurable intellectualintensity, from which we are saved by the merciful stupidity ofthe body; & I think that the mind of Edwin Ellis was constantlyupon the edge of trance. Once we were discussing the symbolism ofsex, in the philosophy of Blake, and had been in disagreement allthe afternoon. I began talking with a new sense of conviction, andafter a moment Ellis, who was at his easel, threw down his brushand said that he had just seen the same explanation in a series ofsymbolic visions. 'In another moment, ' he said, 'I should havebeen off. ' We went into the open air and walked up and down to getrid of that feeling, but presently we came in again and I beganagain my explanation, Ellis lying upon the sofa. I had beentalking some time when Mrs. Ellis came into the room and said:'Why are you sitting in the dark?' Ellis answered, 'But we arenot, ' and then added in a voice of wonder, 'I thought the lamp waslit and that I was sitting up, and I find I am in the dark andlying down. ' I had seen a flicker of light over the ceiling, buthad thought it a reflection from some light outside the house, which may have been the case. 

XV

I had already met most of the poets of my generation. I had said, soon after the publication of 'The Wanderings of Usheen, ' to theeditor of a series of shilling reprints, who had set me to compiletales of the Irish fairies, 'I am growing jealous of other poets, and we will all grow jealous of each other unless we know eachother and so feel a share in each other's triumph. ' He was aWelshman, lately a mining engineer, Ernest Rhys, a writer of Welshtranslations and original poems that have often moved me greatlythough I can think of no one else who has read them. He was sevenor eight years older than myself and through his work as editorknew everybody who would compile a book for seven or eight pounds. Between us we founded 'The Rhymers' Club' which for some years wasto meet every night in an upper room with a sanded floor in anancient eating house in the Strand called 'The Cheshire Cheese. 'Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, Victor Plarr, Ernest Radford, JohnDavidson, Richard le Gallienne, T. W. Rolleston, Selwyn Image andtwo men of an older generation, Edwin Ellis and John Todhunter, came constantly for a time, Arthur Symons and Herbert Home lessconstantly, while William Watson joined but never came and FrancisThompson came once but never joined; and sometimes, if we met in aprivate house, which we did occasionally, Oscar Wilde came. It hadbeen useless to invite him to the 'Cheshire Cheese' for he hatedBohemia. 'Olive Schreiner, ' he said once to me, 'is staying in theEast End because that is the only place where people do not wearmasks upon their faces, but I have told her that I live in theWest End because nothing in life interests me but the mask. '

We read our poems to one another and talked criticism and drank alittle wine. I sometimes say when I speak of the club, 'We hadsuch and such ideas, such and such a quarrel with the greatVictorians, we set before us such and such aims, ' as though we hadmany philosophical ideas. I say this because I am ashamed to admitthat I had these ideas and that whenever I began to talk of them agloomy silence fell upon the room. A young Irish poet, who wroteexcellently but had the worst manners, was to say a few yearslater, 'You do not talk like a poet, you talk like a man ofletters;' and if all the rhymers had not been polite, if most ofthem had not been to Oxford or Cambridge, they would have said thesame thing. I was full of thought, often very abstract thought, longing all the while to be full of images, because I had gone tothe art school instead of a university. Yet even if I had gone toa university, and learned all the classical foundations of Englishliterature and English culture, all that great erudition which, once accepted, frees the mind from restlessness, I should have hadto give up my Irish subject matter, or attempt to found a newtradition. Lacking sufficient recognised precedent I must needsfind out some reason for all I did. I knew almost from the startthat to overflow with reasons was to be not quite well-born, andwhen I could I hid them, as men hide a disagreeable ancestry; andthat there was no help for it, seeing that my country was not bornat all. I was of those doomed to imperfect achievement, and undera curse, as it were, like some race of birds compelled to spendthe time, needed for the making of the nest, in argument as to theconvenience of moss and twig and lichen. Le Gallienne andDavidson, and even Symons, were provincial at their setting out, but their provincialism was curable, mine incurable; while the oneconviction shared by all the younger men, but principally byJohnson and Horne, who imposed their personalities upon us, was anopposition to all ideas, all generalisations that can be explainedand debated. E... Fresh from Paris would sometimes say--'We areconcerned with nothing but impressions, ' but that itself was ageneralisation and met but stony silence. Conversation constantlydwindled into 'Do you like so and so's last book?' 'No, I preferthe book before it, ' and I think that but for its Irish members, who said whatever came into their heads, the club would not havesurvived its first difficult months. I knew--now ashamed that Ithought 'like a man of letters, ' now exasperated at theirindifference to the fashion of their own river bed--that Swinburnein one way, Browning in another, and Tennyson in a third, hadfilled their work with what I called 'impurities, ' curiositiesabout politics, about science, about history, about religion; andthat we must create once more the pure work. 

Our clothes were for the most part unadventurous like ourconversation, though I indeed wore a brown velveteen coat, a loosetie and a very old Inverness cape, discarded by my father twentyyears before and preserved by my Sligo-born mother whose actionswere unreasoning and habitual like the seasons. But no othermember of the club, except Le Gallienne, who wore a loose tie, andSymons, who had an Inverness cape that was quite new & almostfashionable, would have shown himself for the world in any costumebut 'that of an English gentleman. ' 'One should be quiteunnoticeable, ' Johnson explained to me. Those who conformed mostcarefully to the fashion in their clothes generally departedfurthest from it in their hand-writing, which was small, neat andstudied, one poet--which I forget--having founded his upon thehandwriting of George Herbert. Dowson and Symons I was to knowbetter in later years when Symons became a very dear friend, and Inever got behind John Davidson's Scottish roughness andexasperation, though I saw much of him, but from the first Idevoted myself to Lionel Johnson. He and Horne and Image and oneor two others shared a man-servant and an old house in CharlotteStreet, Fitzroy Square, typical figures of transition, doing as anachievement of learning and of exquisite taste what theirpredecessors did in careless abundance. All were Pre-Raphaelite, and sometimes one might meet in the rooms of one or other a raggedfigure, 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 termof imprisonment for a criminal offence, he had sunk intodrunkenness and misery. Introduced one night, however, to some manwho mistook him, in the dim candle light, for another Solomon, asuccessful academic painter and R. A. , he started to his feet in arage with 'Sir, do you dare to mistake me for that mountebank?'Though not one had harkened to the feeblest caw, or been spatteredby the smallest dropping from any Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage bundle of old twigs, I began by suspecting them oflukewarmness, and even backsliding, and I owe it to that suspicionthat I never became intimate with Horne, who lived to become thegreatest English authority upon Italian life in the fourteenthcentury and to write the one standard work on Botticelli. Connoisseur in several arts, he had designed a little church inthe manner of Inigo Jones for a burial ground near the MarbleArch. Though I now think his little church a masterpiece, itsstyle was more than a century too late to hit my fancy at two orthree and twenty; and I accused him of leaning towards thateighteenth 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 nowmy friends and in certain matters my chief instructors. Somebody, probably Lionel Johnson, brought me to the studio of CharlesRicketts and Charles Shannon, certainly heirs of the greatgeneration, and the first thing I saw was a Shannon picture of alady and child arrayed in lace, silk and satin, suggesting thathated century. My eyes were full of some more mythological motherand child and I would have none of it, and I told Shannon that hehad not painted a mother and child but elegant people expectingvisitors and I thought that a great reproach. Somebody writing in'The Germ' had said that a picture of a pheasant and an apple wasmerely a picture of something to eat, and I was so angry with theindifference to subject, which was the commonplace of all artcriticism since Bastien-Lepage, that I could at times see nothingelse but subject. I thought that, though it might not matter tothe man himself whether he loved a white woman or a black, afemale pickpocket or a regular communicant of the Church ofEngland, if only he loved strongly, it certainly did matter to hisrelations and even under some circumstances to his wholeneighbourhood. Sometimes indeed, like some father in Moliere, Iignored the lover's feelings altogether and even refused to admitthat a trace of the devil, perhaps a trace of colour, may lendpiquancy, especially if the connection be not permanent. 

Among these men, of whom so many of the greatest talents were tolive such passionate lives and die such tragic deaths, one sereneman, T. W. Rolleston, seemed always out of place. It was I broughthim there, intending to set him to some work in Ireland later on. I have known young Dublin working men slip out of their workshopto see 'the second Thomas Davis' passing by, and even remember aconspiracy, by some three or four, to make him 'the leader of theIrish race at home & abroad, ' and all because he had regularfeatures; and when all is said, Alexander the Great & Alcibiadeswere personable men, and the Founder of the Christian religion wasthe only man who was neither a little too tall nor a little tooshort but exactly six feet high. We in Ireland thought as do theplays and ballads, not understanding that, from the first momentwherein nature foresaw the birth of Bastien-Lepage, she has onlygranted great creative power to men whose faces are contorted withextravagance or curiosity or dulled with some protectingstupidity. 

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

XVI

I have described what image--always opposite to the natural selfor the natural world--Wilde, Henley, Morris copied or tried tocopy, but I have not said if I found an image for myself. I knowvery little about myself and much less of that anti-self: probablythe woman who cooks my dinner or the woman who sweeps out my studyknows more than I. It is perhaps because nature made me agregarious man, going hither and thither looking for conversation, and ready to deny from fear or favour his dearest conviction, thatI love proud and lonely images. When I was a child and went dailyto the sexton's daughter for writing lessons, I found one poem inher School Reader that delighted me beyond all others: a fragmentof some metrical translation from Aristophanes wherein the birdssing scorn upon mankind. In later years my mind gave itself togregarious Shelley's dream of a young man, his hair blanched withsorrow studying philosophy in some lonely tower, or of his oldman, master of all human knowledge, hidden from human sight insome shell-strewn cavern on the Mediterranean shore. One passageabove 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 Theosophistsbecause they had affirmed the real existence of the Jew, or of hislike; and, apart from whatever might have been imagined by Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage, I saw nothing againsthis reality. Presently having heard that Madame Blavatsky hadarrived from France, or from India, I thought it time to look thematter up. Certainly if wisdom existed anywhere in the world itmust 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 andtaste, believed that such men existed and paid them that honour, or paid it to their mere shadow, which they have refused tophilanthropists and to men of learning?

I found Madame Blavatsky in a little house at Norwood, with but, as she said, three followers left--the Society of PsychicalResearch had just reported on her Indian phenomena--and as one ofthe three followers sat in an outer room to keep out undesirablevisitors, I was kept a long time kicking my heels. Presently I wasadmitted and found an old woman in a plain loose dark dress: asort of old Irish peasant woman with an air of humour andaudacious power. I was still kept waiting, for she was deep inconversation with a woman visitor. I strayed through folding doorsinto the next room and stood, in sheer idleness of mind, lookingat a cuckoo clock. It was certainly stopped, for the weights wereoff and lying upon the ground, and yet as I stood there the cuckoocame out and cuckooed at me. I interrupted Madame Blavatsky tosay. 'Your clock has hooted me. ' 'It often 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. ' Iwent back to the clock and began examining it and heard her say'Do not break my clock. ' I wondered if there was some hiddenmechanism, and I should have been put out, I suppose, had I foundany, though Henley had said to me, 'Of course she gets upfraudulent miracles, but a person of genius has to do something;Sarah Bernhardt sleeps in her coffin. ' Presently the visitor wentaway and Madame Blavatsky explained that she was a propagandistfor women's rights who had called to find out 'why men were sobad. ' 'What explanation did you give her?' I said. 'That men wereborn bad but women made themselves so, ' and then she explainedthat I had been kept waiting because she had mistaken me for someman whose name resembled mine and who wanted to persuade her ofthe 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 whereI returned constantly for long visits--for she was surrounded byfollowers. She sat nightly before a little table covered withgreen baize and on this green baize she scribbled constantly witha piece of white chalk. She would scribble symbols, sometimeshumorously applied, and sometimes unintelligible figures, but thechalk was intended to mark down her score when she playedpatience. One saw in the next room a large table where every nighther followers and guests, often a great number, sat down to theirvegetarian meal, while she encouraged or mocked through thefolding doors. A great passionate nature, a sort of female Dr. Johnson, impressive, I think, to every man or woman who hadthemselves any richness, she seemed impatient of the formalism, ofthe shrill abstract idealism of those about her, and thisimpatience broke out inrailing & many nicknames: 'O you are aflapdoodle, but then you are a theosophist and a brother. 'Themost 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 atthe north pole, so that the earth has really a shape somethinglike a dumb-bell. ' I said, for I knew that her imaginationcontained all the folklore of the world, 'That must be some pieceof Eastern mythology. ' 'O no it is not, ' he said, 'of that I amcertain, and there must be something in it or she would not havesaid it. ' Her mockery was not kept for her followers alone, andher voice would become harsh, and her mockery lose phantasy andhumour, when she spoke of what seemed to her scientificmaterialism. Once I saw this antagonism, guided by some kind oftelepathic divination, take a form of brutal phantasy. I brought avery able Dublin woman to see her and this woman had a brother, aphysiologist whose reputation, though known to specialists alone, was European; and, because of this brother, a family pride ineverything scientific and modern. The Dublin woman scarcely openedher mouth the whole evening and her name was certainly unknown toMadame Blavatsky, yet I saw at once in that wrinkled old face bentover the cards, and the only time I ever saw it there, a personalhostility, the dislike of one woman for another. Madame Blavatskyseemed to bundle herself up, becoming all primeval peasant, andbegan 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 mychair, ' she said, 'when the master came in and brought somethingwith him which he put over my knee, something warm which enclosedmy knee--it was a live dog which he had cut open. ' I recognised acure used sometimes in mediaeval medicine. She had two masters, and their portraits, ideal Indian heads, painted by some mostincompetent artist, stood upon either side of the folding doors. One night, when talk was impersonal and general, I sat gazingthrough the folding doors into the dimly lighted dining-roombeyond. I noticed a curious red light shining upon a picture andgot up to see where the red light came from. It was the picture ofan Indian and as I came near it slowly vanished. When I returnedto my seat, Madame Blavatsky said, 'What did you see?' 'Apicture, ' I said. 'Tell it to go away. ' 'It is already gone. ' 'Somuch the better, ' she said, 'I was afraid it was medium ship butit is only clairvoyance. ' 'What is the difference?' 'If it hadbeen medium ship, it would have stayed in spite of you. Beware ofmedium ship; it is a kind of madness; I know, for I have beenthrough it. '

I found her almost always full of gaiety that, unlike theoccasional joking of those about her, was illogical andincalculable and yet always kindly and tolerant. I had called oneevening to find her absent, but expected every moment. She hadbeen somewhere at the seaside for her health and arrived with alittle suite of followers. She sat down at once in her big chair, and began unfolding a brown paper parcel, while all looked on fullof curiosity. It contained a large family Bible. 'This is apresent for my maid, ' she said. 'What! A Bible and not evenanointed!' said some shocked voice. 'Well my children, ' was theanswer, 'what is the good of giving lemons to those who wantoranges?' When I first began to frequent her house, as I soon didvery constantly, I noticed a handsome clever woman of the worldthere, who seemed certainly very much out of place, penitentthough she thought herself. Presently there was much scandal andgossip, for the penitent was plainly entangled with two young men, who were expected to grow into ascetic sages. The scandal was sogreat that Madame Blavatsky had to call the penitent before herand to speak after this fashion, 'We think that it is necessary tocrush the animal nature; you should live in chastity in act andthought. Initiation is granted only to those who are entirelychaste, ' and so to run on for some time. However, after someminutes in that vehement style, the penitent standing crushed andshamed before her, she had wound up, 'I cannot permit you morethan one. ' She was quite sincere, but thought that nothingmattered but what happened in the mind, and that if we could notmaster the mind, our actions were of little importance. One youngman filled her with exasperation; for she thought that his settledgloom came from his chastity. I had known him in Dublin, where hehad been accustomed to interrupt long periods of asceticism, inwhich he would eat vegetables and drink water, with briefoutbreaks of what he considered the devil. After an outbreak hewould for a few hours dazzle the imagination of the members of thelocal theosophical society with poetical rhapsodies about harlotsand street lamps, and then sink into weeks of melancholy. A fellowtheosophist once found him hanging from the window pole, but cuthim down in the nick of time. I said to the man who cut him down, 'What did you say to one another?' He said, 'We spent the nighttelling comic stories and laughing a great deal. ' This man, tornbetween sensuality and visionary ambition, was now the most devoutof all, and told me that in the middle of the night he could oftenhear the ringing of the little 'astral bell' whereby MadameBlavatsky's master called her attention, and that, although it wasa low silvery sound it made the whole house shake. Another night Ifound him waiting in the hall to show in those who had the rightof entrance on some night when the discussion was private, and asI passed he whispered into my ear, 'Madame Blavatsky is perhapsnot a real woman at all. They say that her dead body was foundmany years ago upon some Russian battlefield. ' She had twodominant moods, both of extreme activity, but one calm andphilosophic, and this was the mood always on that night in theweek, when she answered questions upon her system; and as I lookback after thirty years I often ask myself 'Was her speechautomatic? Was she for one night, in every week, a trance medium, or in some similar state?' In the other mood she was full ofphantasy and inconsequent raillery. 'That is the Greek church, atriangle like all true religion, ' I recall her saying, as shechalked out a triangle on the green baize, and then, as she madeit disappear in meaningless scribbles 'it spread out and became abramble-bush like the Church of Rome. ' Then rubbing it all outexcept one straight line, 'Now they have lopped off the branchesand turned it into a broomstick arid that is Protestantism. ' Andso it was, night after night, always varied and unforseen. I haveobserved a like sudden extreme change in others, half whosethought was supernatural, and Laurence Oliphant records some whereor other like observations. I can remember only once finding herin a mood of reverie; something had happened to damp her spirits, some attack upon her movement, or upon herself. She spoke ofBalzac, whom she had seen but once, of Alfred de Musset, whom shehad known well enough to dislike for his morbidity, and of GeorgeSand whom she had known so well that they had dabbled in magictogether of which 'neither knew anything at all' in those days;and she ran on, as if there was nobody there to overhear her, 'Iused to wonder at and pity the people who sell their souls to thedevil, but now I only pity them. They do it to have somebody ontheir sides, ' and added to that, after some words I haveforgotten, 'I write, write, write as the Wandering Jew walks, walks, walks. ' Besides the devotees, who came to listen and toturn every doctrine into a new sanction for the puritanicalconvictions of their Victorian childhood, cranks came from halfEurope and from all America, and they came that they might talk. One American said to me, 'She has become the most famous woman inthe world by sitting in a big chair and permitting us to talk. 'They talked and she played patience, and totted up her score onthe green baize, and generally seemed to listen, but sometimes shewould listen no more. There was a woman who talked perpetually of'the divine spark' within her, until Madame Blavatsky stopped herwith--'Yes, my dear, you have a divine spark within you, and ifyou are not very careful you will hear it snore. ' A certainSalvation Army captain probably pleased her, for, if vociferousand loud of voice, he had much animation. He had known hardshipand spoke of his visions while starving in the streets and he wasstill perhaps a little light in the head. I wondered what he couldpreach to ignorant men, his head ablaze with wild mysticism, tillI met a man who had heard him talking near Covent Garden to somecrowd in the street. 'My friends, ' he was saying, 'you have thekingdom of heaven within you and it would take a pretty big pillto get that out. '

XVII

Meanwhile I had not got any nearer to proving that 'Ahasuerusdwells in a sea-cavern 'mid the Demonesi, ' but one conclusion Icertainly did come to, which I find written out in an old diaryand dated 1887. Madame Blavatsky's 'masters' were 'trance'personalities, but by 'trance personalities' I meant somethingalmost as exciting as 'Ahasuerus' himself. Years before I hadfound, on a table in the Royal Irish Academy, a pamphlet onJapanese art, and read there of an animal painter so remarkablethat horses he had painted upon a temple wall had stepped downafter and trampled the neighbouring fields of rice. Somebody hadcome to the temple in the early morning, been startled by a showerof water drops, looked up and seen a painted horse, still wet fromthe dew-covered fields, but now 'trembling into stillness. ' Ithought that her masters were imaginary forms created bysuggestion, but whether that suggestion came from MadameBlavatsky's own mind or from some mind, perhaps at a greatdistance, I did not know; and I believed that these forms couldpass from Madame Blavatsky's mind to the minds of others, and evenacquire external reality, and that it was even possible that theytalked and wrote. They were born in the imagination, where Blakehad declared that all men live after death, and where 'every manis king or priest in his own house. ' Certainly the house atHolland Park was a romantic place, where one heard of constantapparitions and exchanged speculations like those of the middleages, and I did not separate myself from it by my own will. TheSecretary, an intelligent and friendly man, asked me to come andsee him, and when I did, complained that I was causing discussionand disturbance, a certain fanatical hungry face had been noticedred and tearful, & it was quite plain that I was not in fullagreement with their method or their philosophy. 'I know, ' hesaid, 'that all these people become dogmatic and fanatical becausethey believe what they can never prove; that their withdrawal fromfamily life is to them a great misfortune; but what are we to do?We have been told that all spiritual influx into the society willcome to an end in 1897 for exactly one hundred years. Before thatdate our fundamental ideas must be spread through the world. ' Iknew the doctrine and it had made me wonder why that old woman, orrather 'the trance personalities' who directed her and were hergenius, insisted upon it, for influx of some kind there mustalways be. Did they dread heresy after the death of MadameBlavatsky, or had they no purpose but the greatest possibleimmediate effort?

XVIII

At the British Museum reading-room I often saw a man of thirty-sixor thirty-seven, in a brown velveteen coat, with a gaunt resoluteface, and an athletic body, who seemed before I heard his name, orknew the nature of his studies, a figure of romance. Presently Iwas introduced, where or by what man or woman I do not remember. He was Macgregor Mathers, the author of the 'Kabbalas Unveiled, ' &his studies were two only--magic and the theory of war, for hebelieved himself a born commander and all but equal in wisdom andin power to that old Jew. He had copied many manuscripts on magicceremonial and doctrine in the British Museum, and was to copymany more in continental libraries, and it was through him mainlythat I began certain studies and experiences that were to convinceme that images well up before the mind's eye from a deeper sourcethan conscious or subconscious memory. I believe that his mind inthose early days did not belie his face and body, though in lateryears it became unhinged, for he kept a proud head amid greatpoverty. One that boxed with him nightly has told me that for manyweeks he could knock him down, though Macgregor was the strongerman, and only knew long after that during those weeks Macgregorstarved. With him I met an old white-haired Oxfordshire clergyman, the most panic-stricken person I have ever known, thoughMacgregor's introduction had been 'He unites us to the greatadepts of antiquity. ' This old man took me aside that he mightsay--'I hope you never invoke spirits--that is a very dangerousthing to do. I am told that even the planetary spirits turn uponus in the end. ' I said, 'Have you ever seen an apparition?' 'Oyes, once, ' he said. 'I have my alchemical laboratory in a cellarunder my house where the Bishop cannot see it. One day I waswalking up & down there when I heard another footstep walking upand down beside me. I turned and saw a girl I had been in lovewith when I was a young man, but she died long ago. She wanted meto kiss her. Oh no, I would not do that. ' 'Why not?' I said. 'Oh, she might have got power over me. ' 'Has your alchemical researchhad any success?' I said. 'Yes, I once made the elixir of life. AFrench alchemist said it had the right smell and the rightcolour, ' (The alchemist may have been Elephas Levi, who visitedEngland in the sixties, & would have said anything) 'but the firsteffect of the elixir is that your nails fall out and your hairfalls off. I was afraid that I might have made a mistake and thatnothing else might happen, so I put it away on a shelf. I meant todrink it when I was an old man, but when I got it down the otherday it had all dried up. '

XIX

I generalized a great deal and was ashamed of it. I thought thatit was my business in life to bean artist and a poet, and thatthere could be no business comparable to that. I refused to readbooks, and even to meet people who excited me to generalization, but all to no purpose. I said my prayers much as in childhood, though without the old regularity of hour and place, and I beganto pray that my imagination might somehow be rescued fromabstraction, and become as pre-occupied with life as had been theimagination of Chaucer. For ten or twelve years more I sufferedcontinual remorse, and only became content when my abstractionshad composed themselves into picture and dramatization. My veryremorse helped to spoil my early poetry, giving it an element ofsentimentality through my refusal to permit it any share of anintellect which I considered impure. Even in practical life I onlyvery gradually began to use generalizations, that have sincebecome the foundation of all I have done, or shall do, in Ireland. For all I know, all men may have been as timid; for I am persuadedthat our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we shall everfind, but as yet we do not know truths that belong to us fromopinions caught up in casual irritation or momentary phantasy. Aslife goes on we discover that certain thoughts sustain us indefeat, or give us victory, whether over ourselves or others, & itis these thoughts, tested by passion, that we call convictions. Among subjective men (in all those, that is, who must spin a webout of their own bowels) the victory is an intellectual dailyrecreation of all that exterior fate snatches away, and so thatfate's antithesis; while what I have called 'The mask' is anemotional antithesis to all that comes out of their internalnature. We begin to live when we have conceived life as a tragedy. 

XX

A conviction that the world was now but a bundle of fragmentspossessed me without ceasing. I had tried this conviction on 'TheRhymers, ' thereby plunging into greater silence an already toosilent evening. 'Johnson, ' I was accustomed to say, 'you are theonly man I know whose silence has beak & claw. ' I had lectured onit to some London Irish society, and I was to lecture upon itlater on in Dublin, but I never found but one interested man, anofficial of the Primrose League, who was also an active member ofthe Fenian Brotherhood. 'I am an extreme conservative apart fromIreland, ' I have heard him explain; and I have no doubt thatpersonal experience made him share the sight of any eye that sawthe world in fragments. I had been put into a rage by thefollowers of Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage, who not only asserted the unimportance of subject, whether in artor literature, but the independence of the arts from one another. Upon the other hand I delighted in every age where poet and artistconfined themselves gladly to some inherited subject matter knownto the whole people, for I thought that in man and race alikethere is something called 'unity of being, ' using that term asDante used it when he compared beauty in the _Convito_ to aperfectly proportioned human body. My father, from whom I hadlearned the term, preferred a comparison to a musical instrumentso strong that if we touch a string all the strings murmurfaintly. There is not more desire, he had said, in lust than intrue love; but in true love desire awakens pity, hope, affection, admiration, and, given appropriate circumstance, every emotionpossible to man. When I began, however, to apply this thought tothe State and to argue for a law-made balance among trades andoccupations, my father displayed at once the violent free-traderand propagandist of liberty. I thought that the enemy of thisunity was abstraction, meaning by abstraction not the distinctionbut 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 ofabhorred London, did not interest me; but I thought constantly ofHomer and Dante and the tombs of Mausolus and Artemisa, the greatfigures of King and Queen and the lesser figures of Greek andAmazon, Centaur and Greek. I thought that all art should be aCentaur finding in the popular lore its back and its strong legs. I got great pleasure too from remembering that Homer was sung, andfrom that tale of Dante hearing a common man sing some stanza from'The Divine Comedy, ' and from Don Quixote's meeting with somecommon man that sang Ariosto. Morris had never seemed to care forany poet later than Chaucer; and though I preferred Shakespeare toChaucer I begrudged my own preference. Had not Europe shared onemind and heart, until both mind and heart began to break intofragments a little before Shakespeare's birth? Music and versebegan to fall apart when Chaucer robbed verse of its speed that hemight give it greater meditation, though for another generation orso minstrels were to sing his long elaborated 'Troilus andCressida;' painting parted from religion in the later Renaissancethat it might study effects of tangibility undisturbed; while, that it might characterise, where it had once personified, itrenounced, in our own age, all that inherited subject matter whichwe have named poetry. Presently I was indeed to number characteritself among the abstractions, encouraged by Congreve's sayingthat 'passions are too powerful in the fair sex to let humour, ' oras we say character, 'have its course. ' Nor have we fared betterunder the common daylight, for pure reason has notoriously madebut light of practical reason, and has been made but light of inits turn, from that morning when Descartes discovered that hecould think better in his bed than out of it; nor needed Ioriginal thought to discover, being so late of the school ofMorris, that machinery had not separated from handicraft whollyfor the world's good; nor to notice that the distinction ofclasses had become their isolation. If the London merchants of ourday competed together in writing lyrics they would not, like theTudor merchants, dance in the open street before the house of thevictor; nor do the great ladies of London finish their balls onthe pavement before their doors as did the great Venetian ladieseven in the eighteenth century, conscious of an all enfoldingsympathy. Doubtless because fragments broke into even smallerfragments we saw one another in a light of bitter comedy, and inthe arts, where now one technical element reigned and now another, generation hated generation, and accomplished beauty was snatchedaway when it had most engaged our affections. One thing I did notforesee, not having the courage of my own thought--the growingmurderousness 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. 

XXI

The Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage coven assertedthat an artist or a poet must paint or write in the style of hisown day, and this with 'The Fairy Queen, ' and 'Lyrical Ballads, 'and Blake's early poems in its ears, and plain to the eyes, inbook or gallery, those great masterpieces of later Egypt, foundedupon that work of the Ancient Kingdom already further in time fromlater Egypt than later Egypt is from us. I knew that I couldchoose my style where I pleased, that no man can deny to the humanmind any power, that power once achieved; and yet I did not wishto recover the first simplicity. If I must be but a shepherdbuilding his hut among the ruins of some fallen city, I might takeporphyry or shaped marble, if it lay ready to my hand, instead ofthe baked clay of the first builders. If Chaucer's personages haddisengaged themselves from Chaucer's crowd, forgotten their commongoal and shrine, and after sundry magnifications become, each inhis turn, the centre of some Elizabethan play, and a few yearslater split into their elements, and so given birth to romanticpoetry, I need not reverse the cinematograph. I could take thoseseparated elements, all that abstract love and melancholy, andgive them a symbolical or mythological coherence. Not Chaucer'srough-tongued riders, but some procession of the Gods! apilgrimage no more but perhaps a shrine! Might I not, with healthand good luck to aid me, create some new 'Prometheus Unbound, 'Patrick or Columbcille, Oisin or Fion, in Prometheus's stead, and, instead of Caucasus, Croagh-Patrick or Ben Bulben? Have not allraces had their first unity from a polytheism that marries them torock and hill? We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which theuneducated classes knew and even sang, and might we not make thosestories current among the educated classes, re-discovering for thework's sake what I have called 'the applied arts of literature, 'the association of literature, that is, with music, speech anddance; and at last, it might be, so deepen the political passionof the nation that all, artist and poet, craftsman and daylabourer would accept a common design? Perhaps even these images, once created and associated with river and mountain, might move ofthemselves, and with some powerful even turbulent life, like thosepainted horses that trampled the rice fields of Japan. 

XXII

I used to tell the few friends to whom I could speak these secretthoughts that I would make the attempt in Ireland but fail, forour civilisation, its elements multiplying by divisions likecertain low forms of life, was all powerful; but in reality I hadthe wildest hopes. To-day I add to that first conviction, to thatfirst desire for unity, this other conviction, long a mere opinionvaguely or intermittently apprehended: Nations, races andindividual men are unified by an image, or bundle of relatedimages, symbolical or evocative of the state of mind, which is ofall states of mind not impossible, the most difficult to that man, race or nation; because only the greatest obstacle that can becontemplated without despair rouses the will to full intensity. Apowerful class by terror, rhetoric, and organised sentimentality, may drive their people to war, but the day draws near when theycannot keep them there; and how shall they face the pure nationsof the East when the day comes to do it with but equal arms? I hadseen Ireland in my own time turn from the bragging rhetoric andgregarious humour of O'Connell's generation and school, and offerherself to the solitary and proud Parnell as to her anti-self, buskin following hard on sock; and I had begun to hope, or tohalf-hope, that we might be the first in Europe to seek unity asdeliberately as it had been sought by theologian, poet, sculptor, architect from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. Doubtlesswe must seek it differently, no longer considering it convenientto epitomise all human knowledge, but find it we well might, couldwe first find philosophy and a little passion. 

XXIII

It was the death of Parnell that convinced me that the moment hadcome for work in Ireland, for I knew that for a time theimagination of young men would turn from politics. There was alittle Irish patriotic society of young people, clerks, shop-boys, shop-girls, and the like, called the Southwark Irish LiterarySociety. It had ceased to meet because each member of thecommittee had lectured so many times that the girls got thegiggles whenever he stood up. I invited the committee to myfather's house at Bedford Park and there proposed a neworganisation. After a few months spent in founding, with the helpof T. W. Rolleston, who came to that first meeting and had aknowledge of committee work I lacked, the Irish Literary Society, which soon included every London Irish author and journalist, Iwent to Dublin and founded there a similar society. 

W. B. Yeats. 

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