REVERIES OVER CHILDHOOD AND
YOUTH BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

To those few people, mainly
personal friends, who have
read all that I have written.

PREFACE

Sometimes when I remember a relative that I have
been fond of, or a strange incident of the past, I wan-
der here and there till I have somebody to talk to.
Presently I notice that my listener is bored ; but now
that I have written it out, I may even begin to for-
get it all. In any case, because one can always close
a book, my friend need not be bored.
I have changed nothing to my knowledge; and yet
it must be that I have changed many things with-
out my knowledge; for I am writing after many
years and have consulted neither friend nor letter
nor old newspaper and describe what comes oftenest
into my memory.

I say this fearing that some surviving friend of my
youth may remember something in a different shape
and be offended with my book.

Christmas Day, 1914.

Four hundred and twenty five
copies of this book have been
printed. This copy is No.

REVERIES OVER CHILDHOOD AND
YOUTH BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

THE CUALA PRESS

CHURCHTOWN

DUNDRUM

MCMXV

A REVERIE OVER CHILDHOOD AND
YOUTH

My first memories are fragmentary and isolated and
contemporaneous, as though one remembered
vaguely some early day of the Seven Days. It seems
as if time had not yet been created, for all are con-
nected with emotion and place and without se-
quence.

I remember sitting upon somebody's knee, looking
out of a window at a wall covered with cracked and
falling plaster, but what wall I do not remember,
and being told that some relation once lived there.
I am looking out of another window in London. It
is at Fitzroy Road. Some boys are playing in the road
and among them a boy in uniform, a telegraph boy
perhaps. When I ask who the boy is, a servant tells
me that he is going to blow the town up, and I go to
sleep in terror.

After that come memories of Sligo, where I live
with my grandparents. I am sitting on the ground
looking at a mastless toy boat with the paint rubbed
and scratched, and I say to myself in great melan-
choly, "it is further away than it used to be," and
while I am saying it I am looking at a long scratch
in the stern, for it is especially the scratch which is
further away. Then one day at dinner my great-un-
cle William Middleton says, "we should not make
b

light of the troubles of children. They are worse
than ours, because we can see the end of our trouble
and they can never see any end," and I feel grateful
for I know that I am very unhappy and have often
said to myself, "when you grow up, never talk as
grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood. "
I may have already had the night of misery when,
having prayed for several days that I might die, I had
begun to be afraid that I was dying and prayed that I
might live. There was no reason for my unhappi-
ness. Nobody was unkind, and my grandmother has
still after so many years my gratitude and my rever-
ence. The house was so big that there was always a
room to hide in, and I had a red pony and a garden
where I could wander, and there were two dogs to
follow at my heels, one white with some black spots
on his head and the other with long black hair all
over him. I used to think about God and fancy that
I was very wicked, and one day when I threw a stone
and hit a duck in the yard by mischance and broke its
wing, I was full of wonder when I was told that the
duck would be cooked for dinner and that I should
not be punished.

Some of my misery was loneliness and some of it fear
of old William Pollexfen my grandfather. He was
never unkind, and I cannot remember that he ever
spoke harshly to me, but it was the custom to fear

2

and admire him. He had won the freedom of some
Spanish city for saving life, but was so silent that his
wife never knew it till he was near eighty, and then
from the chance visit of some old sailor. She asked
him if it was true and he said it was true, but she
knew him too well to question and his old shipmate
had left the town. She too had the habit of fear. We
knew that he had been in many parts of the world,
for there was a great scar on his hand made by a
whaling-hook,and in the dining-room was a cabinet
with bits of coral in it and a jar of water from the
Jordan for the baptising of his children and Chinese
pictures upon rice-paper and an ivory walking-stick
from India that came to me after his death. He had
great physical strength and had the reputation of
never ordering a man to do anything he would not
do himself. He owned many sailing ships and once,
when a captain just come to anchor at Rosses Point
reported something wrong with the rudder, had
sent a messenger to say "send a man down to find
out what's wrong." "The crew all refuse" was the
answer. "Go down yourself" was my grandfather's
order, and when that was not obeyed, he dived from
the main deck, all the neighbourhood lined along
the pebbles of the shore. He came up with his skin
torn but well informed about the rudder. He had a
violent temper and kept a hatchet at his bedside for

burglars and would knock a man down instead of go-
ing to law, and I once saw him hunt a group of men
with a horsewhip. He had no relation for he was an
only child and, being solitary and silent, he had few
friends. He corresponded with Campbell of Islay
who had befriended him and his crew after a ship-
wreck, and Captain Webb, the first man who had
swum the Channel and who was drowned swim-
ming the Niagara Rapids,had been a mate in his em-
ploy and became a close friend. That is all the friends
I can remember and yet he was so looked up to and
admired that when he returned from taking the wa-
ters at Bath his men would light bonfires along the
railway line for miles, while his partner William
Middleton whose father after the great famine had
attended the sick for weeks, and taken cholera from
a man he carried in his arms into his own house and
died of it, and was himself civil to everybody and a
cleverer man than my grandfather, came and went
without notice. I think I confused my grandfather
with God, for I remember in one of my attacks of
melancholy praying that he might punish me for
my sins, and I was shocked and astonished when a
daring little girl — a cousin I think — having wait-
ed under a group of trees in the avenue, where she
knew he would pass near four o'clock on the way to
his dinner, said to him, "if I were you and you were
a little girl, I would give you a doll/'

Yet for all my admiration and alarm, neither I nor
anyone else thought it wrong to outwit his violence
or his rigour ; and his lack of suspicion and a certain
helplessness made that easy while it stirred our af-
fection. When I must have been still a very little
boy, seven or eight years old perhaps, an uncle called
me out of bed one night, to ride the five or six miles
to Rosses Point to borrow a railway-pass from a
cousin. My grandfather had one, but thought it dis-
honest to let another use it, but the cousin was not
so particular. I was let out through a gate that op-
ened upon a little lane beside the garden away from
ear-shot of the house, and rode delighted through
the moonlight, and awoke my cousin in the small
hours by tapping on his window with a whip. I was
home again by two or three in the morning and
found the coachman waiting in the little lane. My
grandfather would not have thought such an adven-
ture possible, for every night at eight he believed
that the stable-yard was locked, and he knew that
he was brought the key. Some servant had once got
into trouble at night and so he had arranged that
they should all be locked in. He never knew, what
everybody else in the house knew, that for all the
ceremonious bringing of the key the gate was never
locked.
Even to-day when I read "King Lear" his image is

5

always before me and I often wonder if the delight
in passionate men in my plays and in my poetry is
more than his memory. He must have been ignor-
ant, though I could not judge him in my childhood,
for he had run away to sea when a boy, "gone to sea
through the hawse-hole" as he phrased it, and I can
but remember him with two books — his Bible and
Falconer's "Shipwreck/' a little green-covered
book that lay always upon his table; he belonged to
some younger branch of an old Cornish family. His
father had been in the Army, had retired to become
an owner of sailing ships, and an engraving of some
old family place my grandfather thought should
have been his hung next a painted coat of arms in
the little back parlour. His mother had been a Wex-
ford woman,and there was a tradition that his family
had been linked with Ireland for generations and
once had their share in the old Spanish trade with
Galway. He had a good deal of pride and disliked
his neighbours, whereas his wife, a Middleton, was
gentle and patient and did many charities in the little
back parlour among frieze coats and shawled heads,
and every night when she saw him asleep went the
round of the house alone with a candle to make cer-
tain there was no burglar in danger of the hatchet.
She was a true lover of her garden and before the
care of her house had grown upon her, would choose

6

some favourite among her flowers and copy it upon
rice-paper. I saw some of her handiwork the other
day and I wondered at the delicacy of form and col-
our and at a handling that may have needed a mag-
nifying glass it was so minute. I can remember no
other pictures but the Chinese paintings, and some
coloured prints of battles in the Crimea upon the
wall of a passage, and the painting of a ship at the
passage end darkened by time.
My grown-up uncles and aunts, my grandfather's
many sons and daughters, came and went, and al-
most all they said or did has faded from my memory,
except a few harsh words that convince me by a vi-
vidness out of proportion to their harshness that all
were habitually kind and considerate. The youngest
of my uncles was stout and humorous and had a
tongue of leather over the keyhole of his door to
keep the draught out, and another whose bedroom
was at the end of a long stone passage had a model
turret ship in a glass case. He was a clever man and
had designed the Sligo quays, but was now going
mad and inventing a vessel of war that could not be
sunk, his pamphlet explained, because of a hull of
solid wood. Only six months ago my sister awoke
dreaming that she held a wingless sea-bird in her
arms and presently she heard that he had died in his
mad-house,for a sea-bird is the omen that announces

7

the death or danger of a Pollexfen. An uncle, George
Pollexfen, afterwards astrologer and mystic, and my
dear friend, came but seldom from Ballina, once to a
race meeting with two postillions dressed in green;
and there was that younger uncle who had sent me
for the railway-pass. He was my grandmother's fa-
vourite,and had,the servants told me,been sent away
from school for taking a crowbar to a bully.
I can only remember my grandmother punishing
me once. I was playing in the kitchen and a servant
in horseplay pulled my shirt out of my trousers in
front just as my grandmother came in and I, accused
of I knew not what childish indecency, was given
my dinner in a room by myself. But I was always
afraid of my uncles and aunts, and once the uncle
who had taken the crowbar to the bully found me
eating lunch which my grandmother had given me
and reproved me for it and made me ashamed. We
breakfasted at nine and dined at four and it was con-
sidered self-indulgent to eat anything between
meals ; and once an aunt told me that I had reined in
my pony and struck it at the same moment that I
might show it off as I rode through the town, and I,
because I had been accused of what I thought a very
dark crime, had a night of misery. Indeed I remem-
ber little of childhood but its pain. I have grown
happier with every year of life as though gradually

8

conquering something in myself, for certainly my
miseries were not made by others but were a part
of my own mind.

II

One day someone spoke to me of the voice of the
conscience, and as I brooded over the phrase I came
to think that my soul, because I did not hear an ar-
ticulate voice, was lost. I had some wretched days
until being alone with one of my aunts I heard a
whisper in my ear, "what a tease you are ! " A t first I
thought my aunt must have spoken, but when I
found she had not, I concluded it was the voice of
my conscience and was happy again. From that day
the voice has come to me at moments of crisis, but
now it is a voice in my head that is sudden and start-
ling. It does not tell me what to do, but often re-
proves me. It will say perhaps, "that is unjust" of
some thought; and once when I complained that a
prayer had not been heard, it said, "you have been
helped." I had a little flagstaff in front of the house
and a red flag with the Union Jack in the corner.
Every night I pulled my flag down and folded it up
and laid it on a shelf in my bedroom, and one morn-
ing before breakfast I found it, though I knew I had
folded it up the nigh t before, knotted round the bot-
tom of the flagstaff so that it was touching the grass.

9 c

I must have heard the servants talking of the faeries
for I concluded at once that a faery had tied those
four knots and from that on believed that one had
whispered in my ear. I have been told, though I do
not remember it myself, that I saw, whether once or
many times I do not know, a supernatural bird in
the corner of the room. Once too I was driving with
my grandmother a little after dark close to the Chan-
nel that runs for some five miles from Sligo to the
sea, and my grandmother showed me the red light
of an outward-bound steamer and told me that my
grandfather was on board, and that night in my sleep
I screamed out and described the steamer's wreck.
The next morning my grandfather arrived on a
blind horse found for him by4grateful passengers.
He had, as I remember the story, been asleep when
the captain aroused him to say they were going on
the rocks. He said, "have you tried sail on her?"
and judging from some answer that the captain was
demoralised took over the command and, when the
ship could not be saved, got the crew and passengers
into the boats. His own boat was upset and he saved
himself and some others by swimming; some wo-
men had drifted ashore, buoyed up by their crino-
lines. "I was not so much afraid of the sea as of that
terrible man with his oar," was the comment of a
schoolmaster who was among the survivors. Eight

10

men were, however, drowned and my grandfather
suffered from that memory at intervals all his life,
and if asked to read family prayers never read any-
thing but the shipwreck of St. Paul.
I remember the dogs more clearly than anyone ex-
cept my grandfather and grandmother. The black
hairy one had no tail because it had been sliced off,
if I was told the truth, by a railway train. I think I
followed at their heels more than they did at mine,
and that their journeys ended at a rabbit-warren be-
hind the garden; and sometimes they had savage
fights, the black hairy dog, being well protected by
its hair, suffering least. I can remember one so sav-
age that the white dog would not take his teeth out
of the black dog's hair till the coachman hung them
over the side of a water-butt, one outside and one in
the water. My grandmother once told the coach-
man to cut the hair like a lion's hair and, after a long
consultation with the stable-boy, he cut it all over
the head and shoulders arid left it on the lower part
of the body. The dog disappeared for a few days and
I did not doubt that its heart was broken.
There was a large garden behind the house full of
apple-trees with flower-beds and grass-plots in the
centre and two figure-heads of ships, one among
the strawberry plants under a wall covered with
fruit trees and one among the flowers. The one

1 1

among the flowers was a white lady in flowing robes,
while the other, a stalwart man in uniform, had been
taken from a three-masted ship of my grandfather's
called "The Russia," and there was a belief among
the servants that the stalwart man represented the
Tsar and had been presented by the Tsar himself.
The avenue, or as they say in England the drive, that
went from the hall door through a clump of big trees
to an insignificant gate and a road bordered by bro-
ken and dirty cottages, was but two or three hundred
yards, and I often thought it should have been made
to wind more, for I judged people's social impor-
tance mainly by the length of their avenues. This
idea may have come from the stable-boy, for he was
my principal friend. He had a book of Orange
rhymes, and the days when we read them together
in the hay-loft gave me the pleasure of rhyme for the
first time. Later on I can remember being told, when
there was a rumour of a Fenian rising, that rifles
had been served out to the Orangemen and present-
ly, when I had begun to dream of my future life, I
thought I would like to die fighting the Fenians. I
was to build a very fast and beautiful ship and to
have under my command a company of young men
who were always to be in training like athletes and
so become as brave and handsome as the young men
in the story-books, and there was to be a big battle

12

on the sea-shore near Rosses and I was to be killed. I
collected little pieces of wood and piled them up in
a corner of the yard, and there was an old rotten log
in a distant field I often went to look at because I
thought it would go a long way in the making of the
ship. All my dreams were of ships ; and one day a sea
captain who had come to dine with my grandfather
put a hand on each side of my head and lifted me up
to show me Africa, and another day a sea captain
pointed to the smoke from the Pern mill on the
quays rising up beyond the trees of the lawn, as
though it came from the mountain, and asked me if
Ben Bulben was a burning mountain.
Once every few months I used to go to Rosses Point
or Ballisodare to see another little boy, who had a
piebald pony that had once been in a circus and
sometimes forgot where it was and went round and
round. He was George Middleton, son of my great-
uncle William Middleton. Old Middleton had
bought land, then believed a safe investment, at Bal-
lisodare and at Rosses, and spent the winter at Bal-
lisodare and the summer at Rosses. The Middleton
and Pollexfen flour mills were at Ballisodare, and a
great salmon weir, rapids and a waterfall, but it was
more often at Rosses that I saw my cousin. We rowed
in the river mouth or were taken sailing in a heavy
slow schooner yacht or in a big ship's boat that had

'3

been rigged and decked. There were great cellars
under the house, for it had been a smuggler's house
a hundred years before, and sometimes three loud
raps would come upon the drawingroom window at
sun-down setting all the dogs barking, some dead
smuggler giving his accustomed signal. One night I
heard them very distinctly and my cousins often
heard them, and later on my sister. A pilot had told
me that, after dreaming three times of a treasure
buried in my uncle's garden, he had climbed the wall
in the middle of the night and begun to dig but grew
disheartened "because there was so much earth." I
told somebody what he had said and was told that it
was well he did not find it for it was guarded by a
spirit that looked like a flat iron. At Ballisodare there
was a cleft among the rocks that I passed with terror
because I believed that a murderous monster lived
there that made a buzzing sound like a bee.
It was through the Middletons perhaps that I got
my interest in country stories and certainly the first
faery stories that I heard were in the cottages about
their houses. The Middletons took the nearest for
friends and were always in and out of the cottages of
pilots and of tenants. They were practical, always
doing something with their hands, making boats,
feeding chickens, and without ambition. One of
them had designed a steamer many years before my

'4

birth and long after I had grown to manhood one
could hear it — it had some sort of obsolete engine —
many miles off wheezing in the Channel like an
asthmatic person. It had been built on the lake and
dragged through the town by many horses, stopping
before the windows where my mother was learning
her lessons,and plunging the whole school into can-
dle-light for five days, and was still patched and
repatched mainly because it was believed to be a
bringer of good luck. It had been called after the
betrothed of itsbuilder "Janet," long corrupted into
the more familiar "Jennet," and the betrothed died
in my youth having passed her eightieth year and
been her husband's plague because of the violence
of her temper. Another who was but a year or two
older than myself used to shock me by running after
hens to know by their feel if they were on the point
of dropping an egg. They let their houses decay and
the glass fall from the windows of their greenhouses,
but one among them at any rate had the second
sight. They were liked but had not the pride and re-
serve, the sense of decorum and order,the instinctive
playing before themselves that belongs to those who
strike the popular imagination.
Sometimes my grandmother would bring me to see
some old Sligo gentlewoman whose garden ran
down to the river ending there in a low wall full of

15

wallflowers and I would sit up upon my chair, very
bored, while my elders ate their seed-cake and drank
their sherry. My walks with the servants were more
interesting; sometimes we would pass a little fat girl
and a servant persuaded me to write her a love-letter,
and the next time she passed she put her tongue out.
But it was the servant's stories that interested me.
At such and such a corner a man had got a shilling
from a drill sergeant by standing in a barrel and had
then rolled out of it and shown his crippled legs.
And in such and such a house an old woman had hid
herself under the bed of her guests, an officer and
his wife, and on hearing them abuse her beaten them
with a broomstick. All the well-known families had
their grotesque or tragic or romantic legends, and I
often said to myself how terrible it would be to go
away and die where nobody would know my story.
Years afterwards, when I was ten or twelve years old
and in London, I would remember Sligo with tears,
and when I began to write, it was there I hoped to
find my audience. Next to Merville where I lived,
was another tree-surrounded house where I some-
times went to see a little boy who stayed there oc-
casionally with his grandmother, whose name I
forget and who seemed to me kind and friendly,
though when I went to see her in my thirteenth or
fourteenth year I discovered that she only cared for

16

very little boys. When the visitors called I hid in
the hay-loft and lay hidden behind the great heap
of hay while a servant was calling my name in the
yard.

I do not know how old I was (for all these events
seem at the same distance) when I was made drunk.
I had been out yachting with an uncle and my cous-
ins and it had come on very rough. I had lain on deck
between the mast and the bowsprit and a wave had
burst over me and I had seen green water over my
head. I was very proud and very wet. When we got
into Rosses again, I was dressed up in an older boy's
clothes so that the trousers came down below my
boots and a pilot gave me a little raw whiskey. I'
drove home with the uncle on an outside car and was
so pleased with the strange state in which I found
myself that for all my uncle could do,I cried to every
passer-by that I was drunk, and went on crying it
through the town and everywhere until I was put to
bed by my grandmother and given something to
drink that tasted of black currants and so fell asleep.

Ill

Some six miles off towards Ben Bulben and beyond
the Channel, as we call the tidal river between Sligo
and the Rosses, and on top of a hill there was a little

17 d

square two-storeyed house covered with creepers
and looking out upon a garden where the box bor-
ders were larger than any I had ever seen, and where
I saw for the first time the crimson streak of the glad-
iolus and awaited its blossom with excitement. Un-
der one gable a dark thicket of small trees made a
shut-in mysterious place, where one played and be-
lieved that something was going to happen. My
great-aunt Micky lived there. Micky was not her
right name for she was Mary Yeats and her father
had been my great-grandfather, John Yeats, who
had been Rector of Drumcliffe,afew miles further
off, and died in 1 847. She was a spare, high-colour-
ed, elderly woman and had the oldest looking cat I
had ever seen, for its hair had grown into matted
locks of yellowy white. She farmed and had one old
man-servant, but could not have farmed at all, had
not neighbouring farmers helped to gather in the
crops, in return for the loan of her farm implements
and "out of respect for the family," for as Johnny
MacGurk, the Sligo barber said to me, "the Yeats's
were always very respectable. " She was full of family
history ; all her dinner knives were pointed like dag-
gers through much cleaning, and there was a little
James the First cream-jug with the Yeats motto and
crest,and on her dining-room mantle-piece a beau-
tiful silver cup that had belonged to my great-great-

18

grandfather, who had married a certain Mary But-
ler. It had upon it the Butler crest and had been al-
ready old at the date 1534, when the initials of some
bride and bridegroom were engraved under the lip.
All its history for generations was rolled up inside
it upon apiece of paper yellow with age, until some
caller took the paper to light his pipe.
Another family of Yeats, a widow and her two
children on whom I called sometimes with my
grandmother, lived near in a long low cottage, and
owned a very fierce turkey cock that did battle with
their visitors; and some miles away lived the secre-
tary to the Grand Jury and Land Agent, my great-
uncle Mat Yeats andhisbig family of boys and girls ;
but I think it was only in later years that I came to
know them well. I do not think any of these liked
the Pollexfens, who were well off and seemed to
them purse-proud, whereas they themselves had
come down in the world. I remember them as very
well-bred and very religious in the Evangelical way
and thinking a good deal of Aunt Micky's old his-
tories. There had been among our ancestors a Kings
County soldier, one of Maryborough's generals, and
when his nephew came to dine he gave him boiled
pork, and when the nephew said he disliked boiled
pork he had asked him to dine again and promised
him something he would like better. However, he

gave him boiled pork again and the nephew took the
hint in silence. The other day as I was coming home
from America, I met one of his descendants whose
family has not another discoverable link with ours,
and he too knew the boiled pork story and nothing
else. We have the General's portrait, and he looks
very fine in his armour and his long curly wig, and
underneath it, after his name, are many honours that
have left no tradition among us. Were we country
people, we could have summarised his life in a le-
gend.

Another ancestor or great-uncle had chased the
United Irishmen for a fortnight, fallen into their
hands and been hanged, and the notorious Major Sirr
who betrayed the brothers Shears, taking their
children upon his knees to question them, if the tale
does not lie, had been god-father to several of my
great-great-grandfather's children; while to make
a balance, my great-grandfather had been Robert
Emmett's friend and been suspected and imprisoned
though but for a few hours. A great-uncle had been
Governor of Penang, and led the forlorn hope at the
taking of Rangoon, and an. uncle of a still older gen-
eration had fallen at New Orleans in 1813, and even
in the last generation there had been lives of some
power and pleasure. An old man who had entertain-
ed many famous people, in his 1 8th century house,

20

where battlement and tower showed the influence
of Horace Walpole, had but lately, after losing all
his money , drowned himself,first taking off his rings
and chain and watch as became a collector of many
beautiful things ; and once to remind us of more pas-
sionate life, a gun-boat put into Rosses, commanded
by the illegitimate son of some great-uncle or other.
Now that I can look at their miniatures, turning
them over to find the name of soldier, or lawyer, or
Castle official, and wondering if they cared for good
books or good music, I am delighted with all that
joins my life to those who had power in Ireland or
with those anywhere that were good servants and
poor bargainers, but I cared nothing as a child for
Micky's tales. I could see my grandfather's ships
come up the bay or the river, and his sailors treated
me with deference, and a ship's carpenter made and
mended my toy boats and I thought that nobody
could be so important as my grandfather. Perhaps,
too, it is only now that I can value those more gen-
tle natures so unlike his passion and violence. An old
Sligo priest has told me how my great-grandfather
John Yeats always went into his kitchen rattling the
keys, so much did he fear finding some one doing
wrong, and how when the agent of the great land-
owner of his parish brought him from cottage to
cottage to bid the women send their children to the

21

Protestant school and all had promised till they
came to one who cried, "child of mine will never
darken your door," he had said "thank you my wo-
man, you are the first honest woman I have met to-
day." My uncle, Mat Yeats, the Land Agent, had
once waited up every night for a week to catch some
boys who stole his apples and when he caught them
had given them sixpence and told them not to do it
again. Perhaps it is only fancy or the softening touch
of the miniaturist that makes me discover in their
faces some courtesy and much gentleness. Two
i 8th century faces interest me the most, one that
of a great-great-grandfather, for both have under
their powdered curling wigs a half-feminine charm,
and as I look at them I discover a something clumsy
and heavy in myself. Yet it was a Yeats who spoke
the only eulogy that turns my head. "We have ideas
and no passions, but by marriage with a Pollexfen
we have given a tongue to the sea cliffs/'
Among the miniatures there is a larger picture, an
admirable drawing by I know not what master, that
is too harsh and merry for its company .He was a con-
nection and close friend of my great-grandmother
Corbet, and though we spoke of him as "Uncle
Beattie" in our childhood, no blood relation. My
great-grandmother who died at ninety-three had

22

many memories of him. He was the friend of Gold-
smith & was accustomed to boast clergyman though
he was, that he belonged to a hunt-club of which
every member but himself had been hanged or tran-
sported for treason, and that it was not possible to
ask him a question he could not reply to with a per-
fectly appropriate blasphemy or indecency.

IV

Because I had found it hard to attend to anything
less interesting than my thoughts, I was difficult to
teach. Several of my uncles and aunts had tried to
teach me to read, and because they could not, and be-
cause I was much older than children who read eas-
ily, had come to think, as I have learnt since, that
I had not all my faculties. But for an accident they
might have thought it for a long time. My father
was staying in the house and-never went to church,
and that gave me the courage to refuse to set out one
Sunday morning. I was often devout, my eyes filling
with tears at the thought of God and of my own sins,
but I hated church. My grandmother tried to teach
me to put my toes first to the ground because I sup-
pose I stumped on my heels and that took my plea-
sure out of the way there. Later on when I had learnt
to read I took pleasure in the words of the hymn,
but never understood why the choir took three times
as long as I did in getting to the end; and the part

of the service I liked, the sermon and passages of
the Apocalypse and Ecclesiastes, were no compen-
sation for all the repetitions and for the fatigue of so
much standing. My father said if I would not go to
church he would teach me to read. I think now that
he wanted to make me go for my grandmother's
sake and could think of no other way. He was an
angry and impatient teacher and flung the reading
book at my head, and next Sunday I decided to go to
church. My father had, however, got interested in
teaching me, and only shifted the lesson to a week-
day till he had conquered my wandering mind. My
first clear image of him was fixed on my imagin-
ation, I believe, but a few days before the first les-
son. He had just arrived from London and was walk-
ing up and down the nursery floor. He had a very
black beard and hair, and one cheek bulged out with
a fig that was there to draw the pain out of a bad
tooth. One of the nurses (a nurse had come from
London with my brothers and sisters) said to the
other that a live frog, she had heard, was best of all.
Then I was sent to a dame school kept by an old wo-
man who stood us in rows and had a long stick like
a billiard cue to get at the back rows. My father was
still at Sligo when I came back from my first lesson
and asked me what I had been taught. I said I had
been taught to sing, and he said, "sing then" and
I sang

"Little drops of water,
Little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean,
And the pleasant land."

high up in my head. So my father wrote to the old
woman that I was never to be taught to sing again,
and afterwards other teachers were told the same
thing. Presently my eldest sister came on a long visit
and she and I went to a little two-storeyed house in
a poor street where an old gentlewoman taught us
spelling and grammar. When we had learned our
lesson well, we were allowed to look at a sword pre-
sented to her father who had led troops in India or
China and to spell out a long complimentary in-
scription on the silver scabbard. As we walked to
her house or home again we held a large umbrella
before us, both gripping the handle and guiding
ourselves by looking out of a round hole gnawed in
the cover by a mouse. When I had got beyond books
of one syllable, I began to spend my time in a room
called the Library, though there were no books in it
that I can remember except some old novels I never
opened and a many-volumed encyclopaedia pub-
lished towards the end of the i8th century. I read
this encyclopaedia a great deal and can remember a

long passage considering whether fossil wood de-
spite its appearance might not be only a curiously
shaped stone.

My father's unbelief had set me thinking about the
evidences of religion and I weighed the matter per-
petually with great anxiety, for I did not think I
could live without religion. All my religious
emotions were, I think, connected with clouds and
cloudy glimpses of luminous sky, perhaps because
of some bible picture of God's speaking to Abraham
or the like. At least I can remember the sight mov-
ing me to tears. One day I got a decisive argument
for belief. A cow was about to calve, and I went to
the field where the cow was with some farm-hands
who carried a lantern, and next day I heard that the
cow had calved in the early morning. I asked every-
body how calves were born, and because nobody
would tell me, made up my mind that nobody knew.
They were the gift of God, that much was certain,
but it was plain that nobody had ever dared to see
them come, and children must come in the same
way. I made up my mind that when I was a man, I
would wait up till calf or child had come. I was cer-
tain there would be a cloud and a burst of light and
God would bring the calf in the cloud out of the
light. That thought made me content until a boy of
twelve or thirteen, who had come on a visit for the

26

day, sat beside me in a hay-loft and explained all the
mechanism of sex. He had learnt all about it from
an elder boy whose pathic he was (to use a term he
would not have understood) and his description,
given as I can see now, as if he were telling of any
other fact of physical life, made me miserable for
weeks. After the first impression wore off, I began
to doubt if he had spoken truth, but one day I dis-
covered a passage in the encyclopaedia, though I
only partly understood its long words, that confirm-
ed what he had said. I did not know enough to be
shocked at his relation to the elder boy, but it was
the first breaking of the dream of childhood.
My realization of death came when my father and
mother and my two brothers and my two sisters
were on a visit. I was in the Library when I heard
feet running past and heard somebody say in the pas-
sage that my younger brother, Robert, had died.
He had been ill for some days. A little later my sis-
ter and I sat at the table, very happy, drawing ships
with their flags half-mast high . We must have heard
or seen that the ships in the harbour had their flags
at half-mast. Next day at breakfast I heard people
telling how my mother and the servant had heard
the banshee crying the night before he died. It must
have been after this that I told my grandmother I
did not want to go with her when she went to see
old bed-ridden people because they would soon die.

27

V

At length when I was eight or nine an aunt said to
me, "you are going to London. Here you are some-
body. There you will be nobody at all." I knew at
the time that her words were a blow at my father
not at me, but it was some years before I knew her
reason. She thought so able a man as my father could
have found out some way of painting more popular
pictures if he had set his mind to it and that it was
wrong of him "to spend every evening at his club."
She had mistaken, for what she would have con-
sidered a place of wantonness, Heatherley's Art
School.

My mother and brother and sister were at Sligo
perhaps when I was sent to England, for my father
and I and a group of landscape painters lodged at
Burnham Beeches with an old Mr. and Mrs. Earle.
My father was painting the first big pond you come
to if you have driven from Slough through Farnham
Royal. He began it in spring and painted all through
the year, the picture changing with the seasons, and
gave it up unfinished when he had painted the snow
upon the heath-covered banks. He is never satisfied
and can never make himself say that any picture is
finished. In the evening he heard me my lessons or
read me some novel of Fenimore Cooper's. I found
delightful adventures in the woods — one day a blind

28

f

worm and an adder fighting in a green hollow, and
sometimes Mrs. Earle would be afraid to tidy the
room because I had put a bottle full of newts on the
mantle-piece. Now and then a boy from a farm on
the other side of the road threw a pebble at my win-
dow at day-break, and he and I went fishing in the
big second pond. Now and then another farmer's boy
and I shot sparrows with an old pepper box revolver
and the boy would roast them on a string. There
was an old horse one of the painters called the scaf-
folding, and sometimes a son of old Earle's drove
with me to Slough and once to Windsor, and at
Windsor we made our lunch of cold sausages bought
from a public house. I did not know what it was to
be alone, for I could wander in pleasant alarm
through the enclosed parts,then very large, or round
some pond imagining ships going in and out among
the reeds and thinking of Sligo or of strange seafar-
ing adventures in the fine ship I should launch when
I grew up. I had always a lesson to learn before night
and that was a continual misery, for I could very
rarely, with so much to remember, set my thoughts
upon it and then only in fear. One day my father told
me that a painter had said I was very thick-skinned
and did not mind what was said to me, and I could
not understand how anybody could be so unjust. It
made me wretched to be idle but one could not help

29

it. I was once surprised and shocked. All but my
father and myself had been to London, and Kennedy
and Farrarand Page, I remember the names vague-
ly, arrived laughing and talking. One of them had
carried off a card of texts from the waiting room of
the station and hung it up on the wall. I thought "he
has stolen it,5 * but my father and all made it a theme
of merry conversation.

Then I returned to Sligofor a few weeks as I was to
do once or twice in every year for years, and after
that we settled in London. Perhaps my mother and
the other children had been there all the time, for I
remember my father now and again going to Lon-
don. The first house we lived in was close to Burne
Jones's house at North End, but we moved after a
year or two to Bedford Park. At North End we had
a pear tree in the garden and plenty of pears, but the
pears used to be full of maggots, and almost opposite
lived a school-master called O'Neill, and when a lit-
tle boy told me that the school-master's great-grand-
father had been a king I did not doubt it. I was sit-
ting against the hedge and iron railing of some villa-
garden there, when I heard one boy say to another it
was something wrong with my liver that gave me
such a dark complexion and that I could not live
more than a year. I said to myself a year is a very
long time, one can do such a lot of things in a year,

3°

and put it out of my head. When my father gave me
a holiday and later when I had a holiday from school
I took my schooner boat to the round pond sailing
it very commonly against the two cutter yachts of
an old naval officer. He would sometimes look at
the ducks and say, "I would like to take that fellow
home for my dinner/' and he sang me a sailor's song
about a coffin ship which left Sligo after the great
famine, that made me feel very important. The ser-
vants at Sligo had told me the story. When she was
moved from the berth she had lain in, an unknown
dead man's body had floated up, a very evil omen;
and my grandfather, who was Lloyd's agent, had
condemned her, but she slipped out in the night.
The pond had its own legends; and a boy who had
seen a certain model steamer "burned to the water's
edge" was greatly valued as a friend. There was a
little boy I was kind to because I knew his father
had done something disgraceful though I did not
know what. It was years before I discovered that his
father was but the maker of certain popular statues,
many of which are now in public places. I had heard
my father's friends speak of him. Sometimes my sis-
ter came with me, and we would look into all the
sweet shops & toy shops on our way home, especial-
ly into one opposite Holland House because there
was a cutter yacht made of sugar in the window, and

3*

we drank at all the fountains. Once a stranger spoke
to us and bought us sweets and came with us almost
to our door. We asked him to come in and told him
our father's name. He would not come in,but laugh-
ed and said, "Oh, that is the painter who scrapes out
everyday what he painted the day before." A poig-
nant memory came upon me the other day while I
was passing the drinking-fountain near Holland
Park, for there I and my sister had spoken together
of our longing for Sligo and our hatred of London.
I know we were both very close to tears and remem-
ber with wonder, for I had never known anyone that
cared for such momentoes, that I longed for a sod of
earth from some field I knew, something of Sligo
to hold in my hand. It was some old race instinct
like that of a savage, for we had been brought up to
laugh at all display of emotion. Yet it was our moth-
er, who would have thought its display a vulgarity,
who kept alive that love. She would spend hours
listening to stories or telling stories of the pilots and
fishing people of Rosses Point, or of her own Sligo
girlhood, and it was always assumed between her
and us that Sligo was more beautiful than other
places. I can see now that she had great depth of
feeling, that she was her father's daughter. My
memory of what she was like in those days has
grown very dim,but I think her sense of personality,

32

her desire of any life of her own, had disappeared in
her care for us and in much anxiety about money.
I always see her sewing or knitting in spectacles and
wearing some plain dress. Yet ten years ago when I
was in San Francisco, an old cripple came to see me
who had left Sligo before her marriage; he came to
tell me, he said, that my mother "had been the most
beautiful girl in Sligo."

The only lessons I had ever learned were those my
father taught me, for he terrified me by descriptions
of my moral degradation and he humiliated me by
my likeness to disagreeable people; but presently I
was sent to school at Hammersmith. It was a Goth-
ic building of yellow brick : a large hall full of desks,
some small class-rooms and a separate house for
boarders, all built perhaps in 1840 or 1850. I
thought it an ancient building and that it had be-
longed to the founder of the school, Lord Godol-
phin, who was romantic to me because there was a
novel about him. I never read the novel, but I
thought only romantic people were put in books.
On one side, there was a piano factory of yellow
brick, upon two sides half finished rows of little
shops and villas all yellow brick, and on the fourth
side, outside the wall of our playing field, a brick-
field of cinders and piles of half-burned yellow
bricks. All the names and faces of my school-fellows

33 f

have faded from me except one name without a face
and the face and name of one friend,mainly no doubt
because it was all so long ago, but partly because I
only seem to remember things that have mixed
themselves up with scenes that have some quality to
bring them again and again before the memory.
For some days as I walked homeward along the
Hammersmith Road, I told my self that whatever I
most cared for had been taken away. I had found a
small, green-covered book given to my father by a
Dublin man of science; it gave an account of the
strange sea creatures the man of science had discov-
ered among the rocks at Howth or dredged out of
Dublin Bay, It had long been my favourite book;
and when I read it I believed that I was growing
very wise, but now I should have no time for it nor
for my own thoughts. Every moment would be
taken up learning or saying lessons or walking be-
tween school and home four times a day, for I came
home in the middle of the day for dinner. But pre-
sently I forgot my trouble, absorbed in two things
I had never known, companionship and enmity. Af-
ter my first day's lesson, a circle of boys had got
around me in a playing field and asked me questions,
"who's your father ?" "what does he do ?" "how
much money has he ?" Presently a boy said some-
thing insulting. I had never struck anybody or been

34

struck, and now all in a minute, without any inten-
tion upon my side, but as if I had been a doll moved
by a string, I was hitting at the boys within reach
and being hit. After that I was called names for be-
ing Irish, and had many fights and never, for years,
got the better of any one of them; for I was delicate
and had no muscles. Sometimes, however, I found
means of retaliation, even of aggression. There was
a boy with a big stride, much feared by little boys,
and finding him alone in the playing field, I went up
to him and said, "rise upon Sugaun and sink upon
Gad." "What does that mean ?" he said. "Rise
upon hay-leg and sink upon straw,'' I answered and
told him that in Ireland the sergeant tied straw and
hay to the ankles of a stupid recruit to show him the
difference between his legs. My ears were boxed,
and when I complained to my friends, they said I
had brought it upon myself; and that I deserved all
I got. I probably dared my self to other feats of a like
sort, for I did not think English people intelligent or
well-behaved unless they were artists. Everyone I
knew well in Sligo despised Nationalists and Cath-
olics, but all disliked England with a prejudice that
had come down perhaps from the days of the Irish
Parliament. I knew stories to the discredit of Eng-
land, and took them all seriously. My mother had
met some English woman who did not like Dublin

35

because the legs of the men were too straight, and at
Sligo, as everybody knew, an Englishman had once
said to a car-driver, "if you people were not so lazy,
you would pull down the mountain and spread it
out over the sand and that would give you acres of
good fields.'' At Sligo there is a wide river mouth
and at ebb tide most of it is dry sand, but all Sligo
knew that in some way I cannot remember it was the
spreading of the tide over the sand that left the nar-
row channel fit for shipping. At any rate the carman
had gone chuckling all over Sligo with his tale. Peo-
ple would tell it to prove that Englishmen were al-
ways grumbling. "They grumble about their din-
ners and everything — there was an Englishman
who wanted to pull down Knock-na-Rea" and so
on. My mother had shown them to me kissing at
railway stations, and taught me to feel disgust at
their lack of reserve, and my father told how my
grandfather, William Yeats, who had died before I
was born, when he came home to his Rectory in
County Down from an English visit, spoke of some
man he had met on a coach road who "Englishman-
like" told him all his affairs. My father explained
that an Englishman generally believed that his pri-
vate affairs did him credit, while an Irishman, being
poor and probably in debt, had no such confidence.
I, however, did not believe in this explanation. My

36

Sligo nurses, who had in all likelihood the Irish '
Catholic political hatred, had never spoken well of
any Englishman. Once when walking in the town of
Sligo I had turned to look after an English man and
woman whose clothes attracted me. The man I re-
member had gray clothes and knee-breeches and the
woman a gray dress, and my nurse had said con-
temptuously, "towrows." Perhaps before my time,
there had been some English song with the burden
"tow row row," and everybody had told me that
English people ate skates and even dog-fish, and I
myself had only just arrived in England when I saw
an old man put marmalade in his porridge. I was di-
vided from all those boys, not merely by the anec-
dotes that are everywhere perhaps a chief expression
of the distrust of races, but because our mental im-
ages were different. I read their boys' books and they
excited me, but if I read of some English victory, I
did not believe that I read of my own people. They
thought of Cressy and Agincourt and the Union
Jack and were all very patriotic, and I, without
those memories of Limerick and the Yellow Ford
that would have strengthened an Irish Catholic,
thought of mountain and lake, of my grandfather
and of ships. Anti-Irish feeling was running high,
for the Land League had been founded and landlords
had been shot, and I, who had no politics, was yet

37

full of pride, for it is romantic to live in a danger-
ous country.

I daresay I thought the rough manners of a cheap
school, as my grandfather Yeats had those of a
chance companion, typical of all England. At any
rate I had a harassed life & got many a black eye and
had many outbursts of grief and rage. Once a boy,
the son of a great Bohemian glass-maker, and who
was older than the rest of us, and had been sent out of
his country because of a love affair, beat a boy for me
because we were "both foreigners/' And a boy, who
grew to be the school athlete and my chief friend,
beat a great many. His are the face and name that I
remember — his name was of Huguenot origin and
his face like his gaunt and lithe body had something
of the American Indian in colour and lineament.
I was very much afraid of the other boys, and that
made me doubt myself for the first time. When I had
gathered pieces of wood in the corner for my great
ship, I was confident that I could keep calm among
the storms and die fighting when the great battle
came. But now I was ashamed of my lack of cour-
age; for I wanted to be like my grandfather who
thought so little of danger that he had jumped over-
board in the Bay of Biscay after an old hat. I was
very much afraid of physical pain,and one day when

38

I had made some noise in class, my friend the ath-
lete was accused and I allowed him to get two
strokes of the cane before I gave my self up. He had
held out his hands without flinching and had not
rubbed them on his sides afterwards. I was not
caned, but was made to stand up for the rest of the
lesson. I suffered very much afterwards when the
thought came to me, but he did not reproach me.
I had been some years at school before I had my last
fight. My friend, the athlete, had given me many
months of peace, but at last refused to beat any more
and said I must learn to box, and not go near the
other boys till I knew how. I went home with him „
every day and boxed in his room, and the bouts, had
always the same ending. My excitability gave me
an advantage at first and I would drive him across
the room, and then he would drive me across and it
would end very commonly with my nose bleeding.
One day his father, an elderly banker, brought us
out into the garden and tried to make us box in a
cold-blooded, courteous way, but it was no use. At
last he said I might go near the boys again and I was
no sooner inside the gate of the playing field than a
boy flung a handful of mud and cried out "mad
Irishman." I hit him several times on the face with-
out being hit, till the boys round said we should
make friends. I held out my hand in fear ; for I knew

3.9

if we went on I should be beaten, and he took it sul-
lenly. I had so poor a reputation as a fighter that it
was a great disgrace to him, and even the masters
made fun of his swollen face ; and though some little
boys came in a deputation to ask me to lick a boy
they named,! had never another fight with a school-
fellow. We had a great many fights with the street
boys and the boys of a neighbouring charity school.
We had always the better because we were not al-
lowed to fling stones, and that compelled us to close
or do our best to close. The monitors had been told
to report any boy who fought in the street, but they
only reported those who flung stones. I always ran
at the athlete's heels, but I never hit anyone. My
father considered these fights absurd, and even that
they were an English absurdity, and so I could not
get angry enough to like hitting and being hit; and
then too my friend drove the enemy before him. He
had no doubts or speculations to lighten his fist up-
on an enemy, that, being of low behaviour, should
be beaten as often as possible, and there were real
wrongs to avenge: one of our boys had been killed
by the blow of a stone hid in a snowball. Sometimes
we on our side got into trouble with the parents of
boys. There was a quarrel between the athlete and
an old German who had a barber's shop we passed
every day on our way home, and one day he spat

40

through the window and hit the German on his bald
head — the monitors had not forbidden spitting.
The German ran after us, but when the athlete
squared up he went away. Now, though I knew it
was not right to spit at people, my admiration for
my friend arose to a great height. I spread his fame
over the school, and next day there was a fine stir
when somebody saw the old German going up the
gravel walk to the head-master's room. Presently
there was such a noise in the passage that even the
master had to listen. It was the head-master's red-
haired brother turning the old German out and
shouting to the man-servant "see that he doesn't
steal the top-coats." We heard afterwards that he
had asked the names of the two boys who passed his
window every day and been told the names of the
two head boys who passed also but were notoriously
gentlemanly in their manners. Yet my friend was
timid also and that restored my confidence in my-
self. He would often ask me to buy the sweets or the
ginger-beer because he was afraid sometimes when
speaking to a stranger.

I had one reputation that I valued. At first when I
went to the Hammersmith swimming-baths with
the other boys, I was afraid to plunge in until I had
gone so far down the ladder that the water came up
to my thighs; but one day when I was alone I fell

4i g

from the spring-board which was five or six feet
above the water. After that I would dive from a
greater height than the others and I practised swim-
ming under water and pretending not to be out of
breath when I came up. And then if I ran a race, I
took care not to pant or show any sign of strain. And
in this I had an advantage even over the athlete; for
though he could run faster and was harder to tire
than anybody else, he grew very pale and I was often
paid compliments. I used to run with my friend
when he was training to keep him in company. He
would give me a long start and soon overtake me.
I followed the career of a certain professional run-
ner for months, buying papers that would tell me if
he had won or lost. I had seen him described as "the
bright particular star of American athletics," and
the wonderful phrase had thrown enchantment
over him. Had he been called the particular bright
star, I should have cared nothing for him. I did not
understand the symptom for years after. I was nurs-
ing my own dream, my form of the common school-
boy dream, though I was no longer gathering the
little pieces of broken and rotting wood. Often in-
stead of learning my lesson, I covered the white
squares of the chessboard on my little table with pen
and ink pictures of myself, doing all kinds of cour-
ageous things. One day my father said "there was a

42

man in Nelson's ship at the battle of Trafalgar, a
ship's purser, whose hair turned white; what a sen-
sitive temperament; that man should have achiev-
ed something ! " I was vexed and bewildered, and am
still bewildered and still vexed, finding it a poor and
crazy thing that we who have imagined so many
noble persons cannot bring our flesh to heel.

VI

The head-master was a clergyman, a good-hu-
moured, easy-going man, as temperate, one had no
doubt in his religious life as in all else, and if he ever
lost sleep on our account, it was from a very proper
anxiety as to our gentility. I was in disgrace once
because I went to school in some brilliant blue
homespun serge, my mother had bought in Devon-
shire, and I was told I must never wear it again. He
had tried several times, though he must have known
it was hopeless, to persuade our parents to put us in-
to Eton clothes, and on certain days we were com-
pelled to wear gloves. After my first year, we were
forbidden to play marbles because it was a form of
gambling and was played by nasty little boys, and a
few months later told not to cross our legs in class.
It was a school for the sons of professional men who
had failed or were at the outset of their career, and
the boys held an indignation meeting when they dis-
covered that a new boy was an apothecary's son (I

43

think at first I was his only friend,) and we all pre-
tended that our parents were richer than they were.
I told a little boy who had often seen my mother
knitting or mending my clothes that she only men-
ded or knitted because she liked it, though I knew
it was necessity.

It was like, I suppose, most schools of its type, an
obscene, bullying place, where a big boy would hit
a small boy in the wind to see him double up, and
where certain boys, too young for any emotion of
sex, would sing the dirty songs of the street, but I
daresay it suited me better than a better school. I
have heard the head-master say, "how has so-and-so
done in his Greek ?" and the class-master reply,
"very badly, but he is doing well in his cricket," and
the head-master has gone away saying "Oh, leave
him alone." I was unfitted for school work, and
though I would often work well for weeks together,
I had to give the whole evening to one lesson if I was
to know it. My thoughts were a great excitement,
but when I tried to do anything with them, it was
like trying to pack a balloon into a shed in a high
wind. I was always near the bottom of my class, and
alwaysnjaking excuses that but added to my timid-
ity ; but no master was rough with me. I was known
to collect moths and butterflies and to get into no
worse mischief than hiding now and again an old
tailless white rat in my coat-pocket or my desk.

44

There was but one interruption of our quiet habits,
the brief engagement of an Irish master,a fine Greek
scholar and vehement teacher, but of fantastic
speech. He would open the class by saying, "there
he goes, there he goes," or some like words as the
head-master passed by at the end of the halL "Of
course this school is no good. How could it be with a
clergyman for head-master?" And then perhaps his
eye would light on me, and he would make me stand
up and tell me it was a scandal I was so idle when all
the world knew that any Irish boy was cleverer than
a whole class-room of English boys, a description I
had to pay for afterwards. Sometimes he would call
up a little boy who had a girl's face and kiss him
upon both cheeks and talk of taking him to Greece
in the holidays, and presently we heard he had writ-
ten to the boy's parents about it, but long before
the holidays he was dismissed.

VII

Two pictures come into my memory. I have climb*
ed to the top of a tree by the edge of the playing
field, and am looking at my school-fellows and am
as proud of myself as a March cock when it crows
to its first sunrise. I am saying to myself, "if when I
grow up I am as clever among grown-up men as I
am among these boys, I shall be a famous man." I

45

remind myself how they think all the same things
and cover the school walls at election times with the
opinions their fathers find in the newspapers. I re-
mind myself that I am an artist's son and must take
some work as the whole end of life and not think as
the others do of becoming well off and living pleas-
antly. The other picture is of a hotel sitting-room
in the Strand, where a man is hunched up over the
fire. He is a cousin who has speculated with another
cousin's money and has fled from Ireland in danger of
arrest. My father has brought us to spend the even-
ing with him, to distract him from the remorse my
father knows that he must be suffering.

VIII

For years Bedford Park was a romantic excitement.
At North End my father had announced at break-
fast that our glass chandelier was absurd and was to
be taken down, and a little later he described the
village Norman Shaw was building. I had thought
he said, "there is to be a wall round and no news-
papers to be allowed in." And when I had told him
how put out I was at finding neither wall nor gate,
he explained that he had merely described what
ought to be. We were to see De Morgan tiles, pea-
cock-blue doors and the pomegranate pattern and
the tulip pattern of Morris, and to discover that we

had always hated doors painted with imitation grain
and the roses of mid- Victoria, and tiles covered with
geometrical patterns that seemed to have been shak-
en out of a muddy kaleidoscope. We went to live in
a house like those we had seen in pictures and even
met people dressed like people in the storybooks.
The streets were not straight and dull as at North
End, but wound about where there was a big tree or
for the mere pleasure of winding, and there were
wood palings instead of iron railings. The newness
of everything, the empty houses where we played
at hide-and-seek, and the strangeness of it all, made
us feel that we were living among toys. We could
imagine people living happy lives as we thought
people did long ago when the poor were picturesque
and the master of a house would tell of strange ad-
ventures over the sea. Only the better houses had
been built. The commercial builder had not begun
to copy and to cheapen, and besides we only knew
the most beautiful houses, the houses of artists. My
two sisters and my brother and myself had dancing
lessons in a low, red-brick and tiled house that drove
away dreams, long cherished, of some day living in a
house made exactly like a ship's cabin. The dining-
room table, where Sinbad the sailor might have sat,
was painted peacock-blue, and the woodwork was
all peacock-blue and upstairs there was a window

47

niche so big and high up, there was a flight of steps
to go up and down by and a table in the niche. The
two sisters of the master of the house, a well-known
pre-Raphaelite painter, were our teachers, and they
and their old mother were dressed in peacock-blue
and in dresses so simply cut that they seemed apart
of every story. Once when I had been looking with
delight at the old woman, my father who had be-
gun to be influenced by French art, muttered, "im-
agine dressing up your old mother like that."
My father's friends were painters who had been in-
fluenced by the pre-Raphaelite movement but had
lost their confidence. Wilson, Page,Nettleship,Pot-
ter are the names I remember, and at North End,
I remember them most clearly. I often heard one
and another say that Rossetti had never mastered his
materials,and though Nettleship had already turned
lion-painter, my father talked constantly of the de-
signs of his youth,especially of "God creating Evil,"
which Browning praised in a letter my father had
seen "as the most sublime conception in ancient or
modern Art. "In those early days, that he might not
be tempted from his work by society, he had made
a rent in the tail of his coat; and I have heard my
mother tell how she had once sewn it up, but before
he came again he had pulled out all the stitches.
Potter's exquisite "Dormouse," now in the Tate

Gallery, hung in our house for years. His dearest
friend was a pretty model who was, when my mem-
ory begins, working for some position in a board-
school. I can remember her sitting at the side of the
throne in the North End Studio, a book in her hand
and my father hearing her say a Latin lesson. Her
face was the typical mild, oval face of the painting
of that time, and may indeed have helped in the
moulding of an ideal of beauty. I found it the other
day drawn in pencil on a blank leaf of a volume of
the "Earthly Paradise." It was at Bedford Park that
I had heard Farrar, whom I hadfirst known at Burn-
ham Beeches, tell of Potter's death and burial. Pot-
ter had been very poor and had died from the effects
of semi-starvation. He had lived so long on bread
and tea that his stomach withered — I am sure that
was the word used, and when his relations found out
and gave him good food, it was too late. Farrar had
been at the funeral and had stood behind some well-
to-do people who were close about the grave and saw
one point to the model, who had followed the hearse
on foot and was now crying at a distance, and say,
"that is the woman who had all his money." She
had often begged him to allow her to pay his debts,
but he would not have it. Probably his rich friends
blamed his poor friends, and they the rich, and I
daresay, nobody had known enough to help him.

49 h

Besides, he had a strange form of dissipation, I had
heard someone say ; he was devoted to children, and
would become interested in some child — his "Dor-
mouse" is a portrait of a child — and spend his mon-
ey on its education. My sister remembers seeing him
paint with a dark glove on his right hand, and his
saying that he had used so much varnish the reflec-
tion of the hand would have teased him but for the
glove. "I will soon have to paint my face some dark
colour," he added. I have no memory, however, but
of noticing that he sat at the easel,whereas my father
always stands and walks up and down, and that there
was dark blue, a colour that always affects me, in the
background of his picture. There is a public gallery
of Wilson 's work in his native Aberdeen and my sis-
ters have a number of his landscapes — wood-scenes
for the most part — painted with phlegm and mel-
ancholy, the romantic movement drawing to its
latest phase.

IX

My father read out to me, for the first time, when
I was eight or nine years old. Between Sligo and
Rosses Point, there is a tongue of land covered with
coarse grass that runs out into the sea or the mud ac-
cording to the state of the tide. It is the place where
dead horses are buried . Sitting there, my father read

5°

me "The Lays of Ancient Rome." It was the first
poetry that had moved me after the stable-boy's
"Orange Rhymes." Later on he read me "Ivan-
hoe" and "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," and they
are still vivid in the memory. I re-read "Ivanhoe"
the other day, but it has all vanished except Gurth,
the swineherd, at the outset and Friar Tuck and his
venison pasty, the two scenes that laid hold of me in
childhood. "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" gave
me a wish to turn magician that competed for years
with the dream of being killed upon the sea-shore.
When I first went to school, he tried to keep me
from reading boys' papers, because a paper, by its
very nature, as he explained to me, had to be made
for the average boy or man and so could not but
thwart one's growth. He took away my paper and I
had not courage to say that I was but reading and
delighting in a prose re-telling of the Iliad. But af-
ter a few months, my father said he had been too
anxious and became less urgent about my lessons and
less violent if I had learnt them badly, and he ceased
to notice what I read. From that on I shared the
excitement which ran through all my fellows on
Wednesday afternoons when the boys' papers were
published, and I read endless stories I have forgotten
as completely as Grimm's Fairy Tales that I read at
Sligo, and all of Hans Andersen except the Ugly

5'

Duckling which my mother had read to me and to
my sisters. I remember vaguely that I liked Hans
Andersen better than Grimm because he was less
homely, but even he never gave me the knights and
dragons and beautiful ladies that I longed for. I have
remembered nothing that I read, but only those
things that I heard or saw. When I was ten or twelve
my father took me to see Irving play Hamlet, and
did not understand why I preferred Irving to Ellen
Terry, who was, I can now see, the idol of himself
and his friends. I could not think of her, as I could
of Irving's Hamlet, as but myself, and I was not old
enough to care for feminine charm and beauty. For
many years Hamlet was an image of heroic self-
possession for the poses of youth and childhood to
copy, a combatant of the battle within myself. My
father had read me the story of the little boy mur-
dered by the Jews in Chaucer and the tale of Sir To-
paz, explaining the hard words, and though both
excited me, I had liked Sir Topaz best and been dis-
appointed that it left off in the middle. As I grew
older, he would tell me plots of Balzac's novels, us-
ing incident or character as an illustration for some
profound criticism of life. Now that I have read all
the Comedie Humaine, certain pages have an un-
natural emphasis, straining and overbalancing the
outline, and I remember how in some suburban

52

street, he told me of Lucien de Rubempre,orof the
duel after the betrayal of his master, and how the
wounded Lucien had muttered "so much the
worse" when he heard someone say that he was not
dead.

I now can but share with a friend my thoughts and
my emotions, and there is a continual discovery of
difference, but in those days, before I had found my-
self, we could share adventures. When friends plan
and do together, their minds become one mind and
the last secret disappears. I was useless at games. I
cannot remember that I ever kicked a goal or made
a run, but I was a mine of knowledge when I and
the athlete and those two notoriously gentlemanly
boys — theirs was the name that I remember with-
out a face — set out for Richmond Park, for Coomb
Wood or Twyford Abbey to look for butterflies and
moths and beetles. Sometimes to-day I meet people
at lunch or dinner whose address will sound familiar
and I remember of a sudden how a game-keeper
chased me from the plantation behind their house,
and how I have turned over the cow-dung in their
paddock in the search for some rare beetle believed
to haunt the spot. The athlete was our watchman
and our safety. He would suggest, should we meet
a carriage on the drive, that we take off our hats and
walk on as though about to pay a call. And once

53

when we were sighted by a game-keeper at Coomb
Wood, he persuaded the eldest of the brothers to
pretend to be a school-master taking his boys for a
walk, and the keeper, instead of swearing and
threatening the law, was sad and argumentative. No
matter how charming the place, (and there is a lit-
tle stream in a hollow where Wimbledon Common
flows into Coomb Wood that is pleasant in the mem-
ory,) I knew that those other boys saw something I
did not see. I was a stranger there. There was some-
thing in their way of saying the names of places that
made me feel this.

X

When I arrived at the Clarence Basin, Liverpool,
(the dock Clarence Mangan had his first name from)
on my way to Sligo for my holidays I was among
Sligo people. When I was a little boy, an old woman
who had come to Liverpool with crates of fowl,
made me miserable by throwing her arms around
me the moment I had alighted from my cab and tel-
ling the sailor who carried my luggage that she had
held me in her arms when I was a baby. The sailor
may have known me almost as well, for I was often
at Sligo quay to sail my boat; and I came and went
once or twice in every year upon the ss. Sligo or the
ss. Liverpool which belonged to a company that had

54

for directors my grandfather and his partner Wil-
liam Middleton. I was always pleased if it was the
Liverpool, for she had been built to run the blockade
during the war of North and South.
I waited for this voyage always with excitement and
boasted to other boys about it, and when I was a little
boy had walked with my feet apart as I had seen sail-
ors walk. I used to be sea-sick, but I must have hid-
den this from the other boys and partly even from
myself; for, as I look back, I remember very little
about it, while I remember stories I was told by the
captain or by his first mate, and the look of the great
cliffs of Donegal & Tory Island men coming along-
side with lobsters, talking Irish and, if it was night,
blowing on a burning sod to draw our attention. The
captain, an old man with square shoulders and a
fringe of grey hair round his face, would tell his first
mate, a very admiring man, of fights he had had
on shore at Liverpool; and perhaps it was of him I
was thinking when I was very small and asked my
grandmother if God was as strong as sailors. Once,
at any rate, he had been nearly wrecked; the Liver-
pool had been all but blown upon the Mull of Gallo-
way with her shaft broken, and the captain had said
to his mate, "mind and jump when she strikes, for
we don't want to be killed by the falling spars;" and
when the mate answered, "my God,I cannot swim,"

55

he had said, "who could keep afloat for five minutes
in a sea like that?" He would often say his mate was
the most timid of men and that "a girl along the
quays could laugh him out of any thing. * ' My grand-
father had more than once given the mate a ship of
his own, but he had always thrown up his berth to
sail with his old captain where he felt safe. Once he
had been put in charge of a ship in a dry dock in
Liverpool, but a boy was drowned in Sligo, and be-
fore the news could reach him he wired to his wife,
"ghost, come at once, or I will throw up berth. " He
had been wrecked a number of times, and maybe
that had broken his nerve or maybe he had a sen-
sitiveness that would in another class have given
him taste & culture. I once forgot a copy of "Count
Robert of Paris" on a deck-seat, and when I found
it again, it was all covered with the prints of his dirty
thumb. He had once seen the coach-a-baur or
death coach. It came along the road, he said, till it
was hidden by a cottage and it never came out on the
other side of the cottage. Once I smelled new-mown
hay when we were quite a long way from land, and
once when I was watching the sea-parrots (as the
sailors call the puffin) I noticed they had different
ways of tucking their heads under their wings, or I
fancied it, and said to the captain "they have differ-
ent characters." Sometimes my father came too, and

56

the sailors when they saw him coming would say
"there is John Yeats and we shall have a storm,"
for he was considered unlucky.
I no longer cared for little shut-in places, for a cop-
pice against the stable-yard at Merville where my
grandfather lived or against the gable at Seaview
where Aunt Micky lived, and I began to climb the
mountains, sometimes with the stable-boy for com-
panion, and to look up their stories in the county
history. I fished for trout with a worm in the moun-
tain streams and went out herring-fishing at night:
and because my grandfather had said the English
were in the right to eat skates, I carried a large skate
all the six miles or so from Rosses Point, but my
grandfather did not eat it.

One night just as the equinoctial gales were coming
when I was sailing home in the coastguard's boat a
boy told me a beetle of solid gold, strayed maybe
from Poe's "gold bug," had been seen by somebody
in Scotland and I do not think that either of us doubt-
ed his news. Indeed, so many stories did I hear from
sailors along the wharf, or round the fo 'castle fire of
the little steamer that ran between Sligo and Rosses,
or from boys out fishing that the world was full of
monsters and marvels. The foreign sailors wearing
ear-rings did not tell me stories, but like the fishing
boys, I gazed at them in wonder and admiration.

57 i

When I look at my brother's picture, "Memory
Harbour/' houses and anchored ship and distant
lighthouse all set close together as in some old map,
I recognize in the blue-coated man with the mass of
white shirt the pilot I went fishing with, and I am
full of disquiet and of excitement, and I am melan-
choly because I have not made more and better ver-
ses. I have walked on Sinbad's yellow shore and
never shall another hit my fancy.
I had still my red pony, and once my father came
with me riding too, and was very exacting. He was
indignant and threatening because he did not think
I rode well. "You must do everything well," he said,
"that the Pollexfens respect, though you must do
other things also. " He used to say the same about my
lessons, and tell me to be good at mathematics. I can
see now that he had a sense of inferiority among
those energetic, successful people. He himself, some
Pollexfen told me, though he rode very badly , would
go hunting upon anything and take any ditch. His
father, the County Down Rector, though a courtly
man and a scholar, had been so dandified a horseman
that I had heard of his splitting three riding breech-
es before he had settled into his saddle for a day's
hunting, and of his first rector exclaiming, "I had
hoped for a curate but they have sent me a jockey."

.58

Left to myself, I rode without ambition though get-
ting many falls and more often to Rathbroughan
where my great-uncle Mat lived, than to any place
else. His children and I used to sail our toy-boats in
the river before his house, arming them with toy-
cannon, touch-paper at all the touch-holes, always
hoping but always in vain that they would not twist
about in the eddies but fire their cannon at one an-
other. I must have gone to Sligo sometimes in the
Christmas holidays, for I can remember riding my
red pony to a hunt. He balked at the first jump, to
my relief, and when a crowd of boys began to beat
him, I would not allow it. They all jeered at me for
being afraid. I found a gap and when I was alone in
a field tried another ditch, but the pony would not
jump that either ; so I tied him to a tree and lay down
among the ferns and looked up into the sky. On my
way home I met the hunt again and noticed that
everybody avoided the dogs, and because I wanted
to find out why they did so I rode to where the dogs
had gathered in the middle of the lane and stood my
pony amongst them, and everybody began to shout
at me.

Sometimes I would ride to Castle Dargan, where
lived a brawling squireen, married to one of my
Middleton cousins, and once I went thither on a
visit with my cousin George Middleton. It was, I

59

dare say, the last household where I could have
found the reckless Ireland of a hundred years ago in
final degradation. But I liked the place for the ro-
mance of its two ruined castles facing one another
across a little lake, Castle Dargan and Castle Fury.
The squireen lived in a small house whither his fam-
ily had moved from their castle some time in the
1 8th century, and two old Miss Furys, who let lodg-
ings in Sligo, were the last remants of the breed of
the other ruin. Once in every year he drove to Sligo
for the two old women, that they might look upon
the ancestral stones and remember their gentility,
and he would put his wildest horses into the shafts
to enjoy their terror.

He himself, with a reeling imagination, knew not
what he could be at to find a spur for the heavy hours.
The first day I came there, he gave my cousin a re-
volver, (we were upon the high road,) and to show
it off, or his own shooting, he shot a passing chicken ;
and half an hour later, when he had brought us to
the lake's edge under his castle, now but the broken
corner of a tower with a winding stair, he fired at or
over an old countryman who was walking on the far
edge of the lake. The next day I heard him settling
the matter with the old countryman over a bottle of
whiskey, and both were in good humour. Once he
had asked a timid aunt of mine if she would like to

60

see his last new pet, and thereupon had marched a
race-horse in through the hall door and round the
dining-room table. And once she came down to a
bare table because he had thought it a good joke to
open the window and let his harriers eat the break-
fast. There was a current story, too, of his shooting,
in the pride of his marksmanship, at his own door
with a Martini-Henry rifle till he had shot the
knocker off. At last he quarrelled with my great-
uncle William Middleton, and to avenge himself
gathered a rabble of wild country-lads and mounted
them and himself upon the most broken-down ras-
cally horses he could lay hands on and marched them
through Sligo under a land-league banner. After
that, having neither friends nor money, he made
off to Australia or to Canada. I fished for pike at
Castle Dargan and shot at birds with a muzzle-
loading pistol until somebody shot a rabbit and I
heard it squeal. From that on I would kill nothing
but the dumb fish.

XI

We left Bedford Park for a long thatched house at
Howth, Co. Dublin. The land war was now at its
height and our Kildare land, that had been in the
family for many generations, was slipping from us.
Rents had fallen more and more, we had to sell to

61

pay some charge or mortgage, but my father and
his tenants parted without ill-will. During the
worst times an old tenant had under his roof my
father's shooting-dog and gave it better care than
the annual payment earned. He had set apart for
its comfort the best place at the fire ; and if some man
were in the place when the dog walked into the
house, the man must needs make room for the dog.
And a good while after the sale, I can remember my
father being called upon to settle some dispute be-
tween this old man and his sons.
I was now fifteen ; and as he did not want to leave his
painting my father told me to go to Harcourt Street
and put myself to school. I found a bleak 1 8th cen-
tury house and a small playing-field full of mud and
pebbles, fenced by an iron railing from a wide 1 8th
century street, but opposite a long hoarding and a
squalid, ornamental railway station. Here, as I soon
found, nobody gave a thought to decorum. We
worked in a din of voices. We began the morning
with prayers, but when class began the head-master,
if he was in the humour, would laugh at Church and
Clergy. "Let them say what they like," he would
say, "but the earth does go round the sun." On the
other hand there was no bullying and I had not
thought it possible that boys could work so hard.
Cricket and football, the collection of moths and

62

butterflies, though not forbidden,were discouraged.
They were for idle boys. I did not know, as I used
to, the mass of my school-fellows; for we had little
life in common outside the class-rooms. I had begun
to think of my school work as an interruption of my
natural history studies, but even had I never opened
a book not in the school course, I could not have
learned a quarter of my night's work. I had always
done Euclid easily, making the problems out while
the other boys were blundering at the blackboard,
and it had often carried me from the bottom to the
top of my class ; but these boys had the same natural
gift and instead of being in the fourth or fifth book
were in the modern books at the end of the primer;
and in place of a dozen lines of Virgil with a diction-
ary, I was expected to learn with the help of a crib a
hundred and fifty lines. The other boys were able to
learn the translation off, and to remember what
words of Latin and English corresponded with one
another, but I, who it may be had tried to find out
what happened in the parts we had not read, made
ridiculous mistakes; and what could I, who never
worked when I was not interested, do with a history
lesson that was but a column of seventy dates? I was
worst of all at literature, for we read Shakespeare
for his grammar exclusively.
One day I had a lucky thought. A great many lessons

63

were run through in the last hour of the day, things
we had learnt or should have learnt by heart over
night, and after not having known one of them for
weeks, I cut off that hour without anybody's leave.
I asked the mathematical master to give me a sum
to work and nobody said a word. My father often
interfered, and always with disaster, to teach me my
Latin lesson. "But I have also my geography," I
would say. "Geography," he would reply, "should
never be taught. It is not a training for the mind.
You will pick up all that you need, in your general
reading." And if it was a history lesson, he would
say just the same, and "Euclid," he would say, "is
too easy. It comes naturally to the literary imagin-
ation. The old idea, that it is a good training for the
mind, was long ago refuted." I would know my Lat-
in lesson so that it was a nine day's wonder, and for
weeks after would be told it was scandalous to be so
clever and so idle. No one knew that I had learnt it
in the terror that alone could check my wandering
mind. I must have told on him at some time or oth-
er for I remember the head-master saying, "I am
going to give you an imposition because I cannot
get at your father to give him one." Sometimes we
had essays to write ; & though I never got a prize, for
the essays were j udged by hand- writing and spelling
I caused a measure of scandal. I would be called up

before some master and asked if I really believed
such things, and that would make me angry for I had
written what I had believed all my life, what my
father had told me, or a memory of the conversation
of his friends. There were other beliefs but they
were held by people one did not know, people who
were vulgar or stupid. I was asked to write an essay
on "men may rise on stepping-stones of their dead
selves to higher things." My father read the subject
to my mother who had no interest in such matters.
"That is the way," he said "boys are made insincere
and false to themselves. Ideals make the blood thin,
and take the human nature out of people." He walk-
ed up and down the room in eloquent indignation,
and told me not to write on such a subject at all, but
upon Shakespeare's lines "to thine own self be true,
and it must follow as the night the day thou canst
not then be false to any man." At another time, he
would denounce the idea of duty, and "imagine,"
he would say, "how the right sort of woman would
despise a dutiful husband ;" and he would tell us how
much my mother would scorn such a thing. Maybe
there were people among whom such ideas were
natural, but they were the people with whom one
does not dine. All he said was, I now believe right,
but he should have taken me away from school. He
would have taught me nothing but Greek and Lat-
in, and I would now be a properly educated man, and

65 j

would not have to look in useless longing at books
that have been, through the poor mechanism of
translation, the builders of my soul, nor faced au-
thority with the timidity born of excuse and eva-
sion. Evasion and excuse were in the event as wise
as the house-building instinct of the beaver.

XII

My London schoolfellow, the athlete, spent a sum-
mer with us, but the friendship of boyhood, found-
ed upon action and adventure, was drawing to an
end. He was still my superior in all physical activity
and climbed to places among the rocks that even
now are uncomfortable memories, but I had begun
to criticize him. One morning I proposed a journey
to Lambay Island, and was contemptuous because
he said we should miss our mid-day meal. We hoist-
ed a sail on our small boat and ran quickly over the
nine miles and saw on the shore a tame sea-gull,
while a couple of boys, the sons of a coast-guard, ran
into the water in their clothes to pull us to land, as
we had read of savage people doing. We spent an
hour upon the sunny shore and I said, "I would like
to live here always, and perhaps some day I will."
I was always discovering places where I would like
to spend my whole life. We started to row home,and
when dinner-time had passed for about an hour, the
athlete lay down on the bottom of the boat doubled

66

up with the gripes. I mocked at him and at his fel-
low-countrymen whose stomachs struck the hour
as if they were clocks.

Our natural history, too, began to pull us apart. I
planned some day to write a book about the changes
through a twelve-month among the creatures of
some hole in the rock, and had some theory of my
own, which I cannot remember, as to the colour of
sea-anemones: and after much hesitation, trouble
and bewilderment, was hot for argument in refuta-
tion of Adam and Noah and the Seven Days. I had
read Darwin and Wallace, Huxley and Haeckel,
and would spend hours on a holiday plaguing a pious
geologist, who, when not at some job in Guinness's
brewery, came with a hammer to look for fossils in
the Howth Cliffs. "You know," I would say, "that
such and such human remains cannot be less, be-
cause of the strata they were found in, than fifty
thousand years old." "Oh !" he would answer, "they
are an isolated instance." And once when I pressed
hard my case against Ussher's chronology, he beg-
ged me not to speak of the subject again. "If I believ-
ed what you do," he said, "I could not live a moral
life." But I could not even argue with the athlete
who still collected his butterflies for the adventure's
sake, and with no curiosity but for their names. I
began to judge his intelligence, and to tell him that

his natural history had as little to do with science as
his collection of postage stamps. Even during my
school days in London, influenced perhaps by my
father, I had looked down upon the postage stamps.

XIII

Our house for the first year or so was on the top of
a cliff, so that in stormy weather the spray would
sometimes soak my bed at night, for I had taken the
glass out of the window, sash and all. A literary pas-
sion for the open air was to last me for a few years.
Then for another year or two, we had a house over-
looking the harbour where the one great sight was
the going and coming of the fishing fleet. We had
one regular servant, a fisherman's wife, and the oc-
casional help of a big, red-faced girl who ate a whole
pot of jam while my mother was at church and ac-
cused me of it. Some such arrangement lasted until
long after the time I write of, and until my father
going into the kitchen by chance found a girl, who
had been engaged during a passing need, in tears at
the thought of leaving our other servant, and pro-
mised that they should never be parted. I have no
doubt that we lived at the harbour for my mother's
sake. She had, when we were children, refused to
take us to a seaside place because she heard it posses-
sed a bathing box, but she loved the activities of a

68

fishing village. When I think of her, I almost al-
ways see her talking over a cup of tea in the kitchen
with our servant, the fisherman's wife, on the only
themes outside our house that seemed of interest —
the fishing people of Howth, or the pilots and fish-
ing people of Rosses Point. She read no books, but
she and the fisherman's wife would tell each other
stories that Homer might have told pleased with
any moment of sudden intensity and laughing to-
gether over any point of satire. There is an essay
called "Village Ghosts" in my "Celtic Twilight"
which is but a record of one such afternoon, and
many a fine tale has been lost because it had not oc-
curred tome soon enough to keep notes. My father
was always praising her to my sisters and to me, be-
cause she pretended to nothing she did not feel. She
would write him letters telling of her delight in the
tumbling clouds, but she did not care for pictures,
and never went to an exhibition even to see a picture
of his, nor to his studio to see the day's work, neither
now nor when they were first married, I remember
all this very clearly and little after until her mind
had gone in a stroke of paralysis and she had found,
liberated at last from financial worry, perfect happi-
ness feeding the birds at a London window. She had
always, my father would say, intensity, and that was
his chief word of praise; and once he added to the

praise "no spendthrift ever had a poet for a son,
though a miser might."

XIV

The great event of a boy's life is the awakening of
sex. He will bathe many times a day, or get up at
dawn and having stripped leap to and fro over a stick
laid upon two chairs and hardly know, and never
admit, that he had begun to take pleasure in his own
nakedness, nor will he understand the change until
some dream discovers it. He may never understand
at all the greater change in his mind.
It all came upon me when I was close upon seven-
teen like the bursting of a shell. Somnambulistic
country-girls, when it is upon them, throw plates
about or pull them with long hairs in simulation of
thepolter-geist,or become mediums for some gen-
uine spirit-mischief, surrendering to their desire of
the marvellous. As I look backward, I seem to dis-
cover that my passions, my loves and my despairs,
instead of being my enemies, a disturbance and an
attack, became so beautiful that I must be constant-
ly alone to give them my whole attention. I notice
that, for the first time as I run through my memory,
what I saw when alone is more vivid than what I
did or saw in company.

70

A herd had shown me a cave some hundred and fifty
feet below the cliff path and a couple of hundred
above the sea, and told me how an evicted tenant
called Macrom, dead some fifteen years, had lived
there many years, and shown me a rusty nail in the
rock which had served perhaps to hold up some
wooden protection from wind and weather. Here
I stored a tin of cocoa and some biscuits, and instead
of going to my bed, would slip out on warm nights
and sleep in the cave on the excuse of catching
moths. One had to pass over a rocky ledge, safe
enough for anyone with a fair head, yet seeming, if
looked at from above, narrow and sloping; and are-
monstrance from a stranger who had seen me climb-
ing along it doubled my delight in the adventure.
When however, upon a bank holiday, I found lovers
in my cave, I was not content with it again till I
heard of alarm among the fishing boats, because the
ghost of Macrom had been seen a little before the
dawn, stooping over his fire in the cave-mouth. I
had been trying to cook eggs, as I had read in some
book, by burying them in the earth under a fire of
sticks.

At other times, I would sleep among the rhododen-
drons and rocks in the wilder part of the grounds of
Howth Castle. After a while my father said I must
stay in-doors half the night, meaning that I should

71

get some sleep in my bed; but I, knowing that I
would be too sleepy and comfortable to get up again
used to sit over the kitchen fire till half the night
was gone. Exaggerated accounts spread through the
school, and sometimes when I did not know a les-
son some master would banter me. My interest in
science began to fade away, and presently I said to
myself, "it has all been a misunderstanding." I re-
membered how soon I tired of my specimens, and
how little I knew after all my years of collecting,
and I came to believe that I had gone through so
much labour because of a text,heard for the first time
in St. John's Church in Sligo. I wanted to be certain
of my own wisdom by copying Solomon, who had
knowledge of hyssop and of tree. I still carried my
green net but I began to play at being a sage, a magi-
cian or a poet. I had many idols, and now as I climb-
ed along the narrow ledge I was Manfred on his
glacier, and now I thought of Prince Athanase and
his solitary lamp, but I soon chose Alastor for my
chief of men and longed to share his melancholy,
and maybe at last to disappear from everybody's
sight as he disappeared drifting in a boat along some
slow-moving river between great trees. When I
thought of women they were modelled on those in
my favourite poets and loved in brief tragedy, or like
the girl in "The Revolt of Islam," accompanied

72

their lovers through all manner of wild places, law-
less women without homes and without children.

XV

My father's influence upon my thoughts was at its
height. We went to Dublin by train every morning,
breakfasting in his studio. He had taken a large
room with a beautiful i8th century mantel-piece
in a York Street tenement house, and at breakfast
he read passages from the poets, and always from
the play or poem at its most passionate moment. He
never read me a passage because of its speculative in-
terest, and indeed did not care at all for poetry where
there was generalisation or abstraction however im-
passioned. He would read out the first speeches of
the Prometheus Unbound, but never the ecstatic
lyricism of that famous fourth act; and another day
the scene where Coriolanus comes to the house of
Aufidius and tells the impudent servants that his
home is under the canopy. I have seen Coriolanus
played a number of times since then,and read it more
than once, but that scene is more vivid than the rest,
and it is my fathers voice that I hear and not Irving's
or Benson's. He did not care even for a fine lyric
passage unless one felt some actual man behind its
elaboration of beauty, and he was always looking
for the lineaments of some desirable, familiar life.

73 k

When the spirits sang their scorn of Manfred I was
to judge by Manfred's answer "O sweet and melan-
choly voices" that they could not, even in anger,
put off their spiritual sweetness. He thought Keats
a greater poet than Shelley, because less abstract, but
did not read him, caring little, I think,for any of that
most beautiful poetry which has come in modern
times from the influence of painting. All must bean
idealisation of speech, and at some moment of pas-
sionate action or somnambulistic reverie. I remem-
ber his saying that all contemplative men were in a
conspiracy to overrate their state of life, and that all
writers were of them, excepting the great poets.
Looking backwards, it seems to me that I saw his
mind in fragments, which had always hidden con-
nections I only now begin to discover. He disliked
the Victorian poetry of ideas, and Wordsworth
but for certain passages or whole poems. He describ-
ed one morning over his breakfast how in the shape
of the head of a Wordsworthian scholar, an old and
greatly respected clergyman whose portrait he was
painting, he had discovered all the animal instincts
of a prize-fighter. He despised the formal beauty of
Raphael, that calm which is not an ordered passion
but an hypocrisy, and attacked Raphael's life for its
love of pleasure and its self-indulgence. In literature

74

he was always pre-Raphaelite, and carried into lit-
erature principles that, while the Academy was still
unbroken, had made the first attack upon academic
form. He no longer read me anything for its story,
and all our discussion was of style.

XVI

I began to make blunders when I paid calls or visits,
and a woman I had known and liked as a child told
me I had changed for the worse. I had wanted to be
wise and eloquent, an essay on the younger Ampere
had helped me to this ambition, and when I was
alone I exaggerated my blunders and was miserable.
I had begun to write poetry in imitation of Shelley
and of Edmund Spenser, play after play — for my
father exalted dramatic poetry above all other
kinds — and I invented fantastic and incoherent
plots. My lines but seldom scanned, for I could not
understand the prosody in the books, although there
were many lines that taken by themselves had mus-
ic. I spoke them slowly as I wrote and only discover-
ed when I read them to somebody else that there
was no common music, no prosody. There were,
however, moments of observation; for, even when
I caught moths no longer, I still noticed all that pas-
sed; how the little moths came out at sunset, and
how after that there were only a few big moths till

75

dawn brought little moths again; and what birds
cried out at night as if in their sleep.

XVII

At Sligo, where I still went for my holidays, I stay-
ed with my uncle, George Pollexfen, who had come
from Ballina to fill the place of my grandfather,
who had retired. My grandfather had no longer his
big house, his partner William Middleton was dead,
and there had been legal trouble. He was no longer
the rich man he had been, and his sons and daugh-
ters were married and scattered. He had a tall, bare
house overlooking the harbour, and had nothing to
do but work himself into a rage if he saw a mud-
lighter mismanaged or judged from the smoke of a
steamer that she was burning cheap coal, and to
superintend the making of his tomb. There was a
Middleton tomb and a long list of Middletons on
the wall, and an almost empty place for Pollexfen
names, but he had said, because there was a Mid-
dleton there he did not like, "I am not going to lie
with those old bones ;" and already one saw his name
in large gilt letters on the stone fence of the new
tomb. He ended his walk at St. John's churchyard
almost daily, for he liked everything neat and com-
pendious as upon shipboard,and if he had not looked

after the tomb himself the builder might have ad-
ded some useless ornament. He had, however, all
his old skill and nerve. I was going to Rosses Point
on the little trading steamer and saw him take the
wheel from the helmsman and steer her through
a gap in the channel wall, and across the sand, an un-
heard-of course, and at the journey's end bring her
alongside her wharf at Rosses without the accus-
tomed zigzagging or pulling on a rope but in a sin-
gle movement. He took snuff when he had a cold,
but had never smoked or taken alcohol; and when
in his eightieth year his doctor advised a stimulant,
he replied, "no, no, I am not going to form a bad
habit."

My brother had partly taken my place in my grand-
mother's affections. He had lived permanently in
her house for some years now, and went to a Sligo
school where he was always bottom of his class. My
grandmother did not mind that, for she said, "he
is too kind-hearted to pass the other boys." He spent
his free hours going here and there with crowds of
little boys, sons of pilots and sailors, as their well-
liked leader, arranging donkey races or driving don-
key's tandem, an occupation which requires all
one's intellect because of their obstinancy. Besides
he had begun to amuse everybody with his draw-
ings; and in half the pictures he paints to-day I re-
cognise faces that I have met at Rosses or the Sligo

77

quays. It is long since he has lived there, but his
memory seems as accurate as the sight of the eye.
George Pollexfen was as patient as his father was
impetuous, and did all by habit. A well-to-do, elder-
ly man, he lived with no more comfort than when
he had set out as a young man. He had a little house
and one old general servant and a man to look after
his horse, and every year he gave up some activity
and found that there was one more food that dis-
agreed with him. A hypochondriac, he passed from
winter to summer through a series of woollens that
had always to be weighed; for in April or May or
whatever the date was he had to be sure he carried
the exact number of ounces he had carried upon that
date since boyhood. He lived in despondency, find-
ing in the most cheerful news reasons of discour-
agement, and sighing every twenty-second of June
over the shortening of the days. Once in later years,
when I met him in Dublin sweating in a midsum-
mer noon, I brought him into the hall of the Kil-
dare Street Library, a cool and shady place, with-
out lightening his spirits ; for he but said in a melan-
choly voice, "how very cold this place must be in
winter time." Sometimes when I had pitted my
cheerfulness against his gloom over the breakfast
table, maintaining that neither his talent nor his
memory nor his health were running to the dregs,
he would rout me with the sentence, "how very old

78

I shall be in twenty years." Yet this inactive man, in
whom the sap of life seemed to be dried away, had
a mind full of pictures. Nothing had ever happened
to him except a love affair, not I think very passion-
ate, that had gone wrong,and a voyage when a young
man. My grandfather had sent him in a schooner to
a port in Spain where the shipping agents were
two Spaniards called O'Neill, descendants of Hugh
O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, who had fled from Ireland
in the reign of James I; and their Irish trade was a
last remnant of the Spanish trade that had once made
Galway wealthy. For some years he and they had
corresponded for they cherished the memory of
their origin. In some Connaught burying ground,
he had chanced upon the funeral of a child with but
one mourner, a distinguished foreign-looking man.
It was an Austrian count burying the last of an Irish
family, long nobles of Austria, who were always car-
ried to that half-ruined burying ground.
My uncle had almost given up hunting and was soon
to give it up altogether, and he had once ridden
steeple-chases and been, his horse-trainer said, the
best rider in Connaught. He had certainly great
knowledge of horses, for I have been told, several
counties away, that at Ballina he cured horses by
conjuring. He had, however, merely great skill in
diagnosis, for the day was still far off when he was to

79

give his nights to astrology and ceremonial magic.
His servant, Mary Battle, who had been with him
since he was a young man, had the second sight and
that, may be, inclined him to strange studies. He
would tell how more than once when he had brought
home a guest without giving her notice he had
found the dinner-table set for two, and one morning
she was about to bring him a clean shirt, but stopped
saying there was blood on the shirt-front and that
she must bring him another. On his way to his office
he fell, crossing over a little wall, and cut himself
and bled on to the linen where she had seen the blood.
In the evening, she told how surprised she had been
to find when she looked again that the shirt she had
thought bloody was quite clean. She could neither
read nor write and her mind, which answered his
gloom with its merriment, was rammed with every
sort of old history and strange belief. Much of my
"Celtic Twilight" is but her daily speech.
My uncle had the respect of the common people as
few Sligo men have had it ; he would have thought a
stronger emotion an intrusion on his privacy. He
gave to all men the respect due to their station or
their worth with an added measure of ceremony,
and kept among his workmen a discipline that had
about it something of a regiment or a ship, know-
ing nothing of any but personal authority. If a cart-
er let us say was in fault, he would not dismiss him,

80

but send for him and take his whip away and hang
it upon the wall; and having reduced the offender,
as it were, to the ranks for certain months, would
restore him to his post and his whip. This man of
diligence and of method, who had no enterprise but
in contemplation, and claimed that his wealth, con-
siderable for Ireland, came from a brother's or part-
ner's talent, was the confidant of my boyish freaks
and reveries. When I said to him, echoing some
book I had read, that one never knew a countryside
till one knew it at night, (though nothing would
have kept him from his bed a moment beyond the
hour) he was pleased ; for he loved natural things and
had learnt two cries of the lapwing, one that drew
them to where he stood and one that made them fly
away. And he approved, and arranged my meals
conveniently, when I told him I was going to walk
round Lough Gill and sleep in a wood. I did not tell
him all my object, for I was nursing a new ambition.
My father had read to me some passage out of "Wai-
den, "and I planned to live someday in a cottage on
a little island called Innisfree, and Innisfree was op-
posite Slish Wood where I meant to sleep.
I thought that having conquered bodily desire and
the inclination of my mind towards women and
love, I should live, as Thoreau lived, seeking wis-
dom. There was a story in the county history of a

81 1

tree that had once grown upon that island guarded
by some terrible monster and borne the food of the
gods. A young girl pined for the fruit and told her
lover to kill the monster and carry the fruit away.
He did as he had been told, but tasted the fruit; and
when he reached the mainland where she had wait-
ed for him, was dying of its powerful virtue. And
from sorrow and from remorse she too ate of it and
died. I do not remember whether I chose the island
because of its beauty or for the story's sake, but I was
twenty-two or three before I gave up the dream.
I set out from Sligo about six in the evening, walk-
ing slowly, for it was an evening of great beauty ; but
though I was well into Slish Wood by bed-time, I
could not sleep, not from the discomfort of the dry
rock I had chosen for my bed, but from my fear of
the wood-ranger. Somebody had told me, though I
do not think it could have been true, that he went
his round at some unknown hour. I kept going over
what I should say if I was found and could not think
of anything he would believe. However, I could
watch my island in the early dawn and notice the
order of the cries of the birds.
I came home next day unimaginably tired & sleepy,
having walked some thirty miles partly over rough
and boggy ground. For months afterwards,if I allud-
ed to my walk, my uncle's general servant (not Mary

82

Battle, who was slowly recovering from an illness
and would not have taken the liberty) would go into
fits of laughter. She believed I had spent the night
in a different fashion and had invented the excuse to
deceive my uncle, and would say to my great em-
barrassment, for I was as prudish as an old maid,
"and you had good right to be fatigued."
Once when staying with my uncle at Rosses Point
where he went for certain months of the year, I cal-
led upon a cousin towards midnight and asked him
to get his yacht out, for I wanted to find what sea
birds began to stir before dawn. He was indignant
and refused; but his elder sister had overheard me
and came to the head of the stairs and forbade him
to stir, and that so vexed him that he shouted to the
kitchen for his sea-boots. He came with me in great
gloom for he had people's respect, he declared, and
nobody so far had said that he was mad as they said
I was, and we got a very sleepy boy out of his bed in
the village and set up sail. We put a trawl out, as he
thought it would restore his character if he caught
some fish, but the wind fell and we were becalmed.
I rolled myself in the main-sail and went to sleep for
I could sleep anywhere in those days. I was awak-
ened towards dawn to see my cousin and the boy
turning out their pockets for money and to rum-
mage in my own pockets. A boat was rowing in from

83

Roughley with fish and they wanted to buy some
and would pretend they had caught it, but all our
pockets were empty. It was for the poem that be-
came fifteen years afterwards "The Shadowy Wa-
ters' ' that I had wanted the birds' cries, and it had
been full of observation had I been able to write it
when I first planned it. I had found again the windy
light that moved me when a child. I persuaded my-
self that I had a passion for the dawn, and this pas-
sion, though mainly histrionic like a child's play, an
ambitious game, had moments of sincerity. Years
afterwards when I had finished "The Wanderings
of Oisin," dissatisfied with its yellow and its dull
green, with all that overcharged colour inherited
from the romantic movement, I deliberately re-
shaped my style, deliberately sought out an impres-
sion as of cold light and tumbling clouds. I cast off
traditional metaphors and loosened my rhythm, and
recognizing that all the criticism of life known to
me was alien and English, became as emotional as
possible but with an emotion which I described to
myself as cold. It is a natural conviction for a pain-
ter's son to believe that there may be a landscape
symbolical of some spiritual condition that awakens
a hunger such as cats feel for valerian.

XVIII

I was writing a long play on a fable suggested by one
of my father's early designs. A king's daughter loves
a god seen in the luminous sky above her garden in
childhood, and to be worthy of him and put away
mortality, becomes without pity & commits crimes,
and at last, having made her way to the throne by
murder, awaits the hour among her courtiers. One
by one they become chilly and drop dead, for unseen
by all but her, her god is walking through the hall.
At last he is at her throne's foot and she, her mind in
the garden once again, dies babbling like a child.

XIX

Once when I was sailing with my cousin, the boy
who was our crew talked of a music-hall at a neigh-
bouring seaport, and how the girls there gave them-
selves to men, and his language was as extravagant
as though he praised that courtezan after whom
they named a city or the queen of Sheba herself.
Another day he wanted my cousin to sail some fifty
miles along the coast and put in near some cottages
where he had heard there were girls "and we would
have a great welcome before us." He pleaded with
excitement (I imagine that his eyes shone) but hard-
ly hoped to persuade us,and perhaps but played with
fabulous images of life and of sex. -A young jockey

85

and horse-trainer, who had trained some horses for
my uncle, once talked tome of wicked England
while we cooked a turkey for our Christmas dinner
making it twist about on a string in front of his har-
ness-room fire. He had met two lords in England
where he had gone racing, who "always exchanged
wives when they went to the Continent for a holi-
day."He himself had once been led into temptation
and was going home with a woman, but having
touched his scapular by chance, saw in a moment an
angel waving white wings in the air. Presently I was
to meet him no more and my uncle said he had done
something disgraceful about a horse.

XX

I was climbing up a hill at Howth when I heard
wheels behind me and a pony-carriage drew up be-
side me. A pretty girl was driving alone and without
a hat. She told me her name and said we had friends
in common and asked me to ride beside her. After
that I saw a great deal of her and was soon in love.
I did not tell her I was in love, however, because she
was engaged. She had chosen me for her confidant
and I learned all about her quarrels with her lover.
Several times he broke the engagement off, and she
would fall ill, and friends would make peace. Some-
times she would write to him three times a day, but

86

she could not do without a confidant. She was a
wild creature, a fine mimic and given to bursts of
religion. I have known her to weep at a sermon, call
herself a sinful woman, and mimic it after. I wrote
her some bad poems and had more than one sleepless
night through anger with her betrothed.

XXI

At Ballisodare an event happened that brought me
back to the superstitions of my childhood. I do not
know when it was, for the events of this period have
as little sequence as those of childhood. I was stay-
ing with cousins at Avena house, a young man a few
years older and a girl of my own age and perhaps her
sister who was a good deal older. My girl cousin had
often told me of strange sights she had seen at Bal-
lisodare or Rosses. An old woman three or four feet
in height and leaning on a stick had once come to
the window and looked in at her, and sometimes she
would meet people on the road who would say "how
is so-and-so," naming some member of her family,
and she would know, though she could not explain
how, that they were not people of this world. Once
she had lost her way in a familiar field, and when she
found it again the silver mounting on a walking-
stick belonging to her brother which she carried had

vanished. An old woman in the village said after-
wards "you have good friends amongst them, and
the silver was taken instead of you."
Though it was all years ago what I am going to tell
now must be accurate, for no great while ago she
wrote out her unprompted memory of it all and it
was the same as mine. She was sitting under an old-
fashioned mirror reading and I was reading in an-
other part of the room. Suddenly I heard a sound as
if somebody was throwing a shower of peas at the
mirror. I got her to go into the next room and rap
with her knuckles on the other side of the wall to see
if the sound could come from there, and while I was
alone a great thump came close to my head upon the
wainscot and on a different wall of the room. Later
in the day a servant heard a heavy footstep going
through the empty house, and that night, when I
and my two cousins went for a walk, she saw the
ground under some trees all in a blaze of light. I saw
nothing, but presently we crossed the river and went
along its edge where, they say, there was a village
destroyed, I think in the wars of the I7th century,
and near an old grave-yard. Suddenly we all saw light
moving over the river where there is a great rush of
waters. It was like a very brilliant torch. A moment
later the girl saw a man coming towards us who dis-
appeared in the water. I kept asking my self if I could

be deceived. Perhaps after all, though it seemed im-
possible, somebody was walking in the water with a
torch. But we could see a small light low down on
Knock-na-rea seven miles off, and it began to move
upward over the mountain slope. I timed it on my
watch and in five minutes it reached the summit,and
I, who had often climbed the mountain, knew that
no human footstep was so speedy.
From that on I wandered about raths and fairy hills
and questioned old women and old men and, when
I was tired out or unhappy, began to long for some
such end as True Thomas found. I did not believe
with my intellect that you could be carried away
body and soul, but I believed with my emotions and
the belief of the country people made that easy.
Once when I had crawled into the stone passage in
some rath of the third Rosses, the pilot who had
come with me called down the passage: "are you all
right, sir ?"

And one night as I came near the village of Rosses
on the road from Sligo, a fire blazed up on a green
bank at my right side seven or eight feet above me,
and another fire suddenly answered from Knock-na-
rea. I hurried on doubting, and yet hardly doubting
in my heart that I saw again the fires that I had seen
by the river at Ballisodare. I began occasionally tel-
ling people that one should believe whatever had

89 m

been believed in all countries and periods, and only
reject any part of it after much evidence, instead of
starting all over afresh and only believing what one
could prove. But I was always ready to deny or turn
into a joke what was for all that my secret fanati-
cism. When I had read Darwin and Huxley and be-
lieved as they did, I had wanted, because an estab-
lished authority was upon my side, to argue with
everybody.

XXII

I no longer went to the Harcourt Street school and
we had moved from Howth to Rathgar. I was at the
Art schools in Kildare Street, but my father, who
came to the school now and then, was my teacher.
The masters left me alone, for they liked a very
smooth surface and a very neat outline, and indeed
understood nothing but neatness and smoothness. A
drawing of the Discobolus, after my father had
touched it, making the shoulder stand out with
swift and broken lines,had no meaning for them;and
for the most part I exaggerated all that my father
did. Sometimes indeed, out of rivalry to some stu-
dent near, I too would try to be smooth and neat.
One day I helped the student next me, who certainly
had no artistic gifts, to make a drawing of some plas-
ter fruit. In his gratitude he told me his history. "I

9°

don't care for art/' he said. "I am a good billiard
player, one of the best in Dublin; but my guardian
said I must take a profession, so I asked my friends
to tell me where I would not have to pass an exam-
ination, and here I am." It may be that I myself was
there for no better reason. My father had wanted me
to go to Trinity College and, when I would not, had
said, "my father, and grandfather and great-grand-
father have been there. ' ' I did not tell him my reason
was that I did not believe my classics or my mathe-
matics good enough for any examination.
I had for fellow-student an unhappy "village gen-
ius'* sent to Dublin by some charitable Connaught
landlord. He painted religious pictures upon sheets
nailed to the wall of his bedroom, a "Last Judg-
ment" among the rest. Then there was a wild young
man who would come to school of a morning with a
daisy-chain hung round his neck; and George Rus-
sel, "^E," the poet and mystic. He did not paint the
model as we tried to, for some other image rose al-
ways before his eyes (a St. John in the Desert I re-
member,) and already he spoke to us of his visions.
His conversation, so lucid and vehement to-day, was
all but incomprehensible, though now and again
some phrase would be understood and repeated.
One day he announced that he was leaving the Art
schools because his will was weak and the arts or any

91

other emotional pursuit could but weaken it fur-
ther.

Presently I went to the modelling class to be with
certain elder students who had authority among us.
Among these were John Hughes and Oliver Shep-
pard, well-known now as Irish sculptors. The day
I first went into the studio where they worked, I
stood still upon the threshold in amazement. A
pretty gentle-looking girl was modelling in the
middle of the room, and all the men were swearing
at her for getting in their light with the most violent
and fantastic oaths, and calling her every sort of
name, and through it all she worked in undisturbed
diligence. Presently the man nearest me saw my face
and called out, "she is stone deaf, so we always swear
at her and call her names when she gets in our light. "
In reality I soon found that everyone was kind to
her, carrying her drawing-boards and the like, and
putting her into the tram at the day's end.
We had no scholarship, no critical knowledge of the
history of painting, and no settled standards. A stu-
dent would show his fellows some French illustrated
paper that we might all admire now some statue by
Rodin or Dalou and now some declamatory Parisian
monument, and if I did not happen to have discussed
the matter with my father I would admire with no
more discrimination than the rest. That pretentious

92

monument to Gambetta made a great stir among us.
No influence touched us but that of France, where
one or two of the older students had been already and
all hoped to go. Of England I alone knew anything.
Our ablest student had learnt Italian to read Dante,
but had never heard of Tennyson or Browning, and
it was I who carried into the school some knowledge
of English poetry , especially of Browning who had
begun to move me by his air of wisdom. I do not be-
lieve that I worked well, for I wrote a great deal and
that tired me, and the work I was set to bored me.
When alone and uninfluenced, I longed for pattern,
for pre-Raphaelitism, for an art allied to poetry, and
returned again and again to our National Gallery to
gaze at Turner's Golden Bough. Yet I was too timid,
had I known how, to break away from my father's
style and the style of those about me. I was always
hoping that my father would return to the style of
his youth,and make pictures out of certain designs
now lost, that one could still find in his portfolios.
There was one of an old hunchback in vague medi-
eval dress, going through some underground place
where there are beds with people in the beds; a girl
half rising from one has seized his hand and is kis-
sing it. I have forgotten its story, but the strange old
man and the intensity in the girl's figure are vivid as
in my childhood. There is some passage, I believe in

93

the Bible about a man who saved a city and went
away and was never heard of again, and here he was
in another design, an old ragged beggar in the mar-
ket-place laughing at his own statue. But my father
would say: "I must paint what I see in front of me.
Of course I shall really paint something different
because my nature will come in unconsciously."
Sometimes I would try to argue with him, for I had
come to think the philosophy of his fellow-artists
and himself a misunderstanding created by Victor-
ian science, and science I had grown to hate with a
monkish hate ; but no good came of it, and in a mom-
ent I would unsay what I had said and pretend that I
did not really believe it. My father was painting
many fine portraits, Dublin leaders of the bar, col-
lege notabilities, or chance comers whom he would
paint for nothing if he liked their heads; but all dis-
pleased me. In my heart I thought that only beauti-
ful things should be painted, and that only ancient
things and the stuff of dreams were beautiful. And I
almost quarrelled with my father when he rjiade a
large water-colour, one of his finest pictures and
now lost, of a consumptive beggar girl. And a pic-
ture at the Hibernian Academy of cocottes with
yellow faces sitting before a cafe by some follower
of Manet's made me miserable for days, but I was
happy when partly through my father's planning

94

some Whistlers were brought over and exhibited,
and did not agree when my father said: "imagine
making your old mother an arrangement in gray!"
I did not care for mere reality and believed that cre-
ation should be conscious, and yet I could only im-
itate my father. I could not compose anything but a
portrait and even to-day I constantly see people, as a
portrait painter, posing them in the mind^s eye be-
fore such and such a background. Meanwhile I was
still very much of a child, sometimes drawing with
an elaborate frenzy, simulating what I believed of
inspiration, and sometimes walking with an arti-
ficial stride in memory of Hamlet and stopping at
shop windows to look at my tie gathered into a loose
sailor-knot and to regret that it could not be always
blown out by the wind like Byron's tie in the pic-
ture. I had as many ideas as I have now, only I did
not know how to choose from among them those
that belonged to my life.

XXIII

We lived in a villa where the red bricks were made
pretentious and vulgar with streaks of slate colour,
and there seemed to be enemies everywhere. At one
side indeed there was a friendly architect, but on the
other some stupid stout woman and her family. I had
a study with a window opposite some window of

95

hers,& one night when I was writing I heard voices
full of derision and saw the stout woman and her
family standing in the window. I have a way of act-
ing what I write and speaking it aloud without
knowing what I am doing. Perhaps I was on my
hands and knees, or looking down over the back of
a chair talking into what I imagined an abyss. An-
other day a woman asked me to direct her on her
way and while I was hesitating, being so suddenly
called out of my thought,a woman from some neigh-
bouring house came by. She said I was a poet and my
questioner turned away contemptuously. Upon the
other hand, the policeman and tramway conductor
thought my absence of mind sufficiently explained
when our servant told them I was a poet. "Oh well,"
said the policeman,who had been asking why I went
indifferently through clean and muddy places, "if
it is only the poetry that is working in his head!" I
imagine I looked gaunt and emaciated, for the little
boys at the neighbouring cross-road used to say
when I passed by: "Oh, here is King Death again."
One morning when my father was on the way to his
studio, he met his landlord who had a big grocer's
shop and they had this conversation: "will you tell
me, sir, if you think Tennyson should have been
given that peerage?" "one's only doubt is if he
should have accepted it : it was a finer thing to be

Alfred Tennyson." There was a silence, and then:
"well, all the people I know think he should not
have got it." Then, spitefully: "what's the good of
poetry?" "Oh, it gives our minds a great deal of
pleasure." "But wouldn't it have given your mind
more pleasure if he had written an improving
book?" "Oh, in that case I should not have read it."
My father returned in the evening delighted with
his story, but I could not understand how he could
take such opinions lightly and not have seriously ar-
gued with the man.

None of these people had ever seen any poet but an
old white-haired man who had written volumes of
easy, too-honied verse, and run through his money
and gone clean out of his mind. He was a common
figure in the streets and lived in some shabby neigh-
bourhood of tenement houses where there were
hens and chickens among the cobble stones. Every
morning he carried home a loaf and gave half of it
to the hens and chickens, the birds, or to some dog
or starving cat. He was known to live in one room
with a nail in the middle of the ceiling from which
innumerable cords were stretched to other nails in
the walls. In this way he kept up the illusion that he
was living under canvas in some Arabian desert. I
could not escape like this old man from house and
neighbourhood,but hated both, hearing every whis-
per, noticing every passing glance.

97 n

When my grandfather came for a few days to see a
doctor, I was shocked to see him in our house. My
father read out to him in the evening Clark Russell's
"Wreck of the Grosvenor;"but the doctor forbade
it, for my grandfather got up in the middle of the
night and acted through the mutiny, as I acted my
verse, saying the while, "yes, yes, that is the way it
would all happen."

XXIV

From our first arrival in Dublin, my father had
brought me from time to time to see Edward Dow-
jlen. He and my father had been college friends and
were trying, perhaps, to take up again their old
friendship. Sometimes we were asked to breakfast,
and afterwards my father would tell me to read out
one of my poems. Dowden was wise in his encour-
agement, never overpraising and never unsympa-
thetic, and he would sometimes lend me books. The
orderly, prosperous house where all was in good
taste,where poetry was rightly valued,made Dublin
tolerable for a while,and for perhaps a couple of years
he was an image of romance. My father would not
share my enthusiasm and soon, I noticed, grew im-
patient at these meetings. He would sometimes say
that he had wanted Dowden when they were young
to give himself to creative art, and would talk of
what he considered Dowden's failure in life. I know

now that he was finding in his friend what he him-
self had been saved from by the conversation of the
pre-Raphaelites. "He will not trust his nature/' he
would say, or "he is too much influenced by his in-
feriors," or he would praise "Renunciants," one of
Dowden's poems, to prove what Dowden might
have written . I was not influenced for I had imagin-
ed a past worthy of that dark, romantic face. I took
literally his verses, touched here and there with
Swinburnian rhetoric, and believed that he had
loved, unhappily and illicitly; and when through
the practice of my art I discovered that certain im-
ages about the love of woman were the properties
of a school, I but changed my fancy and thought of
him as very wise.

I was constantly troubled about philosophic ques-
tions. I would say to my fellow students at the Art
school, "poetry and sculpture exist to keep our pas-
sions alive;" and somebody would say, "we would
be much better without our passions." Or I would
have a week's anxiety over the problem : do the arts
make us happier, or more sensitive and therefore
more unhappy. And I would say to Hughes or Shep-
pard, "if I cannot be certain they make us happier
I will never write again." If I spoke of these things
to Dowden he would put the question away with
good-humoured irony : he seemed to condescend to

99

everybody and everything and was now my sage. I
was about to learn that if a man is to write lyric po-
etry he must be shaped by nature and art to some one
out of half-a-dozen traditional poses, and be lover
or saint, sage or sensualist, or mere mocker of all life ;
and that none but that stroke of luckless luck can
open before him the accumulated expression of the
world. And this thought before it could be know-
ledge was an instinct.

I was vexed when my father called Dowden's irony
timidity, but after many years his impression has not
changed for he wrote to me but a few months ago,
"it was like talking to a priest. One had to be careful
not to remind him of his sacrifice." Once after
breakfast Dowden read us some chapters of the un-
published "Life of Shelley," and I who had made
the "Prometheus Unbound" my sacred book was
delighted with all he read. I was chilled, however,
when he explained that he had lost his liking for
Shelley and would not have written it but for an old
promise to the Shelley family. When it was publish-
ed, Matthew Arnold made sport of certain conven-
tionalities and extravagances that were, my father
and I had come to see, the violence or clumsiness of
a conscientious man hiding from himself a lack of
sympathy. He had abandoned too, or was about to
abandon, what was to have been his master-work,

100

"The Life of Goethe," though in his youth a lecture
course at Alexandra College that spoke too openly
of Goethe's loves had brought upon him the dis-
pleasure of our Protestant Archbishop of Dublin.
Only Wordsworth, he said, kept more than all, his
early love.

Though my faith was shaken, it was only when he
urged me to read George Eliot that I became angry
and disillusioned & worked myself into a quarrel or
half-quarrel. I had read all Victor Hugo's romances
and a couple of Balzac's and was in no mind to like
her. She seemed to have a distrust or a distaste for
all in life that gives one a springing foot. Then too
she knew so well how to enforce her distaste by the
authority of her mid-Victorian science or by some
habit of mind of its breeding, that I, who had not es-
caped the fascination of what I loathed, doubted
while the book lay open whatsoever my instinct
knew of splendour. She disturbed me and alarmed
me, but when I spoke of her to my father, he threw
her aside with a phrase,"Oh,she was an ugly woman
who hated handsome men and handsome women;"
and he began to praise " Wuthering Heights."
Only the other day, when I got Dowden's letters,
did I discover for how many years the friendship
between Dowden and my father had been an antag-
onism. My father had written from Fitzroy Road

101

in the sixties that the brotherhood, by which he
meant the poet Edwin Ellis, Nettleship and himself,
"abhorred Wordsworth;" and Dowden, not re-
membering that another week would bring a differ-
ent mood and abhorrence, had written a pained and
solemn letter. My father had answered that Dowden
believed too much in the intellect and that all valu-
able education was but a stirring up of the emotions
and had added that this did not mean excitability.
"In the completely emotional man," he wrote, "the
least awakening of feeling is a harmony in which
every chord of every feeling vibrates. Excitement is
the feature of an insufficiently emotional nature, the
harsh vibrating discourse of but one or two chords."
Living in a free world accustomed to the gay exag-
geration of the talk of equals, of men who talk and
write to discover truth and not for popular instruc-
tion, he had already, when both men were in their
twenties, decided it is plain that Dowden was a Pro-
vincial.

XXV

It was only when I began to study psychical research
and mystical philosophy that I broke away from my
father's influence. He had been a follower of John
Stuart Mill and had grown to manhood with the
scientific movement. In this he had never been of

102

Rossetti's party who said that it mattered to nobody
whether the sun went round the earth or the earth
round the sun. But through this new research, this
reaction from popular science, I had begun to feel
that I had allies for my secret thought.
Once when I was in Dowden's drawing-room a ser-
vant announced my late head-master. I must have
got pale or red, for Dowden with some ironical,
friendly remark, brought me into another room and
there I stayed until the visitor was gone. A few
months later, when I met the head-master again I
had more courage. We chanced upon one another
in the street and he said, "I want you to use your in-
fluence with so-and-so, for he is giving all his time
to some sort of mysticism and he will fail in his ex-
amination." I was in great alarm, but I managed to
say something about the children of this world being
wiser than the children of light. He went off with a
brusque "good morning." I do not think that even
at that age I would have been so grandiloquent but
for my alarm. He had, however, aroused all my in-
dignation.

My new allies and my old had alike sustained me.
"Intermediate examinations," which I had always
refused, meant money for pupil and for teacher, and
that alone. My father had brought me up never
when at school to think of the future or of any prac-
tical result. I have even known him to say, "when I

103

was young, the definition of a gentleman was a man
not wholly occupied in getting on." And yet this
master wanted to withdraw my friend from the pur-
suit of the most important of all the truths. My
friend, now in his last year at school, was a show boy,
and had beaten all Ireland again and again, but now
he and I were reading Baron Reichenbach on Odic
Force and manuals published by the Theosophical
Society. We spent a good deal of time in the Kildare
Street Museum passing our hands over the glass-
cases, feeling or believing we felt the Odic Force
flowing from the big crystals. We also found pins
blindfolded and read papers on our discoveries to
the Hermetic Society that met near the roof in York
Street. I had, when we first made our society, pro-
posed for our consideration that whatever the great
poets had affirmed in their finest moments was the
nearest we could come to an authoritative religion,
and that their mythology, their spirits of water and
wind were but literal truth. I had read "Prometheus
Unbound" with this thought in mind and wanted
help to carry my study through all literature. I was
soon to vex my father by defining truth as "the
dramatically appropriate utterance of the highest
man." And if I had been asked to define the "high-
est" man, I would have said perhaps, "we can but
find him as Homer found Odysseus when he was
looking for a theme."

104

My friend had written to some missionary society
to send him to the South Seas, when I offered him
Kenan's "Life of Christ" and a copy of "Esoteric
Buddhism." He refused both, but a few days later
while reading for an examination in Kildare Street
Library, he asked in an idle moment for "Esoteric
Buddhism" and came out an esoteric Buddhist. He
wrote to the missionaries withdrawing his letter and
offered himself to the Theosophical Society as a
chela. He was vexed now at my lack of zeal, for I had
stayed somewhere between the books, held there
perhaps by my father's scepticism. I said, and he
thought it was a great joke though I was serious, that
even if I were certain in my own mind, I did not
know "a single person with a talent for conviction."
For a time he made me ashamed of my world and its
lack of zeal, and I wondered if his world (his father
was a notorious Orange leader) where everything
was a matter of belief was not better than mine. He
himself proposed the immediate conversion of the
other show boy, a clever little fellow, now a Dublin
mathematician and still under five feet. I found him
a day later in much depression. I said, "did he refuse
to listen to you ?" "not at all," was the answer, "for
I had only been talking for a quarter of an hour when
he said he believed." Certainly those minds, parched
by many examinations, were thirsty.

105 o

Sometimes a professor of Oriental Languages at
Trinity College, a Persian, came to our Society and
talked of the magicians of the East. When he was a
little boy, he had seen a vision in a pool of ink, a mul-
titude of spirits singing in Arabic, "woe unto those
that do not believe in us. " And we persuaded a Brah-
min philosopher to come from London and stay for a
few days with the only one among us who had rooms
of his own. It was my first meeting with a philo-
sophy that confirmed my vague speculations and
seemed at once logical and boundless. Consciousness,
he taught, does not merely spread out its surface but
has, in vision and in contemplation, another motion
and can change in height and in depth. A handsome
young man with the typical face of Christ, he chaf-
fed me good-humouredly because he said I came at
breakfast and began some question that was inter-
rupted by the first caller, waited in silence till tenor
eleven at night when the last caller had gone, and
finished my question.

XXVI

I thought a great deal about the system of education
from which I had suffered, and believing that every-
body had a philosophical defence for all they did,
I desired greatly to meet some school-master that I
might question him. For a moment it seemed as if I

106

should have my desire. I had been invited to read out
a poem called "The Island of Statues," an arcadian
play in imitation of Edmund Spenser, to a gathering
of critics who were to decide whether it was worthy
of publication in the College magazine. The mag-
azine had already published a lyric of mine, the first
ever printed, and people began to know my name.
We met in the rooms of Mr. C. H. Oldham, now
professor of Political Economy at our new Univer-
sity; and though Professor Bury, then a very young
man, was to be the deciding voice, Mr. Oldham had
asked quite a large audience. When the reading was
over and the poem had been approved I was left
alone, why I cannot remember, with a young man
who was, I had been told, a school-master. I was si-
lent, gathering my courage, and he also was silent;
and presently I said without anything to lead up to
it, "I know you will defend the ordinary system of
education by say ing that it strengthens the will, but
I am convinced that it only seems to do so because it
weakens the impulses." Then I stopped, overtaken
by shyness. He made no answer but smiled and look-
ed surprised as though I had said, "you will say they
are Persian attire; but let them be changed."

107

XXVII

I had begun to frequent a club founded by Mr. Old-
ham, and not from natural liking, but from a secret
ambition. I wished to become self-possessed, to be
able to play with hostile minds as Hamlet played, to
look in the lion's face, as it were, with unquivering
eye-lash. In Ireland harsh argument which had gone
out of fashion in England was still the manner of our
conversation, and at this club Unionist and Nation-
alist could interrupt one another and insult one an-
other without the formal and traditional restraint of
public speech. Sometimes they would change the
subject & discuss Socialism, or a philosophical ques-
tion, merely to discover their old passions under a
new shape. I spoke easily and I thought well till some
one was rude and then I would become silent or ex-
aggerate my opinion to absurdity, or hesitate and
grow confused, or be carried away myself by some
party passion. I would spend hours afterwards going
over my words and putting the wrong ones right.
Discovering that I was only self-possessed with peo-
ple I knew intimately, I would often go to a strange
house where I knew I would spend a wretched hour
for schooling sake. I did not discover that Hamlet
had his self-possession from no schooling but from
indifference and passion conquering sweetness, and
that less heroic minds can but hope it from old age.

108

XXVIII

I had very little money and one day the toll- taker at
the metal bridge over the Liffey and a gossip of his
laughed when I refused the halfpenny and said "no,
I will go round by O'Connell Bridge." When I cal-
led for the first time at a house in Leinster Road sev-
eral middle-aged women were playing cards and
suggested my taking a hand and gave me a glass of
sherry. The sherry went to my head and I was im-
poverished for days by the loss of sixpence. My host-
ess was Ellen O'Leary, who kept house for her bro-
ther John O'Leary the Fenian, the handsomest old
man I had ever seen. He had been condemned to
twenty years penal servitude but had been set free
after five on condition that he did not return to Ire-
land for fifteen years. He had said to the government,
"I will not return if Germany makes war on you,
but I will return if France does." He and his old sis-
ter lived exactly opposite the Orange leader for
whom he had a great respect. His sister stirred my
affection at first for no better reason than her likeness
of face and figure to the matron of my London
school, a friendly person, but when I came to know
her I found sister and brother alike were of Plu-
tarch's people. She told me of her brother's life, how
in his youth as now in his age, he would spend his
afternoons searching for rare books among second-
hand book-shops, how the Fenian organizer James

109

Stephens had found him there and asked for his help.
"I do not think you have any chance of success/' he
had said, "but if you never ask me to enroll anybody
else I will join, it will be very good for the morals of
the country." She told me how it grew to be a for-
midable movement, and of the arrests that followed
(I believe that her own sweetheart had somehow
fallen among the wreckage,) of sentences of death
pronounced upon false evidence amid a public
panic, and told it all without bitterness. No fanati-
cism could thrive amid such gentleness. She never
found it hard to believe that an opponent had as high
a motive as her own and needed upon her difficult
road no spur of hate.

Her brother seemed very unlike on a first hearing
for he had some violent oaths, "Good God in Hea-
ven" being one of them; and if he disliked anything
one said or did, he spoke all his thought, but in a lit-
tle one heard his justice match her charity. "Never
has there been a cause so bad," he would say, "that it
has not been defended by good men for good reas-
ons." Nor would he overvalue any man because they
shared opinions; and when he lent me the poems of
Davis and the Young Irelanders, of whom I had
known nothing, he did not, although the poems of
Davis had made him a patriot, claim that they were
very good poetry.

I 10

His room was full of books, always second-hand
copies that had often been ugly and badly printed
when new and had not grown to my unhistoric mind
more pleasing from the dirt of some old Dublin
book-shop. Great numbers were Irish, and for the
first time I began to read histories and verses that a
Catholic Irishman knows from boy hood. He seem-
ed to consider politics almost wholly as a moral dis-
cipline, and seldom said of any proposed course of
action that it was practical or otherwise. When he
spoke to me of his prison life he spoke of all with
seeming freedom, but presently one noticed that he
never spoke of hardship and if one asked him why,
he would say, "I was in the hands of my enemies,
why should I complain ?" I have heard since that
the governor of his jail found out that he had endur-
ed some unnecessary discomfort for months and had
asked why he did not speak of it. "I did not come
here to complain," was the answer. He had the mor-
al genius that moves all young people and moves
them the more if they are repelled by those who
have strict opinions and yet have lived common-
place lives. I had begun, as would any other of my
training, to say violent and paradoxical things to
shock provincial sobriety, and Dowden's ironical
calm had come to seem but a professional pose. But
here was something as spontaneous as the life of an

1 1 1

artist. Sometimes he would say things that would
have sounded well in some heroic Elizabethan play.
It became my delight to rouse him to these outbursts
for I was the poet in the presence of his theme. Once
when I was defending an Irish politician who had
made a great outcry because he was treated as a com-
mon felon, by showing that he did it for the cause's
sake, he said, "there are things that a man must not
do even to save a nation/' He would speak a sen-
tence like that in ignorance of its passionate value,
and would forget it the moment after.
I met at his house friends of later life, Katharine
Tynan who still lived upon her father's farm, and
Dr. Hyde, still a college student who took snuff like
those Mayo county people, whose stories and songs
he was writing down. "Davitt wants followers by
the thousand," O'Leary would say, "I only want
half-a-dozen." One constant caller looked at me
with much hostility, John F. Taylor, an obscure
great orator. The other day in Dublin I overheard
a man murmuring to another one of his speeches as
I might some Elizabethan lyric that is in my very
bones. It was delivered at some Dublin debate, some
College society perhaps. The Lord Chancellor had
spoken with balanced unemotional sentences now
self-complacent, now in derision. Taylor began hes-
itating and stopping for words, but after speaking

I 12

very badly for a little, straightened his figure and
spoke as out of a dream: "I am carried to another
age, a nobler court, and another Lord Chancellor is
speaking. I am at the court of the first Pharaoh/'
Thereupon he put into the mouth of that Egyptian
all his audience had listened to, but now it was spok-
en to the children of Israel. "If you have any spirit-
uality as you boast, why not use our great empire to
spread it through the world, why still cling to that
beggarly nationality of yours ? what are its history
and its works weighed with those of Egypt. " Then
his voice changed and sank: "I see a man at the edge
of the crowd; he is standing listening there, but he
will not obey;" and then with his voice rising to a
cry, "had he obeyed he would never have come
down the mountain carrying in his arms the tables
of the Law in the language of the outlaw."
He had been in a linen-draper's shop for a while, had
educated himself and put himself to college, and was
now, as a lawyer, famous for hopeless cases where
unsure judgment could not make things worse, and
eloquence, power of cross-examination and learn-
ing might amend all. Conversation with him was al-
ways argument, and for an obstinate opponent he
had such phrases as, "have you your head in a bag,
sir?" and I seemed his particular aversion. Like
many of the self-made men of that generation, Car-
lyle was his chief literary enthusiasm, supporting

"3 P

him, as he believed, in his contempt for the com-
plexities and refinements he had not found in his
hard life, and I belonged to a generation that had be-
gun to call Carlyle's rhetorician and demagogue. I
had once seen what I had believed to be an enraged
bull in a field and had walked up to it as a test of
courage to discover, just as panic fell upon me, that
it was merely an irritable cow. I braved Taylor again
and again, but always found him worse than my ex-
pectation. I would say, quoting Mill, "oratory is
heard, poetry is overheard." And he would answer,
his voice full of contempt, that there was always an
audience; and yet, in his moments of lofty speech,
he himself was alone no matter what the crowd.
At other times his science or his Catholic ortho-
doxy, I never could discover which, would become
enraged with my supernaturalism. I can but once
remember escaping him unabashed and unconquer-
ed. I said with deliberate exaggeration at some even-
ing party at O'Leary's "five out of every six people
have seen a ghost ; " and Taylor fell into my net with
"well, I will ask everybody here." I managed that
the first answer should come from a man who had
heard a voice he believed to be that of his dead bro-
ther, and the second from a doctor's wife who had
lived in a haunted house and met a man with his
throat cut, whose throat as he drifted along the gar-
den-walk "had opened and closed like the mouth of

114

a fish." Taylor threw up his head like an angry horse,
but asked no further question, and did not return to
the subject that evening. If he had gone on he would
have heard from everybody some like story though
not all at first hand, and Miss O'Leary would have
told him what happened at the death of one of the
MacManus brothers, well-known in the politics of
Young Ireland. One brother was watching by the
bed where the other lay dying and saw a strange
hawk-like bird fly through the open window and
alight upon the breast of the dying man. He did not
dare to drive it away and it remained there,as it seem-
ed, looking into his brother's eyes until death came,
and then it flew out of the window. I think, though
I am not sure, that she had the story from the watch-
er himself.

It was understood that Taylor's temper kept him
from public life, though he may have been the great-
est orator of his time, partly because no leader would
accept him, and still more because, in the words of
one of his Dublin enemies, "he had never joined any
party and as soon as one joined him he seceded. "
With O'Leary he was always, even when they dif-
fered, as they often did, gentle and deferential, but
once only, and that was years afterwards, did I think
that he was about to include me among his friends.

We met by chance in a London street and he stop-
ped me with an abrupt movement : /'Yeats," he said,

"I have been thinking. If you and (naming

another aversion,) were born in a small Italian prin-
cipality in the Middle Ages, he would have friends
at court and you would be in exile with a price on
your head. * ' He went off without another word, and
the next time we met he was no less offensive than
before. He, imprisoned in himself, and not the al-
ways unperturbed O'Leary comes before me as the
tragic figure of my youth. The same passion for all
moral and physical splendour that drew him to
O ' Leary would make him beg leave to wear , for some
few days, a friend's ring or pin, and gave him a heart
that every pretty woman set on fire. I doubt if he
was happy in his loves; for those his powerful intel-
lect had fascinated were, I believe/repelled by his
coarse red hair, his gaunt ungainly body, his stiff
movements as of a Dutch doll, his badly rolled,
shabby umbrella. And yet with women, as with
O'Leary, he was gentle, deferential, almost dif-
fident.

A Young Ireland Society met in the lecture hall of
a workman's club in York Street with O'Leary for
president, and there four or five university students
and myself and occasionally Taylor spoke on Irish
history or literature. When Taylor spoke, it was a

116

great event, and his delivery in the course of a speech
or lecture of some political verse by Thomas Davis
gave me a conviction of how great might be the ef-
fect of verse spoken by a man almost rhythm-drunk
at some moment of intensity, the apex of long
mounting thought. Verses that seemed when one
saw them upon the page flat and empty caught from
that voice, whose beauty was half in its harsh
strangeness, nobility and style. My father had al-
ways read verse with an equal intensity and a greater
subtlety, but this art was public and his private, and
it is Taylor's voice that rings in my ears and awak-
ens my longing when I have heard some player speak
lines, "so naturally/' as a famous player said to me,
"that nobody can find out that it is verse at all." I
made a good many speeches,more I believe as a train-
ing for self-possession than from desire of speech.
Once our debates roused a passion that came to the
newspapers and the streets. There was an excitable
man who had fought for the Pope against the Italian
patriots and who always rode a white horse in our
Nationalist processions. He got on badly with
O'Leary who had told him that "attempting to op-
press others was a poor preparation for liberating
your own country." O'Leary had written some let-
ter to the press condemning the "Irish-American
Dynamite Party" as it was called, and defining the

117

limits of "honourable warfare/' At the next meet-
ing, the papal soldier rose in the middle of the dis-
cussion on some other matter and moved a vote of
censure on O'Leary. "I myself" he said "do not ap-r
prove of bombs, but I do not think that any Irish-
man should be discouraged." O'Leary ruled him out
of order. He refused to obey and remained standing.
Those round him began to threaten. He swung the
chair he had been sitting on round his head and de-
fied everybody. However he was seized from all sides
and thrown out, and a special meeting called to ex-
pel him. He wrote letters to the papers and addres-
sed a crowd somewhere. "No Young Ireland So-
ciety," he protested "could expel a man whose
grandfather had been hanged in 1798." When the
night of the special meeting came his expulsion was
moved, but before the vote could be taken an excited
man announced that there was a crowd in the street,
that the papal soldier was making a speech, that in a
moment we should be attacked. Three or four of us
ran and put our backs to the door while others car-
ried on the debate. It was an inner door with narrow
glass windows at each side and through these we
could see the street-door and the crowd in the street.
Presently a man asked us through the crack in the
door if we would as a favour "leave the crowd to the
workman's club upstairs." In a couple of minutes

118

there was a great noise of sticks and broken glass,
and after that our landlord came to find out who was
to pay for the hall-lamp.

XXIX

From these debates, from O'Leary's conversation,
and from the Irish books he lent or gave me has come
all I have set my hand to since. I had begun to know
a great deal about the Irish poets who had written
in English. I read with excitement books I should
find unreadable to-day, and found romance in lives
that had neither wit nor adventure. I did not deceive
myself, I knew how often they wrote a cold and ab-
stract language, and yet I who had never wanted to
see the houses where Keats and Shelley lived would
ask everybody what sort of place Inchedony was,
because Callanan had named after it a bad poem in
the manner of "Childe Harold." Walking home
from a debate, I remember saying to some college
student "Ireland cannot put from her the habits
learned from her old military civilization and from
a church that prays in Latin. Those popular poets
have not touched her heart, her poetry when it
comes will be distinguished and lonely." O'Leary
had once said to me, "neither Ireland nor England
knows the good from the bad in any art, but Ireland
unlike England does not hate the good when it is

119

pointed out to her. " I began to plot and scheme how
one might seal with the right image the soft wax be-
fore it began to harden. I had noticed that Irish
Catholics among whom had been born so many poli-
tical martyrs had not the good taste, the household
courtesy and decency of the Protestant Ireland I had
known, and yet Protestant Ireland had begun to
think of nothing but getting on. I thought we might
bring the halves together if we had a national litera-
ture that made Ireland beautiful in the memory, and
yet had been freed from provincialism by an exact-
ing criticism, an European pose. It was because of
this dream when we returned to London that I made
with pastels upon the ceiling of my study a map of
Sligo decorated like some old map with a ship and
an elaborate compass and wrote, a little against the
grain, a couple of Sligo stories, one a vague echo of
"Grettir the Strong," which my father had read to
me in childhood, and finished with better heart my
"Wanderings of Oisin," and began after ridding my
sty le of romantic colour "The Countess Cathleen."
I saw that our people did not read, but that they lis-
tened patiently (how many long political speeches
have they listened to ?) and saw that there must be a
theatre, and if I could find the right musicians,
words set to music. I foresaw a great deal that we are
doing now, though never the appetite of our new

120

middle-class for "realism," nor the greatness of the
^opposition, nor the slowness of the victory. Davis
had done so much in the four years of his working
life, I had thought all needful pamphleteering and
speech-making could be run through at the day's
end, not knowing that taste is so much more deeply
rooted than opinion that even if one had school and
newspaper to help, one could scarcely stir it under
two generations. Then too,hred up in a studio where
all things are discussed and where I had even been
told that indiscretion and energy are inseparable, I
knew nothing of the conservatism or of the suspic-
ions of piety. I had planned a drama like that of
Greece, and romances that were, it may be, half Hu-
go and half de la Motte Fouque, to bring into the
town the memories and visions of the country and
to spread everywhere the history and legends of
mediaeval Ireland and to fill Ireland once more with
sacred places. I even planned out, and in some detail,
(for those mysterious lights and voices were never
long forgotten,) another Samothrace, a new Eleusis.
I believed, so great was my faith, or so deceptive
the precedent of Young Ireland, that I should find
men of genius everywhere. I had not the convic-
tion as it may seem, that a people can be compelled
to write what one pleases, for that could but end in
rhetoric or in some educational movement but be-
lieved I had devined the soul of the people and had

121 q

set my shoes upon a road that would be crowded
presently.

XXX

Someone at the Young Ireland Society gave me a
newspaper that I might read some article or letter.
I began idly reading verses describing the shore of
Ireland as seen by a returning, dying emigrant. My
eyes filled with tears and yet I knew the verses were
badly written — vague, abstract words such as one
finds in a newspaper. I looked at the end and saw the
name of some political exile who had died but a few
days after his return to Ireland. They had moved me
because they contained the actual thoughts of a man
at a passionate moment of life, and when I met my
father I was full of the discovery. We should write
out our own thoughts in as nearly as possible the
language we thought them in, as though in a letter
to an intimate friend. We should not disguise them
in any way ; for our lives give them force as the lives
of people in plays give force to their words. Personal
utterance, which had almost ceased in English lit-
erature, could be as fine an escape from rhetoric and
abstraction as drama itself. My father was indig-
nant, almost violent, and would hear of nothing but
drama. "Personal utterance was only egotism." I

122

knew it was not, but as yet did not know how to ex-
plain the difference. I tried from that on to write
out of my emotions exactly as they came to me in
life, not changing them to make them more beau-
tiful, and to rid my syntax of all inversions and my
vocabulary of literary words, and that made it hard
to write at all. It meant rejecting the words or the
constructions that had been used over and over be-
cause they flow most easily into rhyme and measure.
Then, too,how hard it was to be sincere,not to make
the emotion more beautiful and more violent or the
circumstance more romantic. "If I can be sincere
and make my language natural, and without becom-
ing discursive, like a novelist, and so indiscreet and
prosaic," I said to myself, "I shall, if good luck or
bad luck make my life interesting, be a great poet;
for it will be no longer a matter of literature at all."
Yet when I re-read those early poems which gave me
so much trouble, I find little but romantic conven-
tion, unconscious drama. It is so many years before
one can believe enough in what one feels even to
know what the feeling is.

XXXI

Perhaps a year before we returned to London, a
Catholic friend brought me to a spiritualistic seanee

123

at the house of a young man who had been lately ar-
rested under a suspicion of Fenianism, but had been
released for lack of evidence. He and his friends had
been sitting weekly about a table in the hope of
spiritual manifestation and one had developed me-
diumship. A drawer full of books had leaped out of
the table when no one was touching it, a picture had
moved upon the wall. There were some half dozen
of us, and our host began by making passes until the
medium fell asleep sitting upright in his chair. Then
the lights were turned out, and we sat waiting in the
dim light of a fire. Presently my shoulders began to
twitch and my hands. I could easily have stopped
them, but I had never heard of such a thing and I
was curious. After a few minutes the movement be-
came violent and I stopped it. I sat motionless for a
while and then my whole body moved like a sudden-
ly unrolled watch-spring, and I was thrown back-
ward on the wall. I again stilled the movement and
sat at the table. Everybody began to say I was a me-
dium, and that if I would not resist some wonderful
thing would happen. I remembered that my father
had told me that Balzac had once desired to take op-
ium for the experience sake, but would not because
he dreaded the surrender of his will. We were now
holding each other's hands and presently my right
hand banged the knuckles of the woman next to me

124

upon the table. She laughed, and the medium,speak-
ing for the first time, and with difficulty, out of his
mesmeric sleep, said, "tell her there is great dan-
ger." He stood up and began walking rbund me
making movements with his hands as though he
were pushing something away. I was now strug-
gling vainly with this force which compelled me to
movements I had not willed, and my movements
had become so violent that the table was broken. I
tried to pray, and because I could not remember a
prayer, repeated in a loud voice

Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe . . .
Sing heavenly muse.

My Catholic friend had left the table and was say-
ing a Pater Noster and Ave Maria in the corner.
Presently all became still and so dark that I could
not see anybody. I described it to somebody next day
as like going out of a noisy political meeting on to a
quiet country road. I said to myself, "I am now in a
trance but I no longer have any desire to resist." But
when I turned my eyes to the fireplace I could see
a faint gleam of light, so I thought "no, I am not
in a trance." Then I saw shapes faintly appearing in

1*5

the darkness & thought, "they are spirits ; ' ' but they
were only the spiritualists and my friend at her pray-
ers. The medium said in a faint voice, "we are
through the bad spirits." I said," will they ever come
again do you think?"and he said, "no, never again I
think," and in my boyish vanity I thought it was I
who had banished them.

For years afterwards I would not go to a seance or
turn a table and would often ask myself what was
that violent impulse that had run through my
nerves ? was it a part of myself — something always
to be a danger perhaps ; or had it come from without,
as it seemed?

XXXII

I had published my first book of poems by subscrip-
tion, O' Leary finding many subscribers, and a book
of stories, when I heard that my grandmother was
dead and went to Sligo for the funeral. She had asked
to see me but by some mistake I was not sent for. She
had heard that I was much about with a beautiful,
admired woman and feared that I did not speak of
marriage because I was poor, and wanted to say to
me "women care nothing about money." My

126

grandfather was dying also and only survived her a
few weeks. I went to see him and wondered at his
handsome face now sickness had refined it, and not-
iced that he foretold the changes in the weather by
indications of the light and of the temperature that
could not have told me anything. As I sat there my
old childish fear returned and I was glad to get away.
I stayed with my uncle whose house was opposite
where my grandfather lived, and walking home
with him one day we met the doctor. The doctor
said there was no hope and that my grandfather
should be told, but my uncle would not allow it. He
said "it would make a man mad to know he was
dying." In vain the doctor pleaded that he had never
known a man not made calmer by the knowledge.
I listened sad and angry, but my uncle always took a
low view of human nature, his very tolerance which
was exceedingly great came from his hoping no-
thing of anybody. Before he had given way my
grandfather lifted up his arms and cried out "there
she is," and fell backward dead. Before he was dead,
old servants of that house where there had never
been noise or disorder began their small pilferings,
and after his death there was a quarrel over the dis-
position of certain mantel-piece ornaments of no
value.

127

XXXIII

For some months now I have lived with my own
youth and childhood, not always writing indeed but
thinking of it almost every day, and I am sorrowful
and disturbed. It is not that I have accomplished too
few of my plans, for I am not ambitious; but when
I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise
words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have
given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes
that I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my
own life seems to me a preparation for something
that never happens.

Here ends 'Reveries over Childhood
and Youth' by William Butler Yeats.
Printed upon paper made in Ireland,
and published by Elizabeth C. Yeats,
at The Cuala Press, Churchtown,
Dundrum, in the County of Dublin,
Ireland. Finished on All Hallows' Eve
in the year nineteen hundred & fifteen.