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《Four Years》
I
FOUR YEARS 1887?1891.
At the end of the eighties my father and mother, my brother and sisters and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were settled in Bedford Park in a red?brick house with several wood mantlepieces copied from marble mantlepieces by the brothers Adam, a baly, and a little garden shadowed by a great horse?chestnut tree. Years before we had lived there, when the crooked, ostentatiously picturesque streets, with great trees casting great shadows, had been ahusiasm: the Pre?Raphaelite movement at last affeg life. But now exaggerated criticism had taken the place of enthusiasm; the tiled roofs, the first in modern London, were said to leak, which they did not, & the drains to be bad, thou藏书网gh that was no lorue; and I imagihat houses were cheap. I remember feeling disappointed because the co?operative stores, with their little seveh tury panes, were so like any on shop; and because the public house, called The Tabard
after Chaucers Inn, was so plainly a on public house; and because the great sign of a trumpeter designed by Rooke, the Pre? Raphaelite artist, had been freshened by some inferior hand. The big red?brick church had never pleased me, and I was aced, when I saw the wooden balustrade that ran along the slanting edge of the roof, where nobody ever walked or could walk, to remember the opinion of some architect friend of my fathers, that it ha99lib.d been put there to keep the birds from falling off. Still, however, it had some village characters and helped us to feel not wholly lost iropolis. I no longer went to church as a regular habit, but go I sometimes did, for one Sunday m I saw these words painted on a board in the porch: The gregation are requested to kneel during prayers; the kneelers are afterwards to be hung upon pegs provided for the purpose. In front of every seat hung a little cushion, and these cushions were called kneelers. Presently the joke ran through the unity, where there were many artists, who sidered religion at best an unimportant accessory to good architecture and who disliked that particular church.
II
I could not uand where the charm had gohat I had felt, when as a school?boy of twelve or thirteen, I had played among the unfinished houses, once leaving the marks of my two hands, blacked by a fall among some paint, upon a white balustrade. Sometimes I thought it was beca..use these were real houses, while my play had been among toy?houses some day to be inhabited by imaginary people full of the happihat one see in picture books. I was in all things Pre?Raphaelite. When I was fifteen or sixteen, my father had told me about Rossetti and Blake and giveheir poetry to read; & on Liverpool on my way to Sligo, "I had seen Dantes Dream in the gallery there??a picture painted when Rossetti had lost his dramatic power, and to?day not very pleasing to me??and its colour, its people, its romantic architecture had blotted all other pictures away." It erpetual bewilderment that my father, who had begun life as a Pre?Raphaelite painter, now painted portraits of the first er, children selling neers, or a ptive girl with a basket offish upon her head, and that when, moved perhaps by memory of his youth, he chose some theme from poetic tradition, he would soon weary and leave it unfinished. I had seen the ge ing bit by bitand its defence elaborated by young men fresh from the Paris art? schools. We must paint what is in front of us, or A man must be of his own time, they would say, and if I spoke of Blake or Rossetti they would point out his bad drawing and tell me to admire Carolus Duran and Bastien?Lepage. Then, too, they 藏书网its full vitality when written learnedly and slowly. The roots of his antithetical dream were visible enough: a never idle man of great physical strength aremely irascible??did he not fling a badly baked plum pudding through the window upon Xmas Day???a man more joyous than any intellectual man of our world, called himself the idle singer of ay day created new forms of melancholy, and faint persons, like the knights & ladies of Burne Jones, who are never, no, not on forty volumes, put out of temper. A blunderer, who had said to the only unverted man at a socialist pii Dublin, to prove that equality came easy, I was brought up a gentleman and now, as you see, associate with all sorts, a wounds thereby that rankled after twenty years, a man of whom I have heard it said He is always afraid that he is doing something wrong, and generally is, wrote long stories with apparently no other object than that his persons might show one ahrough situations of poignant difficulty, the most exquisite tact.
He did not project, like Henley or like Wilde, an image of himself, because, having all his imaginatio on making and doing, he had little self?knowledge. He imagined instead new ditions of making and doing; and, ieeth of those stifieralisations that cowed my boyhood, I see some like imagining in every great ge, believing that the first flying fish leaped, not because it sought adaptation to the air, but out of horror of the sea.
X
Soon after I began to attend the lectures, a French class was started in the old coach?house for certain young socialists who planned a tour in France, and I joi and was for a time a model student stantly enced by the pliments of the old French mistress. I told my father of the class, and he asked me to get my sisters admitted. I made difficulties and put off speaking of the matter, for I khat the new and admirable self I was making would turn, under family eyes, into plain rag doll. How could I pretend to be industrious, and even carry dramatization to the point of learning my lessons, when my sisters were there and khat I was nothing of the kind? But I had nument I could use and my sisters were admitted. They said nothing unkind, so far as I remember, but in a week or two I was my old procrastinating idle self and had soohe class altogether. My elder sister stayed on and became an embroideress under Miss May Morris, and the hangings round Morriss big bed at Kelmscott House, Oxfordshire, with their verses about lying happily in bed when all birds sing iown of the tree, were from her needle though not from her design. She worked for the first few month９9ｌib?s at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, and in my imagination Iot always separate what I saw and heard from her report, or indeed from the report of that tribe uild who looked up to Morris as to some worshipped mediaeval king. He had no need for other people. I doubt if their marriage or death made him sad lad, a no man I have known was so well loved; you saw him produg everywhere anisation ay, seeming, almost in the same instant, helpless and triumphant; and people loved him as children are loved. People mu his neighbourhood became gradually occupied with him, or about his affairs, and without any wish on his part, as simple people bee occupied with children. I remember a man who roud and pleased because he had distracted Morris thoughts from an attack of gout by leading the versation delicately to the hated name of Milton. He began at Swinburne.
Oh, Swinburne, said Morris, is a rhetori; my masters have bees and Chaucer for they make pictures. Does not Milton make pictures? asked my informant. No, was the answer, Dante makes pictures, but Milton, though he had a great ear mind, expressed himself as a rhetori. Great ear mind,
sourao me and I doubt not that were his questioner not a simple man, Morris had been more violent. Another day the same man started by praising Chaucer, but th99lｉb?e gout was worse and Morris cursed Chaucer for destroying the English language with fn words.
He had few detachable phrases and I remember little of his speech, which many thought the best of all good talk, except that it matched his burly body and seemed within definite boundaries inexhaustible in fad expression. He alone of all the men I have known seemed guided by some beast?like instind e strange meat. Balzac! Balzac! he said to me once, Oh, that was the man the French beoisie read so much a few years ago. I remember him at supper praising wine: Why do people say it is prosaic to be inspired by wine? Has it not been made by the sunlight and the sap? and his dispraising houses decorated by himself: Do you suppose I like that kind of house? I would like a house like a big barn, where oe in one er, cooked in another er, slept ihird er & in the fourth received ones friends; and his plaining of Ruskins obje to the underground railway: If you must have a railway the best thing you do with it is to put it in a tube with a cork at ead. I remember too that when I asked what led up to his movement, he replied, Oh, Ruskin and Carlyle, but somebody should have been beside Carlyle and punched his head every five mihough I remember little, I do not doubt that, had I tinued going there on Sunday evenings, I should have caught fire from his words and turned my hand to some mediaeval work or other. Just before I had ceased to go there I had sent my Wanderings of Usheen to his daughter, hoping of course that it might meet his eyes, & soon after sending it I came upon him by Holborn.
You write my sort of poetry, he said and began to praise me and to promise to send his praise to The oh, the League an, and he would have said more of a certainty had he not caught sight of a new oral cast?iron lamp?post and got very heated upon that subject.
I did not read eics, having turned socialist because of Morriss lectures and pamphlets, and I think it uhat Morris himself could read eics. That old dogma of mine seemed germao the matter. If the men and women imagined by the poets were the norm, and if Morris had, i us say, News from Nowhere, then running through The oh, described such men and women living uheir natural ditions or as they would desire to live, then those ditions themselves must be the norm, and could we but get rid of certain institutions the world would turn from etricity. Perhaps Morris himself justified himself in his ow by as simple an argument, and was, as the socialist D... said to me one night walking home after some lecture, an anarchist without knowing it. Certainly I and all about me, including D... himself, were for chopping up the old king for Medeas pot. Morris had told us to have nothing to do with the parliamentary socialists, represented for men in general by the Fabian Society and Hyndmans Socialist Democratic Federation and for us in particular by D... During the period of transition mistakes must be made, and the discredit of these mistakes must be left to the beoisie; and besides, when you begin to talk of this measure or that other you lose sight of the goal ao reverse Swinburnes description of Tiresias, light on t藏书网he way but darkness on the goal. By mistakes Morris meaious restris and promises??If any man puts me into a labour squad, I will lie on my bad kick. That phrase very much expresses our idea of revolutionary tactics: we all inteo lie upon our bad kick. D..., pale aary, did not dislike labour squads and we all hated him with the left side of our heads, while admiring him immensely with the right. He alone was io eain Mrs. Morris, having many tales of his Irish uncles, more especiallyof one particular uncle who had tried to it suicide by shutting his head into a carpet bag. At that time he was an obscure man, known only for a witty speaker at street ers and in Park demonstrations. He had, with an assumed trud fury, cold logi universal gentleness, an unruffled courtesy, a could never close a speech without being denounced by a journeyman hatter with an Italian name. verted to socialism by D..., and to anarchism by himself, with swinging arm and uplifted voice this man perhaps exaggerated our scruple about parliament. I lack, said D..., the bump of reverence; whereon the wild man shouted You ave a ole. There are moments when looking back I somewhat fuse my own figure with that of the hatter, image of our hysteria, for I too became violent with the violent solemnity of a religious devotee.
I even remember sitting behind D... and saying some rude thing or other over his shoulder. I dont remember why I gave it up but I did quite suddenly; and I think the push may have e from a young workman who was edug himself between Morris and Karl Marx. He had planned a history of the navy and when I had spoken of the battleship of Nelsons day, had said: Oh, that was the dece of the battleship, but if his naval is were mediaeval, his ideas abion were pure Karl Marx, and we were soon iual argument. Then gradually the attitude towards religion of almost everybody but Morris, who avoided the subject altogether, got upon my nerves, for I broke out after some lecture or other with all the arrogance ing youth. They attacked religion, I said, or some such words, ahere must be a ge of heart and only religion could make it. What was the use of talking about some near revolution putting all things right, when the ge must e, if e it did, with astronomical slowness, like the cooling of the sun or, it may have been, like the drying of the moon? Morris rang his chairmans bell, but I was too angry to listen, and he had t it a sed time before I sat down. He said that night at supper: Of course I know there must be a ge of heart, but it will not e as slowly as all that. I rang my bell because you were not being uood. He did not show aion, but I never returned after that night; a I did not always believe what I had said and only gradually gave up thinking of and planning for some near sudden ge for the better.
XI
I spent my days at the British Museum and must, I think, have been delicate, for I remember often putting off hour after hour sulting some necessary book because I shrank from lifting the heavy volumes of the catalogue; ao save money for my afternoon coffee and roll I often walked the whole way home to Bedford Park. I was piling, for a series of shilling books, an anthology of Irish fairy stories and, for an Ameri publisher, a two volume sele from the Irish s that would be somewhat dearer. I was not well paid, for each book e more than three months reading; and I aid for the first some twelve pounds, (O Mr. E... said publisher to editor, you must never again pay so much) and for the sed, twenty; but I did not think myself badly paid, for I had chosen the work for my own purposes.
Though I went to Sligo every summer, I was pelled to live out of Ireland the greater part of every year and was but keeping my mind upon what I knew must be the subject matter of my poetry. I believed that if Morris had set his stories amid the sery of his own Wales (for I knew him to be of Welsh extra and supposed wrongly that he had spent his childhood there) that if Shelley had nailed his Prometheus or some equal symbol upon some Welsh or Scottish rock, their art had entered more intimately, more microscopically, as it were, into our thought, and had given perhaps to moderry a breadth and stability like that of a poetry. The statues of Mausolus and Artemisia at the British Museum, private, half animal, half divine figures, all uhe Gre athletes aian kings in their near neighbourhood, that stand in the middle of the crolause or sit above measuring it out unpersuadable justice, became to me, now or later, images of an unpremeditated joyous energy, that her I nor any other man, racked by doubt and enquiry, achieve; and that yet, if once achieved, might seem to men and women of ara or of Galway their very soul. In our study of that ruiomb, raised by a queen to her dead lover, and finished by the unpaid labour of great sculptors after her death from grief, or so runs the tale, we ot distinguish the handiworks of Scopas and Praxiteles; and I wao create once more an art, where the artists handiwork would hide as uhose half anonymous chisels, or as we find it in some old Scots ballads or in some twelfth or thirteenth tury Arthurian romahat handiwork assured, I had martyred no man for modelling his own image upon PallasAthenas buckler; for I took great pleasure iain allusions to the singers life one find.９9lib.s in old romances and ballads, and thought his presehere all the more poignant because we discover it half lost, like portly Chaucer riding behind his Maunciple and his Pardoner. Wolfram von Esbach, singing his German Parsival, broke off some description of a famished city to remember that in his own house at home the very mice lacked food, and what old ballad singer was it who claimed to have fought by day in the very battle he sang by night? So masterful indeed was that instinct that when the minstrel knew not who his poet was he must needs make up a man: When any stranger asks who is the sweetest of singers, answer with one voice: "A blind man; he dwells upon rocky Chios; his songs shall be the most beautiful for ever." Elaborate modern psychology souistical, I thought, when it speaks in the first person, but not those simple emotions which resemble the more, the more powerful they are, everybodys emotion, and I was soon to write many poems where an alersoion was woven into a general pattern of myth and symbol. When the Fenia says that his heart has grown cold and callous, For thy hapless fate, dear Ireland, and sorrows of my ow follows tradition, and if he does not move us deeply, it is because he has no sensuous musical vocabulary that es at need, without pelling him to sedentary toil and so driving him out from his fellows. I thought to create that sensuous, musical vocabulary, and not for myself only but that I might leave it to later Irish poets, much as a mediaeval Japanese painter left his style as an iao his family, and was careful to use a traditional manner and matter; yet did something altogether different, ged by that toil, impelled by my share in s curse, by all that sterile modern plication, by my inality as the neers call it. Morris set out to make a revolution that the persons of his Well at the Worlds End or his Waters of the Wondrous Isles, always, to my mind, in the likeness of Artemisia and her man, might walk his native sery; and I, that my native sery might find imaginary inhabitants, half planned a new method and a new culture. My mind began drifting vaguely towards that doe of the mask which has vinced me that every passionate man (I have nothing to do with meist, or philanthropist, or man whose eyes have no preference) is, as it were, linked with ane, historiaginary, where alone he finds images that rouse his energy. Napoleon was never of his own time, as the naturalistic writers and painters bid all men be, but had some Roman Emperors image in his head and some dottieres blood in his heart; and when he ed that head at Rome with his own hands,.t> he had covered, as may be seen from Davids painting, his hesitation with that Emperors old suit.
XII
I had various women friends on whom I would call towards five oclock, mainly to discuss my thoughts that I could n to a man without meeting somebbr> peting thought, but partly because their tea & toast saved my pennies for the bus ride home; but with women, apart from their intimate exges of thought, I was timid and abashed. I was sitting on a seat in front of the British Museum feeding pigeons, when a couple of girls sat near and begaig my pigeons away, laughing and whispering to one another, and I looked straight in front of me, very indignant, and presently went into the Museum without turning my head towards them. Sihen I have often wondered if they were pretty or merely very young. Sometimes I told myself very adventurous love stories with myself for hero, and at other times I planned out a life of lonely austerity, and at otheal purpose, use nothing but the on syntax. A couple of years later I would not have written that first lih its ventional archaism??Arise and go??nor the inversion in the last stanza. Passing another day by the new Law Courts, a building that I admired because it was Gothic,??It is not very good, Morris had said, but it is better than any thing else they have got and so they hate it.??I grew suddenly oppressed by the great weight of stone, and thought, There are miles and miles of stone and brick all round me, and presently added, If John the Baptist, or his like, were to e again and had his mi upon it, he could make all these peoplego out into some wilderness leaving their buildiy, and that tho９9liｂ?
le young man of letters brave the metropolis without some like stimulant; and all, after two or three, or twelve or fifteen years, acc to obstinacy, have uood that we achieve, if we do achieve, in little diligeary stitches as though we were making lace. I had one unmeasured advantage from my stimulant: I could ink my socks, that they might not show through my shoes, with a most haughty mind, imagining myself, and my torn tackle, somewhere else, in some far plader the opy ... i the city of kites and crows.
In London I saw nothing good, and stantly remembered that Ruskin had said to some friend of my fathers??As I go to my work at the British Museum I see the faces of the people bee daily more corrupt.
I vinced myself for a time, that on the same journey I saw but what he saw. Certain old womens faces filled me with horror, faces that are no lohere, or if they are, pass before me unnoticed: the fat blotched faces, rising above double s, of women who have drunk too much beer aen too much meat. In Dublin I had often seen old women walking with erect heads and gaunt bodies, talking to themselves in loud voices, mad with drink and poverty, but they were different, they beloo romance: Da Vinci has drawn women who looked so and so carried their bodies.
XIII
I attempted to restore one old friend of my fathers to the practice of his youth, but failed though he, unlike my father, had not ged his belief. My father brought me to dih Jaettleship at Wigmore Street, onventor of imaginative designs and noainter of melodramatic lions. At dinner I had talked a great deal??too much, I imagine, for so young a man, or may be for any man??and on the way home my father, who had been plainly anxious that I should make a good impression, was very angry. He said I had talked for effed that talking for effect recisely what one must never do; he had always hated rhetorid emphasis and had made me hate it; and his anger plunged me into great deje. I called at leships studio the day to apologise aleship opehe door himself and received me with enthusiasm. He had explaio some womahat I would probably talk well, being an Irishman, but the reality had surpassed, etc., et>. I was not flattered, though relieved at not having to apologise, for I soon discovered that what he really admired was my volubility, for he himself was very silent. He seemed about sixty, had a bald head, a grey beard, and a nose, as one of my fathers friends used to say, like an lass, and sipped cocoa all the afternoon and evening from an enormous tea cup that must have been designed for him alone, not g how cold the cocoa grew. Years before he had been thrown from his horse while hunting and broken his arm and, because it had been badly set, suffered great pain for along time. A little whiskey would always stop the pain, and soon a little became a great deal and he found himself a drunkard, but having signed his liberty away for certain months he was pletely cured. He had acquired, however, the need of some liquid which he could sip stantly. I brought him an admiratioled in early boyhood, for my father had always said, Gee Wilson was our born painter but leship enius, and even had he showhing I could care for, I had admired him still because my admiration was in my bones. He showed me his early designs and they, though often badly drawn, fulfilled my hopes. Something of Blake they certainly did show, but had in place of Blakes joyous intellectual energy a Saturnian passion and melancholy. God creating evil
the death? like head with a woman and a tiger ing from the forehead, which Rossetti??or was it Browning???had described as the most sublime design of a or modern art had been lost, but there was another version of the same thought and other designs never published or exhibited. They rise before me even now iation, especially a blind Titan?like ghost floating with groping hands above the treetops. I wrote a criticism, and arranged for reprodus with the editor of an art magazine, but after it was written andaccepted the proprietor, lifting what I sidered an obsequious caw in the Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien?Lepage rookery, insisted upon its reje. leship did not mind its reje, saying, Who cares for such things now? Not ten people, but he did mind my refusal to show him what I had written. Though what I had written was all eulogy, I dreaded his judgment for it was my first art criticism. I hated his big lion pictures, where he attempted an art too much ed with the sense of touch, with the softness hness, the minutely observed irregularity of surfaces, for his genius; and I think he k. Rossetti used to call my pictures pot? boilers, he said, but they are all??all, and he waved his arms to the vases, symbols. When I wanted him to design gods and angels and lost spirits once more, he always came back to the point, Nobody would be pleased. Everybody should have a raisore was one of his phrases.
Mrs??s articles are not good but they are her raisore. I had but little knowledge of art, for there was little scholarship in the Dublin Art School, so I overrated the quality of anything that could be ected with my general beliefs about the world. If I had been able to give angelical, or diaboliames to his lions I might have liked them also and I think that leship himself would have liked them better, and liking them better have bee a better painter. We had the same kind ious feeling, but I could give a crude philosophical expression to mine while he could only express his in a or with brush and pencil. He often told me of certain ascetic ambitions, very much like my own, for he had kept all the moral ambition of youth with a moral ce peculiar to himself, as for instance??Yeats, the ht I was arrested by a poli??was walking rous Park barefooted to keep the flesh under??good sort of thing to do??I was carrying my boots in my hand ahought I was a burglar; and even when .I explained and gave him half a , he would not let me go till I had promised to put on my boots before I met the poli.
He was very proud and shy, and I could not imagine anybody asking him questions, and so I was tent to take these stories as they came, firmations of stories I had heard in boyhood. Oory in particular had stirred my imagination, for, ashamed all my boyhood of my lack of physical ce, I admired what was beyond my imitatiohought that any weakness, even a weakness of body, had the character of sin, and while at breakfast with his brother, with whom he shared a room ohird floor of a er house, he said that his nerves were out of order. Presently he left the table, and got out through the window and on to a stone ledge that ran along the wall uhe windowsills. He sidled along the ledge, and turning the er with it, got in at a different window auro the table. My nerves, he said, are better than I thought.
XIV
leship said to me: Has Edwin Ellis ever said anything about the effect of drink upon my genius? No, I answered. I ask, he said, because I have always thought that Ellis has some strange medical insight. Though I had answered no, Ellis had only a few days before used these words: leship drank his genius away.
Ellis, but lately returned from Perugia, where he had lived many years, was another old friend of my fathers but some years youhaleship or my father. leship had found his simplifying image, but in his painting had turned away from it, while Ellis, the son of Alexander Ellis, a once famous man of sce, who erhaps the last man in England to run the circle of the sces without superficiality, had never found that image at all. He ainter and poet, but his painting, which did not i me, showed no influe that of Leighton. He had started perhaps a couple of years too late for Pre?Raphaelite influence, for no great Pre?Raphaelite picture ainted after 1870, a England too soon for that of the French painters.
He was, however, sometimes moving as a poet and still more often an astonishment. I have known him cast something just said into a dozen lines of musical verse, without apparently ceasing to talk; but the work once done he could not or would not amend it, and my father thought he lacked all ambitio he had at times nobility of rhythm??an instinct frandeur??and after thirty years I still repeat to myself his address to Mother Earth: O mother of the hills, five our towers; O mother of the clouds, five our dreams and there are certain whole poems that I read from time to time or try to make others read. There is that poemwhere the manner is unworthy of the matter, being loose and facile, describing Adam and Eve fleeing from Paradise. Adam asks Eve what s?he carries so carefully and Eve replies that it is a little of the apple core kept for their children. There is that vision of Christ the Less, a too hurriedly written ballad, where the half of Christ, sacrificed to the divine half that fled to seek felicity, wanders wailing through Golgotha; and there is The Saint and the Youth in which I discover no fault at all. He loved plexities??seven silences like dles round her face is a line of his??and whether he wrote well or ill had always a manner, which I would have known from that of any other poet. He would say to me, I am a mathemati with the mathematics left out??his father was a great mathemati??or A woman once said to me, "Mr. Ellis why are your poems like sums?" aainly he loved symbols and abstras. He said once, when I had asked him not to mention something or other, Surely you have discovered by this time that I know of no means whereby I mention a fa versation.
He had a passion for Blake, picked up in Pre?Raphaelite studios, and early in our acquainta into my hands a scrap of note paper on which he had written some years before an interpretation of the poem that begins The fields from Islington to Maryleboo Primrose Hill and St. Johns Wood Were builded over with pillars of gold And there Jerusalems pillars stood.
The four quarters of London represented Blakes freat mythological persohe Zoas, and also the four elements. These few sentences were the foundation of all study of the philosophy of William Blake, that requires a knowledge for its pursuit and that traces the e between his system and that of Swedenb or of Boehme. I reised certain attributions, from what is sometimes called the Christian Cabala, of which Ellis had never heard, and with this proof that his interpretation was more than phantasy, he and I began our four years work upon the Prophetic Books of William Blake. We took it as almost a sign of Blakes personal help when we discovered that the spring of 1889, when we first joined our knowledge, was one hundred years from the publication of The Book of Thel, the first published of the Prophetic Books, as though it were firmly established that the dead delight in anniversaries. After months of discussion and reading, we made a cordance of all Blakes mystical terms, and there was much copying to be done in the Museum & at Red Hill, where the desdants of Blakes friend and patron, the landscape painter, John Linnell, had many manuscripts. The Linnellswere narrow in their religious ideas & doubtful of Blakes orthodoxy, whom they held, however, i honour, and I remember a timid old lady who had known Blake when a child saying: He had very wrong ideas, he did not believe in the historical Jesus. One old man sat always beside us ostensibly to sharpen our pencils, but perhaps really to see that we did not steal the manuscripts, and they gave us very old port at lund I have upon my dining room walls their present of Blakes Dante engravings. Going thither aurning Ellis would eain me by philosophical discussion, varied with improvised stories, at first folk tales which he professed to have picked up in Scotland; and though I had read and collected many folk tales, I did not see through the deceit. I have a partial memory of two more elaborate tales, one of an Italian spirator flying barefoot from I fet what advehrough I fet what Italian city, in the early m. Fearing to be reised by his bare feet, he slipped past the sleepy porter at an hotel calling out number so and so as if he were some belated guest. Then passing from bedroom door to door he tried on the boots, and just as he got a pair to fit a voice cried from the room Who is that?
Merely me, sir, he called back, taking your boots. The other was of a Martyrs Bible round which the cardinal virtues had taken personal form??this a fragment of Blakes philosophy. It was in the possession of an old clergyman when a certain jockey called upon him, and the cardinal virtues, fused between jockey and clergymaed themselves to the jockey. As whenever he sinned a cardinal virtue interfered and turned him back to virtue, he lived i credit and made, but for oence, a very holy death. As his wife and family k round in admiration and grief, he suddenly said Damn. O my dear, said his wife, what a dreadful expression. He answered, I am going to heaven and straightway died. It was a long tale, for there were all the jockeys vain attempts to sin, as well as all the adventures of the clergyman, who became very sinful indeed, but it ended happily, for when the jockey died the cardinal virtues returo the clergyman. I think he would talk to any audiehat offered, one audience being the same as another in his eyes, and itmay have been for this reason that my father called him unambitious. When he was a young man he had befriended a reformed thief and had asked the grateful thief to take him round the thieves quarters of London.
The thief, however, hurried him away from the worst saying, Another minute and they would have found you out. If they were not the stupidest men in London, they had done so already. Ellis had gohrough a no doubt romantid witty at of all the houses he had robbed, and all the throats he had cut in one short life.
His versation would often pass out of my prehension, or indeed I think of any mans, into a labyrinth of abstra and subtilty, and then suddenly return with some verbal ceit or turn of wit. The mind is known to attain, iain ditions of trance, a quiess so extraordinary that we are pelled at times to imagine a dition of unendurable intellectual iy, from which we are saved by the merciful stupidity of the body; & I think that the mind of Edwin Ellis was stantly upon the edge of trance. Once we were discussing the symbolism of sex, in the philosophy of Blake, and had been in disagreement all the afternoon. I began talking with a new sense of vi, and after a moment Ellis, who was at his easel, threw down his brush and said that he had just seen the same explanation in a series of symbo..lic visions. In another moment,
he said, I should have been off. We went into the open air and walked up and down to get rid of that feeling, but presently we came in again and I began again my explanation, Ellis lying upon the sofa. I had been talking some time when Mrs. Ellis came into the room and said: Why are you sitting in the dark? Ellis answered, But we are not, and then added in a voice of wonder, I thought the lamp was lit and that I was sitting up, and I find I am in the dark and lying down. I had seen a flicker of light over the ceiling, but had thought it a refle from some light outside the house, which may have been the case.
XV
I had already met most of the poets of my geion. I had said, soon after the publication of The Wanderings of Usheen, to the editor of a series of shilling reprints, who had set me to pile tales of the Irish fairies, I am growing jealous of other poets, and we will all grow jealous of each other unless we know each other and so feel a share in each others triumph. He was a Welshman, lately a mining engineer, Er Rhys, a writer of Welsh translations and inal poems that have often moved me greatly though I think of no one else who has read them. He was seven ht years older than myself and through his work as editor knew everybody who would pile a book for seven ht pounds. Between us we fouhe Rhymers Club which for some years was to meet every night in an upper room with a sanded floor in an a eating house irand called The Cheshire Cheese. Lionel Johnson, Er Dowson, Victor Plarr, Er Radford, John Davidson, Richard le Gallie. W. Rolleston, Selwyn Image and two men of an eion, Edwin Ellis and John Todhunter, came stantly for a time, Arthur Symons and Herbert Home less stantly, while William Watson joined but never came and Francis Thompson came o never joined; and sometimes, if we met in a private house, which we did occasionally, Oscar Wilde came. It had been useless to invite him to the Cheshire Cheese for he hated Bohemia. Olive Schreiner, he said oo me, is staying in the East End because that is the only place where people do not wear masks upon their faces, but I have told her that I live in the West End because nothing in life is me but the mask.
We read our poems to one another and talked criticism and drank a little wine. I sometimes say when I speak of the club, We had sud such ideas, sud such a quarrel with the great Victorians, we set before us sud such aims, as though we had many philosophical ideas. I say this because I am ashamed to admit that I had these ideas and that whenever I began to talk of them a gloomy silence fell upon the room. A young Irish poet, who wrote excellently but had the worst manners, was to say a few years later, You do not talk like a poet, you talk like a man of letters; and if all the rhymers had not been polite, if most of them had not been to Oxford or Cambridge, they would have said the same thing. I was full of thought, often very abstract thought, longing all the while to be full of images, because I had goo the art school instead of a uy.
Yet even if I had goo a uy, and learned all the classical foundations of English literature and English culture, all that great erudition which, once accepted, frees the mind from restlessness, I should have had to give up my Irish subject matter, or attempt to found a radition. Lag suffit reisedpret I must needs find out some reason for all I did. I knew almost from the start that to overflow with reasons was to be not quite well?born, and when I could I hid them, as men hide a disagreeable ary; and that there was no help for it, seeing that my try was not born at all. I was of those doomed to imperfect achievement, and under a curse, as it were, l藏书网ike some race of birds pelled to spend the time, needed for the making of the , in argument as to the venienoss and twig and li. Le Gallienne and Davidson, and even Symons, were provincial at their setting out, but their provincialism was curable, mine incurable; while the one vi shared by all the younger men, but principally by Johnson and Horne, who imposed their personalities upon us, position to all ideas, all generalisations that be explained aed. E... fresh from Paris would sometimes say??We are ed with nothing but impressions,
but that itself was a generalisation a but stony silence. versation stantly dwindled into Do you like so and sos last book? No, I prefer the book before it, and I think that but for its Irish members, who said whatever came into their heads, the club would not have survived its first difficult months. I knew??now ashamed that I thought like a man of letters, noerated at their indiffereo the fashion of their own river bed??that Swinburne in one way, Browning in another, and Tennyson in a third, had filled their work with what I called impurities, curiosities about politics, about sce, about history, abion; and that we must create once more the pure work.
Our clothes were for the most part uurous like our versation, though I indeed wore a broween coat, a loose tie and a very old Inverness cape, discarded by my father twenty years before and preserved by my Sligo?born mother whose as were unreasoning and habitual like the seasons. But no other member of the club, except Le Gallienne, who wore a loose tie, and Symons, who had an Inverness cape that was quite ne; almost fashionable, would have shown himself for the world in any e but that of an English gentleman. One should be quite unnoticeable, Johnson explaio me. Those who ed most carefully to the fashion in their clothes generally departed furthest from it in their hand?writing, which was small, and studied, one poet??which I fet??having founded his upon the handwriting of Gee Herbert. Dowson and Symons I was to know better in later years when Symons became a very dear friend, and I never got behind John Davidsons Scottish roughness and exasperation, though I saw much of him, but from the first I devoted myself to Lionel Johnson. He and Horne and Image and one or two others shared a man?servant and an old house in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, typical figures of transition, doing as an achievement of learning and of exquisite taste what their predecessors did in careless abundance. All were Pre?Raphaelite, and sometimes one might meet in the rooms of one or other a ragged figure, as of some fallen dynasty, Simeon Solomon, the Pre? Raphaelite painter, ohe friend of Rossetti and of Swinburne, but fresh now from some low public house. o a long term of impriso for a criminal offence, he had sunk into drunkenness and misery. Introduced one night, however, to some man who mistook him, in the dim dle light, for another Solomon, a successful academic painter and R. A., he started to his feet in a rage with Sir, do you dare to mistake me for that mountebank? Though not one had harkeo the feeblest caw, or been spattered by the smallest dropping from any Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien?Lepage bundle of old twigs, I began by suspeg them of lukewarmness, and even backsliding, and I owe it to that suspi that I never became intimate with Horne, who lived to bee the greatest English authority upon Italian life in the fourteenth tury and to write the oandard work on Botticelli. oisseur in several arts, he had designed a little chur the manner of Inigo Jones for a burial grouhe Marble Arch.
Though I now think his little church a masterpiece, its style was more than a tury too late to hit my fancy at two or three and twenty; and I accused him of leaning towards that eighteenth tury That taught a school Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit Till, like the certain wands of Jacobs wit, Their verses tallied.
Another fanaticism delayed my friendship with two men, who are now my friends and iain matters my chief instructors. Somebody, probably Lionel Johnson, brought me to the studio of Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannoainly heirs of the great geion, and the first thing I saw was a Shannon picture of a lady and child arrayed in lace, silk and satin, suggesting that hated tury. My eyes were full of some more mythological mother and child and I would have none of it, and I told Shannon that he had not painted amother and child but elegant people expeg visitors and I thought that a great reproach. Somebody writing in The Germ had said that a picture of a pheasant and an apple was merely a picture of something to eat, and I was so angry with the indiffereo subject, which was the onplace of all art criticism since Bastien?Lepage, that I could at times see nothing else but subject. I thought that, though it might not matter to the man himself whether he loved a white woman or a black, a female pickpocket or a regular unit of the Church of England, if only he loved strongly, it certainly did matter to his relations and even under some circumstao his whole neighbourhood. Sometimes indeed, like some father in Moliere, I ighe lovers feelings altogether and even refused to admit that a trace of the devil, perhaps a trace of colour, may lend piquancy, especially if the e be not perma.
Among these men, of whom so many of the greatest talents were to live such passionate lives and die such tragic deaths, one serene man, T. W. Rolleston, seemed always out of place. It was I brought him there, intending to set him to some work in Ireland later on. I have known young Dublin w men slip out of their workshop to see the sed Thomas Davis passing by, and even remember a spiracy, by some three or four, to make him the leader of the Irish race at home & abroad, and all because he had regular features; and when all is said, Alexahe Great & Alcibiades were personable men, and the Founder of the Christian religion was the only man who was her a little too tall nor a little too short but exactly six feet high. We in Ireland thought as do the plays and ballads, not uanding that, from the first moment wherein nature foresaw the birth of Bastien?Lepage, she has only granted great creative power to men whose faces are torted with extravagance or curiosity or dulled with some proteg stupidity.
I had now met all those who were to make the ies of the last tury tragi the history of literature, but as yet we were all seemingly equal, whether in talent or in luck, and scarce even personalities to one another. I remember saying one night at the Cheshire Cheese, when more poets than usual had e, None of us say who will succeed, or even who has or has not talent. The only thiain about us is that we are too many.
XVI
I have described what image??always opposite to the natural self or the natural world??Wilde, Henley, Morris copied or tried to copy, but I have not said if I found an image for myself. I know very little about myself and much less of that anti?self: probably the woman who y dinner or the woman who sweeps out my study knows more than I. It is perhaps because nature made me a gregarious man, going hither and thither looking for versation, and ready to deny from fear or favour his dearest vi, that I love proud and lonely images. When I was a child a daily to the sextons daughter for writing lessons, I found one poem in her School Reader that delighted me beyond all others: a fragment of some metrical translation from Aristophanes wherein the birds sing s upon mankind. In later years my mind gave itself tarious Shelleys dream of a young man, his hair blanched with sorrow studying philosophy in some loower, or of his old man, master of all human knowledge, hidden from human sight in some shell?strewn cavern on the Mediterranean shore. One passage above all raually in my ears??
Some feign that he is Enoch: others dream He re?Adamite, and has survived Cycles of geion and of ruin. The sage, in truth, by dreadful abstinence, And quering penance of the mutinous flesh, Deep plation and unwearied study, In years outstretched beyond the date of man, May have attaio snty and sce Over those strong a things and thoughts Which others fear and know not.
MAHMUD I would talk With this old Jew.
HASSAN Thy will is even now Made known to him where he dwells in a sea?cavern Mid the Demonesi, less accessible Than thod! He who would question him Must sail alo su where the stream Of o sleeps around those foamless isles, When the young moon is westering as now, And evening airs wander upon the wave; And, when the pines of that bee?pasturing isle, Greehus, quench the fieryshadow Of his gilt prow within the sapphire water, Then must the lonely helmsman cry aloud Ahasuerus! and the caverns round Will answer Ahasuerus! If his prayer Be granted, a faieor will arise, Lighting him over Marmora; and a wind Will rush out of the sighing pine?forest, And with the wind a storm of harmony Unutterably sweet, and pilot him Through the soft twilight to the Bosphorus: The the hour and plad circumsta for the matter of their ferehe Jeears. Few dare, and few who dare Win the desired union.
Already in Dublin, I had been attracted to the Theosophists because they had affirmed the real existence of the Jew, or of his like; and, apart from whatever might have been imagined by Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran and Bastien?Lepage, I saw nothing against his reality. Presently having heard that Madame Blavatsky had arrived from France, or from India, I thought it time to look the matter up. Certainly if wisdom existed anywhere in the world it must be in some such lonely mind admitting no duty to us, uning with God only, g nothing from fear or favour. Have not all peoples, while bound together in a single mind and taste, believed that such meed and paid them that honour, or paid it to their mere shadow, which they have refused to philanthropists and to men of learning?
I found Madame Blavatsky in a little house at Norwood, with but, as she said, three followers left??the Society of Psychical Research had just reported on her Indian phenomena??and as one of the three followers sat in an outer room to keep out undesirable visitors, I was kept a long time kig my heels. Presently I was admitted and found an old woman in a plain loose dark dress: a sort of old Irish peasant woman with an air of humour and audacious power. I was still kept waiting, for she was deep in versation with a woman visitor.
I strayed through folding doors into the room and stood, in sheer idleness of mind, looking at a cuckoo clock. It was certainly stopped, for the weights were off and lying upon the ground, a as I stood there the cue out and cuckooed at me. I interrupted Madame Blavatsky to say. Your clock has hooted me.
It often hoots at a stranger, she replied. Is there a spirit in it? I said. I do not know, she said, I should have to be aloo know what is in it. I went back to the clod began examining it and heard her say Do not break my clock. I wondered if there was some hidden meism, and I s.9９lib?hould have been put out, I suppose, had I found any, though Henley had said to me, Of course she gets up fraudulent miracles, but a person of genius has to do something; Sarah Bernhardt sleeps in her coffin. Presently the visitor went away and Madame Blavatsky explaihat she ropagandist for womens rights who had called to find out why men were so bad. What explanation did you give her? I said. That men were born bad but women made themselves so, and then she explaihat I had bee waiting because she had mistaken me for some man whose name resembled mine and who wao persuade her of the flatness of the earth.
When I saw her she had moved into a house at Holland Park, and some time must have passed??probably I had been in Sligo where I returned stantly for long visits??for she was surrounded by followers. She sat nightly before a little table covered with green baize and on this green baize she scribbled stantly with a piece of white chalk. She would scribble symbols, sometimes humorously applied, and sometimes unintelligible figures, but the chalk was inteo mark down her score when she played patience. One saw in the room a large table where every night her followers and guests, often a great number, sat down to their vegetarian meal, while she enced or mocked through the folding doors. A great passioure, a sort of female Dr. Johnson, impressive, I think, to every man or woman who had themselves any riess, she seemed impatient of the formalism, of the shrill abstract idealism of those about her, and this impatience broke out inrailing & many niames: O you are a flapdoodle, but then you are a theosophist and a brother. The most devout and learned of all her followers said to me, H.P.B. has just told me that there is anlobe stu to this at the north pole, so that the earth has really a shape something like a dumb?bell. I said, for I khat her imagination tained all the folklore of the world, That must be some piece of Eastern mythology. O no it is not, he said, of that I am certain, and there must be something in it or she would not have said it. Her mockery was not kept for her followers alone, and her voice would bee harsh, and her mockery lose phantasy and humour, when she spoke of what seemed to her stific materialism. Once I saw this antagonism, guided by some kind of telepathic divination, take a form of brutal phantasy. I brought a very able Dublin woman to see her and this woman had a brother, a physiologist whosereputation, though known to specialists alone, was European; and, because of this brother, a family pride ihing stifid modern. The Dublin woman scarcely opened her mouth the whole evening and her name was certainly unknown to Madame Blavatsky, yet I saw at on that wrinkled old face bent over the cards, and the only time I ever saw it there, a personal hostility, the dislike obbr>..f one woman for another.
Madame Blavatsky seemed to bundle herself up, being all primeval peasant, and began plaining of her ailments, more especially of her bad leg. But of late her master??her old Jew, her Ahasuerus, cured it, or set it on the way to be cured. I was sitting here in my chair, she said, when the master came in and brought something with him which he put over my knee, something warm whiclosed my k was a live dog which he had cut open. I reised a cure used sometimes in mediaeval medie. She had two masters, and their portraits, ideal Indian heads, painted by some most inpetent artist, stood upoher side of the folding doors. One night, when talk was impersonal and general, I sat gazing through the folding doors into the dimly lighted dining?room beyond. I noticed a curious red light shining upon a picture and got up to see where the red light came from. It was the picture of an Indian and as I came near it slowly vanished. When I returo my seat, Madame Blavatsky said, What did you see? A picture, I said. Tell it to go away. It is already gone. So much the better, she said, I was afraid it was medium ship but it is only clairvoyance.
What is the difference? If it had been medium ship, it would have stayed in spite of you. Beware of medium ship; it is a kind of madness; I know, for I have been through it.
I found her almost always full of gaiety that, uhe occasional joking of those about her, was illogical and incalculable a always kindly and tolerant. I had called one evening to find her absent, but expected every moment. She had been somewhere at the seaside for her health and arrived with a little suite of followers. She sat down at on her big chair, and began unfolding a broer parcel, while all looked on full of curiosity. It tained a large family Bible. This is a present for my maid, she said. What! A Bible and not even anointed! said some shocked voice. Well my children, was the answer, what is the good of giving lemons to those who want es? When I first began to frequent her house, as I soon did very stantly, I noticed a handsome clever woman of the world there, who seemed certainly very much out of place, pehough she thought herself. Presently there was much sdal and gossip, for the pe laiangled with two young men, who were expected to grow into ascetic sages. The sdal was so great that Madame Blavatsky had to call the pe before her and to speak after this fashiohink that it is necessary to crush the animal nature; you should live in chastity in ad thought. Initiation is granted only to those who are entirely chaste, and so to run on for some time. However, after some minutes in that vehement style, the pe standing crushed and shamed before her, she had wound up, I ot permit you more than one. She was quite sincere, but thought that nothing mattered but what happened in the mind, and that if we could not master the mind, our as were of little importance. One young man filled her with exasperation; for she thought that his settled gloom came from his chastity. I had known him in Dublin, where he had been aced to interrupt long periods of asceticism, in which he would eat vegetables and drink water, with brief outbreaks of what he sidered the devil. After an outbreak he would for a few hours dazzle the imagination of the members of the local theosophical society with poetical rhapsodies about harlots and street lamps, and then sink into weeks of melancholy. A fellow theosophist once found him hanging from the window pole, but cut him down in the nick of time. I said to the man who cut him down, What did you say to one another? He said, We spent the night telling ic stories and laughing a great deal. This man, t?９9lｉb.orween sensuality and visionary ambition, was now the most devout of all, and told me that in the middle of the night he could oftehe ringing of the little astral bell whereby Madame Blavatskys master called her attention, and that, although it was a low silvery sound it made the whole house shake. Anht I found him waiting in the hall to show in those who had the right of entran some night when the discussion rivate, and as I passed he whispered into my ear, Madame Blavatsky is perhaps not a real woman at all. They say that her dead body was found many years ago upon some Russian battlefield. She had two dominant moods, both of extreme activity, but one calm and philosophid this was the mood always on that night in the week, when she answered questions upon her system; and as I look back after thirty years I often ask myself Was her speech automatic? Was she for one night, in every week, a trance medium, or in some similar state? Iher mood she was full of phantasy and insequent raillery. That is the Greek church, a triangle like all true religion, I recall her saying, as she chalked out a triangle on the green baize,and then, as she made it disappear in meaningless scribbles it spread out and became a bramble?bush like the Church of Rome. Then rubbing it all out except oraight line, Now they have lopped off the branches and tur into a broomstick arid that is Protestantism. And so it was, night after night, always varied and unforseen. I have observed a like suddereme ge in others, half whose thought was supernatural, and Laurence Oliphant records some where or other like observations. I remember only once finding her in a mood of reverie; something had happeo damp her spirits, some attack upon her movement, or upon herself. She spoke of Balzac, whom she had seen but once, of Alfred de Musset, whom she had known well enough to dislike for his morbidity, and of Gee Sand whom she had known so well that they had dabbled in magic together of whieither knew anything at all in those days; and she ran on, as if there was nobody there to overhear her, I used to wo and pity the people who sell their souls to the devil, but now I only pity them. They do it to have somebody on their sides, and added to that, after some words I have fotten, I write, write, write as the Wandering Jew walks, walks, walks. Besides the devotees, who came to listen and to turn every doe into a ne藏书网w san for the puritanical vis of their Victorian childhood, ks came from half Europe and from all America, and they came that they might talk. One Ameri said to me, She has bee the most famous woman in the world by sitting in a big chair ating us to talk. They talked and she played patience, and totted up her score on the green baize, and generally seemed to listen, but sometimes she would listen no more. There was a woman who talked perpetually of the divine spark within her, until Madame Blavatsky stopped her with??Yes, my dear, you have a divine spark within you, and if you are not very careful you will hear it snore. A certain Salvation Army captain probably pleased her, for, if vociferous and loud of voice, he had muimation. He had known hardship and spoke of his visions while starving ireets and he was still perhaps a little light in the head. I wondered what he could preach to ignorant men, his head ablaze with wild mysticism, till I met a man who had heard him talking near t Garden to some crowd ireet. My friends, he was saying, you have the kingdom of heaven within you and it would take a pretty big pill to get that out.
XVII
Meanwhile I had not got any o proving that Ahasuerus dwells in a sea?cavern mid the Demonesi, but one clusion I certainly did e to, which I find written out in an old diary and dated 1887. Madame Blavatskys masters were trance personalities, but by trance personalities I meant something almost as exg as Ahasuerus himself. Years before I had found, on a table in the Royal Irish Academy, a pamphlet on Japanese a>..rt, ahere of an animal painter so remarkable that horses he had painted upon a temple wall had stepped down after and trampled the neighb fields of rice. Somebody had e to the temple in the early m, been startled by a shower of water drops, looked up and seen a painted horse, still wet from the dew?covered fields, but now trembling into stillness. I thought that her masters were imagin.ary forms created by suggestion, but whether that suggestion came from Madame Blavatskys own mind or from some mind, perhaps at a great distance, I did not know; and I believed that these forms could pass from Madame Blavatskys mind to the minds of others, and even acquire external reality, and that it was even possible that they talked and wrote. They were born in the imagination, where Blake had declared that all men live 藏书网after death, and where every man is king or priest in his own house. Certainly the house at Holland Park was a romantic place, where one heard of stant apparitions and exged speculations like those of the middle ages, and I did not separate myself from it by my own will. The Secretary, an intelligent and friendly man, asked me to e and see him, and when I did, plaihat I was causing discussion and disturbance, a certain fanatical hungry face had been noticed red and tearful, & it was quite plain that I was not in full agreement with their method or their philosophy. I know, he said, that all these people bee dogmatid fanatical because they believe what they ever prove; that their withdrawal from family life is to them a great misfortune; but what are we to do? We have been told that all spiritual influx into the society will e to an end in 1897 for exactly one hundred years. Before that date our fual ideas must be spread through the world. I khe doe and it had made me wonder why that old woman, or rather the trance personalities who directed her and were her genius, insisted upon it, for influx of some kind there must always be. Did they dread heresy after the death of Madame Blavatsky, or had they no purpose but the greatest possible immediate effort?
XVIII
At the British Museum reading?room I often saw a man of thirty?six or thirty?seven, in a broween coat, with a gaunt resolute face, and an athletic body, who seemed before I heard his name, or khe nature of his studies, a figure of romance. Presently I was introduced, where or by what man or woman I do not remember. He was Macgregor Mathers, the author of the Kabbalas Unveiled, & his studies were two only??magid the theobbr>藏书网ry of war, for he believed himself a born ander and all but equal in wisdom and in power to that old Jew. He had copied many manuscripts on magic ceremonial and doe in the British Museum, and was to any more in tial libraries, and it was through him mainly that I begaain studies and experiehat were to vince me that images well up before the minds eye from a deeper source than scious or subco.
nsemory. I believe that his mind in those early days did not belie his fad body, though in later years it became unhinged, for he kept a proud head amid great poverty. Ohat boxed with him nightly has told me that for many weeks he could knock him down, though Macgregor was the stronger man, and only knew long after that during those weeks Macgregor starved. With him I met an old white?haired Oxfordshire clergyman, the m..ost panic?stri person I have ever known, though Macgregors introdu had been He unites us to the great adepts of antiquity. This old man took me aside that he might say??I hope you never invoke spirits??that is a very dangerous thing to do. I am told that even the plaary spirits turn upon us in the end. I said, Have you ever seen an apparition? O yes, once, he said. I have my alchemical laboratory in a cellar under my house ..he Bishop ot see it. One day I was walking up & down there when I heard another footstep walking up and down beside me. I turned and saw a girl I had been in love with when I was a young man, but she died long ago. She wanted me to kiss her.
Oh no, I would not do that. Why not? I said. Oh, she might have got power over me. Has your alchemical research had any success? I said. Yes, I once made the elixir of life. A French alchemist said it had the right smell and the right colour, (The alchemist may have been Elephas Levi, who visited England in the sixties, & would have said anything) but the first effect of the elixir is that your nails fall out and your hair falls off. I was afraid that I might have made a mistake and that nothing else might happen, so I put it away on a shelf. I meant to drink it when I was an old man, but when I got it dowher day it had all dried up.
XIX
I generalized a great deal and was ashamed of it. I thought that it was my business in life to bean artist and a poet, and that there could be no business parable to that. I refused to read books, and even to meet people who excited me to generalization, but all to no purpose. I said my prayers much as in childhood, though without the ularity of hour and place, and I began to pray that my imagination might somehow be rescued from abstra, and bee as pre?occupied with life as had been the imagination of Chaucer. For ten or twelve years more I suffered tinual remorse, and only became tent when my abstras had posed themselves into picture and dramatization. My very remorse helped to spoil my early piving it a of seality through my refusal to permit it any share of an intellect which I sidered impure. Even in practical life I only very gradual99lｉｂ?ly began to use generalizations, that have since bee the foundation of all I have done, or shall do, in Ireland. For all I know, all men may have been as timid; for I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty tain all the truths we shall ever find, but as yet we do not know truths that belong to us fr.99ｌｉｂ.om opinions caught up in casual irritation or momentary phantasy. As life goes on we discover that certain thoughts sustain us i, ive us victory, whether over ourselves or others, & it is these thoughts, tested by passion, that we call vis. Among subjective men (in all those, that is, who m..ust spin a web out of their own bowels) the victory is an intellectual daily recreation of all that exterior fate snatches away, and so that fates antithesis; while what I have called The mask is aional antithesis to all that es out of their internal nature. We begin to live when we have ceived life as a tragedy.
XX
A vi that the world was now but a bundle ments possessed me without ceasing. I had tried this vi on The Rhymers, thereby plunging into greater silen already too silent evening. Johnson, I was aced to say, you are the only man I know whose silence has beak & claw. I had lectured on it to some London Irish society, and I was to lecture upon it later on in Dublin, but I never found but oerested man, an official of the Primrose League, who was also an active member of the Fenian Brotherhood. I am areme servative ap?99liｂ?art from Ireland, I have heard him explain; and I have no doubt that personal experience made him share the sight of ahat saw the world in fragments. I had been put inte by the followers of Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran and Bastien?Lepage, who not only asserted the unimportance of subject, whether in art or literature, but the independence of the arts from one another. Upoher hand I delighted in every age where poet and artist fihemselves gladly to some ied subject matter known to the whole people, for I thought that in man and race alike there is something called unity of being, using that term as Dante used it when he pared beauty in the vito to a perfectly proportioned human body. My father, from whom I had learhe term, preferred a parison to a musical instrument s that if we touch a string all the string藏书网s murmur faintly. There is not more desire, he had said, in lust than in true love; but in true love desire awakens pity, hope, affe, admiration, and, given appropriate circumstance, every emotion possible to man. When I began, however, to apply this thought to the State and tue for a law?made balance among trades and occupations, my father displayed at ohe violent free?trader and propagandist of liberty. I thought that the enemy of this unity was abstraeaning by abstra not the distin but the isolation of occupation, or class or faculty??
Call down the hawk from the air Let him be hooded, ed, Till the yellow eye has grown mild, For larder and spit are bare, The old cook ehe scullion gone wild.
I knew no mediaeval cathedral, aminster, being a part of abhorred London, did not i me; but I thought stantly of Homer and D?ante and the tombs of Mausolus and Artemisa, the great figures of King and Queen and the lesser figures of Greek and Amazoaur and Greek. I thought that all art should be a taur finding in the popular lore its bad its strong legs. I got great pleasure too from remembering that Homer was sung, and from that tale of Dante hearing a an sing some stanza from The Divine edy, and from Don Quixotes meeting with some an that sang Ariosto. Morris had never seemed to care for any poet later than Chaucer; and though I preferred Shakespeare to Chaucer I begrudged my own preference. Had not Europe shared one mind a, until both mind a began to break intments a little before Shakespeares birth? Musid verse began to fall apart when Chaucer robbed verse of its speed that he might give it greater meditation, though for aneion or.9９liｂ? so minstrels were to sing his long elaborated Troilus and Cressida; painting parted frion ier Renaissahat it might study effects of tangibility undisturbed; while, that it might characterise, where it had once personified, it renounced, in our own age, all that ied subject matter which we have named poetry. Presently I was io number character itself among the abstras, enced by greves saying that passions are too powerful in the fair sex to let humour, or as we say character, have its course. Nor have we fared better uhe on daylight, for pure reason has notoriously made but light of practical reason, and has been made but light of in its turn, from that m when Descartes discovered that he could thier in his bed than out of it; nor needed I inal thought to discover, being so late of the school of Morris, that mach..that is, with music, speed dance; and at last, it might be, so deepen the political passion of the nation that all, artist and poet, craftsman and day labourer would accept a on design? Perhaps even these images, once created and associated with river and mountain, might move of themselves, and with some powerful even turbulent life, like those painted horses that trampled the rice fields of Japan.
XXII
I used to tell the few friends to whom I could speak these secret thoughts that I would make the attempt in Ireland but fail, for our civilisation, its elements multiplying by divisions like certain low forms of life, owerful; but iy I had the wildest hopes. ?99ｌｉｂ?To?day I add to that first vi, to that first desire for unity, this other vi, long a mere opinion vaguely or itently apprehended: Nations, races and individual men are unified by an image, or bundle of related images, symbolical or evocative. of the state of mind, which is of all states of mind not impossible, the most difficult to that man, race or nation; because only the greatest obstacle that be plated without despair rouses the will to full iy. A powerful class by terror, rhetorid anised seality, may drive their people to war, but the day draws near when they ot keep them there; and how shall they face the pure nations of the East when the day es to do it with but equal arms? I had seen Ireland in my own time turn from the bragging rhebbr>.torid gregarious humour of Oells geion and school, and offer herself to the solitary and proud Parnell as to her anti?self, buskin following hard on sock; and I had begun to hope, or to half?hope, that we might be the first in Europe to seek unity as deliberately as it? had been sought by theologian, poet, sculptor, architect from the eleventh to the thirteenth tury. Doubtless we must seek it differently, no longer sidering it veo epitomise all human knowledge, but find it we well might, could we first find philosophy and a little passion.
XXIII
It was the death of Parhat vinced me that the moment had e for work in Ireland, for I khat for a time the imaginat