XV
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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,<samp></samp> 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<bdo>藏书网</bdo>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 loo<cite></cite>se 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<mark></mark> 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.
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