FOUR YEARS
BY WILLIAM BUTLER
YEATS
(Excerpt)
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 balcony, 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 anew enthusiasm: the Pre-Raphaelite movement at last
affecting 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, though that was no longer true;
and I imagine that houses were cheap. I remember feeling disappointed because
the co-operative stores, with their little seventeenth century panes, were so
like any common shop; and because the public house, called 'The Tabard' after
Chaucer's Inn, was so plainly a common 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 accustomed, 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 father's, that it had 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 in the metropolis. I no longer
went to church as a regular habit, but go I sometimes did, for one Sunday
morning I saw these words painted on a board in the porch: 'The congregation
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 community, where there were many artists, who considered religion
at best an unimportant accessory to good architecture and who disliked that particular
church.
II
I could not
understand where the charm had gone that I had felt, when as a school-boy of twelve
or thirteen, I had played among 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 because these were real houses, while my play had
been among toy-houses someday to be inhabited by imaginary people full of the
happiness that one can 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 given me their poetry to read; & once in Liverpool
on my way to Sligo, "I had seen 'Dante's Dream' in the gallery there--a
picture painted when Rossetti had lost his dramatic power, and today not very
pleasing to me--and its colour, its people, its romantic architecture had
blotted all other pictures away." It was a perpetual bewilderment that my
father, who had begun life as a Pre-Raphaelite painter, now painted portraits
of the first comer, children selling newspapers, or a consumptive 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 change coming bit by bit and its defense 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 were very ignorant men; they
read nothing, for nothing mattered but 'Knowing how to paint,' being in
reaction against a generation that seemed to have wasted its time upon so many
things. I thought myself alone in hating these young men, now indeed getting
towards middle life, their contempt for the past, their monopoly of the future,
but in a few months I was to discover others of my own age, who thought as I
did, for it is not true that youth looks before it with the mechanical gaze of
a well-drilled soldier. Its quarrel is not with the past, but with the present,
where its elders are so obviously powerful, and no cause seems lost if it seem
to threaten that power. Does cultivated youth ever really love the future,
where the eye can discover no persecuted Royalty hidden among oak leaves,
though from it certainly does come so much proletarian rhetoric? I was unlike
others of my generation in one thing only. I am very religious, and deprived by
Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the simple-minded religion of my childhood,
I had made a new religion, almost an infallible church, out of poetic
tradition: a fardel of stories, and of personages, and of emotions, a bundle of
images and of masks passed on from generation to generation by poets &
painters with some help from philosophers and theologians. I wished for a world
where I could discover this tradition perpetually, and not in pictures and in
poems only, but in tiles round the chimney-piece and in the hangings that kept
out the draught. I had even created a dogma: 'Because those imaginary people
are created out of the deepest instinct of man, to be his measure and his norm,
whatever I can imagine those mouths speaking may be the nearest I can go to
truth.' When I listened they seemed always to speak of one thing only: they,
their loves, every incident of their lives, were steeped in the supernatural.
Could even Titian's 'Ariosto' that I loved beyond other portraits, have its
grave look, as if waiting for some perfect final event, if the painters, before
Titian, had not learned portraiture, while painting into the corner of
compositions, full of saints and Madonnas, their kneeling patrons? At seventeen
years old I was already an old-fashioned brass cannon full of shot, and nothing
kept me from going off but a doubt as to my capacity to shoot straight.
III
I was not
an industrious student and knew only what I had found by accident, and I had
found "nothing I cared for after Titian--and Titian I knew chiefly from a
copy of 'the supper of Emmaus' in Dublin--till Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites;"
and among my father's friends were no Pre-Raphaelites. Some indeed had come to
Bedford Park in the enthusiasm of the first building, and others to be near
those that had. There was Todhunter, a well-off man who had bought my father's
pictures while my father was still Pre- Raphaelite. Once a Dublin doctor he was
a poet and a writer of poetical plays: a tall, sallow, lank, melancholy man, a
good scholar and a good intellect; and with him my father carried on a warm exasperated
friendship, fed I think by old memories and wasted by quarrels over matters of
opinion. Of all the survivors he was the most dejected, and the least
estranged, and I remember encouraging him, with a sense of worship shared, to
buy a very expensive carpet designed by Morris. He displayed it without strong liking and
would have agreed had there been any to find fault. If he had liked anything
strongly he might have been a famous man, for a few years later he was to
write, under some casual patriotic impulse, certain excellent verses now in all
Irish anthologies; but with him every book was a new planting and not a new bud
on an old bough. He had I think no peace in himself. But my father's chief
friend was York Powell, a famous Oxford Professor of history, a broad-built, broad-headed,
brown-bearded man, clothed in heavy blue cloth and looking, but for his glasses
and the dim sight of a student, like some captain in the merchant service. One
often passed with pleasure from Todhunter's company to that of one who was
almost ostentatiously at peace. He cared nothing for philosophy, nothing for
economics, nothing for the policy of nations, for history, as he saw it, was a
memory of men who were amusing or exciting to think about. He impressed all who
met him & seemed to some a man of genius, but he had not enough ambition to
shape his thought, or conviction to give rhythm to his style, and remained
always a poor writer. I was too full of unfinished speculations and premature convictions
to value rightly his conversation, in-formed by a vast erudition, which would
give itself to every casual association of speech and company precisely because
he had neither cause nor design. My father, however, found Powell's concrete
narrative manner a necessary completion of his own; and when I asked him, in a
letter many years later, where he got his philosophy, replied 'From York
Powell' and thereon added, no doubt remembering that Powell was without ideas,
'By looking at him.' Then there was a good listener, a painter in whose hall
hung a big picture, painted in his student days, of Ulysses sailing home from
the Phaeacian court, an orange and a skin of wine at his side, blue mountains
towering behind; but who lived by drawing domestic scenes and lovers' meetings
for a weekly magazine that had an immense circulation among the imperfectly educated.
To escape the boredom of work, which he never turned to but under pressure of
necessity, and usually late at night with the publisher's messenger in the
hall, he had half filled his studio with mechanical toys of his own invention,
and perpetually increased their number. A model railway train at intervals
puffed its way along the walls, passing several railway stations and signal
boxes; and on the floor lay a camp with attacking and defending soldiers and a
fortification that blew up when the attackers fired a pea through a certain
window; while a large model of a Thames barge hung from the ceiling. Opposite
our house lived an old artist who worked also for the illustrated papers for a
living, but painted landscapes for his pleasure, and of him I remember nothing
except that he had outlived ambition, was a good listener, and that my father
explained his gaunt appearance by his descent from Pocahontas. If all these men
were a little like becalmed ships, there was certainly one man whose sails were
full. Three or four doors off, on our side of the road, lived a decorative artist
in all the naive confidence of popular ideals and the public approval. He was
our daily comedy. 'I myself and Sir Frederick Leighton are the greatest
decorative artists of the age,' was among his sayings, & a great lych-gate,
bought from some country church-yard, reared its thatched roof, meant to
shelter bearers and coffin, above the entrance to his front garden, to show
that he at any rate knew nothing of discouragement. In this fairly numerous
company--there were others though no other face rises before me--my father and
York Powell found listeners for a conversation that had no special loyalties,
or antagonisms; while I could only talk
upon set topics, being in the heat of my youth, and the topics that filled me
with excitement were never spoken of.
IV
Some
quarter of an hour's walk from Bedford Park, out on the high road to Richmond,
lived W. E. Henley, and I, like many others, began under him my education. His
portrait, a lithograph by Rothenstein, hangs over my mantlepiece among
portraits of other friends. He is drawn standing, but, because doubtless of his
crippled legs, he leans forward, resting his elbows upon some slightly suggested
object--a table or a window-sill. His heavy figure and powerful head, the
disordered hair standing upright, his short irregular beard and moustache, his
lined and wrinkled face, his eyes steadily fixed upon some object, in complete
confidence and self-possession, and yet as in half-broken reverie, all are
exactly as I remember him. I have seen other portraits and they too show him
exactly as I remember him, as though he had but one appearance and that seen
fully at the first glance and by all alike. He was most human--human, I used to
say, like one of Shakespeare's characters--and yet pressed and pummelled, as it
were, into a single attitude, almost into a gesture and a speech, as by some overwhelming
situation. I disagreed with him about everything, but I admired him beyond
words. With the exception of some early poems founded upon old French models, I
disliked his poetry, mainly because he wrote Vers Libre, which I
associated with Tyndall and Huxley and Bastien-Lepage's clownish peasant
staring with vacant eyes at her great boots; and filled it with unimpassioned
description of an hospital ward where his leg had been amputated. I wanted the
strongest passions, passions that had nothing to do with observation, and
metrical forms that seemed old enough to be sung by men half-asleep or riding
upon a journey.
Furthermore,
Pre-Raphaelitism affected him as some people are affected by a cat in the room,
and though he professed himself at our first meeting without political
interests or convictions, he soon grew into a violent unionist and imperialist.
I used to say when I spoke of his poems: 'He is like a great actor with a bad
part; yet who would look at Hamlet in the grave scene if Salvini played the
grave-digger?' and I might so have explained much that he said and did. I meant
that he was like a great actor of passion--character-acting meant nothing to me
for many years--and an actor of passion will display someone quality of soul,
personified again and again, just as a great poetical painter, Titian, Botticelli,
Rossetti may depend for his greatness upon a type of beauty which presently we
call by his name. Irving, the last of the sort on the English stage, and in
modern England and France it is the rarest sort, never moved me but in the expression
of intellectual pride; and though I saw Salvini but once, I am convinced that
his genius was a kind of animal nobility. Henley, half inarticulate--'I am very
costive,' he would say--beset with personal quarrels, built up an image of
power and magnanimity till it became, at moments, when seen as it were by
lightning, his true self. Half his opinions were the contrivance of a
sub-consciousness that sought always to bring life to the dramatic crisis, and
expression to that point of artifice where the true self could find its tongue.
Without opponents there had been no drama, and in his youth Ruskinism and
Pre-Raphaelitism, for he was of my father's generation, were the only possible
opponents. How could one resent his prejudice when, that he himself might play
a worthy part, he must find beyond the common rout, whom he derided and flouted
daily, opponents he could imagine moulded like himself? Once he said to me in
the height of his imperial propaganda, 'Tell those young men in Ireland that
this great thing must go on. They say Ireland is not fit for self-government
but that is nonsense. It is as fit as any other European country but we cannot
grant it.'
And then he
spoke of his desire to found and edit a Dublin newspaper. It would have
expounded the Gaelic propaganda then beginning, though Dr. Hyde had as yet no
league, our old stories, our modern literature--everything that did not demand
any shred or patch of government. He dreamed of a tyranny but it was that of
Cosimo de Medici.
V
We gathered
on Sunday evenings in two rooms, with folding doors between, & hung, I
think, with photographs from Dutch masters, and in one room there was always, I
think, a table with cold meat. I can recall but one elderly man--Dunn his name
was--rather silent and full of good sense, an old friend of Henley's. We were
young men, none as yet established in his own, or in the world's opinion, and
Henley was our leader and our confidant. One evening I found him alone amused
and exasperated.
He cried:
'Young A... has just been round to ask my advice. Would I think it a wise thing
if he bolted with Mrs. B...? "Have you quite determined to do it?" I asked him. "Quite."
"Well," I said, "in that case I refuse to give you any
advice."' Mrs. B... was a beautiful talented woman, who, as the Welsh
triad said of Guinevere, 'was much given to being carried off.' I think we
listened to him, and often obeyed him, partly because he was quite plainly not
upon the side of our parents. We might have a different ground of quarrel, but
the result seemed more important than the ground, and his confident manner and
speech made us believe, perhaps for the first time, in victory. And besides, if
he did denounce, and in my case he certainly did, what we held in secret
reverence, he never failed to associate it with things, or persons, that did
not move us to reverence. Once I found him just returned from some art congress
in Liverpool or in Manchester. 'The Salvation Armyism of art,' he called it,
& gave a grotesque description of some city councillor he had found
admiring Turner. Henley, who hated all that
Ruskin praised, thereupon derided Turner, and finding the city councillor the
next day on the other side of the gallery, admiring some Pre-Raphaelite there,
derided that Pre-Raphaelite. The third day Henley discovered the poor man on a
chair in the middle of the room, staring disconsolately upon the floor. He
terrified us also, and certainly I did not dare, and I think none of us dared,
to speak our admiration for book or picture he condemned, but he made us feel
always our importance, and no man among us could do good work, or show the
promise of it, and lack his praise. I can remember meeting of a Sunday night
Charles Whibley, Kenneth Grahame, author of 'The Golden Age,' Barry Pain, now a
well known novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a famous talker, George
Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chief secretary, and Oscar Wilde,
who was some eight years or ten older than the rest. But faces and names are
vague to me and, while faces that I met but once may rise clearly before me, a
face met on many a Sunday has perhaps vanished. Kipling came sometimes, I
think, but I never met him; and Stepniak, the nihilist, whom I knew well
elsewhere but not there, said 'I cannot go more than once a year, it is too
exhausting.' Henley got the best out of us all, because he had made us accept
him as our judge and we knew that his judgment could neither sleep, nor be
softened, nor changed, nor turned aside. When I think of him, the antithesis that is
the foundation of human nature being ever in my sight, I see his crippled legs
as though he were some Vulcan perpetually forging swords for other men to use;
and certainly I always thought of C..., a fine classical scholar, a pale and
seemingly gentle man, as our chief swordsman and bravo. When Henley founded his
weekly newspaper, first the 'Scots,' afterwards 'The National Observer,' this
young man wrote articles and reviews notorious for savage wit; and years afterwards
when 'The National Observer' was dead, Henley dying & our cavern of outlaws
empty, I met him in Paris very sad and I think very poor. 'Nobody will employ
me now,' he said. 'Your master is gone,' I answered, 'and you are like the
spear in an old Irish story that had to be kept dipped in poppy- juice that it
might not go about killing people on its own account.' I wrote my first good
lyrics and tolerable essays for 'The National Observer' and as I always signed
my work could go my own road in some measure.
Henley
often revised my lyrics, crossing out a line or a stanza and writing in one of
his own, and I was comforted by my belief that he also re-wrote Kipling then in
the first flood of popularity. At first, indeed, I was ashamed of being
re-written and thought that others were not, and only began investigation when
the editorial characteristics--epigrams, archaisms and all--appeared in the
article upon Paris fashions and in that upon opium by an Egyptian Pasha. I was
not compelled to full conformity for verse is plainly stubborn; and in prose,
that I might avoid unacceptable opinions, I wrote nothing but ghost or fairy
stories, picked up from my mother, or some pilot at Rosses Point, and Henley
saw that I must needs mix a palette fitted to my subject matter. But if he had
changed every 'has' into 'hath' I would have let him, for had not we sunned
ourselves in his generosity? 'My young men out-dome and they write better than
I, 'he wrote in some letter praising Charles Whibley's work, and to another
friend with a copy of my 'Man who dreamed of Fairyland:' 'See what a fine thing
has been written by one of my lads.'
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