Part 1

EARLY MEMORIES; SOME CHAPTERS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

BY JOHN BUTLER YEATS.

THE CUALA PRESS CHURCHTOWN DUNDRUM

MCMXXIII

PREFACE

My father died in New York on February 2nd, 1922, at the end of his eighty second year. He died after a few hours illness brought on, as it seemed, by a long walk in the cold of a New York winter. He awoke in the middle of the night to find his friends Mrs Foster and Mr John Quinn sitting beside his bed and after a few words of pleasure at the sight said to Mrs Foster 'Remember you have promised me a sitting in the morning.' These were his last words for he dropped off to sleep and died in his sleep. He had gone to America some ten or twelve years before to be near my eldest sister who had an exhibition of embroidery there, and though she left after a few months he stayed on. 'At last' he said 'I have found a place where people do not eat too much at dinner to talk afterwards'. As he grew infirm his family & his friends constantly begged him to return, but, though he promised as constantly and would even fix the day of sailing, he would always ask for a few weeks more. He lived in a little French hotel in 29th Street where there is a café and night after night sat there, sketch book in hand, surrounded by his friends, painters and writers for the most part, who came to hear his conversation. He seemed to work as hard as in his early days, and drew with pen or pencil innumerable portraits with vigour, and subtlety. He painted a certain number in oils, & worked for several years at a large portrait of himself, commissioned by Mr John Quinn. I have not seen this portrait, but expect to find that he had worked too long upon it and, as often happened in his middle life when, in a vacillation prolonged through many months it may be, he would scrape out every morning what he had painted the day before, that the form is blurred, the composition confused, and the colour muddy. Yet in his letters he constantly spoke of this picture as his masterpiece, insisted again and again, as I had heard him insist when I was a boy, that he had found what he had been seeking all his life. This growing skill had been his chief argument against return to Ireland, for the portrait that displayed it must not be endangered by a change of light. The most natural among the fine minds that I have known he had been preoccupied all his life with the immediate present and what he thought his growing skill, but began towards its end, as I suppose we all do, to compare the present to the remote past. When I noticed how often his letters referred to long dead relations and friends, 'those lost people' as he called them in one letter, I persuaded him to begin his autobiography. He wrote, though with difficulty and a little against the grain, the biographical fragment in this book. When his account of friends and relations had come to an end the difficulty increased, and finding it more amusing to put the present into letters, or conversation, he put off the next chapter from day to day. Everything that happened, the death or marriage of an acquaintance, the discovery of a new friend, stirred his imagination; and his letters, now that his conversation can be heard no more, are indeed the fullest expression of a wisdom where there is always beauty. Yet this biographical fragment has its measure of wisdom and beauty, and I am pleased to think that when my son has reached his eighteenth birthday he will be able to say 'Though my grandfather was born a hundred years ago, and I have never seen his face, I know him from his book and think of him with affection'.

W. B. Yeats.

June, 1923.

EARLY MEMORIES SOME CHAPTERS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY BY JOHN BUTLER YEATS.

Why I became an artist is a question which every artist must sometimes put to himself. It was my father who made me an artist, though his intention was that I should become a barrister, and I did become a barrister, but soon left it to follow my destiny and be an artist. Had I remained a barrister, in all probability both my sons would have taken to the law and would not now be one a poet and the other a painter.

When I was a little child, like other children I took to drawing, and my father being very appreciative of his children admired what I drew. In those days there was a heavy tax on paper as a defence against cheap journalism, & the radical movements which it was bound to foster, and my mother, being, as are most mothers, careful of expenditure, and not very sympathetic toward my artistic strivings, was always reluctant to give me paper on which I could draw. However, my father was an Irish gentleman of the old school and not at all thrifty; from him I could always get as much paper as I wanted. At that time there were no illustrated magazines and only one illustrated paper which I saw very occasionally at a friend's house. The only newspaper which came into my father's house was the London 'Times' and it had a picture of a clock. It was I think a rough wood-block. There is no child who will not really subscribe to Aristotle's doctrine that art is imitation, and in this case the imitation was roughly rendered so that it might be described as imitation with selection.

I was the eldest of the family and my brothers were much younger, for which reason my childhood was without companionship. Ah, the loneliness of such a childhood and the blessedness of it! Whether inside the house or out in the grounds I was always by myself, therefore I early learned to sustain myself by revery and dream. Years afterwards I suffered a good deal from the reproofs of my elders, for my habit of absentmindedness. Of course I was absentminded and am so still. In those childhood days I discovered the world of fantasy, and I still spend all my spare moments in that land of endearing enchantment.

I think as a child I was perfectly happy; my father my friend and counsellor, my mother my conscience. My father theorized about things and explained things and that delighted me, not because I had any mental conceit but because I delighted then as I still do in reasoning. My mother never explained anything, she hadn't a theoretical faculty; but she had away of saying 'Yes darling' or 'No darling,' which, when put out, she would change into a hasty 'Yes dear' or 'No dear' that was sufficient for all purposes. There was a servant in the house whose name was Sam Matchett. As is the way in the country, he was butler and coachman, land steward and gardener. He had been in the army and he several times told me that he had been the strongest man in the regiment. I admired him more than I did anybody else, and he enjoyed my admiration as much as Achilles did that of Patroclus. I think he did very much as he liked with my father, but my mother was made of firmer material. My mother had a great belief in exercise in the open air, and when Sam wanted to do a little shooting on his own account, he would approach her artfully and say that he knew where there was a pheasant or a hare and that he thought of going to get it, and that he would like to take 'Master Johnny' with him; and off we two would go. My father, was six feet two inches in his stocking feet and well-built, famous in his college days as an athlete and racket player, and Sam Matchett to excite the admiration of the women servants would induce my father to stand on the palm of his hand, and he would raise him with arms outstretched to the level of the kitchen table. It was no wonder that I admired Sam, and it helped no doubt in my artistic education and started an appreciation, which still exists, for muscular well-made men. Of course I picked up all Sam's words and modes of expression, and my mother didn't quite like it; but as these referred to horses and cattle and fields and game, in my own mind I was convinced that Sam knew a good deal more about it than she did. I remember he used to wonder that I did not prefer my father to my mother. I think he was an exceedingly good influence upon my life. He bestowed a great deal of care on my manners, which is not surprising when one remembers that however it be with the upper classes, the Irish peasant has the instincts of a gentleman. My father was a Rector of a very large parish in County Down, Ireland, & there were no boys' schools anywhere within reach. A village school-master taught me to read, after which I read Robinson Crusoe diligently. In the evening after dinner my father would sit beside his candle reading, and my mother would sit by her candle sewing, and I would nestle beside her reading Robinson Crusoe, and I can remember that at certain critical passages in this history I would tremble with anxiety, and that I was most careful lest my elders should discover my excitement and laugh at me. These candles needed to be snuffed incessantly, and it was my ambition to be allowed to snuff them; but when I tried I snuffed the candle out, and never again got the chance, my mother was inexorable. We were a large family, boisterous, full of animal spirits & health, sometimes very friendly together while at other times we would quarrel. Yet I never remember a single instance of corporal punishment or indeed any kind of punishment but once, and then I was the victim. My mother induced my father to commence my education, and he began by something in arithmetic, and I failed miserably as I would at the present moment. Up to that moment I had been the pride of my father: not only was I his eldest son and the heir to the family property, but he was convinced I was exceedingly like his brother Tom, who in his course at Trinity College, Dublin, had never been beaten in mathematics. When therefore I failed in arithmetic the blow was too much for his fond hopes, and he gave me a box on my ear. He had no sooner done so than he shook hands with me and hoped I was not offended, and then glided out of the room. I was not offended but very much astounded. I wonder if he told my mother. At any rate, years afterwards when I was a full grown man, I heard her regretting that she could never induce my father to teach any of us. He said he had no patience.

At last I went to school. It was a boarding-school at Seaforth, Liverpool, and was kept by three maiden ladies: it was a very fashionable school. We were nice little boys with short jackets and wide white collars. Never was any boy so happy as I was in the prospect of that school. My uncle took me to Liverpool; and when he suggested that I stay with him a day longer I would not, I wanted to get into that school. I was not ten minutes inside the walls when I think I was about the most miserable boy in all England, and believed the cloud would never, never lift. I looked at all the other boys and wondered again and again how they could be so cheerful.

My father was evangelical as was then fashionable in the best intellectual circles. He must have said something about hell in my hearing, yet, I did not make any real acquaintance with that dismal and absurd doctrine till I went to Miss Davenport's school. The school was managed upon the highest principles of duty, no prizes were ever given for all must work from sake of duty, and we slept with our Bibles under our pillows with directions to read them as soon as we awoke in the morning; but hell was the driving force. Miss Emma Davenport, who was the chief of the school, often spoke of it.

In the early mornings I read my Bible with assiduity, but only the Old Testament never the New. It was the age of faith; I believed every word to be the word of God, of that mighty God of whom our school-mistress was always speaking. I had always believed also that Robinson Crusoe was an equally veracious history; and when the nurses and servants told me ghost stories and fairy tales, I accepted all they said with an unfaltering credulity. There were certain cabins in our neighbours said to be haunted one in particular covered with ivy which I never passed without a shiver of fear and curiosity. I did not tell my elders, I was too wise: instinctively I knew that they would have robbed me of my ghostly thrills. Now-a-days people are brought up in a world of reason and science: is it any wonder that intricate and delicate and difficult verse should give way to the poetry of rhetoric and a moral uplift? People used to amuse themselves by bracing or relaxing their souls in the vast and shadowy world of solitary fantasy: now we do better--at any rate it is easier--we set about reforming our neighbours. When I first arrived at that English School I was greatly surprised by English mispronunciation. Emma, the Christian name of our headmistress was invariably called 'Emmer,' just as to this day in London clergymen of all denominations pronounce the name of our late Gracious Majesty as 'Victorier,' whereas every Irishman knows that her name is 'Victoria.' Among the trio of ladies governing the school Emma was the ruling spirit, but she had a sister Betsy who if she could do nothing else could apply the cane with sharpness and decision. One day the only other Irish boy in the school and myself climbed for a few feet on one of the trees. There was a sharp tap at the schoolroom window: it was Betsy. She told us to stand in the dining-room until the boys came in for tea. We stood there and waited and would have been dull but for my friend. He produced out of the recesses of his pocket a piece of wax kept for the purpose and diligently applied it to the palm of his hand, & I followed his example. Afterwards we rubbed our hands as hard as we could along the iron top of the fire-screen. Thus we prepared for what was coming. When the boys entered for tea, Betsy came with them and sat down at the head of the table, we standing in the centre of the room. After a moment or two she arose and I still hear her voice as she said, 'Tandy, (Tandy was my friend's name) fetch me the cane.' Tandy had been longer in the school than I and knew all about that cane and found it easily. We received three strokes on each of our hands; it was very painful and I was very much astonished, and when I went home for the holidays I was glad to find that the blood blisters were still there, and I very eagerly showed them to my father who to my surprise only laughed, being neither sympathetic nor impressed. Years afterwards when I saw the portraits of Queen Elizabeth I recognized the resemblance to Betsy. She dressed elaborately with a high collar that reached over her ears and was very tall & meagre, and was, as I remember, like the Queen in that she was a faded beauty. Lonely spinsters sometime suffer from the thought that they've lived wasted lives. It must have soothed Betsy's last moments to remember how she could raise blood blisters on little boys' hands.

My conscience once played me a very nasty trick. As you may suppose the greatest crime next to setting the school on fire, or running away, or something of that sort, was to tell a lie. If a little boy told a lie he was birched for it, and possibly went to hell hereafter. Telling a lie is sometimes a little boy's greatest temptation, and the elders have decided that it is the greatest crime. I was reading a novel called 'The Children of the New Forest,' and had got far on into the second volume and was so interested that I insisted upon telling all about it to the drawing-master, and he told me novels were lies, and was so emphatic that my conscience compelled me to shut that book. I still remember that I had just reached page 224 in the second volume. Yet that master who was such a fanatic for truth always touched up our water-colour drawings, and made them look like master-pieces, for the edification of our parents and for their deception. To my non-puritan eyes man's inconsistency is always a charm and it has often been his safe-guard.

The great Queen Elizabeth used to spit and swear when the foreign ambassadors crossed her temper, yet I doubt whether she had distinguished nerves. Cecil said of her that she was sometimes greater than a man and sometimes less than a woman.

At twelve years old I left that school and I think I left happiness behind me: ever since I've lived under cloudy skies. I went to a school in the Isle of Man kept by a Scotchman. That Scotchman brushed the sun out of my sky. I remember, as yesterday, how my father talked about him. He had never been to school himself, having been educated by his father who was a scholar; and it was his conviction that if he had only gone to school and had been efficiently flogged he would have risen to the highest eminence; therefore, he talked of this Scotch school-master with an enthusiasm that was infectious: so that I who shared all his ideas went to my second school, my mind alive with the most pleasant anticipations. When we reached the Island and Athol Academy we were ushered into the library, and I saw my school-master. My father had already tactfully interrogated him about his flogging propensities, so that when he brought into our presence a class of small boys in order that my father and uncle, who was of the party, might test their proficiency, he suddenly asked each boy how many times he had been flogged. As I remember not a boy had escaped. What my uncle thought I don't know, but I know that my courage oozed out at the end of my fingers. My mother had arranged that we three boys should sleep in a room by ourselves. That night when we were going to bed, the housekeeper, a very nice woman who came from Ireland, & I daresay felt a little sorry for her compatriots, by way of distracting our thoughts pulled up the blind and we looked out and there, quite close to the front of the house, we saw the wild waves tumbling under a stormy moon.

The next morning between nine o'clock & twelve I saw three boys receive what the master called 'Three capital drubbings.' That night as we lay in our little room we three brothers had become very sober boys.

Among the Beatitudes is one which is not in the Bible, but nevertheless is in every Scotchman's bones: 'Blessed are they who expect not, for they shall not be disappointed.'

Among the boys was one from the County Limerick who saw the grotesque in everything, and my brother who was the leader in all the games and the handsomest and merriest boy in the school, who lived to be the success of the family and who had never known illness until he died when fifty six years of age. Fortune seemed to have showered on him every kind of good luck except that of growing old. Another boy was my dear friend, George Pollexfen, whose sister I afterwards married. Unlike my brother, George was the most melancholy of men. He was melancholy as a boy and as a man. I think it was his melancholy that attracted me, who am a cheerful & perennially hopeful man. It always mortifies me to think how cheerful I am, for I am convinced it is a gift which I share with all the villains: it is their unsinkable buoyancy that enables these unfortunates to go on from disaster to disaster and remain impenitent. My old friend and school-mate always saw the worst side of things. On a summer day he would remember that winter was coming, and if prosperity came to him, as it did all his life, he made elaborate preparations for the arrival of misfortune. He was very tender-hearted and humane, & so out of his prognostications of evil he would extract a kind of sad humour that made him infinitely tender and pitiful. Out of sorrow he would extract mirthfulness as the scaffold echoes with a jest. In the vehemence of good spirits and hopefulness we grow careless of other people's feelings, as do the rich of the poor men at their gates: not so my sad-hearted and much-burdened old friend. He had also great gifts of expression. What he felt and thought and what he smiled at, for he never laughed, he could tell you in long detailed narratives of men and things. Although slow and tedious in all his movements--and in conversation that tedium was delightful--he afterwards became famous as a steeplechase rider. He was exceedingly well made, and of proved nerve and courage. Sometimes both as boy and man he would throw off some of his melancholy and then his gaiety had the charm of the unexpected, like rare sunshine on a gloomy mountain. The head-master disliked him because of his irresponsiveness which is always trying to the autocratic temper. He said that he looked at him with the face of a horse, which indeed was not an inaccurate description. Had it been possible for our head-master to conceal himself for one night in the large dormitory, where George slept with nine or ten other boys, he would have been wiser. Night after night he would keep these boys wide awake & perfectly still while he told them stories, made impromptu as he went along. Silence was commanded in all the bedrooms, therefore these had to be told in smothered whispers. I did all I could--and my father helped me--to persuade him to come to Trinity College. Had he done so, he would doubtless have been a writer of extraordinary spontaneity & force, and I should not be writing now these boyish recollections. My friend was because of his family and their traditions puritanic, but his puritanism was of a peculiar sort; he wasn't in the least aggressive like the Belfast man, nor was he conceited nor inquisitorial as the Scotch are; it was merely that he saw human nature sorrowfully, and with little hope. It only enhanced his tenderness, which was like that of a nurse by the bedside of a sick man, and veritably there were times when thinking about this benighted and lost human nature he was like a tender mother with a fractious child: yet never did he lose his sense of proportion, or his sense of fact, or his mirthfulness. At first in any company he would be a perfect wet blanket, and an embarrassment, so that conversation would flag; presently he would begin to talk and then people would discover that he knew more about the subject than, as it seemed to them, anybody else that had ever existed, and that he knew it all as a man of feeling and imagination. They would also discover that he was a listener, whose attention you would woo as that of a king on his throne. He died possessed of a good deal of money: but as he himself told me, with characteristic veracity, the money was made for him by a clerk whom he kept from drink. It never entered into his head to give any of the money to the clerk; it was his by the law, and by the law he kept it. Why puritans are thus tied up and bound and handcuffed and padlocked in the prisons of the law is not for me to say. I have always distrusted puritanism, in that respect I am a genuine Irish Protestant and believe with Christ that the law was made for man and not man for the law. So did not believe my melancholy friend. At the command of the law he would have given you everything he owned and not harboured a regret. What he was ready to give he would exact of others. His life was a long imprisonment. Yet human nature is never more interesting than when undergoing this kind of ordeal. To meet a man in the pleasant ways of acquaintanceship is interesting and exciting, to visit him in prison may be painful, but it is enthralling; for which reason, though I hate puritanism, I don't think I would like it to be entirely removed from the world, unless it be the Belfast variety, which like the east wind is good for neither man nor beast. There was a phrase sometimes on my father's lips, forced from him by sudden annoyance: 'Nothing can exceed the vulgar assumption of a Belfast man.' The root of my old friend's puritanism was self-immolation, the other sort is the glorification of self-assertion. When I think of my friend and others like him, I say to myself that the prison pallor on a fine face is more interesting than the ruddy cheeks of the warden or turnkey or the Governor of the gaol, who all live in the open air.