Part 2

George Pollexfen was not popular at school nor was he popular as a man. He never talked except upon some subject which long meditation had made his very own, and though a good listener, it was with a perfectly impassive face. Yet though never popular he came to be loved by a few, and as the years went by these few who had discovered him for themselves talked about him to others. There are people who come to us and there are people to whom we go: he was of the latter kind. There are people who go out into the streets, along the roads and gather in their friends in armfuls. These are the popular people, they are irresistible, they are as stimulating as the winds of Spring, wherever they appear opinions are formed and conceit grows. My friend had no conceit and no opinions, and therefore could impart none, but he was as rich in natural fertility as a virgin forest: and though logicians and theoretical people could make nothing of him, poets--my son, for instance--were at ease in his company. The question arises, did he himself love anybody? Though I have known him all his life, I am not sure. He leaned upon my daughter, and perhaps he had some affection for her. He constantly came up from Sligo to Dublin, though the exertion was irksome, to consult her. He would say 'She has a head! she has a head!' and then he would shake his own. His feeling for my son was a kind of enthusiasm; for your genuine puritan has a profound respect for worldly success, in that respect being a Jew of the Old Testament rather than a Disciple of the New. I have already said that if he knew anything about a subject he knew everything: and one of his subjects was racing. Sligo was full of racing men, they are swarming all along the West of Ireland. If a party of these came to see him, they would find him wrapped in his habitual gloom, and they would rouse him by asking some adroit questions about his nephew; and then they would talk about the horses. He himself, I know for a certainty never risked more than ten shillings on any race, but he knew all about the horses. Many years ago I went to Punchestown Races with him: he knew not only everything that was to be known about the horses, but all about the jockeys and their curious histories, & what he knew he presented without philosophy, without theories, without ideas, in a language that recalled the vision of Chaucer and the early poets. On that occasion as always he talked poetry though he did not know it.

George on a race-course, above all if mounted on a wild and splendid race-horse, was a transformed being. Puritanism was shattered, torn away, a mere rag of antediluvianism. Then he loved all men, he loved humanity, he loved even himself: a natural man, such as he was meant to be, a pleasant self-esteem, without aggressiveness, smiling from every gesture. I never saw any man on horseback to compare with him, horse and man made a unity of grace and strength. Yes, at such times he was a lovable man, and you never forgot it. I've heard old jockeys talk with enthusiasm of his skill as a steeplechase rider, especially when it came to the 'finish.' These old warriors of the race-course didn't care much about poets and artists, or even successful men of business, but they knew what they were saying when they talked about steeplechasing. I speak of the old days, when the jumps were so high on an Irish race-course that every time a jockey rode he took his life in his hands, and when after every race we were pretty sure to hear the crack of a policeman's rifle sending some gallant steed to his doom because of a broken leg or some such accident, and when a celebrated surgeon would come down from Dublin prepared with all his instruments--at any rate it was so at Punchestown.

From time immemorial the Irish have had a passion for horses. A friend of mine once said to an old man past his work 'Tom what are you always thinking about?' 'Sor,' said he, 'I do be thinkin' of horses.' Six weeks before George died my daughter arrived in Sligo for her annual visit; and to her surprise found him in bed. He said to her 'Lily, I think I'm going,' and made no further allusion until two days before his death, when he gave her elaborate directions as to where she would find, in various pockets of his coat, certain sums of money, for the distribution of which he gave her further directions. While awaiting the inevitable event he read diligently during those last weeks, my daughter hunting everywhere among neighbours' houses for novels of a kind to interest him. He died just as dawn was breaking, while the Banshee was crying around the house. As soon as this crying began one of the nurses came and awakened my daughter because another nurse, who had arrived the day before from Dublin, was very much alarmed. The three women heard that crying. At first the nurses had thought it an old woman in distress: at least the new nurse thought so. Then they knew, and one of them went for my daughter. In his solitary musings, and he was always solitary, he had discovered for himself some kind of religious faith neither Protestant nor Catholic which enabled him to look on Death and Eternity with a tranquil mind. As he never went to church and had no sociable impulses and never dealt in opinion his religion remained inarticulate, incommunicable. This curious solitariness was characteristic of the whole family. I myself am eagerly communicative, and when my son first revealed to me his gift of verse 'Ah!' I said, 'Behold I have given a tongue to the sea-cliffs.' It should never be forgotten that poetry is the Voice of the Solitary Spirit, prose the language of the sociable-minded. Solitary feeling is the substance of poetry. Facile emotion, persuasion, opinion and argument and moral purpose are the substance of prose, and belong to the sympathetic side of our nature, reaching out for companionship.

This portrait of my old friend would be incomplete if I did not mention his skill as an astrologer. Through my son's influence, astrology became one of his subjects. In his horoscopes he never failed. He was eager for them. At all times he had an unsleeping industry. A horoscope cost him two days of continued effort. Give him the date and place of anyone's birth and in two days' time he would present you with a paper written out in a most attractive archaic language telling you everything--everything at any rate that was essential, past, present and to come in the life of the unknown 'native.' I say unknown, because he did not care to draw the horoscope of any person whom he knew.

Still the question occurs, why did some men love this man without asking his love in return? The answer is simple: he had an interesting mind and revealed it to us. For one thing, in the matter of what I call opinions his mind was a blank, he had no opinions. A man richly endowed with instincts as countless as the threads in a piece of embroidery, each with its own intelligence as true as the instinct of a nesting bird, and yet no opinions, no more than if he were a visitant come from a distant star! And oh, the blessedness of it! It was like the peace of early morning after a night of sorrow. Sometimes here in New York I have wandered into apartments and among people where they were running some great factory for the production of opinion, anarchist, socialist, pacifist, I know not what. The din seems that of the trenches, only that instead of heroism and the sobering effect of great issues on which men stand face to face with death itself, we have small antagonism and vanity and temper, always temper; and instead of intensity, vehemence; and the pitiful mental and moral squalor of men trying to dominate, and with that end in view quite content to be shallow in feeling as in thought; quite willing, also, to insult with ugliness and to make themselves ugly--in fact, anything for effect! To be with my old friend was like entering a shaded parlour, its quiet only broken by the rustling noise of a fire burning briskly on the hearthstone.

You see, he knew so much that no opinion and no theory could cover what he knew. Doubtless, had he liked he might have denied what he knew and rushed into the fray and been as clamorous and vulgar as anybody. This did not tempt the solitary man, nourishing himself on the indwelling spirit of brooding truth. When I think of him and others of his sort I have known in Ireland, Synge, for one, I am reminded of the great Russian writers. In old age Tolstoi made strange incursions into the world of opinion, and found what he wanted in the New Testament, and Dostoïevsky, if I remember rightly, fell back on the Orthodox Greek Church. For this kind of futile industry neither had any aptitude. I suppose their sensitive minds heard the call of the spirit of the age. Had George taken to opinions he would have been just as credulous and unskilful as these mighty men. Living all his days in the West of Ireland, far from books and from leaders of thought, the spirit of the age did not come his way. And how does Shakespeare figure in the world of opinion? Did he ever take lance in hand to fight on behalf of any of the opinions of his day? I fancy that like Hamlet he had too much mind to make up! Is it not a fact attested over and over again that poets always know too much to give entertainment to any system of opinion, however loudly it clamours for admittance.

These men have to live in the hermitage of their own minds. The poet always is solitary and never more solitary than when most sociable, and it is because it lacks the fervour of heated opinion that good literature avoids emphasis. I am perfectly alive to the value of the fighting man when in the ranks and under strong discipline, or self-appointed, as he often is, to subordinate tasks, as when an artist produces the hideous to excite the crowd and to interest them in some good cause that without the stimulus of hatred would not appeal to them. Hatred so difficult to a full mind is so easy to an empty one. I don't believe there was ever a great man that was a fighting man--not Cromwell, he lived surrounded by fighting men but was himself conciliatory to a degree; not Napoleon, of him a contemporary wrote, 'A larger soul hath seldom dwelt in a house of clay:' his gift was that of vision and purpose and an amazing talent for organisation. Had the French demanded peace his genius would have devoted itself to organising 'the victories of peace.' Luther struggled hard to remain within the Church, it was the fighting men inside its fold who drove him out. These great men had purposes and had visions and were never fighting men, though these were the tools with which they worked.

Poets must not meddle with opinions. The poet who becomes a fighting man circumscribes his activity and coarsens his mind. Milton's poetical genius never recovered the six political pamphlets he wrote. When I think of the poetical mind I think of an oak tree that all night and all day is drawing nourishment from the earth about its roots. A tree not so nourished, and with its roots not pressed deep down into the earth, would soon be overthrown soon laid prostrate by the storms of the upper air. Had his attachments sunk deeper, pushing their intricate & sensitive roots into kindly Mother Nature, Shelley, being kindly as well as fine, would not so easily have been overthrown by Godwin's stale philosophy--that man with a large head full of cold thought--and the Harriet episode would have been more human.

I sometimes think that all of us mortal men, are companionable, but that commerce and progress and a false civilization have put weapons into our hands and taught us subterfuge and evasion, flight or attack. The poets and artists are in revolt and would have none of this, at least in their poetry, whatever they may do in their foolish logic. This is the unique charm of poetry and the inspiration of what, from time immemorial, people have agreed to call love, which is the true bond between man and man that will survive all others. Its perfect and complete expression is beauty, as ugliness is the expression of hatred or contempt or fear.

Goethe said of himself that he could not hate, and was ill-advised enough to think it a blemish. If a poet hates, as sometime happens, love is not far away. We have the invention of the Sirens, who, though they have fish tails, are beautiful women; I think Homer was sorry for Thersites.

Poets, being all compact of imagination and dream, are attached to the quiet of the soul; and ugliness is exhausting, while love and beauty replenish the wells. I think that but for some accident every great poet would have attained to length of years, and every minor poet also, while artists and poets of hate died young. My old school fellow, though delicate both as a boy and a man, lived to be long past seventy. He steered his course clear of opinion, hating no one and without contention. One never knew what he thought. One did know abundantly what he felt. Does anyone know what was Shakespeare's opinion of Juliet? Did he know himself? Milton would not have kept silent.

Such people are a continual novelty. Had intellect been the dominating thing in this personality, I should soon have grown tired. Intellect is always the same. There are not two ways of doing the fifth proposition of Euclid or of stating the theory of rent. You just know it or you don't know it. But when it comes to a matter of feeling and of the instincts and desires and the multitudinous sensibilities, no two men are alike. They differ as a leaf on the tree differs from every other leaf. In each is concealed a lovely surprise, if only someone would draw the curtain. Change is the law of life; we desire it as we desire the morning and sniff the morning air, a desire that will get us into strange scrapes sometimes and be a pitfall to the innocent. A friend of mine found Rossetti doing a study of a woman model, and painting the nostrils with ultramarine. 'Well' said he wearily, 'I am so tired of painting them always with madder brown.'

Search for novelty was quickening his imagination when he created the Rossetti woman--I would that he had created many--it is like the lamp set in the cap of the miner when he works underground. At that time those of us young artists who aspired after imaginative and poetic art were all agog about Rossetti. His poems had not then been published, nor had any one seen his pictures outside his immediate friends. But by all accounts he was a man of wonderful presence, keeping open mind and open house for kindred spirits. Swinburne was one of the circle; I was told Rossetti would not admit him without Whistler who knew how to keep him from drinking too much. Rossetti seldom went to picture exhibitions; by rare chance he did go to the Dudley, and saw there a picture of mine which he liked so much that he sent to me by three messengers, one of whom was his brother, an invitation to come and see him. I did not come. I regret it very much. I think I was afraid of the great man; diffident about myself and my work. To be afraid of anything is to listen to the counsels of your evil angel. I used to hear a great deal about Rossetti. I think that he exercised so much ascendancy because of a personality which was naked and unashamed. A personality encased in the armour of opinion arouses or calls for adherents & followers. Thoughts, fancies, surmises, the whole army of guesses, which are the airy children of hope and affection, present themselves to be liked or disliked without any power of argument. Opinion challenges assent and submission as of right, and is quite indifferent as to whether or no it is hideous in all men's sight. Rossetti would not go to his brother's wedding because he said he would meet all the bores of London. These bores were the men with opinions and contentions. I sometimes meet a man all cased in the armour of opinion, even as was John Knox--but raise his visor, let me see his personality shining in his eyes, and how fascinating it is! Rossetti never wore this kind of armour and did not need to raise his visor. He was neither conventional nor unconventional. He immersed himself in art and poetry, letting opinion go by the wind. How often I regret that I did not go to him. Perhaps at a single bound I should have escaped forever from this entangling web of grey theory in which I have spent my life. There was another great poet that I missed. Browning had seen a design that I made for a picture of Job's wife bidding him curse God and die, and he came to see me. Unfortunately I was not in my studio when he called.

I am sometimes asked what is it that artists & poets aim at. I answer, it is the birth, the growth, and expansion of ever living personalities. That is the value or the charm of a picture or poem. I read a poem or I look at a picture; these, if they be works of art embody a personality. A personality is a man brought into unity by a mood, not a static unity, (that is character) but alive and glowing like a star, all in harmony with himself. Conscience at peace yet vigilant; spiritual and sensual desires at one; all of them in intense movement. In contact with such picture or poem, the mood enters into my mind, pervading soul and body, so that for the moment I become a living personality, with, for dominant note, joy or sorrow, or hope or love. I become the personality I create. When I read Rossetti's poems or look at his pictures, I fall under the spell of his art. Had I met Rossetti in the flesh I think I should have cast out forever this questioning intellect which has haunted me all my life like a bad conscience--as indeed it does most men in these uneasy days--and lived the imaginative life.

Going to see Rossetti must have been like a visit to the tropics. A friend often asked me to go with him to see George Meredith. I threw away also that chance but by no means with so keen a regret. In George Meredith is no wild luxuriance, no risk of self-abandonment. He is pervaded through and through with the conventions of upper middle-class English society. The other stood aside from all conventions, even from those of unconventionality. Naked we come into the world, and naked we should remain if we retain personality and have the wizard's spell.

That school was in many things an image of life. All the nicknames and jokes and daring comments sprang from the obscurity of the lower forms and were anonymous. We elder and upper boys had a certain sobriety that preserved us in staid decorum. If one of us in class was laboriously translating an indecent passage in Lucian's Fables; from the lower end of the class, which never even tried to translate anything, would come a suppressed chuckle that would make our form teacher very uneasy. I fancy it is these idle boys, with their preternatural acuteness for life and reality, and the confidence that results, who afterwards become the successful men. Most of their jokes were innocent enough. One morning before breakfast in the playground when it was very cold, I found a little gathering of them round a big burly boy in an aggressively thick overcoat, and all were busy ostentatiously spreading out their hands and rubbing them as if before a good fire, the big boy looking very sheepish and helpless. An impudent Irish boy called out 'Heat by radiation, Yeats.' The day before the head-master had given us a chemical lesson on the properties of heat. And the nicknames! One boy was known as 'King.' He had red hair and at first was called the 'Prairie on fire.' That was too long and it became 'King Rufus' and finally 'King,' and he went by no other name. Another was called 'Sin' which changed to 'Satan,' and 'Satan' he remained: a quiet dull boy, ugly and kindly, hulking in all his ways and movements. It arose in this way. Every week the neighbouring clergyman came to spend an hour in teaching us religion, and when he asked what Judas carried in his bag this boy answered 'Sin.' There may have been mines of sensibility in that boy. It was a bold idea for a schoolboy to suppose Judas had carried Sin in his bag; but he belonged to the commercial side of the school where they learned nothing and had an easy time. We who worked at Latin and Greek went through much suffering. In those days the classics were taught after the crudest methods. Having learned some grammar, the declensions, and verbs, and done a few sentences in Delectus, the Life of Hannibal by Cornelius Nepos was thrust into our hands and the tribulation began. Without the constant menace of the cane no healthy minded boy would have faced the difficulties of our task. To fit the verb to the noun, and the adjectives to the noun, and worry through all the participles, and prepositions, and concords, and these through a long sentence in which every word seemed to be wrongly placed, without any help, all alone by yourself, under a rule of silence, so that you could not consult your neighbour, was no end of a puzzle. Henry James' sentences are difficult, but the difficulty is nothing to the difficulty of a young boy with a Latin sentence. And we were all young boys not in the least interested in the fortune of Hannibal, the Latin mind being as strange to us as the mental processes of a futurist poet; but there stood our head-master cane in hand, watchful to strike if a single mistake was made. Just as in life, time and fate wait for human error! I can tell you we worked--those of us at any rate who feared the cane. At the lower end of the class were boys who never learned anything, and had, as it seemed to me, grown habituated to the cane.

Novels were strictly forbidden. A very handsome boy of eighteen from the Highlands was one day sitting in front of the school-room fire, basking in its heat and comfortably reading a novel called 'The Romance of War.' Our head-master stole in with cat-like tread in his noiseless slippers and looked over his shoulder. I was nearby at the time, and saw that book being slowly consumed in the red centre of the fire. We watched it till it was in ashes the head-master, myself, and the boy who owned it! Within twelvemonths that boy was fighting in the Crimea. He was one of five or six boys being prepared for the military entrance examination. None of them ever worked or were expected to work. They did, indeed, do some mysterious things with solid cubes, which meant, I suppose, instruction in methods of fortification. They always kept together and were considered wild and wicked.

In those far off days, travelling was expensive. My parents lived deep in the country, only to be reached by a four-horse coach, and Christmas holidays were short at all schools, at ours only ten days. Therefore we saw our families only once a year, during the summer holidays which lasted six weeks. My father, mother, sisters and all the countryside would exert themselves to give us a good time. The first week of that holiday was enjoyment without alloy. Such sudden happiness would admit companionship only with itself. After that came, like a creeping shadow, growing darker and denser, the ever-nearer approach of the day when we should have to return to school. Until the last week came, we brothers scattered, each bent upon his own particular enjoyment. When that week came, we went about together, made good companions by an identical mournfulness; and our mother was as sad as we were.