Part 5

Trinity College Dublin did very little for me, which is entirely my own fault, neither did Trinity College Dublin inspire me with affection, and that was the fault of Trinity College Dublin. One night, in the College park, walking under the stars with that brilliant scientist George Fitzgerald, I saw him look round at some new buildings just erected and with a snap of satisfaction he said, 'No ornament, that is one good thing.' I made the obvious retort 'How is Trinity College Dublin to inspire affection, if it is not made beautiful in its buildings, its quadrangle, its trees and its park.' He gave a grunting assent. Had he not been in a controversial mood, and ascetic for severe science, he would have responded generously; for he was a true scientist, that is, a poet as well. Trinity College inspires no love; outside what it has done for learning and mathematics and things purely intellectual it has a lean history. Still youth is youth, and the time of youth is pleasant to look back upon. Fitzgerald, I have said, had a poetical mind, and that means among other things that he took humanity in the lump. Indeed I never knew any of that distinguished family that did not love the sinner as much as they deplored the sin, & in this surely they showed themselves to be Irish of the Irish. I leave it to others to explain, for it is a quality which is not English or Scotch. Think of it, to love the sinner! What a reach of mind it demands and what patience and long practice in the right kind of sensibilities; remember Thomas Carlyle and how he hated the sinner, being a sort of Public Executioner everywhere and anywhere. I recall that when he died in the fullness of his glory and success, and we all praised him, it was old Baron Fitzgerald, the uncle of George Fitzgerald, who shocked us by calling out at his dinner-table. 'The great Sham is dead, what is to be done with the great Sham?' Yet Carlyle's hatred for the sinner was not sham but an active quality of fierce anger for the encouragement of which and its sustenance he had ransacked history and philosophy. I once saw him in the flesh in London, in the Chelsea district, an old man, tottering along very rapidly, wearing a blue frock coat with a large red rose in his buttonhole. Instantly I saw who it was and stopped and turned round to watch him as he receded, and he also turned round and looked at me, and I saw his face, his ruddy cheeks and blue eyes, charged I thought with a smouldering irascibility, and yet I could see the benevolence that, had it not been Scotch and further infected by Prussian rigours, would have brought pity and tenderness to drown that wrath. Yet it was wrath, and bore no resemblance to the cold and treacherous cruelty of Froude, in whose long horse-face was neither irascibility nor pity. While I stood there watching the old sage, a British workman passed, his bag of tools over his shoulder, and said in an aside--'A rare old file that!'

There was a man named Thomas Allingham, a brother to the poet who mentions him somewhere, as a man who had won a great reputation in Trinity College Dublin but who was without any creative ability. If he could not create he could write imitations of his brother's poems and publish them with the poet's initials in the country newspaper of Ballyshannon where these brothers were born. The poet was extraordinary fastidious and exacting in all matters of style, never satisfied with anything he wrote, and he was much the elder brother, claiming all the rights of an elder brother who is fastidious about style. I knew Thomas and was often in his rooms and very soon became aware of the spirit of mischief that dwelt behind his gray eyes and half-closed heavy eyelids. A Ballyshannon paper was declining, and its editor was a friend of Allingham's. Allingham returning to College sought out a congenial spirit named Green, and together they started to revive the paper by an acrimonious controversy over the words 'telegram' and 'telegraph.' One wrote a letter to that paper saying it should be 'telegraph' & the other that it should be 'telegram.' I've seen them sitting together over Allingham's fire, concocting lying paragraphs and offensive epithets to be used against each other. Returning to Ballyshannon for his vacation Allingham sowed in the general ear whispers and rumours as to impending law suits. His next transformation was to become evangelical and pious. He was a man of extraordinary mental power and this was all that he made of it. Perhaps too much education is as bad as none at all. The poet probably had none but what he picked up for himself. A well-stored memory is something like too much orthodoxy. It captures the whole man and arrests the dreaming faculty and inhibits initiative.

There is yet another memory which comes to me from Trinity College and comes pleasantly. I lost my orthodoxy. I was reading Butler's Analogy, that delectable book which, by my fathers account he, and some other man alone understood, when I suddenly amazed myself by coming to the conclusion that revealed religion was myth and fable. My father had himself pushed me into the way of thinking for myself; and my Scotch school-master, who had lived on his own resources since he was twelve years old, acquiring thereby a bold and independent spirit, had unconsciously assisted in the process. Thus it came about that I had the courage to reject the Bishop's teachings, drawing an entirely different conclusion from the premises he placed before his reader, and with it went also my worldly-minded uncle's hope that some day I should be a respectable, Episcopalian clergyman. Everything now was gone, my mind a contented negation. At school my ethics had been based on fear of the school-master and now was gone fear of God and God's justice. I went to Church when I couldn't help it, that is once every Sunday. I do not know how it is now-a-days, but at that time Churches were so crowded that young men, unable to find a seat, remained the whole service through standing in the aisle. This exactly suited my inclinations, especially in one of the Kingstown churches down by the sea, for there I could stand all the two hours at the front door, half within and half without, so that while listening to the clergyman I could at the same time comfort my eye and soothe my spirit by looking toward the sea and sky. The Reverend Hugh Hamilton, Dean of Dromore, reckoned the most learned man in the Diocese, had determined that my father should, on presenting himself for ordination, be rejected because of his love for hunting, shooting and fishing and I may add, dancing, but was so impressed by his profound knowledge and understanding of Butler's Analogy that he became and continued from that hour on his constant friend. Yet this book that made my father a proudly orthodox man had shattered all my orthodoxy, so that I preferred sea & sky and floating clouds to the finest pulpit oratory of the Reverend Richard Brooke, father of the brilliantly successful Stopford. Yet I dared not say so, poetic and artistic intuitions not having reached at that time the dignity of any sort of opinion, theory, or doctrine. The finest feelings are nothing if you cannot bulwark them with opinions about which men wrangle and fight. Looking back I am convinced that I might have talked with my father, that he would have met me and come with me half way, but only half way. On a perilous journey one is more apt to quarrel with the man who accompanies you for part of the way and then stops, than with him who refuses even to set out on the journey. My father, a rector of the Episcopalian Church and at one time an eloquent preacher of the Evangelical form of doctrine, could not have come all the way. My aunt, dear old Mickey, would not have said a word in opposition, but would have been greatly distressed and prayed her hardest in secret communion with God. My uncle Robert, would have been amused and, on worldly grounds, somewhat alarmed.

I used to know pretty well an intellectual and cultivated priest and we had many talks together. I said to him that I liked so much. Catholic philosophy and was so attracted by his Church's stupendous history, and high pomp of good and evil that I would join it but for one difficulty; and when with some eagerness he asked what that was, I answered: 'How could I ever believe in the supernatural? Give that up,' I said, 'and I will join you.' I was much amused to notice that he seemed to hesitate, as if he thought there was something in what I said, and that with some adroitness a concession might be granted. Then he threw up his arms and shouted in his deep Kerry voice: 'No, impossible; we should collapse altogether.'

Some weeks after this conversation I was lunching with my friend John Dowden and told him of what I said to the priest. 'What did he reply?' he asked looking very much alive. 'That it was impossible, for without the supernatural you would collapse altogether.' 'Of course we would, of course we would,' he repeated in a musing, grumbling kind of voice; & to myself I laughed thinking many things which I did not utter aloud.

Now and again I went down to the pretty village of Monasterevan in County Kildare, thirty miles from Dublin, to stay with my uncle John Yeats, the County Surveyor. There was a house full of children, blue-eyed fair-haired, all gay and all lively, like a crystal fountain welling out of a rock, for there was little money and no pleasure and excitement. All these little people had just to depend on themselves for instruction and amusement and were yet happy, being like canaries in a cage who, having been born there, know no other life; partly also because of a certain inexhaustible vitality and its natural accompaniment, good temper and kindness. I loved to be with these people, little and big: merely to be in the same room with my uncle or to be in the same field (for he was a sort of amateur farmer) was happiness. He was very clever and, if he was ever unhappy, it was when he remembered that no one knew how clever he was: but I knew all about his cleverness and relished his laconic and fragmentary talk on men and things. In his eyes to be happy was to be good, and yet he had some reasons for being uneasy.

The County Grand Juries will not hold an honoured place in Irish history, particularly when, as in Kildare, made up of rich men. One of these landlords wrote to my uncle, asking him to pass the account of a certain contractor engaged in mending the road, stating frankly that if that account was not passed the landlord's rent would not be forthcoming. This letter was written politely, addressed on the envelope to 'John Yeats, Esq.' commencing with the usual 'Dear Mr. Yeats.' The work was not well done and my uncle did not pass the account. Thereupon my uncle received another letter addressed to 'Mr. Yeats,' the letter itself commencing with the formal unfriendly 'Dear Sir' and containing an angry complaint that the trees near the writer's park gate were not kept pruned, so that his coachman's hat had been knocked off. The rich Irish landlords were a banditti whom the laws safe-guarded, since it was supposed that upon their allegiance depended the safety of the English connection, and if some were good and kind from the spirit of order many of them were like the man who wrote that impertinent note to my uncle; some indeed were good and kind in themselves but forced to be rapacious and cruel because of the mortgagees who had them in their grip. These mortgagees themselves were often kind old ladies who read their Protestant Bibles and were as gentle as their necessities and piety would permit them to be.

Not for worlds, not for anything you could reasonably offer would I revisit Monasterevan. The stones in the walls and the very twisting of the roads would bring back to me all that lost happiness & my Uncle and Aunt & all the little children so innocent and so clever. Perhaps their cleverness was of little avail because of their innocence. To be cut off from sin and evil is to be cut off from so much that, entering into our intricate being, is necessary to mental power and effectiveness. These people lived for other people. To be with them was to find yourself among those to whom your happiness was all that mattered. And I may add that they had great nervous energy, an incessant activity, as the law of their existence. I remember also that they were physically intrepid. The eldest son would ride the wildest horses over the biggest jumps, each time taking his life in his hand, for he never learned to ride well, had some natural incapacity for it which nothing would overcome. The four sons are all dead and gone, happy to the last and unsuccessful. One of the girls is now an old maid, shut away from everyone by some kind of religion of which no one but herself can make head or tail. All these people were merry because they asked nothing for themselves. Yet asking nothing for themselves they got nothing, for so are things constituted.

Civilization is always putting people into positions where no one can remain good except by becoming heroically virtuous. No one expected our Irish landlords to be heroes. For one thing they had no country. England disowned them and they disowned Ireland. There are so many bad angels that one needs all the good angels to fight against them, and one of these good angels has always been for Irishmen a love of his native land. The Englishman is proud of his empire on which the sun never sets. The good Irishman loves Ireland as in Shakespeare's day the Englishman loved England, affection not vanity the essence of the relation. The historic sense, which is so fatally lacking in America, abounds among the Irish peasants when they gather in their cottages and talk together and scheme, and hope intensifies this affection. The American, like the Englishman, is very proud of his vast country, its wealth and its millions of people. The Irishman has nothing to boast of except that his country's history is sorrowful and lovable. In life there are a few great rhythms; there is friendship and domestic affection, and conjugal love and the feeling of a youth for a maiden; sovereign over all is patriotism, compared to which internationalism is cold and abstract like a mathematical formula, intelligible only to the ideologue, who is himself a bloodless person, a Rousseau dropping his five children into the foundling basket. I think the Irishman, unspoiled by too much contact with the Englishman, has the charm of being natural. Sir Walter Scott, after making amusing comparisons between him and the English and the Scotch, wrote that, given his chance, the Irishman would be 'the best of the triune.' Of course it was this naturalness, this constant and most potent spontaneity that won the heart of the great writer. It is our second thoughts that lead us astray; first thoughts in conduct are right, as Blake says they are in art.

There is one idealism always present and alive in the Irish peasant-heart, war with England. The soil is volcanic with it, so that if you scratch the surface it is ready to blaze forth. When my brother-in-law and I were out shooting, we met an old man, and looking into an empty barn, my brother-in-law asked how many men it would accommodate as sleeping quarters? He gave us a sharp look and said, 'When you bring yer men, we will find a better place than that for them.' I think this anecdote would please Sir Walter Scott and be a mere foolishness to George Bernard Shaw and his teacher Sam Butler. I am now writing of the Island that used to be, when poverty, conversation, and idleness kept company with each other around the turf fire in the winter, or on the hillside in summer, an ancient spirituality was always present there and a kind of humour, sometimes gentle like Goldsmith's and often, especially in the cities, iconoclastic like Swift's, or like Tim Healy's when he was first in Parliament. The soul of Ireland was partly pagan and that was good for lovers and for sensuous poetry; partly Catholic and Christian and that was good for the sorrowful and for lovers also; and partly patriotic and that was good for the courageous, whether young or old.

My niece writes to me of the 'appalling commonness of the Australian mind.' The Irish peasant mind is not common, is indeed so interesting that the peasants in the west of Ireland can enjoy themselves in solitude, poetized, if I may use such a word, by their religion, by their folk lore, and by their national history, and by living under a changeable sky which, from north to south and from west to east is a perpetual decoration like the scenery in some vast theatre. Synge, spiritually the most fastidious man I ever knew and the proudest, who turned away from modern French literature, told me that he preferred their society to the comforts of the best hotel. They are so happy in themselves and in each other's conversation that they are conservative, as conservative as the people behind the barriers of privilege. It is, the people with 'common minds' who quarrel with themselves and with life, and are a homeless people and seek for change, for experiment and for progress. It is the unhappy people who make the world go round. Yet these happy people might also help progress if the impossible should take place and we could teach them the technique of the arts. Perhaps they might not think it worth the trouble? Yet it is among people of this sort, whose imagination is vivid and whose will has been broken by dreams & visions, that the arts have always flourished. And remember if these peasants have not the will power which has made the dull people of Belfast such an edifying success, all the same they have their own intensity, and I myself and there are more like me, would rather listen to a Mayo man whistling a tune, or telling a fairy tale or ghost story, than to the greatest man out of Belfast or Liverpool, talking of his commercial triumphs. Synge spoke of their poetical language, and ranked it above any written in his plays. I heard of a servant girl who on her master the priest's return from America told him that she was glad to see him back for there had been the 'colour of loneliness' in the air. I fancy that in Shakespeare's age I can find three things: conversation, freedom of thought and idleness, and there was a fourth--the soul of romance and of laughter. In my youth, Ireland possessed all of these except freedom of thought. The last she now has; may she be allowed to keep it. The others are under sentence to quit, if they are not already gone, the passion for material success, and the remorseless logic it inculcates, will have none of them. It is as if a flower garden, enjoyed by women and children and simple souls had been turned into a cabbage patch. I suppose the change is pleasing to G. B. Shaw and to reformers generally. Reformers must work with public opinion and public opinion has gross appetites.

Let me now tell a story of the city and therefore unlovely. Before the police came, Dublin and towns generally were in the guardianship of watchmen nicknamed 'Charlies', and a state of war existed between them and the young men. My uncle, Arthur Corbet, has told me some of the tricks he and his friends used to play on these old rascals, such as bundling one of them into a cab and carrying him off into the country and leaving him there to find his way back, and to explain to his superior why he was absent from his post. But the old rascals could sometimes retaliate. One morning before dawn my uncle was walking with dog and gun through the quiet streets toward the open country for a day's shooting. As my uncle hurried through the dark, noiseless morning mist, he was confronted by a 'Charlie,' and the 'Charlie' flung himself down on the pavement & sprung his rattle & roared for help. My uncle was well aware of the diabolical nature of the 'Charlie' mind; he himself and others had done the best to make it so, therefore he did not delay, but without a word ran with his dog by another street, parallel to the one where he was stopped, until he got away a good distance and then in the foggy misty light cautiously crossed the street. At its far end he could see the 'Charlie' standing among a crowd of other 'Charlies.' My uncle indulged in many such escapades in his youth. It was considered good style and was no doubt a tradition; but I think these things afterwards burthened my uncle's memory when he was old and was trying to comfort his chilly and solitary bachelor existence with Bible Christianity. He was a disappointed man. He stammered in his speech. All his brothers became officers in the Army. For him this was impossible because of his stammer. He became a clerk in the Bank of Ireland, yet could not be promoted because of his stammer. Luck in every way was against him. He had great gifts as a caricaturist, and would sometimes compliment his friends by doing pictures of them which turned them into enemies. I think he disapproved of me, yet on fishing or shooting expeditions he was the pleasantest of companions. He was both affectionate and cranky, but in the open country, the day fine and the fishing good, he was companionable and affectionate and no longer cranky.

In my post graduate year I won the prize in Political Economy. It was ten pounds and my first earnings, and with that money in my pocket I visited Sligo and stayed with my old school friend, George Pollexfen. At that time you reached Sligo by taking the train to Enniskillen and then by public car to Sligo. To catch that train I had to rise early, and on such occasions the family trusted in my father, he was our alarm clock, which never failed. I remember that on that morning he said to me 'I see you are very sleepy, I will return a little later,' and his tall, white figure flitted from the room. When dressed and ready I sat for some time at his bedroom door, and as he lay in bed he talked of Sligo, which he had not seen since his father died in 1846, and of how he would like to go there, and take a car early some morning, and visit all the places that he had known and then get away before any one was awake. Only thus would he visit a place where he had been so happy and young, his heart of course too full for company.

I have never forgotten the first evening of my arrival in Sligo. Five miles from the town, at the mouth of the river, is a village called Rosses Point, and the Pollexfens were staying there for the summer. George and I walked on the sand hills which were high above the sea. The sign of happiness in the Pollexfens has always been a great talkativeness,--I suppose birds sing and children chatter for a similar reason. George talked endlessly--what about I forget, excepting that he several times sang one of Moore's melodies, which he had lately heard at a concert. Indeed, I think the talk was mostly about that concert. The place was strange to me and very beautiful in the deepening twilight. A little way from us, and far down from where we talked, the Atlantic kept up its ceaseless tumult, foaming around the rocks called Dead Man's Point. Dublin and my uneasy life there & Trinity College, though but a short day's journey, were obliterated, and I was again with my school friend, the man self-centered and tranquil and on that evening so companionable. I had been extraordinarily fond of him at school where I was passive in his hands. I have sometimes an amused curiosity in thinking whether he cared for me at all, or how much he cared, but it has been only curiosity. I was always quite content with my own liking for him.