Welcome the toss for ease, the gasp for air,
The visage drawn, and Hippocratic stare;
Welcome the darkening dream, the lost control,
The sleep, the swoon, the arousal of the soul!”
Sidgwick thought these lines, and indeed, the whole poem, wonderful, far finer than “St. Paul.”
Of the younger generation of the poets, four of the most noted, William Watson, W. B. Yeats, John Davidson and le Gallienne, were at one time almost weekly at our flat. Watson, whose powerful clean-shaven face always reminded me of Charles James Fox, before that inventor of irresponsible Liberalism lost his looks by dissipation, I see still sometimes. It was only last year that he and his beautiful young wife asked me to visit them at their house in the country.
The sturdy Yorkshire stock of which he came is reflected in his poems. He is accustomed to think and write upon large national and international movements, and he has a splendid gift of sonorous and epigrammatic diction. I did not share the views he expressed, but that did not prevent me from admiring the way in which he expressed them. In my mind, there was no question but that the laureateship lay between him and Kipling. But at Oxford Bridges already had a reputation as a poet while I was an undergraduate.
When Yeats first came to our house he was a shock-headed Irish boy of twenty-six, without any regard for his personal appearance. He did not care whether he had any studs in his shirt or not, and once he came in evening dress without a tie. But we knew then that he was a genius, and the world knows it now. He has a fairy-like muse, whose quill is dipped in pathos. He had then only just given up the idea of being an artist, like his father. He was an art student for three years. His poems and plays will live.
Yeats was very naïve. I remember his complaining to me in the early days of the Irish Literary Society that it suffered under a grave disadvantage; its authors were unable to write as “nationalistically” as they would have desired, because the Irish never bought books, and the brutal Saxon would not buy them if they went too far in denouncing him. Those were not his exact words, but they give the substance of them. One might fancy that these young men and young women, falling between the devil and the deep sea, took refuge in playwriting, because the Englishman will go and see a play which is sufficiently pathetic or sufficiently funny, no matter how disloyal to himself its sentiments may be; but his purse-strings are tighter with regard to displeasing books. Yeats was always highly appreciated. When he published John Sherman it was thought that he had a career as a novelist before him, but he did not follow this up.
Another Irishman whom I may mention here is Dr. Todhunter, though he already had some silver in his beard twenty years ago, and was the doyen of our poets, and at the beginning the most considerable in his accomplishments. He had made his name with “The Black Cat” and the “Sicilian Idyll,” and belonged to an older generation.