So, clad in an Arrow collar and a Brokaw suit, the young poet stepped from Acutism on to the Iron Boat.

And what is the moral of this tale, mes enfants?... But must we not leave something to waft in the spaces of uncertainty?

[3]Inscribed to the Little Review

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

I am sorry now not to have treasured every word that came from my poet. At the moment I disliked to play Boswell; I thought it beneath my dignity. But artists like Arnold Bennett who ply the notebook are not ashamed to be the Boswells of mediocrity. Why should I have hesitated to take notes of William Butler Yeats?

In the Pennsylvania station I had met him, as his host agreed, and I intruded on him as far as Philadelphia. I say intruded: his forehead wrinkled in tolerant endurance too often for me to feel that I was welcome. And yet, once we were settled, he was not unwilling to speak. His dark eyes, oblique and set far into his head, gave him a cryptic and remote suggestion. His pursed lips closed as on a secret. He opened them for utterance almost as in a dream. As if he were spokesman of some sacred book spread in front of him but raptly remembered, he pronounced his opinions seriously, occasionally raising his hands to fend his words. He was, I think, inwardly satisfied that I was attentive. I was indeed attentive. I had never listened to more distinguished conversation. Or, rather, monologue—for when I talked he suspended his animation, like a singer waiting for the accompanist to run down.

It was on the eve of The New Republic. I asked him if he’d write for it, and he answered characteristically. He said that journalism was action and that nothing except the last stage of exasperation could make him want to write for a journal as he had written about Blanco Posnet or The Playboy. The word “journalism” he uttered as a nun might utter “vaudeville.” He was reminded, he said, of an offer that was made to Oscar Wilde of the editorship of a fashion paper, to include court gossip. Wouldn’t it interest Wilde? “Ah, yes,” responded Wilde, “I am deeply interested in a court scandal at present.” The journalist (devourer of carrion, of course) was immediately eager. “Yes,” said Wilde, “the scandal of the Persian court in the year 400 B. C.”

It was telling. It made me ashamed for my profession. I could not forget, however, pillars of the Ladies’ World edited by Oscar Wilde which I used to store in an out-house. Wilde had condescended in the end.

Yeats’s mind was bemused by his recollection of his fellow-Irishman. Once he completed his lectures he would go home, and a “fury of preoccupation” would keep him from being caught in those activities that lead to occasional writing. His lectures would not go into essays but into dialogues, “of a man wandering through the antique city of Fez.” In the cavern blackness of those eyes I could feel that there was a mysterious gaze fixed on the passing crowd of the moment, the gaze of a stranger to fashion who might as well write of Persia, a dreamer beyond space and time.

“And humanitarian writing,” he concluded, with a weary limp motion of his hand, “the writing of reformers, ‘uplifters,’ with a narrow view of democracy I find dull. The Webbs are dull. And truistic.”