I spoke of the Irish John Mitchel’s narrow antidemocracy and belief in the non-existence of progress, such as he had argued in Virginia during the Civil War. Mitchel, he protested, was a passionate nature. The progress he denied was a progress wrongly conceived by Macaulay and the early Victorians. It was founded on “truisms” not really true. Whether Carlyle or Mitchel was the first to repudiate these ideas he didn’t know: possibly Mitchel was.
Yeats’s one political interest at that time, before the war, was the Irish question. He believed in home rule. He believed the British democracy was then definitely making the question its own, and “this is fortunate.” I spoke of Jung’s belief in England’s national complex. He was greatly interested. Ulster opposition to home rule he regretted. “The Scarlet Woman is of course a great inspiration,” he said, “and Carson has stimulated this. His one desire is to wreck home rule, and so there cannot be arrangement by consent. I agree with Redmond that Carson has gone ahead on a military conspiracy. Personally, I do not say so for a party reason. I am neither radical nor tory. I think Asquith is a better man than Lloyd George—less inflated. He is a moderate, not puffed up with big phrases. He meets the issue that arises when it arises.... I object to the uplifter who makes other people’s sins his business, and forgets his chief business, his own sins. Jane Addams? Ah, that is different.”
His lectures he would not discuss but he spoke a good deal of audiences. In his own audiences he found no one more eager, no one who knows more, than an occasional old man, a man of sixty. He was surprised and somewhat disappointed to find prosperity go hand in hand with culture in this country. In the city where the hotel is bad there is likely to be a poor audience. Where it is good, the audience is good. In his own country the happiest woman he could name was a woman living in a Dublin slum whose mind is full of beautiful imaginings and fantasies. Is poverty an evil? We should desire a condition of life which would satisfy the need for food and shelter, and, for the rest, be rich in imagination. The merchant builds himself a palace only for auto-suggestion. The poor woman is as rich as the merchant. I said yes, but that a brute or a Bismarck comes in and overrides the imagination. He agreed. “Life is the warring of forces and these forces seem to be irreconcilable.”
It could cost an artist too much to escape poverty. I spoke of the deadness of so much of the work done by William Sharp and Grant Allen. He said it was Allen’s own fault. He, or his wife, wanted too many thousand dollars a year. They had to bring up their children on the same scale as their friends’ children! And he kindled at this folly. “A woman who marries an artist,” he said with much animation, “is either a goose, or mad, or a hero. If she’s a goose, she drives him to earn money. If she’s mad she drives him mad. If she’s a hero, they suffer together, and they come out all right.”
Phrases like this were not alone. There was the keen observation that the Pennsylvania station is “free from the vulgarity of advertisement”; the admission of second hand expression in Irish poetry except in The Dark Rosaleen and Hussey’s Ode; a generalization on Chicago to the effect that “courts love poetry, plutocracies love tangible art.” Not for a moment did this mind cease to move over the face of realities and read their legend and interpret its meaning. Meeting him was not like Hazlitt’s meeting Coleridge. I could not say, “my heart, shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge.” But the Yeats I met did not meet me. I remained on the periphery. Yet from what I learned there I can believe in the sesame of poets. I hope that some one to-day, nearer to him than a journalist, is wise enough to treasure his words.
“WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE”
Last night I woke up suddenly to the sound of bombardment. A great detonation tore the silence; an answering explosion shook it; then came a series of shots in diminishing intensity. My windows look out on a rank of New York skyscrapers, with a slip of sky to the south. In the ache of something not unlike fear, I thrust out my head to learn as quickly as I could what was happening. No result from the explosions was to be seen. The skyscrapers were gaunt and black, with a square of lost light in a room or two. The sky was clean-swept and luminous, the stars unperturbed. Still the shots barked and muttered, insanely active, beyond the blank buildings, under the serene sky.
I heard hoarse cries from river-craft. Could it be on the river? Could it be gun practice, or was there really an interchange of gun-fire? A U-boat? An insurrection? At any rate, it had to be explained and my mind was singularly lively for three a. m.
Long after your country has gone to war, I told myself, there remains, if you have sluggish sympathies, what may fairly be called a neutrality of the imagination. You are aware that there is fighting, bloodshed, death, but you retain the air of the philosophic. You do not put yourself in the place of Americans under fire. But if this be really bombardment, shell-fire in Manhattan? I felt in an instant how Colonel Roosevelt might come to seem the supreme understander of the situation. An enemy that could reach so far and hit so hard would run a girdle of feeling from New York to the remotest fighters in Africa or Mesopotamia. To protect ourselves against the hysteria of hatred—that would always be a necessity. But I grimly remembered the phrase, “proud punctilio.” I remembered the President’s tender-minded words, “conduct our operations as belligerents without passion,” and his pledge of sincere friendship to the German people: warfare without “the desire to bring any injury or disadvantage upon them.” Here, with the Germans’ shell-fire plowing into our buildings and into our skins? Here, meeting the animosity of their guns?
Becoming awake enough to think about the war, I began to reason about this “bombardment,” to move from the hypnoidal state, the Hudson Maxim-Cleveland Moffett zone. The detonations were continuing, but not at all sensationally, and soon they began to shape themselves familiarly, to sound remarkably like the round noises of trains shunting, from the New York Central, carried on clear dry November air. Soon, indeed, it became impossible to conceive that these loud reverberations from the Vanderbilt establishment had ever been so distorted by a nightmare mind as to seem gun-fire. And my breathless inspection of the innocent sky!