Early memories; some chapters of autobiography

by John Butler Yeats

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.

In my family, and in the society which I frequented in Dublin, the master desire was for enjoyment. Yet do not mistake me; it was not pleasure, which is animalism efflorescent. By enjoyment I mean the gratification of the affections and the sympathies and of the spirit of hopefulness. We lived in the sunlight and did our very best to keep there. It was demoralizing but all the same delightful, and from a moral point of view it had its good side. We solved all our doubts in matters of conduct by thinking well of our fellow creatures, which is exactly the opposite of what the puritans do, and we prided ourselves upon it; we considered it a gentlemanly trait. Our censorious neighbours, who thought badly of each other, we dismissed from our minds as vulgar people. Or rather we considered that the puritan conception of human nature was admirably adapted to the kind of people who believed in it, but was never intended for us or for our friends. It was a shock to pass from a society, where people enjoy themselves and laugh gaily, not being at all concerned about moral issues, to a society where no one thought of enjoyment, and if they laughed did so with a grim humour that was not always good-natured, where the air itself was heavy with moral disapprobation of the world generally and of themselves in particular. Yet in my bones I felt it to be something salutary. At home and among my friends everyone did as they liked, provided that they were tactful and sympathetic with each other. We were a city without rules, and might verge at times into being a city of misrule. Here on the contrary was rule and strictest order.

A man, suddenly come amongst my wife's relations, would think that they were a people of strong primitive instinct, and great natural kindliness, all smothered in business. I very quickly came to a different conclusion for I had known intimately my old friend George. The master principle in that family was what I may describe as self-loyalty, each member of that family a concrete embodiment of Shakespearean teaching:

'To thine own self be true;
And it must follow as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.'