Early memories; some chapters of autobiography

by John Butler Yeats

In my society we were loyal to the social principle. We lived for society and worshipped its pleasant needs, and for reward we had our social conceit. This conceit was a feather in our caps, which we wore gallantly and lightly, not at all flauntingly. In this, and in all matters, we escaped the vice of pretension. Our wit and humour for instance, and that of Dublin society generally, was wit for wit's sake; and with delighted superiority we thought of the English, who would incorporate their dull morality into the most trivial actions and words. We ridiculed and criticised each other with great freedom, and with French malice, but since we had no mission to reform anybody we would keep the joke to ourselves, the victim knowing nothing of it. Thus we spared his feelings and the joke was all the better. It was, perhaps, demoralizing, because in our pursuit of enjoyment we put aside what did not quite suit us; we never, for one thing, looked into the lower abysses of human nature. We did not absolutely deny that there were such things as hatred and rage and unbridled appetite and lust, but we forgot all about them. Indeed, it was not good form to mention such things. Thus we lived pleasantly, but falsely, and yet we did believe in human nature, at least in our human nature, in parental affection & in conjugal faith and loyalty between friends. On this matter we had a trustfulness that was at once romantic and robust. Parents and children and husbands and Wives and friends and comrades, at least in our circles, would have stood by each other to the death. As regards Ireland our feelings were curious, and though exceedingly selfish not altogether so. We intended as good Protestants and Loyalists to keep the papists under our feet. We impoverished them, though we loved them, and their religion by its doctrine of submission and obedience unintentionally helped us, yet we were convinced that an Irishman, whether a Protestant or Catholic, was superior to every Englishman, that he was a better comrade and physically stronger and of greater courage. My mother's family had been for generations officers in the English army and I fancy drew that strong faith from their experience in many military campaigns. I might in my youthful impudence have sneered at many things and nobody would have taken the trouble to contradict me, but I did not venture to doubt the superiority of Irishmen to everybody in England.

At Sligo, I was the social man where it was individual man that counted. It is a curious fact that entering this sombre house of stern preoccupation with business I for the first time in my life felt my self to be a free man, and that I was invited by the example of everyone around me to be my very self, thereby receiving the most important lesson in my life. The malady of puritanism is self-exaggeration, 'self-saturation' is the medical term. Even Shakespeare had experience of it, if we interpret as personal and literal the first line in one of his sonnets: 'Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye.'

That is the malady, the excess, and there's plenty of it in puritan middle-class England, but the good side is that the puritan belongs to himself, whereas the votary of the religion of social enjoyment belongs to his neighbours and to society, so that not even on his death-bed can he return to himself. The Pollexfen charm was in their entire sincerity, John Pollexfen the seaman once told me, he was greatly troubled because it took him so long to make up his mind. Napoleon might have made a similar admission. This slow vacillation is always characteristic of entire sincerity. The man of society possesses a quick facility in making up his mind. He does not belong to himself, and the rules of society are written on his heart and brain. He is what is called well-bred. The individual man of entire sincerity has to wrestle with himself, unless transported by rage or passion; he has so much mind to make up, with none to help him and no guide except his conscience; and conscience after all, is but a feeble glimmer in a labyrinthine cavern of darkness.

I think it was Shakespeare the poet, and not the thinking Shakespeare or the wise Shakespeare, who made that discovery about the importance of self-loyalty, for it is the root of every kind of poetical distinction, and without distinction poetry is of little avail. It is reported that Swinburne in some fit of petulance said that he and Shelley were better poets than anybody else because they were gentlemen. My criticism is that both these poets are lacking in the entire sincerity of the greatest poets, that because Keats has this entire sincerity he is better than either. I find, indeed, in Shelley and Swinburne activity, animation, eloquence. I find in Keats force as of mother nature. 'What man,' says the Bible, 'by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?'

Yet let any young poet stay for a while among the puritans and practise all the restraints of self-loyalty, and he will turn his sociable activity and animated sympathy into something which is much better, namely force. It is a foolish question, yet I wonder did Shakespeare undergo that kind of discipline?

It is evident from what I have written that to live amongst my people was pleasanter, but that to live amongst the Pollexfens was good training. Which of these two civilizations was best for the human product I have never, in my own mind, been able to decide. What we all seek is neither happiness nor pleasure but to be ourselves through and through. The man born or made sorrowful would go on being sorrowful, and the man who is joyous would be more joyous, & the spiritually minded man more spiritual, and the materialistic more materialistic. Thus like the plants & the animals we would grow, each after its own kind. It is obvious that the puritan doctrine of self-loyalty is serviceable to this kind of growth. Yet the puritan doctrine would cut off the sunshine of enjoyment and pleasure and easy relaxation, and the poet or artist, though self-loyalty be the condition of every excellence, must have enjoyment. He must have tears and laughter & romance and vision and relaxation and ease, otherwise his soul for poetry and beauty withers and dies away. Among my friends and in their type of civilization we made enjoyment of first importance, and for that reason we were eager for art and poetry, which are all made of enjoyment. Yet it was bound to come to nothing, because we had not that deep sincerity, which is another name for what may be indifferently called human force or, better still, genius. Inarticulate as the sea cliffs were the Pollexfen heart and brain, lying buried under mountains of silence. They were released from bondage by contact with the joyous amiability of my family, and of my bringing up, and so all my four children are articulate, and yet with the Pollexfen force.

Commerce is war, each man watching to take the bread out of his neighbour's mouth, and puritanism with the doctrine of the inherent badness of human nature is well calculated to hearten the fighters.

My old friend George, as full of human nature as an egg is of meat, held the puritan doctrine. He condemned all his neighbours impartially; he had not however like the ordinary man any self-complacent acrimony, no, that was not his way. He was an indulgent and compassionate puritan, because a consistent puritan. If he condemned others he condemned himself also, and he sadly saw himself in those predestined sinners and transgressors and backsliders. Now he was a chief of story tellers. I remember the late York Powell, that Savant who by some strange accident was also a man of genius, praising one of his stories, saying it was the best he had ever listened to. He would tell a story that would take at least two hours in the telling and it would be about nothing at all, yet as it grew and developed, the mere nothing became everything, because he would mass together such richness of significant detail. Long ago at school he slept in a room known as number twelve, and in it slept all the bigger boys of the school. There was a rule that every boy should keep perfectly silent once in bed and the gas turned out. George would keep all that room awake—sleepy schoolboys though they were—telling them in a whisper long stories made in the fashion of Dumas & Fenimore Cooper. All his life he delighted compassionately in the foibles of dandies from the time of Dumas down to our own times, especially if they were military. He had a gift for every kind of indulgence. He never showed capacity for any religions or poetic ecstasy. I could not conceive his reading Shelley with understanding, yet Keats would have pleased him. He was pitiful for men and women and animals and the very plants in the garden. He was as pitiful as St. Francis of Assisi. In this I do not in the least exaggerate. A convinced puritan, holding the doctrine as profoundly as he held all his beliefs, he was naturally a melancholy man. His doctor said of him after his death that he was by no means a delicate man, 'but very low spirited.' The ordinary puritan, in the buoyant strength of high animal spirits, reacts against every kind of depression. He is pessimist as regards other men, as regards himself a confirmed optimist. My old friend, because of his uncheered solitary existence in a small town under a rainy sky beside the sad sea wave, suffered in some degree from what I have called the puritan malady self-exaggeration. He was full of himself and that self all doubt and dreariness, yet among genial friends who loved him it soon passed away. When he came to my house he would invariably dedicate the first evening, or part of it, to this kind of sorrowful personal preoccupation, sighing and shaking his head, complaining aloud of everything, and we who knew him would wait, and be outwardly sympathetic, while inwardly we smiled. At hand grips with hard times we were naturally a little incredulous of the sorrows of an old bachelor who was exceedingly well off and knew how to take care of his money. He had small eyes, very blue, and straight eyebrows and a long skull stretching far back such as I have always found in conjunction with a marked capacity for detail. He was at the same time an exceedingly good listener, and well as he talked I think he preferred listening. Had the destinies permitted he might have become a great student and a recluse and buried himself in a university. His expression was strangely wistful, his eyes seemed to peep at you like stars in the early twilight. Although a successful trader he said that his success and I believe him—was due entirely to his chief clerk and an elder brother's advice. He did not look as if he belonged to the actual world. Indeed he had become the denizen of another world. My stammering uncle tried to comfort his latter years with Bible Christianity and an occasional prayer meeting. George chose better, he studied books on magic and he practised in the ancient science of astrology. It was my son W. B. Yeats who put him on the track of these wonders, and what was in some degree only occasional with my son was to my friend the passion of his life. I think my son looks a poet; I know George looked an astrologer. His eyes were the eyes of second sight. I think indeed he knew the future better than he knew the present and the past. He had a scared look, as if he saw ghosts that no one else could see, & his horoscopes as many can testify were verified. He foresaw and predicted almost to the day, and certainly to the week, when my friend York Powell would die, and he did this more than a year before, when York Powell was in perfect health. When the London 'Times' announced that York Powell was making good recovery, 'No' said George 'the stars are still there.' The last weeks of his life were characteristic. My eldest daughter always spent her summer holidays with him. Arriving one evening she was surprised to find him in bed and he at once said to her, 'Lily I think I am going'. He lived on for six weeks spending his time calmly reading novels for which she searched the country. He would read only what is called serious fiction, and not once again did he speak of death till two days before the end, when he gave her minute directions as to certain things she was to do after his death, how she was to distribute certain small sums of money which she would find in his pockets. He died at day-break while the Banshee, heard by my daughter and two nurses, was wailing around the house. Business men cried when told of his death; they said he had an attractive personality.

Puritans claim to be fervent Christians who draw all their wisdom from the Bible. In my mind they have no Christianity at all. They cling to their creed of the badness of human nature, because it helps them in their unnatural war of commercial selfishness. As you would get the better of your opponents, and to the commercial mind all the neighbours are opponents except here and there a fellow conspirator, it is a mighty encouragement to be able religiously to believe the worst of them; that is why puritanism flourishes among traders. This combination of selfishness and religion results in the belief, implied rather than expressed, that a successful man is a sort of a secular saint, and it lay like a heavy stone on George's conscience. He tried to cast it from him; he expressed his scorn of it; I've heard him do so again and again; yet he could not altogether get rid of the obstruction. At any rate I cannot otherwise account for the fact that I myself, who was his oldest and indeed his only friend, was in the latter years of his life an exile from his affections. But my son was the pride of his life. (Ah, if he had only been called Pollexfen instead of Yeats.) An applauded poet is better after all than a rich trader, a more conspicuous success. He would have liked to have kept him always with him, that he might watch over him as he did over his race-horses. My son tells me that dining with him was like taking a doctor's prescription, so careful was George that he should eat the right food and chew it properly. The racing men of Sligo, when in the evening they visited the old bachelor to benefit by his knowledge of the racing world, always opened operations by inquiring about the nephew, & when he had exhausted this subject which took some time and must have bored them terribly, those poor fellows who cared as much for poetry as they did for Sanscrit, would artfully lead him to the other subject of his affections. After which they would depart and make their bets. He himself never made a bet. I think indeed he once lost or won, I forget which, ten shillings. He has told me with perfect sincerity, indeed with shame and contrition of spirit, that he disliked making money because it put him to so much trouble, and yet he was most careful of it, and though he would lend money to a friend and ask no security, he had to be perfectly satisfied in the most meticulous way as to the nature of the demand so that he might lend on some ascertained principle. The same sense of order, the same physical moral and mental neatness kept him a lonely bachelor. In his eyes marriage and domestic entanglements were things disorderly, all chance and change, a sort of wild experiment. More than once he had expressed to me his wonder, that sensible men would incur such risks.

Now what would have happened had this man been born into conditions that were not puritanical? It is my belief that he would have become a writer of note and power. At school his education was backward. His commercial family and he himself had attached no importance to things of the mind. When I entered the university I implored him to remain on at school, and prepare himself for Trinity College, and I remember that my father became greatly interested, but Dis aliter visum—he entered his father's office and began his dreary and uncongenial pilgrimage remote from books & intellectual companionship.