Early memories; some chapters of autobiography

by John Butler Yeats

At twelve years old I left that school and I think I left happiness behind me: ever since I've lived under cloudy skies. I went to a school in the Isle of Man kept by a Scotchman. That Scotchman brushed the sun out of my sky. I remember, as yesterday, how my father talked about him. He had never been to school himself, having been educated by his father who was a scholar; and it was his conviction that if he had only gone to school and had been efficiently flogged he would have risen to the highest eminence; therefore, he talked of this Scotch school-master with an enthusiasm that was infectious: so that I who shared all his ideas went to my second school, my mind alive with the most pleasant anticipations. When we reached the Island and Athol Academy we were ushered into the library, and I saw my school-master. My father had already tactfully interrogated him about his flogging propensities, so that when he brought into our presence a class of small boys in order that my father and uncle, who was of the party, might test their proficiency, he suddenly asked each boy how many times he had been flogged. As I remember not a boy had escaped. What my uncle thought I don't know, but I know that my courage oozed out at the end of my fingers. My mother had arranged that we three boys should sleep in a room by ourselves. That night when we were going to bed, the housekeeper, a very nice woman who came from Ireland, & I daresay felt a little sorry for her compatriots, by way of distracting our thoughts pulled up the blind and we looked out and there, quite close to the front of the house, we saw the wild waves tumbling under a stormy moon.

The next morning between nine o'clock & twelve I saw three boys receive what the master called 'Three capital drubbings.' That night as we lay in our little room we three brothers had become very sober boys.

Among the Beatitudes is one which is not in the Bible, but nevertheless is in every Scotchman's bones: 'Blessed are they who expect not, for they shall not be disappointed.'

Among the boys was one from the County Limerick who saw the grotesque in everything, and my brother who was the leader in all the games and the handsomest and merriest boy in the school, who lived to be the success of the family and who had never known illness until he died when fifty six years of age. Fortune seemed to have showered on him every kind of good luck except that of growing old. Another boy was my dear friend, George Pollexfen, whose sister I afterwards married. Unlike my brother, George was the most melancholy of men. He was melancholy as a boy and as a man. I think it was his melancholy that attracted me, who am a cheerful & perennially hopeful man. It always mortifies me to think how cheerful I am, for I am convinced it is a gift which I share with all the villains: it is their unsinkable buoyancy that enables these unfortunates to go on from disaster to disaster and remain impenitent. My old friend and school-mate always saw the worst side of things. On a summer day he would remember that winter was coming, and if prosperity came to him, as it did all his life, he made elaborate preparations for the arrival of misfortune. He was very tender-hearted and humane, & so out of his prognostications of evil he would extract a kind of sad humour that made him infinitely tender and pitiful. Out of sorrow he would extract mirthfulness as the scaffold echoes with a jest. In the vehemence of good spirits and hopefulness we grow careless of other people's feelings, as do the rich of the poor men at their gates: not so my sad-hearted and much-burdened old friend. He had also great gifts of expression. What he felt and thought and what he smiled at, for he never laughed, he could tell you in long detailed narratives of men and things. Although slow and tedious in all his movements—and in conversation that tedium was delightful—he afterwards became famous as a steeplechase rider. He was exceedingly well made, and of proved nerve and courage. Sometimes both as boy and man he would throw off some of his melancholy and then his gaiety had the charm of the unexpected, like rare sunshine on a gloomy mountain. The head-master disliked him because of his irresponsiveness which is always trying to the autocratic temper. He said that he looked at him with the face of a horse, which indeed was not an inaccurate description. Had it been possible for our head-master to conceal himself for one night in the large dormitory, where George slept with nine or ten other boys, he would have been wiser. Night after night he would keep these boys wide awake & perfectly still while he told them stories, made impromptu as he went along. Silence was commanded in all the bedrooms, therefore these had to be told in smothered whispers. I did all I could—and my father helped me—to persuade him to come to Trinity College. Had he done so, he would doubtless have been a writer of extraordinary spontaneity & force, and I should not be writing now these boyish recollections. My friend was because of his family and their traditions puritanic, but his puritanism was of a peculiar sort; he wasn't in the least aggressive like the Belfast man, nor was he conceited nor inquisitorial as the Scotch are; it was merely that he saw human nature sorrowfully, and with little hope. It only enhanced his tenderness, which was like that of a nurse by the bedside of a sick man, and veritably there were times when thinking about this benighted and lost human nature he was like a tender mother with a fractious child: yet never did he lose his sense of proportion, or his sense of fact, or his mirthfulness. At first in any company he would be a perfect wet blanket, and an embarrassment, so that conversation would flag; presently he would begin to talk and then people would discover that he knew more about the subject than, as it seemed to them, anybody else that had ever existed, and that he knew it all as a man of feeling and imagination. They would also discover that he was a listener, whose attention you would woo as that of a king on his throne. He died possessed of a good deal of money: but as he himself told me, with characteristic veracity, the money was made for him by a clerk whom he kept from drink. It never entered into his head to give any of the money to the clerk; it was his by the law, and by the law he kept it. Why puritans are thus tied up and bound and handcuffed and padlocked in the prisons of the law is not for me to say. I have always distrusted puritanism, in that respect I am a genuine Irish Protestant and believe with Christ that the law was made for man and not man for the law. So did not believe my melancholy friend. At the command of the law he would have given you everything he owned and not harboured a regret. What he was ready to give he would exact of others. His life was a long imprisonment. Yet human nature is never more interesting than when undergoing this kind of ordeal. To meet a man in the pleasant ways of acquaintanceship is interesting and exciting, to visit him in prison may be painful, but it is enthralling; for which reason, though I hate puritanism, I don't think I would like it to be entirely removed from the world, unless it be the Belfast variety, which like the east wind is good for neither man nor beast. There was a phrase sometimes on my father's lips, forced from him by sudden annoyance: 'Nothing can exceed the vulgar assumption of a Belfast man.' The root of my old friend's puritanism was self-immolation, the other sort is the glorification of self-assertion. When I think of my friend and others like him, I say to myself that the prison pallor on a fine face is more interesting than the ruddy cheeks of the warden or turnkey or the Governor of the gaol, who all live in the open air.

George Pollexfen was not popular at school nor was he popular as a man. He never talked except upon some subject which long meditation had made his very own, and though a good listener, it was with a perfectly impassive face. Yet though never popular he came to be loved by a few, and as the years went by these few who had discovered him for themselves talked about him to others. There are people who come to us and there are people to whom we go: he was of the latter kind. There are people who go out into the streets, along the roads and gather in their friends in armfuls. These are the popular people, they are irresistible, they are as stimulating as the winds of Spring, wherever they appear opinions are formed and conceit grows. My friend had no conceit and no opinions, and therefore could impart none, but he was as rich in natural fertility as a virgin forest: and though logicians and theoretical people could make nothing of him, poets—my son, for instance—were at ease in his company. The question arises, did he himself love anybody? Though I have known him all his life, I am not sure. He leaned upon my daughter, and perhaps he had some affection for her. He constantly came up from Sligo to Dublin, though the exertion was irksome, to consult her. He would say 'She has a head! she has a head!' and then he would shake his own. His feeling for my son was a kind of enthusiasm; for your genuine puritan has a profound respect for worldly success, in that respect being a Jew of the Old Testament rather than a Disciple of the New. I have already said that if he knew anything about a subject he knew everything: and one of his subjects was racing. Sligo was full of racing men, they are swarming all along the West of Ireland. If a party of these came to see him, they would find him wrapped in his habitual gloom, and they would rouse him by asking some adroit questions about his nephew; and then they would talk about the horses. He himself, I know for a certainty never risked more than ten shillings on any race, but he knew all about the horses. Many years ago I went to Punchestown Races with him: he knew not only everything that was to be known about the horses, but all about the jockeys and their curious histories, & what he knew he presented without philosophy, without theories, without ideas, in a language that recalled the vision of Chaucer and the early poets. On that occasion as always he talked poetry though he did not know it.

George on a race-course, above all if mounted on a wild and splendid race-horse, was a transformed being. Puritanism was shattered, torn away, a mere rag of antediluvianism. Then he loved all men, he loved humanity, he loved even himself: a natural man, such as he was meant to be, a pleasant self-esteem, without aggressiveness, smiling from every gesture. I never saw any man on horseback to compare with him, horse and man made a unity of grace and strength. Yes, at such times he was a lovable man, and you never forgot it. I've heard old jockeys talk with enthusiasm of his skill as a steeplechase rider, especially when it came to the 'finish.' These old warriors of the race-course didn't care much about poets and artists, or even successful men of business, but they knew what they were saying when they talked about steeplechasing. I speak of the old days, when the jumps were so high on an Irish race-course that every time a jockey rode he took his life in his hands, and when after every race we were pretty sure to hear the crack of a policeman's rifle sending some gallant steed to his doom because of a broken leg or some such accident, and when a celebrated surgeon would come down from Dublin prepared with all his instruments—at any rate it was so at Punchestown.

From time immemorial the Irish have had a passion for horses. A friend of mine once said to an old man past his work 'Tom what are you always thinking about?' 'Sor,' said he, 'I do be thinkin' of horses.' Six weeks before George died my daughter arrived in Sligo for her annual visit; and to her surprise found him in bed. He said to her 'Lily, I think I'm going,' and made no further allusion until two days before his death, when he gave her elaborate directions as to where she would find, in various pockets of his coat, certain sums of money, for the distribution of which he gave her further directions. While awaiting the inevitable event he read diligently during those last weeks, my daughter hunting everywhere among neighbours' houses for novels of a kind to interest him. He died just as dawn was breaking, while the Banshee was crying around the house. As soon as this crying began one of the nurses came and awakened my daughter because another nurse, who had arrived the day before from Dublin, was very much alarmed. The three women heard that crying. At first the nurses had thought it an old woman in distress: at least the new nurse thought so. Then they knew, and one of them went for my daughter. In his solitary musings, and he was always solitary, he had discovered for himself some kind of religious faith neither Protestant nor Catholic which enabled him to look on Death and Eternity with a tranquil mind. As he never went to church and had no sociable impulses and never dealt in opinion his religion remained inarticulate, incommunicable. This curious solitariness was characteristic of the whole family. I myself am eagerly communicative, and when my son first revealed to me his gift of verse 'Ah!' I said, 'Behold I have given a tongue to the sea-cliffs.' It should never be forgotten that poetry is the Voice of the Solitary Spirit, prose the language of the sociable-minded. Solitary feeling is the substance of poetry. Facile emotion, persuasion, opinion and argument and moral purpose are the substance of prose, and belong to the sympathetic side of our nature, reaching out for companionship.

This portrait of my old friend would be incomplete if I did not mention his skill as an astrologer. Through my son's influence, astrology became one of his subjects. In his horoscopes he never failed. He was eager for them. At all times he had an unsleeping industry. A horoscope cost him two days of continued effort. Give him the date and place of anyone's birth and in two days' time he would present you with a paper written out in a most attractive archaic language telling you everything—everything at any rate that was essential, past, present and to come in the life of the unknown 'native.' I say unknown, because he did not care to draw the horoscope of any person whom he knew.

Still the question occurs, why did some men love this man without asking his love in return? The answer is simple: he had an interesting mind and revealed it to us. For one thing, in the matter of what I call opinions his mind was a blank, he had no opinions. A man richly endowed with instincts as countless as the threads in a piece of embroidery, each with its own intelligence as true as the instinct of a nesting bird, and yet no opinions, no more than if he were a visitant come from a distant star! And oh, the blessedness of it! It was like the peace of early morning after a night of sorrow. Sometimes here in New York I have wandered into apartments and among people where they were running some great factory for the production of opinion, anarchist, socialist, pacifist, I know not what. The din seems that of the trenches, only that instead of heroism and the sobering effect of great issues on which men stand face to face with death itself, we have small antagonism and vanity and temper, always temper; and instead of intensity, vehemence; and the pitiful mental and moral squalor of men trying to dominate, and with that end in view quite content to be shallow in feeling as in thought; quite willing, also, to insult with ugliness and to make themselves ugly—in fact, anything for effect! To be with my old friend was like entering a shaded parlour, its quiet only broken by the rustling noise of a fire burning briskly on the hearthstone.

You see, he knew so much that no opinion and no theory could cover what he knew. Doubtless, had he liked he might have denied what he knew and rushed into the fray and been as clamorous and vulgar as anybody. This did not tempt the solitary man, nourishing himself on the indwelling spirit of brooding truth. When I think of him and others of his sort I have known in Ireland, Synge, for one, I am reminded of the great Russian writers. In old age Tolstoi made strange incursions into the world of opinion, and found what he wanted in the New Testament, and Dostoïevsky, if I remember rightly, fell back on the Orthodox Greek Church. For this kind of futile industry neither had any aptitude. I suppose their sensitive minds heard the call of the spirit of the age. Had George taken to opinions he would have been just as credulous and unskilful as these mighty men. Living all his days in the West of Ireland, far from books and from leaders of thought, the spirit of the age did not come his way. And how does Shakespeare figure in the world of opinion? Did he ever take lance in hand to fight on behalf of any of the opinions of his day? I fancy that like Hamlet he had too much mind to make up! Is it not a fact attested over and over again that poets always know too much to give entertainment to any system of opinion, however loudly it clamours for admittance.