Early memories; some chapters of autobiography

by John Butler Yeats

These men have to live in the hermitage of their own minds. The poet always is solitary and never more solitary than when most sociable, and it is because it lacks the fervour of heated opinion that good literature avoids emphasis. I am perfectly alive to the value of the fighting man when in the ranks and under strong discipline, or self-appointed, as he often is, to subordinate tasks, as when an artist produces the hideous to excite the crowd and to interest them in some good cause that without the stimulus of hatred would not appeal to them. Hatred so difficult to a full mind is so easy to an empty one. I don't believe there was ever a great man that was a fighting man—not Cromwell, he lived surrounded by fighting men but was himself conciliatory to a degree; not Napoleon, of him a contemporary wrote, 'A larger soul hath seldom dwelt in a house of clay:' his gift was that of vision and purpose and an amazing talent for organisation. Had the French demanded peace his genius would have devoted itself to organising 'the victories of peace.' Luther struggled hard to remain within the Church, it was the fighting men inside its fold who drove him out. These great men had purposes and had visions and were never fighting men, though these were the tools with which they worked.

Poets must not meddle with opinions. The poet who becomes a fighting man circumscribes his activity and coarsens his mind. Milton's poetical genius never recovered the six political pamphlets he wrote. When I think of the poetical mind I think of an oak tree that all night and all day is drawing nourishment from the earth about its roots. A tree not so nourished, and with its roots not pressed deep down into the earth, would soon be overthrown soon laid prostrate by the storms of the upper air. Had his attachments sunk deeper, pushing their intricate & sensitive roots into kindly Mother Nature, Shelley, being kindly as well as fine, would not so easily have been overthrown by Godwin's stale philosophy—that man with a large head full of cold thought—and the Harriet episode would have been more human.

I sometimes think that all of us mortal men, are companionable, but that commerce and progress and a false civilization have put weapons into our hands and taught us subterfuge and evasion, flight or attack. The poets and artists are in revolt and would have none of this, at least in their poetry, whatever they may do in their foolish logic. This is the unique charm of poetry and the inspiration of what, from time immemorial, people have agreed to call love, which is the true bond between man and man that will survive all others. Its perfect and complete expression is beauty, as ugliness is the expression of hatred or contempt or fear.

Goethe said of himself that he could not hate, and was ill-advised enough to think it a blemish. If a poet hates, as sometime happens, love is not far away. We have the invention of the Sirens, who, though they have fish tails, are beautiful women; I think Homer was sorry for Thersites.

Poets, being all compact of imagination and dream, are attached to the quiet of the soul; and ugliness is exhausting, while love and beauty replenish the wells. I think that but for some accident every great poet would have attained to length of years, and every minor poet also, while artists and poets of hate died young. My old school fellow, though delicate both as a boy and a man, lived to be long past seventy. He steered his course clear of opinion, hating no one and without contention. One never knew what he thought. One did know abundantly what he felt. Does anyone know what was Shakespeare's opinion of Juliet? Did he know himself? Milton would not have kept silent.

Such people are a continual novelty. Had intellect been the dominating thing in this personality, I should soon have grown tired. Intellect is always the same. There are not two ways of doing the fifth proposition of Euclid or of stating the theory of rent. You just know it or you don't know it. But when it comes to a matter of feeling and of the instincts and desires and the multitudinous sensibilities, no two men are alike. They differ as a leaf on the tree differs from every other leaf. In each is concealed a lovely surprise, if only someone would draw the curtain. Change is the law of life; we desire it as we desire the morning and sniff the morning air, a desire that will get us into strange scrapes sometimes and be a pitfall to the innocent. A friend of mine found Rossetti doing a study of a woman model, and painting the nostrils with ultramarine. 'Well' said he wearily, 'I am so tired of painting them always with madder brown.'

Search for novelty was quickening his imagination when he created the Rossetti woman—I would that he had created many—it is like the lamp set in the cap of the miner when he works underground. At that time those of us young artists who aspired after imaginative and poetic art were all agog about Rossetti. His poems had not then been published, nor had any one seen his pictures outside his immediate friends. But by all accounts he was a man of wonderful presence, keeping open mind and open house for kindred spirits. Swinburne was one of the circle; I was told Rossetti would not admit him without Whistler who knew how to keep him from drinking too much. Rossetti seldom went to picture exhibitions; by rare chance he did go to the Dudley, and saw there a picture of mine which he liked so much that he sent to me by three messengers, one of whom was his brother, an invitation to come and see him. I did not come. I regret it very much. I think I was afraid of the great man; diffident about myself and my work. To be afraid of anything is to listen to the counsels of your evil angel. I used to hear a great deal about Rossetti. I think that he exercised so much ascendancy because of a personality which was naked and unashamed. A personality encased in the armour of opinion arouses or calls for adherents & followers. Thoughts, fancies, surmises, the whole army of guesses, which are the airy children of hope and affection, present themselves to be liked or disliked without any power of argument. Opinion challenges assent and submission as of right, and is quite indifferent as to whether or no it is hideous in all men's sight. Rossetti would not go to his brother's wedding because he said he would meet all the bores of London. These bores were the men with opinions and contentions. I sometimes meet a man all cased in the armour of opinion, even as was John Knox—but raise his visor, let me see his personality shining in his eyes, and how fascinating it is! Rossetti never wore this kind of armour and did not need to raise his visor. He was neither conventional nor unconventional. He immersed himself in art and poetry, letting opinion go by the wind. How often I regret that I did not go to him. Perhaps at a single bound I should have escaped forever from this entangling web of grey theory in which I have spent my life. There was another great poet that I missed. Browning had seen a design that I made for a picture of Job's wife bidding him curse God and die, and he came to see me. Unfortunately I was not in my studio when he called.

I am sometimes asked what is it that artists & poets aim at. I answer, it is the birth, the growth, and expansion of ever living personalities. That is the value or the charm of a picture or poem. I read a poem or I look at a picture; these, if they be works of art embody a personality. A personality is a man brought into unity by a mood, not a static unity, (that is character) but alive and glowing like a star, all in harmony with himself. Conscience at peace yet vigilant; spiritual and sensual desires at one; all of them in intense movement. In contact with such picture or poem, the mood enters into my mind, pervading soul and body, so that for the moment I become a living personality, with, for dominant note, joy or sorrow, or hope or love. I become the personality I create. When I read Rossetti's poems or look at his pictures, I fall under the spell of his art. Had I met Rossetti in the flesh I think I should have cast out forever this questioning intellect which has haunted me all my life like a bad conscience—as indeed it does most men in these uneasy days—and lived the imaginative life.

Going to see Rossetti must have been like a visit to the tropics. A friend often asked me to go with him to see George Meredith. I threw away also that chance but by no means with so keen a regret. In George Meredith is no wild luxuriance, no risk of self-abandonment. He is pervaded through and through with the conventions of upper middle-class English society. The other stood aside from all conventions, even from those of unconventionality. Naked we come into the world, and naked we should remain if we retain personality and have the wizard's spell.

That school was in many things an image of life. All the nicknames and jokes and daring comments sprang from the obscurity of the lower forms and were anonymous. We elder and upper boys had a certain sobriety that preserved us in staid decorum. If one of us in class was laboriously translating an indecent passage in Lucian's Fables; from the lower end of the class, which never even tried to translate anything, would come a suppressed chuckle that would make our form teacher very uneasy. I fancy it is these idle boys, with their preternatural acuteness for life and reality, and the confidence that results, who afterwards become the successful men. Most of their jokes were innocent enough. One morning before breakfast in the playground when it was very cold, I found a little gathering of them round a big burly boy in an aggressively thick overcoat, and all were busy ostentatiously spreading out their hands and rubbing them as if before a good fire, the big boy looking very sheepish and helpless. An impudent Irish boy called out 'Heat by radiation, Yeats.' The day before the head-master had given us a chemical lesson on the properties of heat. And the nicknames! One boy was known as 'King.' He had red hair and at first was called the 'Prairie on fire.' That was too long and it became 'King Rufus' and finally 'King,' and he went by no other name. Another was called 'Sin' which changed to 'Satan,' and 'Satan' he remained: a quiet dull boy, ugly and kindly, hulking in all his ways and movements. It arose in this way. Every week the neighbouring clergyman came to spend an hour in teaching us religion, and when he asked what Judas carried in his bag this boy answered 'Sin.' There may have been mines of sensibility in that boy. It was a bold idea for a schoolboy to suppose Judas had carried Sin in his bag; but he belonged to the commercial side of the school where they learned nothing and had an easy time. We who worked at Latin and Greek went through much suffering. In those days the classics were taught after the crudest methods. Having learned some grammar, the declensions, and verbs, and done a few sentences in Delectus, the Life of Hannibal by Cornelius Nepos was thrust into our hands and the tribulation began. Without the constant menace of the cane no healthy minded boy would have faced the difficulties of our task. To fit the verb to the noun, and the adjectives to the noun, and worry through all the participles, and prepositions, and concords, and these through a long sentence in which every word seemed to be wrongly placed, without any help, all alone by yourself, under a rule of silence, so that you could not consult your neighbour, was no end of a puzzle. Henry James' sentences are difficult, but the difficulty is nothing to the difficulty of a young boy with a Latin sentence. And we were all young boys not in the least interested in the fortune of Hannibal, the Latin mind being as strange to us as the mental processes of a futurist poet; but there stood our head-master cane in hand, watchful to strike if a single mistake was made. Just as in life, time and fate wait for human error! I can tell you we worked—those of us at any rate who feared the cane. At the lower end of the class were boys who never learned anything, and had, as it seemed to me, grown habituated to the cane.