Early memories; some chapters of autobiography

by John Butler Yeats

Novels were strictly forbidden. A very handsome boy of eighteen from the Highlands was one day sitting in front of the school-room fire, basking in its heat and comfortably reading a novel called 'The Romance of War.' Our head-master stole in with cat-like tread in his noiseless slippers and looked over his shoulder. I was nearby at the time, and saw that book being slowly consumed in the red centre of the fire. We watched it till it was in ashes the head-master, myself, and the boy who owned it! Within twelvemonths that boy was fighting in the Crimea. He was one of five or six boys being prepared for the military entrance examination. None of them ever worked or were expected to work. They did, indeed, do some mysterious things with solid cubes, which meant, I suppose, instruction in methods of fortification. They always kept together and were considered wild and wicked.

In those far off days, travelling was expensive. My parents lived deep in the country, only to be reached by a four-horse coach, and Christmas holidays were short at all schools, at ours only ten days. Therefore we saw our families only once a year, during the summer holidays which lasted six weeks. My father, mother, sisters and all the countryside would exert themselves to give us a good time. The first week of that holiday was enjoyment without alloy. Such sudden happiness would admit companionship only with itself. After that came, like a creeping shadow, growing darker and denser, the ever-nearer approach of the day when we should have to return to school. Until the last week came, we brothers scattered, each bent upon his own particular enjoyment. When that week came, we went about together, made good companions by an identical mournfulness; and our mother was as sad as we were.

Is a boarding-school a good institution for any boy? Certainly it is a complete antidote to home influence, and is that desirable? A boarding-school develops selfishness. Every boy for himself. Does one acquire self-control? In such a school as mine the discipline from without was too searching and too constant for that other discipline from within to have a chance. When I left that school for good, I felt myself to be empty of morals. There was avoid within. The outer control had gone and it was a long time before the inner control grew up to take its place. My legacy from that school was a vivid and perfectly unconscious selfishness. From my short, far separated, loving holidays I carried away memories of affection and what it might be for me. And I think my history ever since has been the conflict between these two principles. But I was not self-indulgent.

Some remnants of the old superstitions, assiduously poured into my soul by Miss Emma Davenport, still hung about me, and I used to pray to God for letters from home. I could, in all seriousness, debate with myself whether there was any sense in praying when I knew that the time had passed for posting that particular letter that I hoped for. My mother wrote constantly, but could not write often enough to keep pace with my longings. Occasionally my father wrote in his eloquent and intellectual way and fired me with enthusiasm, so that I walked as if I had wings to my feet. The Sun stands for ambition and intellect and power, and the Moon for the poetry of affection, which being insatiable, brings regret and the consciousness of a forced resignation. In those days if my mother was the Moon my father was the Sun, shining aloft in my sky. It was my father who made me the artist I am, and kindled the sort of ambition I have transmitted to my sons. My wife, once meeting an old man who in his youth had associated much with my father, judged it a good opportunity to ask about him, and whether he was a good preacher. The answer came promptly: 'Yes, good—but flighty—flighty.' I do think that romance, which is pleasant beauty, unlike the austere beauty of the classical school, is born of sweet-tempered men. My father was sweet-tempered, and affectionate, also he constantly read Shelley, and, no less, Shelley's antidote, Charles Lamb. To be with him was to be caught up into a web of delicious visionary hopefulness. Every night, when the whole house was quiet, and the servants gone to bed, he would sit for a while beside the kitchen fire and I would be with him. He never smoked during the day, and not for worlds would he have smoked in any part of the house except the kitchen; and yet he considered himself a great smoker. He used a new clay pipe, and as he waved the smoke aside with his hand, he would talk of the men he had known—his fellow-students—of Archer Butler the Platonist, and of a man called Gray who was, I think, an astronomer, and of his friend Isaac Butt, that man of genius engulfed and lost in law and politics. And he would talk of his youth and boyhood in the West of Ireland where he had fished and shot and hunted, and had not a care. Of how he would, on the first day of the grouse shooting, climb to the top of a high mountain seven miles away, and be there in the dark with his dogs and attendants, waiting for the dawn to break.

There are men with a social gift who must dominate their company, expecting others to woo them. This was not my father's way. Rather would he lure you on till you believed, not in him, about which he did not care, but in your own self. It was he who wooed his company not they him. Naturally I found his conversation enthralling. His country neighbours round about and his own friends & relations, would complain that he used strange words; and so he did, and for that reason I was the more pleased. A new word was to him, as to me, a pearl of discovery, fished up out of some strange book he had been reading, and we would enjoy it together. My mind often goes back into that wide kitchen, and again I sit with him beside the fire, a little table for his tobacco and whiskey at his side and on it a single candle throwing a feeble light. The kitchen is the best room in the house. To compare it with a drawing-room is to remember the difference between a fishing lugger built and rigged and shaped for storm and angry sea, and a spic and span yacht which never leaves the harbour except in the summer time when the seas are safe and the winds gentle.

If the sweet-tempered men keep romance alive, it is the cross-tempered, contentious men without affection who grub into the secret places to find the poison and infection of ugliness. These people desire to destroy everywhere the vision of happiness, and to make war on its prophets and champions. Among such people my father was silent and helpless. I think I am more venturesome.

Everybody was happy in Shakespeare's time. When the French Revolution had spent its force, and Napoleon was at St. Helena, unhappiness was in Paris, and from out of its thick cloud came the realistic wave. Of course I know that there are cheerful people who adore ugliness. Such people have so much animal spirit that they are like many schoolboys who want to frighten their maiden aunt, but ugliness of the intense and passionate kind comes out of the entrails of the angry and the unhappy.

When cheerful artists revel in the ugly what they write or paint is purely mechanical, but whether an artist has the genuine passion and can't help himself, or is only pretending to it, such men are a weariness to any man with any tincture of a romantic imagination. I have seen drawings & read prose done with an appetite for the ugly that reminded me of the dogs that licked the sores of Lazarus.

My father was as forgiving as Shakespeare in the Sonnets, and he could forget. The artist within him incessantly arranged and rearranged life, so that he lived in fairyland. Sometimes my father's and another man's account of the same incident would widely differ; but I always preferred what my father said. William Morris told my son that Kipling when a boy would come home from a days walk with stories of the day's adventures which were all fiction. I wonder if Shakespeare would always cleave to the truth in the common matters of every day. At no time did I lose respect for my father, I knew with him it was only the gentle sport of 'make believe' without which life would be intolerable to men who live by their affections. Saints and lovers and men governed by affection, poets and artists, all live in phantasy, its falsehood truer than any reality. By such falsehood we got nearer to truth. His charm to me was his veracious intellect. He would lie neither to please the sentimentalists nor the moralists. What talent I have for honest thinking I learned from him.

Like every Evangelical clergyman of his kind, he regarded the Catholic Church as the Enemy, yet he never disliked it, I am convinced, as he did the Presbyterian. On leaving the University he became Curate to a clergyman in the North of Ireland. His Rector was a learned man who had published translations in verse from some early Italian poet. He was also a very bad-tempered man. I have noticed that this kind of man finds a great attraction in men who are of sweet and placable temper, as perhaps the evil angels love the righteous whom they incessantly torment and tempt but cannot persuade. The first quarrel arose because my father rode all about the parish on a spirited horse and refused to desist. The Rector wrote to him that he had hired a Curate and not a jockey. The next quarrel was about my father's preaching. Evangelicism was at the time fashionable among men of intellect, & the Rector hated Evangelicism. My father gave me an amusing account of the quarrel. He was staying, as he often did, in the Rector's house, and it was Sunday morning. There was a rapid interchange of letters beginning at six in the morning, and the argument was continued at breakfast, the ladies all on my father's side. Finally the Rector said he would preach himself that morning. As luck would have it, choosing at random among his stock of ready-made sermons, he took with him a sermon tainted with the abominable doctrine. My father described the smile that went round the Rector's pew.