Early memories; some chapters of autobiography

by John Butler Yeats

The Rector did, as I have said, after his hot-tempered way, love my father, and when my father told him that he had lost some of his income and could no longer stay in the parish, where he was, paid but a pittance, the Rector worked himself into a rage and refused to bid him good bye. Yet, some years afterwards, when my father preached in some Cathedral, he saw his old Rector coming towards him with outstretched hands, to suggest that he have the sermon printed and published.

The letters of English women are mostly dull, they are too ceremonious for the ease and freshness of letter writing. Irish women take life gaily & themselves lightly, with no latent puritanism and its suggestion of self-importance, to retard their pens. My mother's letters were a joy to all her family, and my father wrote copiously and eloquently. I remember every letter by either of them would end with the words 'burn this,' and the injunction was too well carried out. I don't think that of all these letters there is even one extant. Nothing delighted my father more than to write speeches and letters for his friends. Sometimes they were business letters, but more often speeches for some family gathering—perhaps there had been a quarrel, and all the clans were to meet at a marriage. The difficulty was to make a speech that would offend nobody and might reconcile their differences. My father would undertake the task with the greatest animation, and as he would not go himself to the wedding, others would come and tell him of the wonderful cleverness of the speaker, and how surprised they were, and of the blessed effects, and he and my mother would keep the secret.

All my father's life he lacked companionship, and he of all men the most companionable. There was no one with whom he could exchange ideas. He was surrounded by good men and good women, but for a man of intellect that is not enough. I think that, though but a boy, I was nearer being his companion than anybody else; I at least had mental curiosity. All the grown-up people lay fast bound in the sleep of comfortable orthodoxy, anxious about this world, but persuaded that the less they thought about the world to come the better. Was it not all set out in the Bible and quite clear to those having faith?

Romantic temper and high vitality had endowed my father with a natural intrepidity. When therefore cholera came to Ireland where it attained a mortality higher than anywhere else in the Kingdom, he went fearlessly among the people, consoling them with religious hope and comforting them also in many secular ways. I have been told that again and again he would take the sick man in his arms, and hold him up, as he prayed and administered the Sacrament, and this at a time when cholera was supposed to be virulently infectious. This was never forgotten to him in the parish. The poor have long memories.

To be fond of fishing ran in the family, but my father I think preferred grouse shooting. Arthur Corbet, my mother's brother, a big athletic man with a short temper, had because of a very bad stammer become a clerk in the Bank of Ireland which all his life he regarded as an insult inflicted upon him by cruel destiny. He would walk fourteen Irish miles to a pretty sequestered village high up among the mountains, fish all day, and at night return walking all those miles carrying a load of fish. I don't think my father would have endured that fatigue for a day's fishing, and my uncle would sometimes say that he had not the true zest. The friends of my youth used to measure a man by his taste in shooting, fishing, or hunting, and there were noisy and dismal circles where men were measured by their capacity for drinking. When I was asked by the people compiling 'Who's who' what was my favourite pastime, I replied that I had none, but would like a little fishing. It was not inserted, being considered, I suppose, too frivolous for the solemn emptiness of that useful book. I do not like fishing with bait because of the nauseous handling of the worms; and in shooting the sight of the bird alive and wounded in one's hand is painful for the nerves. But no one minds the flapping and writhing of the fish taken out of his element. The fish is too remote; we cannot guess its thoughts, it inspires no curiosity. To wander along a river bank and with your utmost dexterity cast your flics lightly here and there over the surface of a deep pool and watch for the yellow gleam of the fish as it rises, is there anything so fascinating as this gambling in dark waters? I knew a man who died an enviable death. He was a distinguished Dublin barrister, a man of imagination, and he loved salmon fishing. He had just hooked a salmon and was playing it when he had a heart seizure. As he lay in a friend's arms, with his dying eyes he watched that fish being played and landed. He went to his death charioted to the next world in a fisherman's dream.

Mr. F. B., my cousin, had a very pretty country house and demesne on the banks of Lough Dan, County Wicklow, and was the Squire of the district, a sort of County Wicklow Sir Roger de Coverly. He had a little flock of children and a wife upon whom he depended a good deal. Every day she took the children for a walk, and if she stayed away a long time, as would occasionally happen on a fine day, and he missed her, he would bring out the dinner-gong and beat it, sending its mellow voice rolling among the hills. And his wife would say 'We must return, my dears, I hear your father calling.' Everyone liked that house and its despotically indulgent master and gentle mistress and the happy children who are now old people. Everything about that house partook of a sort of civility not to be found every where. The coachman, when required to yoke the car, would come out of the stable yard to the front of the house and give a loud halloo, and having done so would go back, and you would hear presently from far away down in the valley of the demesne the rapid hoof-beats of a horse, a handsome grey horse I remember, and like rushing wind he would gallop past you into the yard behind the house, eager to leave the solitude of his pasturage for the open road. There were other horses, and there were dogs and cats, all pleasant and friendly. And there were beehives that made a pleasant hum in the summer air, and there was a pony which no one in the house, not even the coachman, could catch. 'Herself', the mistress of the house, would have to come out on to the lawn, and he would let himself be taken and she would lead him to the coachman. There was also a wise old donkey, who, when we dined, would thrust his head through the window and ask to be fed. Dining there, I said 'Don't give him any thing and see what he will do.' 'He will come into the hall' they said, and when we heard him blundering about in that not particularly spacious place, I wanted them to try him further, but they said 'No, for he will bray'.

Why did people like staying in that house? Partly because of the great natural beauty by which it was surrounded, and partly because of the great cordiality of your welcome from all that numerous company of men women and children. And yet there was something else. It was that they were a quaintly interesting people, not modern at all, just mediæval, who stirred the historical sense and made you think of some golden age when no one was in a hurry and so all had time to enjoy themselves, and for the sake of enjoyment to be courteous and witty and pleasant. There was an old butler and an old French woman who did the cooking. Indeed everything flavoured of 'tanned antiquity' except the brood of pretty children, who, as I remember, did on my first visit keep all together, bright and gay, with a life of their own, and rather silent. I was at the awkward age when a boy becomes self-conscious and is at his ease with no one.

Certain sour-faced socialists would explain everything by the economic situation—yet surely here was poetry pure and simple—nothing but poetry. It was on Lough Dan I caught my first trout, just under a dark cliff rising straight out of the water. And many a fish I've caught in that spot. I was staying there with my father and mother when my father was seized with rheumatic fever, further aggravated by gout, and I helped my mother to nurse him. Some years afterwards I myself had that fever. I know all about it. Your soul turns to blackness, wrath overpowers you and fills you with a sort of devilry. For a few days I was as Swift or Carlyle at their fiercest. I hated everyone. I had such insight and gift of utterance that I knew how to wound anyone who approached me. It is not surprising, therefore, that my father, suffering from this fever, should for once have been unreasonable. He asked me to move him in bed. In a great flutter of fear and anxiety I tried to do so. If you touched him he groaned, and though I tried my very best I could not satisfy him. Beside himself with pain and with my awkwardness, he called out impatiently 'Place me diagonally in the bed.' The word 'diagonal' I knew only in Euclid. Yet he would only repeat 'Place me diagonally.' Afterwards, amidst all his pain, he laughed and apologised, and said that he got the word, not from Euclid at all but from Tristram Shandy, where years afterwards I found it. When they had retired behind their bed-curtains, Mrs. Shandy said to Mr. Shandy 'I think Uncle Toby is going to be married.' Then said Mr. Shandy 'He won't be able to lie diagonally in bed any more.'

It was always an annoyance to Mr. Shandy that he could not puzzle Mrs. Shandy, because she never bestowed a further thought upon anything that she did not understand at once. But my father, when he flung at me the word 'diagonal,' knew that he was inflicting on me the pain of puzzledom and that was a passing satisfaction to him, even though the effect was to increase my awkwardness and prolong his own discomfort. Is it because of the sociable instinct that when we are ourselves in pain we desire to share it with somebody else? A man worried about his business doesn't like his smiling wife to go on smiling, and yet if she doesn't smile, it is a breach of all the proprieties that should control a wife's behaviour.

People will sometimes say that religious conversion effects a change of heart. I very much doubt it. Under religion people remain what they were before only they are more so. The influence of Wesley reached the middle and lower classes among the English; & commercial before, they became more commercial. The commercial instinct of selfishness was able henceforth to call itself a duty, and took on religious airs; and a large part of the religion of Belfast may be stated in a single sentence 'The man who sells his cow too cheap goes to Hell.' But when Wesleyism affected the Irish leisured class, gentlemen before, they remained gentlemen, only with more refinement of heart and a more subtle sympathy. The wild men, described by Charles Lever, who cared for nothing except romance and courage and personal glory, now walked in the footsteps of their Lord and Master. In my youth I would sometimes hear people say with self-complacency that there was no gentleman the equal of an Irish gentleman. The boast was not altogether foolish. We all know the type of Christian and Saint who has no manners. These men had manners and cultivated them as part and parcel of the Christian ideal. Back in the misty past I can see those quiet figures of a now forgotten civilisation, whose gentility differed from that of the English as light from darkness, and one especially, Sir Andrew Hart, who was Vice-Provost of Trinity College Dublin, and a learned mathematician. I painted his portrait, and one day, as I looked at him and admired his proud and distinguished profile, I said 'Sir Andrew, I am sure nature intended you to have been the leader of a tribe of insurgents in the Caucasus.' His laugh did not repudiate the suggestion. Yet he had the gentlest manners, imposing restraint on others by the restraint he imposed on himself. My father sometimes said that if a man is rude to you it is always your own fault, and I remember a bumptious man from Belfast, a cousin of my own, who would complain that he could not get men to be civil to him. Sir Andrew was a man singularly handsome, very tall, with great strength and endurance. He told me that on the night of the great storm of 1839 he walked thirty miles, the weather being so dreadful that no one would lend him a horse.