Early memories; some chapters of autobiography

by John Butler Yeats

He lived to be over eighty years of age, and his daughter-in-law told me that he died because of some inadvertence, some chance neglect. There are men who ought to live to be as old as Methuselah. It is some accident, some chance of a window left open or a window kept shut, that makes inevitable the shears of Clotho.

One of my greatest friends was a son of Sir Andrew Hart, George Vaughan Hart. I painted his eldest daughter when she was a beautiful child, and it was my delight afterwards to paint her when she had grown a beautiful woman. She had a fascinating precipitation of thought and action that recalled her mother, together with the beauty derived from both father and mother. I've painted all sorts of people, but I think Ethel Hart was my most difficult subject. She herself was indulgent and easy to please, and her family did not much mind, but I could never please myself. I think that it was because she was an enigma to herself and to me that she tantalised me, being, as she was, just between girlhood and womanhood. I lived in that house many days, perpetually failing and perpetually hopeful.

One day stands out very distinctly in my memory. George Hart was at home, working over law papers which he had brought into the drawing-room, and all the family were there, and by good luck there came that day, to enliven us and add its background to the happy scene, a tremendous thunder-storm. And by further good luck there was present Hart's maiden aunt who was very much afraid of thunder-storms. The house was on the top of Howth Hill, a wild peninsula of mountain and heather, jutting out into Dublin Bay. All around the house the lightening played incessantly, the flames seeming to lick the windows of the room, and the thunder was continuous, while the maiden aunt grew more and more alarmed. She was pious also, which I have always noticed makes people more afraid of thunder-storms. 'Dear, Dear,' Hart would say, after a particularly frightful crash shaking the whole house. 'Dear, Dear! I hope those lightening rods are well oiled.' And again after another crash 'Well, Well, I should not like a volcano on Ireland's Eye' which was a little rocky islet just outside the harbour. Knowing that Hart was a geologist, I foolishly asked if Ireland's Eye had ever been a volcano. 'Not in my time' came the answer in his deep voice. The storm lasted for a long time and through it all we talked and listened and were merry and afraid, except the maiden aunt who was only afraid, while I pursued steadily the painting of my beautiful model. I pity anyone who is not afraid of a thunder-storm. Terror is a delightful feeling if beauty be added to it. The Hebraic conception of Jehovah fascinates the imagination, because it combines terror with its beauty. If children are frightened by a thunder-storm, take them to a window and bid them watch the lightening play among the clouds, and their fears will change into a kind of exultation more delightful than listening to a fairy tale. Beauty cleanses feeling. What more distressing, what more profoundly disturbing than the ache inspired by sex passion; yet add romance and beauty, and while the feeling remains, the ache is gone. It has been cleansed. A tragedy acted on the stage inspires pity and terror, but if that play be written by Shakespeare these feelings are cleansed—they remain, but the ache is gone. Laughter also, like beauty, cleanses the feelings. Its special value, I think, is as a cure for anger. Yet it does not destroy the anger. The energy is still there, but changed into merriment. There is the sunshine of beauty and the sunshine of laughter, and in the great writers they often mingle and become one. All through the beauty of 'Romeo and Juliet' laughter vibrates so that we do not know whether to laugh or to cry.

Of this mirthfulness my friend George Hart had an ample supply. He was a barrister and often engaged in important cases. When contention ran high and everybody was very angry. Hart would still some portion of the troubled waters by a comment, audible only to the barristers immediately about him. My friend was not a wit, he was something infinitely better, he was a humorist. Your wit is an aggressively sociable fellow who makes his thrusts at other people, getting his fun out of their confusion, or alarm, or astonishment. He wants a social success. Your humorist is only amusing himself and surprising himself, getting enjoyment out of the absurdities of life, and is quite as solitary as a poet or nightingale.

Beside his house was a lovely garden. I never saw so many flowers crowded together in so small a space. All his spare time was given to that oasis among the rocks and heather. He was tall and spare & for hours together would work very quietly, making deliberate movements lest he should break a stem or petal. Mrs. Hart told me that more than once she had seen a robin alight on his head, and she insisted that, perched on that eminence, one of them sang its thin little song. Every thing that Hart knew he knew accurately, so that whether it was flowers or law or practical business his judgement was infallible. What he did not know, or could not know accurately and thoroughly, he put away from him, and for that reason was a rigid conservative. A buoyant American full of courage with the key of the future in his pocket was to him only another absurdity in an amazing world. My own politics, which are akin to those of American hopefulness, I never uncovered. I was afraid of that ironic smile. Hart called his house Woodside, since it was close to a little wood. Doctor Mahaffy, the late Provost of Trinity College, renamed it 'Heart's Ease' and so addressed his letters. Probably he did not quite approve of that easy unambitious life. Adam in the Garden in the age of Innocence, before Care had entered, would not have seemed an impressive figure to a modern advocate of the strenuous and the progressive. My friend ought to have been gardener and botanist always, but care entered & drove him out into a world of malodorous Law Courts down beside the river Liffey.

When I left school I entered Trinity College, and for the next four or five years the man most dominant in my life was my uncle Robert Corbet. I think of my poor uncle as a man of generous impulses who lived up to his creed of being a gentleman, a worldling and a club man, nor did he forget that he was a citizen of Dublin, of the type that flourished in the eighteenth century. If he suspected his Catholic neighbours, all the same he liked them; and if he had a certain respect for Englishmen, no less he disliked them. Before I was born, he bought or leased, I never knew which it was, Sandymount Castle, and then began creating all around him beautiful gardens. Of business he knew little or nothing, and probably neglected it, but he did not neglect his gardens. Every morning he rose early, and would wander all over the grounds, sometimes with a small saw and hatchet, making among the trees what he called 'vistas.' He employed four or five gardeners, and as long as I knew Sandymount Castle, none of these men ever left him and no one ever interfered with them. So treated, they were gentle, pleasant and diligent, and the gardens were lovely. There was a piece of water called the 'pond' on which we boys did much boating, and there were plenty of wild ducks and swans, and there was also an island on which was a one-roomed thatched cottage, in which was a collection of souvenirs and relics brought back from India and the Colonies by my uncle's brothers who had all been soldiers. Outside the cottage were two chained eagles. As a child I feared these eagles, and when I was a man they were there still, and when my uncle, an old man, left Sandymount for good, they were sent to the Zoological gardens, where for all I know they may still shriek and flap their wings as was their habit on the Island. In and about Sandymount Castle were various relics of departed worthies, among them a wicked looking sword with a very long handle which my uncle Pat had wrested from an enemy when leading the Forlorn Hope at the taking of Rangoon. This uncle became Governor of Penang. All these things have disappeared and no one remembers them but myself, and I mention them now, not because I think they're likely to interest anybody, but because I think it will please my old uncle to know that I have done so.

My father because of ill-health had retired from active work in his parish and lived in a pretty house (it is at present the Presbyterian College) surrounded by a high wall and separated from the Castle grounds by a wicket-gate. All through my College days I lived the Sandymount Castle life. It was my Capua and only too welcome after my school life. I had been braced too tight, now I was braced too lightly: self-abandoned to a complete relaxation. I left that school, weakened morally by its constant discipline and vigilance, to live all my College days in that pleasant Capua. I did not think, I did not work, I had no ambition, I dreamed. Week after week went by, and no one criticised. As far as the demands of that sympathetic circle went, I satisfied everybody, and was well-behaved. The only thing that ever troubled my uncle was my habit of going long walks in the mountains, all by myself. His old-fashioned, eighteenth century gregarious worldliness was shocked that I should walk all by myself, it seemed to him abnormal and he distrusted the abnormal.

At school I had been well grounded as regards Latin and Greek, therefore the ordinary college examinations gave me no trouble. In my last year I read for honours in metaphysics and logic, but on the days of the examination I was ill with rheumatic fever. Possibly had I read sternly for these courses I should have turned away to the abstract side of life and deserted, for good and all, the concrete world of colour and of images. After taking my degree I won a prize in political economy, and became acquainted with the works of J. S. Mill, and I began to think; but though Capua vanished, I do not think that I thereby became a better man. Certainly I was more disagreeable, for I wanted to quarrel with everyone, making the mistake, common among polemical minded people, of thinking that when I was severe to other people and the world generally, I was severe to myself, although in reality I was acquiring the most disagreeable of qualities, picking up the habits of dictatorial emphasis & dogmatism, which I shall now never get rid of. This was not due to Mill's teaching. Mill must have been the most persuasive man, while I in my crudeness must have been the most dissuasive. Never would he have allowed any authoritative self-conceit to come between him and the truth. I once had the good fortune to hear him make a speech to workingmen, and I thought that both as a speaker and a man he was of all men the most winning. His audience did not cheer, they laughed as with an intensity of enjoyment. At the time I compared the laughter in my own mind to the sound made by the stringing of Ulysses' bow when he was about to shoot the suitors, which Homer likened to the singing of swallows. My own excuse for myself is that I lived for six years under that severe Scotch school-master, who was all authority and self-assertion, and that man is essentially an imitative animal. When I began to think for myself I walked in the footsteps of my school-master.

With my uncle lived three old ladies, his mother who died when ninety three, and her two sisters who lived to be over eighty. After the death of these old people he continued to live alone in Sandymount and hoped to die, as they did, in the odours of a well approved and well-tested worldliness, but fickle and cruel fortune ruled otherwise. He lost his money. How it went I don't know, I don't believe he himself knew, and when he died an old man broken by creeping paralysis, there were some debts whereof his assets sufficed to pay fifteen shillings in the pound, his assets consisting of a collection of pictures, china and silver, very valuable had Dublin only known it.

A sort of incrustation of legend had gathered about my uncle. One was that he was an old Peninsular officer who had seen battles and sieges. As a fact, his nearest approach to actual war was that, when quartered in Hastings, he had had living with him a prisoner of war, a French officer. Very pleasantly they lived together, going to a great many parties and picnics, neither knowing the other's language, so there was no possibility of disputes. Of that friendship the only trace remaining was that my uncle always pronounced the word 'presentiment' with a French accent.