Delphi Complete Poetry and Plays of W. B. Yeats (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series)

by W. B. Yeats

  VII

  It was now that George Moore came into our affairs, brought by Edward Martyn, who invited him to find a cast for The Heather Field. They were cousins and inseparable friends, bound one to the other by mutual contempt. When I told Martyn that Moore had good points, he replied: ‘I know Moore a great deal longer than you do. He has no good points.’ And a week or two later Moore said: ‘That man Martyn is the most selfish man alive. He thinks that I am damned and he doesn’t care.’ I have described their friendship in a little play called The Cat and the Moon; the speaker is a blind beggar-man, and Laban is a townland where Edward Martyn went to chapel:... ‘Did you ever know a holy man but had a wicked man for his comrade and his heart’s darling? There is not a more holy man in the barony than the man who has the big house at Laban, and he goes knocking about the roads day and night with that old lecher from the county of Mayo, and he a woman-hater from the day of his birth. And well you know and all the neighbours know what they talk of by daylight and candlelight. The old lecher does be telling over all the sins he committed, or maybe never committed at all, and the man of Laban does be trying to head him off and quiet him down that he may quit telling them.’ Moore and Martyn were indeed in certain characteristics typical peasants, the peasant sinner, the peasant saint. Moore’s grandfather or great-grandfather had been a convert, but there were Catholic marriages. Catholic families, beaten down by the Penal Laws, despised by Irish Protestants, by the few English Catholics they met, had but little choice as to where they picked their brides; boys, on one side of old family, grew up squireens, half-sirs, peasants who had lost their tradition, gentlemen who had lost theirs. Lady Gregory once told me what marriage coarsened the Moore blood, but I have forgotten.

  George Moore had a ceaseless preoccupation with painting and the theatre, within certain limits a technical understanding of both; whatever idea possessed him, courage and explosive power; but sacrificed all that seemed to other men good breeding, honour, friendship, in pursuit of what he considered the root facts of life. I had seen him once in the Cheshire Cheese. I had with me some proof-sheets of the Ellis and Yeats study of Blake’s philosophy, and the drooping tree on the second page of The Book of Thel stirred him to eloquence. His ‘How beautiful, how beautiful’ is all I can remember. Then one evening, in a narrow empty street between Fleet Street and the river, I heard a voice resounding as if in a funnel, someone in a hansom cab was denouncing its driver, and Moore drove by. Then I met him in Arthur Symons’ flat in the Temple. He threw himself into a chair with the remark: ‘I wish that woman would wash’. He had just returned from an assignation with his mistress, a woman known to Symons personally, to me by repute, an accomplished, witty, somewhat fashionable woman. All his friends suffered in some way; good behaviour was no protection, for it was all chance whether the facts he pursued were in actual life or in some story that amused him. Had ‘that woman’ prided herself upon her cleanliness, he would, had he decided upon a quarrel, have said with greater publicity: ‘I wish that woman would wash’. His pursuit had now and then unfortunate results. ‘What has depressed you, Moore?’ said an acquaintance. ‘I have been paying attention to a certain woman. I had every reason to think she liked me. I came to the point to-day and was turned down completely.”You must have said something wrong.”No, what I said was all right.”What was it?”I said I was clean and healthy and she could not do better.’ Upon occasion it made him brutal and witty. He and I went to the town of Galway for a Gaelic festival that coincided with some assembly of priests. When we lunched at the Railway Hotel the room was full of priests. A Father Moloney, supposed to know all about Greek Art, caught sight of Moore and introduced himself. He probably knew nothing about Moore, except that he was some kind of critic, for he set out upon his favourite topic with: ‘I have always considered it a proof of Greek purity that though they left the male form uncovered, they invariably draped the female’. ‘Do you consider, Father Moloney,’ said Moore in a voice that rang through the whole room, ‘that the female form is inherently more indecent than the male?’ Every priest turned a stern and horrified eye upon Father Moloney, who sat hunched up and quivering.

  I have twice known Moore alarmed and conscience-struck, when told that he had injured somebody’s financial prospects--- a financial prospect is a root fact---but he attacked with indifference so long as nothing suffered but his victim’s dignity or feelings. To injure a famous scholar in a quarrel not his he had printed all the scandalous stories he could rake together, or invent, in a frenzy of political hatred. I had remonstrated in vain, except that he cut out a passage describing his victim as ‘a long pink pig’, yet when he thought he might have deprived that scholar of a post he was miserable.

  He had gone to Paris straight from his father’s racing stables, from a house where there was no culture, as Symons and I understood that word, acquired copious inaccurate French, sat among art students, young writers about to become famous, in some cafee; a man carved out of a turnip, looking out of astonished eyes. I see him as that circle saw him, for I have in memory Manet’s caricature. He spoke badly and much in a foreign tongue, read nothing, and was never to attain the discipline of style. ‘I wrote a play in French,’ he said, ‘before I had seen dialogue on paper.’ I doubt if he had read a play of Shakespeare’s even at the end of his life. He did not know that style existed until he returned to Ireland in middle life; what he learned, he learned from conversation, from acted plays, from pictures. A revolutionary in revolt against the ignorant Catholicism of Mayo, he chose for master Zola as another might have chosen Karl Marx. Even to conversation and acted plays, he gave an inattentive ear, instincts incapable of clear expression deafened him and blinded him; he was Milton’s lion rising up, pawing out of the earth, but, unlike that lion, stuck half-way. He reached to middle life ignorant even of small practical details. He said to a friend: ‘How do you keep your pants from falling about your knees?”O’, said the friend, ‘I put my braces through the little tapes that are sewn there for the purpose.’ A few days later, he thanked the friend with emotion. Upon a long country bicycle ride with another friend, he had stopped because his pants were about his knees, had gone behind a hedge, had taken them off, and exchanged them at a cottage for a tumbler of milk. Only at pictures did he look undeafened and unblinded, for they impose their silence upon us. His Modern Painting has colloquial animation and surprise that might have grown into a roundness and ripeness of speech that is a part of style had not ambition made him in later life prefer sentences a Dublin critic has compared to ribbons of tooth-paste squeezed out of a tube. When the Irish Theatre was founded, he had published A Mummefs Wife, which had made a considerable sensation, for it was the first realistic novel in the language, the first novel where every incident was there not because the author thought it beautiful, exciting or amusing, but because certain people who were neither beautiful, exciting, nor amusing must have acted in that way: the root facts of life, as they are known to the greatest number of people, that and nothing else. Balzac would have added his wisdom. Moore had but his blind ambition. Esther Waters should have been a greater novel, for the scene is more varied. Esther is tempted to steal a half-crown; Balzac might have made her steal it and keep our sympathy, but Moore must create a personification of motherly goodness, almost an abstraction. Five years later he begged a number of his friends to read it. ‘I have just read it’, he said. ‘It has done me good, it radiates goodness.’ He had wanted to be good as the mass of men understand goodness. In later life he wrote a long preface to prove that he had a mistress in Mayfair.

  VIII

  I knew nothing of Moore at the time I write of except what Symons or Martyn told me, or I had learnt from his occasional articles. I had read no book of his, nor would I, had he not insisted, for my sympathies were narrow. I cared for nothing but poetry or prose that shared its intensity. Florence Farr and I had just begun that attempt described in Speaking to the Psaltery to revive the ancient art of minstrelsy. Florence Farr
had ruined her career by premature success. For ten years she had played a series of parts, which had through their association with controversial movements attained great publicity. I remember most vividly her performance in Arms and the Man and in Rosmersholm, but most of all her first success in Dr. Todhunter’s Sicilian Idyll. Because she could not accept less than twenty pounds a week without loss of status and got it but rarely, she was doomed to remain an amateur. Yet her voice was among the most beautiful of her time, her elocution, her mastery of poetical rhythm incomparable.

  IX

  To remind myself of these and other events I have been looking through the letters I wrote to Lady Gregory during those first years of our friendship. She was now at Coole, now at Queen Anne’s Mansions, now in Paris, I at 18 Woburn Buildings, London, or with an uncle at Sligo. On the ground floor at Woburn Buildings lived a shoemaker; on the first floor a workman and his family; I on the second floor; in the attic an old pedlar, who painted a little in water-colours. I wrote in one of the earliest letters: ‘I have measured the window’ (Lady Gregory must have given me the great blue curtain that was a principal feature there for twenty years). ‘Ought I to let you do all these kind things for me?... I have reasoned myself out of the instincts and rules by which one mostly surrounds oneself. I have nothing but reason to trust to, and so am in continual doubt about simple things.’

  Presently she gave me a great leather arm-chair which is before my eyes at this moment. From her came the great collection of folklore that, turned into essays for the monthly reviews, brought ten or fifteen pounds at a time. Then one night when she and the other guests had gone I found twenty pounds behind my clock. I went to see her and tried to return it. ‘You must take this money’, she said. ‘You should give up journalism. The only wrong act that matters is not doing one’s best work.’ She had that test for everyone. We were all like packets of herbs, each with its special quality. From time to time from that on she gave me money. I was not to consider it a loan, though I might return it some day if well off. When I finished my first lecture tour in the United States, the winter of 1903-04, I tried to return it, but she said: ‘Not until I think you have enough money to feel independent’. I inherited a little money from a relative, but she still refused. Four or five years later she consented. I asked how much; she said, ‘Five hundred’. It was a shock to find I owed so much. I wrote to an American lecture agent, earned the money and paid it back. That I am ashamed of that long debt to so dear a friend, that I have told it after a struggle with myself, puts me to shame. Of still greater service were those summers at Coole. For twenty years I spent two or three months there in every year. Because of those summers, because of that money, I was able through the greater part of my working life to write without thought of anything but the beauty or the utility of what I wrote. Until I was nearly fifty, my writing never brought me more than two hundred a year, and most often less, and I am not by nature economical.

  I wrote from Sligo of my uncle George Pollexfen (I have described him in The Trembling of the Veil): ‘He is just at this moment in one of his bad fits owing to the fact that the inhabitants attack him as they cannot get at me. He brought me to a Masonic concert on Thursday. Somebody sang a stage Irishman’s song---the usual whiskey, shillelagh kind of thing---and I hissed him, and lest my hiss might be lost in the general applause, waited until the applause had died down and hissed again. That gave somebody also courage, and we both hissed. My uncle defends me, but says that he makes a poor hand of it and gets beaten.’

  Then I wrote about ‘A great battle with George Armstrong’ (Professor of Literature at Cork; author of a trilogy, Saul, David, Solomon). ‘He lectured on The Two Irelands, or Ireland in Literature, and his whole lecture was an attack on the “Celtic Movement”, full of insinuations about conspiracies to prevent his success as a poet, to keep him out of anthologies, etc. I replied with a great deal of fierceness, described the barrenness of the so-called intellect of Ireland, told him that all the cleverest of the young men were leaving him and coming to us. I then attacked his scholarship and showed that his knowledge of Irish things was of the most obsolete kind. I believe I was unanswerable. At any rate Armstrong made no attempt to reply, but excused himself because of the lateness of the hour, which was weak as he had brought the contest upon himself, and made the hour late by speaking for two hours. Father Barry, who was in the chair, said afterwards: “Thank you for your speech. I agree with almost every word of it.” I was glad of this, as it was probably the fiercest the Society had ever heard.’

  Then I told how I had taken the chair at some public meeting in London where speakers talked open sedition: ‘A principal speaker was the Vicar of Plumpton, who advised everybody to buy a breechloader and prepare for the day of battle and wound up by singing a patriotic song, apparently of his own making.... I was in such a rage that I forgot to put the Resolutions.’ Then I described old Cipriani, who spoke as though he stood ‘on a battlefield, and he has stood on fifty’. A magnificent-looking old man, a friend of Garibaldi, he had gone all over the world fighting for liberty, and Maud Gonne had brought him to Ireland to work out a scheme for insurrection, then to some London Irish to make his report. In one letter I used a phrase Lady Gregory was often to chaff me about, though never to repudiate: ‘In a battle like Ireland’s, which is one of poverty against wealth, we must prove our sincerity by making ourselves unpopular to wealth. We must accept the baptism of the gutter. Have not all the leaders done that?’

  Then an adventure: ‘Yesterday I was in a tea-shop’, I wrote from London, ‘when a woman with an obvious look of the country introduced herself to me as a Gaelic Leaguer, and straightway introduced me to two friends, a man and a woman who had an equally country look. They told me with wonderful brogues that they were on their way to the Paris Exhibition, and wanted to shake hands with me. They had a great deal to say about the Movement and talked very fast for fear I might go before they had said it. What they said was chiefly about a play in Irish to be acted in Macroom next Monday. It is by one Father Peter O’Leary, and is about a man who lived in Macroom and arranged his own funeral to escape the bailiff. There was immense local enthusiasm over it, and deep indignation among the descendants of the bailiff.’

  There is an allusion to the Cabbalistic Society, which had taught me methods of meditation that had greatly affected my thought. A talented girl I had tried to find work for had after years of victorious prudery become the mistress of a drunken scoundrel, and advertised the fact everywhere, even pouring out tea with his arm round her waist. ‘Because she has enough genius’, I wrote, ‘to make her thirst for reality, and not enough intellect to understand the temporal use of unreal things, she is throwing off every remnant of respectability.’ Presently, from excitability, shock, bewilderment at her private circle, which had no objection to lovers but much to that particular lover, her health broke down. Then the Cabbalistic Society took her affairs in hand, a rich member had ‘collected all her unpaid bills... another mystic sees her to-day and will give her whatever help may be wanted. These mystics will not bemoralize her, which her other friends have been doing, especially Lady ---.’ (She had denounced the crime of picking the wrong man. Her own entanglement was notorious but exalted.) ‘For their faith makes them look on everything in the world as so wrong that the conventional errors seem to them trivial, and all defiance meritorious. They keep their morality for each other, and are firmly divided just now into the compassionate who lack idealism, and the idealists who lack compassion---Moore’s “Idle Devout”; and --- has been handed over to the compassionate, to the joy of the “Idle Devout” who are anxious to be forgotten by their enemies.’ A year or two later I was to describe her crying over Wilde’s death: ‘“He was so kind, nobody ever lived who was so kind”. As she said it I thought of Homer’s description of the captive women: “Weeping in seeming for Patroclus, yet each weeping for her own sorrow, because he was ever kind”.’ I wrote to Lady Gregory about this girl, because I was cert
ain of her sympathy, yet those who did not know her thought her stern. A beautiful woman, whose love affairs were notorious, once said to me: ‘When I got into the train at Broadstone, there were only two vacant places, one next Lady Gregory and one next the Bishop of Tuam. I thought “I am in for a lecture from somebody” and took the place next the Bishop, and all he said was: “Well, my child, you know a great deal more of the world than when I confirmed you”.’