by George Moore
Nettleship informed me that Yeats was writing a work on Blake, and the moment Blake’s name was mentioned Yeats seemed altogether to forget the food before him, and very soon we were deep in a discussion regarding the Book of Thel, which Nettleship said was Blake’s most effectual essay in metre. The designs that accompanied Blake’s texts were known to me, and when the waiter brought us our steaks, Blake was lost sight of in the interest of the food, and in our interest in Yeats’s interpretation of Blake’s teaching.
But as the dinner at the Cheshire Cheese was given so that I should make Yeats’s acquaintance, Nettleship withdrew from the conversation, leaving me to continue it, expecting, no doubt, that the combat of our wits would provide him with an entertainment as exciting as that of the cock-fights which used to take place a century ago in the adjoining yard. So there was no choice for me but to engage in disputation or to sulk, and the reader will agree that I did well to choose the former course, though the ground was all to my disadvantage, my knowledge of Blake being but accidental. There was however, no dread of combat in me, my adversary not inspiring the belief that he would prove a stout one, and feeling sure that without difficulty I could lay him dead before Nettleship, I rushed at him, all my feathers erect. Yeats parried a blow on which I counted, and he did this so quickly and with so much ease that he threw me at once. A dialectician, I muttered, of the very first rank; one of a different kind from any I have met before; and a little later I began to notice that Yeats was sparring beautifully, avoiding my rushes with great ease, evidently playing to tire me, with the intention of killing me presently with a single spur stroke. In the bout that ensued I was nearly worsted, but at the last an answer shot into my mind. Yeats would have discovered its weakness in a moment, and I might have fared ill, so it was a relief to me to notice that he seemed willing to drop our argument about Blake and to talk about something else. He was willing to do this, perhaps because he did not care to humiliate me, or it may have been that he wearied of talking about a literature to one who was imperfectly acquainted with it, or it may have been that I made a better show in argument than I thought for.
We might indulge in endless conjectures, and the simplest course will be to assume that the word dramatic led the conversation away from Blake. In Blake there is a great deal of drama, but in Yeats, as far as I knew his poetry, there was none, and his little play The Land of Heart’s Desire did not convince me that there ever would be any; but Yeats’s idea about Yeats was different from mine. About this time he was thinking of himself as a dramatist and was anxious for me to tell him what his chances were of obtaining a hearing for a literary play in London. The Land of Heart’s Desire was not the only play he had written; there was another — a four-act play in verse, which my politeness said would give me much pleasure to read. I had met with many beautiful verses in the little volume picked up in Nettleship’s rooms. Yeats bowed his acknowledgment of my compliments, and the smile of faint gratification that trickled round his shaven lips seemed a little too dignified; nor did I fail to notice that he refrained from any mention of my own writings, and wondering how Esther Waters would strike him, I continued the conversation, finding him at every turn a more enjoying fellow than any I had met for a long time. Very soon, however, it transpired that he was allowing me to talk of the subjects that interested me, without relinquishing for a moment his intention of returning to the subject that interested him, which was to discover what his chances were of getting a verse play produced in London. Two or three times I ignored his attempts to change the conversation, but at last yielded to his quiet persistency, and treated him to an account of the Independent Theatre and of its first performance organised by me, and, warming to my subject, I told him of the play that I had agreed to write if Mr G. R. Sims would give a hundred pounds for a stall from which he might watch the performance. The stipulated price brought the desired perplexity into Yeats’s face, and it was amusing to add to his astonishment with — And I got the hundred pounds. As he was obviously waiting to hear the story of the hundred-pounds stall I told him that Sims was a popular dramatist, to whom a reporter had gone with a view to gathering his opinions regarding independent drama, and that in the course of Sims’s remarks about Ibsen, allusion had been made to the ideas expressed by me regarding literature in drama; and, as if to give point to his belief in the limitations of dramatic art, he had said that he would give a hundred pounds if Mr George Moore would write an unconventional play for the Independent Theatre. The reporter came to me with his newspaper, and after reading his interview with Mr Sims, he asked me for my answer to Mr Sims’s challenge. I am afraid Mr Sims is spoofing you. (In the ‘nineties the word spoofing replaced the old word humbug, and of late years it seems to be heard less frequently; but as it evokes a time gone by, I may be excused for reviving it here.) If you write a play, the reporter answered, Mr Sims will not refuse to give the hundred pounds.
But he asks for an unconventional play, and who is to decide what is conventional? I notice, I said, picking up the paper, that he says the scenes which stirred the audience in Hedda Gabler are precisely those that are to be found in every melodrama. Mr Sims has succeeded in spoofing you, but he will not get me to write a play for him to repudiate as conventional. No, no, I can hear him saying, the play is as conventional as the last one I wrote for the Adelphi. I’ll not pay for that.... But if Mr Sims wishes to help the independent drama, let him withdraw the word conventional or let him admit that he has been humbugging.
The reporter left me, and the next week’s issue of the paper announced that Mr Sims had withdrawn the objectionable word, and that I had laid aside my novel and was writing the play.
So did I recount the literary history of The Strike at Arlingford to Yeats, who waited, expecting that I would give him some account of the performance of the play, but remembering him as he had appeared when on exhibition at the Avenue Theatre, it seemed to me that the moment had come for me to develop my aestheticism that an author should never show himself in a theatre while his own play was being performed. Yeats was of the opinion that it was only by watching the effect of the play upon the public that an author could learn his trade. He consented, however, and very graciously, to read The Strike at Arlingford, if I would send it to him, and went away, leaving me under the impression that he looked upon himself as the considerable author, and that to meet me at dinner at the Cheshire Cheese was a condescension on his part. He had somehow managed to dissipate, and, at the same time, to revive, my first opinion of him, but I am quick to overlook faults in whoever amuses and interests me, and this young man interested me more than Edward or Symons, my boon companions at that time. He was an instinctive mummer, a real dancing dog, and the dog on his hind legs is, after all, humanity; we are all on our hind legs striving to astonish somebody, and that is why I honour respectability; if there were nobody to shock our trade would come to an end, and for this reason I am secretly in favour of all the cardinal virtues. But this young man was advertising himself by his apparel, as the Irish middle classes do when they come to London bent on literature. They come in knee-breeches, in Jaeger, in velvet jackets, and this one was clothed like a Bible reader and chanted like one in his talk. All the same, I could see that among much Irish humbug there was in him a genuine love of his art, and he was more intelligent than his verses had led me to expect. All this I admitted to Nettleship as we walked up Fleet Street together. It even seemed difficult to deny to Nettleship, when he bade me goodbye at Charing Cross, that I should like to see the young man again, and all the way back to the Temple I asked myself if I should redeem my promise and send him The Strike at Arlingford. And I might have sent it if I had happened to find a copy in my bookcase, but I never keep copies of my own books. The trouble of writing to my publisher for the play was a serious one; the postman would bring it in a brown-paper parcel which I should have to open in order to write Yeats’s name on the fly-leaf. I should have to tie the parcel up again, redirect it, and carry it to the post —
and all this trouble for the sake of an opinion which would not be the slightest use to me when I had gotten it. It was enough to know that there was such a play on my publisher’s shelves, and that a dramatic writer had paid a hundred pounds to see it. Why turn into the Vale of Yarrow, I muttered, and, rising from my table, I went to the window to watch the pigeons that were coming down from the roofs to gobble the corn a cabman was scattering for them.
Yeats was forgotten, and almost as completely as before, a stray memory of his subtle intelligence perhaps crossing my mind from time to time and a vague regret coming into it that he had dropped out of my life. But no effort was made to find him, and I did not see him again until we met at Symons’s rooms — unexpectedly, for it was for a talk with Symons before bedtime that I had walked over from King’s Bench Walk. But it was Yeats who opened the door; Symons was out, and would be back presently — he generally returned home about one. Wouldn’t I come in? We fell to talking about Symons, who spent his evenings at the Alhambra and the Empire, watching the ballet. Having written Symbolism in Literature, he was now investigating the problem of symbolism in gesture. Or was it symbolism in rhythm or rhythmic symbolism? Even among men of letters conversation would be difficult were it not for the weakness of our absent friends, and to pass the time I told Yeats of an evening I had spent with Symons at the Empire two weeks ago, and how I had gone with him after to the Rose and Crown; and thinking to amuse him I reported the nonsense I had heard spoken of over tankards of ale by various contemporary poets. He hung dreamily over the fire, and fearing that he should think I had spoken unkindly of Symons — a thing I had no intention of doing (Symons being at the time one of my greatest friends) — I spoke of the pleasure I took in his society, and then of my admiration of his prose, so distinguished, so fine, and so subtle. The Temple clock clanging out the hour interrupted my eulogy. As Symons does not seem to return, I said, I must go home to bed. Yeats begged me to stay a little longer, and tempted by the manuscripts scattered about the floor, I sat down and asked him to tell me what he had been writing. He needed no pressing to talk of his work — a trait that I like in an author, for if I do not want to hear about a man’s work I do not want to hear about himself. He told me that he was revising the stories that he had contributed to different magazines, and was writing some new ones, and together these were to form a book called The Secret Rose.
I am afraid I interrupted you.
No, I had struck work some time. I came upon a knot in one of the stories, one which I could not disentangle, at least not tonight.
I begged him to allow me to try to disentangle it, and when I succeeded, and to his satisfaction, I expected his face to light up; but it remained impassive, hieratic as ancient Egypt. Wherein now lies his difficulty? I asked myself. Being a poet, he must be able to find words, and we began to talk of the search for the right word.
Not so much the right word, Yeats interrupted, but the right language, if I were only sure of what language to put upon them.
But you don’t want to write your stories in Irish, like Edward?
A smile trickled into his dark countenance, and I heard him say that he had no Irish. It was not for a different language that he yearned, but for a style. Morris had made one to suit his stories, and I learnt that one might be sought for and found among the Sligo peasants, only it would take years to discover it, and then he would be too old to use it.
You don’t mean the brogue, the ugliest dialect in the world?
No dialect is ugly, he said; the bypaths are all beautiful. It is the broad road of the journalist that is ugly.
Such picturesqueness of speech enchants me, and the sensation was of a window being thrown suddenly open, and myself looking down some broad chase along which we would go together talking literature, I saying that very soon there would not be enough grammar left in England for literature. English was becoming a lean language. We have lost, Yeats, and I fear for ever, the second person singular of the verbs; thee and thou are only used by peasants, and the peasants use them incorrectly. In poetry, of course — Yeats shook his head — thee and thou were as impossible in verse as in prose, and the habit of English writers to allow their characters to thee and to thou each other had made the modern poetic drama ridiculous. Nor could he sympathise with me when I spoke of the lost subjunctive, and I understood him to be of the opinion that a language might lose all its grammar and still remain a vehicle for literature, the literary artist always finding material for his art in the country.
Like a landscape painter, I answered him. But we are losing our verbs, we no longer ascend and descend, we go up and we go down; birds still continue to alight, whereas human beings get out and get in.
Yeats answered that even in Shakespeare’s time people were beginning to talk of the decline of language. No language, he said, was ever so grammatical as Latin, yet the language died; perhaps from excess of grammar. It is with idiom and not with grammar that the literary artist should concern himself; and, stroking his thin yellow hands slowly, he looked into the midnight fire, regretting he had no gift to learn living speech from those who knew it — the peasants. It was only from them one could learn to write, their speech being living speech, flowing out of the habits of their lives, struck out of life itself, he said, and I listened to him telling of a volume of folklore collected by him in Sligo; a welcome change truly is such after reading the Times, and he continued to drone out his little tales in his own incomparable fashion, muttering after each one of them, like an oracle that has spent itself — a beautiful story, a beautiful story! When he had muttered these words his mind seemed to fade away, and I could not but think that he was tired and would be happier tucked up in bed. But when I rose out of my chair he begged me to remain; I would if he would tell me another story. He began one, but Symons came in in the middle of it, tired after long symbolistic studies at the Empire, and so hungry that he began to eat bread and butter, sitting opposite to us and listening to what we were saying, without, however, giving us much of his attention. He seemed to like listening to Yeats talking about style, but I gathered from his detachment that he felt his own style had been formed years ago; a thing of beauty without doubt, but accidentally bestowed upon him, so much was it at variance with his appearance and his conversation; whereas Yeats and his style were the same thing; and his strange old-world appearance and his chanting voice enabled me to identify him with the stories he told me, and so completely that I could not do otherwise than believe that Angus, Étaine, Diarmuid, Deirdre, and the rest, were speaking through him. He is a lyre in their hands; they whisper through him as the wind through the original forest; but we are plantations, and came from England in the seventeenth century. There is more race in him than in any one I have seen for a long while, I muttered, while wending my way down the long stairs, across Fountain Court, through Pump Court, by the Temple Church, under the archway into King’s Bench Walk.
It is pleasant to stay with a friend till the dusk, especially in summer; the blue dusk that begins between one and two is always wonderful; and that morning, after listening to many legends, it struck me, as I stood under the trees in King’s Bench Walk, watching the receding stars, that I had discovered at last the boon companion I had been seeking ever since I came to live in London. A boon companion is as necessary to me as a valet is to Sir William Eden. Books do not help me to while away the time left over when I am not writing, and I am fain to take this opportunity to advise everybody to attend to his taste for reading; once it is lost it is hard to recover; and believe, if in nothing else, in this, that reading is becoming an increasing necessity. The plays that entertain us are few, the operas hardly more numerous; there are not always concerts, and one cannot choose the music that shall be played if one be not a King. To have music in the evenings at home we must choose for a wife one who can play Chopin, and modern education does not seem to have increased the number of these women. One meets one, misses her, and for ever after is forced to seek literary conversation;
and literary conversation is difficult to get in London. One cannot talk literature in a club, or at a literary dinner; only with a boon companion; and my search is even a more difficult one than that of the light-o’-love who once told me that her great trouble in life was to find an amant de coeur. The confession amused me, the lady being exceedingly beautiful, but I understood her as soon as she explained all the necessary qualifications for the post. He must be in love with me, she said. As you are very polite, you will admit that there can be no difficulty about that. And I must be in love with him! Now you are beginning to understand. He must be able to give me his whole time, he must be sufficiently well off to take me out to dinner, to the theatre, to send me flowers.... Money, of course, I would not take from him.
Your trouble as you explain it is a revelation of life, I answered, but it is not greater than mine — she tossed her head — for what I am seeking in London at the present time is a boon companion. In many respects he must resemble your amant de coeur. He must like my company, and as you are very polite, you will admit there can be no difficulty about that. I shall have to enjoy his company; and so many other things are necessary that I am beginning to lose heart.
Mary pressed me to recapitulate my paragon, and to console her, for there is nothing so consoling as to find that one’s neighbour’s troubles are at least as great as one’s own, I told her that my boon companion must be between thirty and fifty. Until a man reaches the age of thirty he is but a boy, without experience of life; I’d prefer him between thirty-five and forty; and my boon companion must be a bachelor or separated from his wife. How he spends his days concerns me not, only in the evenings do I want his company — at dinner about twice a week, for it is my pleasure to prolong the evenings into the small hours of the morning, talking literature and the other arts until the mouth refuses another cigar and the eyelids are heavy with sleep. You see, he must be a smoker, preferably a cigar rather than a cigarette smoker, but I lay no stress upon that particular point. I should prefer his appearance and manner to be that of a gentleman, but this is another point upon which I lay no particular stress. His first qualification is intelligence, and amongst women you will understand me better than any other, your lovers having always been men of intellect. Any one of them would suit me very well: you have loved, I think, Adrien Marcs, Coppée, and Becque.
