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<h1>Essays Irish and American</h1>
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<p class="pfs100 p4"><i>First Edition, May, 1918.</i><br/>
<i>Reprinted, December, 1918.</i></p>
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<p class="pfs120">JOHN BUTLER YEATS</p>
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<p class="pfs240 p2">Essays<br/>
Irish and American</p>
<p class="pfs120 p1">By</p>
<p class="pfs180"><span class="smcap">John Butler Yeats, r.h.a.</span></p>
<p class="pfs135 p2">With an Appreciation by Æ</p>
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<table class="narrow30" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="Publication Houses">
<tr><td class="tdc fs100">DUBLIN</td><td class="tdc fs100 bl">LONDON</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdc fs100">The Talbot Press Ltd.</td><td class="tdc fs100 bl">T. Fisher Unwin Ltd.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdc fs100">89 Talbot Street</td><td class="tdc fs100 bl">1 Adelphi Terrace</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tdc fs120" colspan="2">1918</td></tr>
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<p class="pfs120 p4">“<ins class="corrx" title="“I am human, and think nothing human is alien to me.”"><i>Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto.</i></ins>”</p>
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<h2 class="no-brk"><SPAN name="Contents" id="Contents">Contents</SPAN></h2>
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<table class="narrow30" border="0" width="65%" summary="Contents">
<tr><td class="tdl"></td><td class="tdr fs60">Page</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl"><SPAN href="#AN_APPRECIATION">An Appreciation</SPAN></td><td class="tdr">5</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl"><SPAN href="#RECOLLECTIONS_OF_SAMUEL_BUTLER">Recollections of Samuel Butler</SPAN></td><td class="tdr">9</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl"><SPAN href="#BACK_TO_THE_HOME">Back to the Home</SPAN></td><td class="tdr">23</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl"><SPAN href="#WHY_THE_ENGLISHMAN_IS_HAPPY">Why the Englishman is Happy</SPAN></td><td class="tdr">37</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl"><SPAN href="#SYNGE_AND_THE_IRISH">Synge and the Irish</SPAN></td><td class="tdr">51</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl"><SPAN href="#THE_MODERN_WOMAN">The Modern Woman</SPAN></td><td class="tdr">63</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tdl"><SPAN href="#WATTS_AND_THE_METHOD_OF_ART">Watts and the Method of Art</SPAN></td><td class="tdr">75</td></tr>
</table></div>
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<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Front_Matter" id="Front_Matter"></SPAN></span></p>
<div class="blockquotx">
<p class="drop-capy1 fs90 p3">FOUR of the following Essays have
appeared in <i class="bold">Harper’s Weekly</i> and one in
<i class="bold">The Seven Arts</i>. The
<ins class="corr" title="Transcriber’s Note—“The thanks The Talbot Press, Limited” changed to “The thanks of The Talbot Press, Limited”.">thanks of The Talbot Press</ins>,
Limited, are due to the proprietors and editors of both Journals,
for permission to reprint.</p>
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<h2 class="no-brk"><SPAN name="AN_APPRECIATION" id="AN_APPRECIATION">AN APPRECIATION</SPAN></h2>
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<p class="pfirst">E admire some because of their accomplishment,
others because of what they
are. I admire Mr. John Yeats as an
artist as much as any, but I feel that
nature’s best gift to him was a humanity which
delights in the humanity of others. Few artists I
think found it more easy to be interested in the
people they met or painted. All his portraits,
whether of men or women, seem touched with
affection. Rarely has he pourtrayed any, young or
old, where something like a soul does not look at
us through the eyes. I have liked people after
seeing Mr. Yeats’ portraits of them, and I am sure
I would not have liked them so much if I had not
first looked at them with his vision. In his delightful
letters, of which extracts have been already
published, and in his essays he lets us unconsciously
into the secret of his meditation about his sitters.
He is always discriminating between themselves
and their ideas, searching for some lovable natural
life. He complains in one of his essays that the<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</SPAN></span>
American women whom he admires cannot be
easily natural. They want so much to be the ideal
daughter or the ideal wife or the ideal friend that
poor ordinary human nature is not good enough for
them. He perhaps never heard of Laotze—how few
people know of that fount of wisdom—but Mr.
Yeats, who is, I fancy, unhappy in the society of
metaphysicians, economists or theorists, would, I
believe, have loved the Chinese sage who made a
religion with this law, “Be ye natural.” All the
other religions draw us away from hearth and home
and love and dominate us by an overlaw, but Laotze
alone among religious teachers heaves a sigh when
he hears of someone setting out to reform the world
because he knows there will be no end to it. When
Laotze says in his ideal state people would be
contented in themselves, think their poor clothes
beautiful and their plain food sweet, I think of Mr.
Yeats and his fear that the reformer will improve
the Irish peasant off the face of the earth. He
delights in him as he is. Why should anybody
want to alter what is already natural, wild and
eloquent? To be primitive is to be unspoiled. Mr.
Yeats seems to be seeking everywhere in art and
letters for the contours and emotions which are the
natural mould of face or mind. Mr. Orpen can
astonish us with technical accomplishment and Mr.
John with masterly drawing, but if we look at the
face of a woman painted by Mr. Yeats we will be
attracted, not by the transient interest of novelty in
treatment, but because of some ancient and sweet<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</SPAN></span>
tradition of womanhood in the face, the eyes, the
lips. We find the eyes so kind that it is so we
imagine mothers or wives from the beginning of
time have looked upon their children or have
bewitched men to build about them the shelter of
home and civilisation. Mr. Yeats in his art had
this intimacy with the heart’s desire, which is not
external beauty, as those who have degenerated art
into the pourtrayal of prettiness suppose, but beauty
of spirit. Those who knew Mr. Yeats will remember
that enchanting flow of conversation which
lightened the burden of sitting; and nature was wise
in uniting the gift of conversation with the gift of
portrait painting, because the artist was so happy in
his art and so reluctant to finish his work; without
that grace of speech few sitters could have endured
to the end with an artist always following up some
new light of the soul, obliterating what already
seemed beautiful to substitute some other expression
which seemed more natural or characteristic. To
those who knew Mr. Yeats these essays will recall
that conversation with which we did not always
agree but which always excited us and started us
thinking on our own account. The reader will find
here thoughts which are profound, said so simply
that their wisdom might be overlooked, and also
much delightful folly uttered with such vivacity and
gaiety that it seems to have the glow of truth.
Perhaps these fantasies and freaks of judgment are
as good as if they were true. One of the most
delightful inventions of nature is the kitten chasing<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</SPAN></span>
its own tail, and this and many other inventions of
nature seem to indicate that a beautiful folly is one
of the many aspects of wisdom. What is it but
mere delight in life for its own sake, in invention for
its own sake, or, as Mr. Yeats puts it elsewhere, a
disinterested love of mischief for its own dear sake.
How dear that is to us Irish who have often had
nothing but love of mischief to console us when all
the substantial virtues and prizes of life had been
amassed by our neighbours. How witty Mr. Yeats
is those who read these essays will discover.
“When a belief rests on nothing you cannot knock
away its foundations,” he says, perhaps half slyly
thinking how secure were some of his own best
sayings from attack. I refuse to argue over or
criticise the philosophy of the man who wrote
that, for I do not know how to get at him. I am
content to enjoy, as I am sure his friends will, and
new friends also who will be made by a reading of
this book, and who will be grateful to Mrs. Bellinger
of New York, who cut out and preserved from various
papers these essays as they appeared; for the
writer, unlike the kitten, had no interest in chasing
his own tail, and had forgotten what he had written
or where it had appeared. Gathered in one book
these essays reflect a light upon each other and recreate
for us a personality which has deserted
Dublin, but which none who knew would wish to
forget.</p>
<p class="right">A. E.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</SPAN></span></p>
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<h2 class="no-brk"><SPAN name="RECOLLECTIONS_OF_SAMUEL_BUTLER" id="RECOLLECTIONS_OF_SAMUEL_BUTLER">RECOLLECTIONS OF SAMUEL BUTLER</SPAN></h2>
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<p class="pfirst"> knew Butler. In the year 1867-68 I was
a pupil at Heatherleigh’s Art School,
Newman Street, London, and Butler
was there also. It is not true that
Butler had talent. To be a painter after the manner
of John Bellini was for years the passion of his life.
It was vain; he had no talent. At the time I knew
him he was beginning to see this and it was
pathetic! We tried to comfort him and would have
cheered him with false hopes. All the intellect in
the world won’t make a painter if it is not the right
kind of intellect.</p>
<p>A Scotch friend of mine and his, whom Butler
loved because of his knowledge of music, would
sometimes say, “Yes, Mr. Butler, you are a
dominie”—and he would chuckle slowly in his
Scotch manner. Like a dominie he kept us all in
order. We called each other briefly by our surnames
without the prefix of the Mr.—Butler was<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</SPAN></span>
always <em>Mr.</em> Butler. Once a daring citizen of London
ventured, “Have you been to the Alhambra,
Butler?” He pronounced it “Al’ambra”—that
gave Butler his opportunity. The Englishman in
possession of all his aitches can always hold the
many in check because of their deficiency in aitches.
“Is there an aitch in the word?” said Butler. Never
again did my poor friend venture, or for that matter
any of us.</p>
<p>The Irishman likes his equal and is, as every one
admits, the best of comrades; the German likes his
superior; but the Englishman likes to be with his
inferior and is not comfortable in any other relation.
He is sent to the public school and the university by
his anxious parents and guardians that he may
acquire the superior manner. There are two sneers
in England, the cockney variety which no one
respects, and the university and public school sneer
which compels respect, even among foreigners. It
impressed Goethe. The footman puts it on but
overdoes it, so that at a glance we know it to be
counterfeit. Butler was the politest, the most ceremonious
of men, but the sneer was there and all the
more palpable because so carefully veiled.</p>
<p>We were art students and tried to be Bohemian,
or would have done so had not Butler been one of
us. There was a student whom he much liked; one
day he took him in hand and in his most paternal
manner admonished him that he must not use the<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</SPAN></span>
word “chap.” Butler was an Englishman through
and through and an Englishman of “class.” The
Englishman of class will part with his faith, with his
wife and children, with his money, even, or his
reputation and be cheerful about it, but closer than
his skin sticks to him his class conceit; and in his
accent, his voice, his gestures, his phrases he carefully
preserves all its insignia. Possessed of these
he knows he may go anywhere and associate with
anyone; it is a passport entitling him to a nobleman’s
freedom. Every Englishman, gentle or
simple, either by force or by patient groping will
try for a sheltered spot where he may have his own
thoughts and his own ways hampered by none.
But the Englishman of class is freest of all; a policeman,
even he, will hesitate to interfere with you if
he knows that you are a gentleman.</p>
<p>In his “Way of All Flesh,” Butler describes
English home life and he enables us to see that
affection and sympathy do not form part of it.
Butler, the product of that life, sets little importance
on either affection or sympathy; and yet there never
was a kinder man. Good nature was fundamental
in his character and was, I think, the source of most
of his writings and opinions. The English going
about life in an intensely selfish way and doing this
on principle are obliged to have strict laws strictly
enforced; yet outside these laws they claim and
allow the utmost license of action and thought. It<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</SPAN></span>
is their distinction among nations that they love
personal liberty so much,—that is for themselves,
for they are quite ready to enslave other people.
With this love for personal freedom has grown up,
side by side with it and as part and parcel of it, an
immense appreciation of human nature itself.
Against this appreciation Puritanism has vainly and
indeed dolorously struggled. Butler’s good nature
was due to his liking for human nature itself; hence
his zeal against all the conventions and illusions and
veiling “respectabilities” that would snatch from
human nature its proper food.</p>
<p>The continental nations may hate human nature
and produce their Goyas, but such art among
Englishmen excites only a lazy contempt. Notwithstanding
their passion for law and rule, a necessary
thing among people so selfishly bent on their own
gains, the Englishman does not actually hate his
neighbour, even though he keeps aloof from him.
He has indeed a genial relish for the selfishness in
his neighbour which is so strong in himself.
Edmund Burke has some such sentence as “the <em>good
nature</em> and integrity of this ancient people.”
The Dutch, being a freedom-loving people, have
a similar good nature. Rembrandt and Shakespeare
get artistic pleasure out of the ugly but
with laughter, not as in Goya with a grin of
hatred. Indeed, looking at some of Goya’s
work, one is forced to believe that he hated<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</SPAN></span>
even the people who looked at his pictures and wished through them
to insult and offend all his friends,—a kind of disorderly
impulse which in him and others prompts to the disgusting and
obscene in art. Butler’s emancipated intellect had won for his soul
and senses a freedom which he wished to share with others; he had
as it were acquired a freedom to be on good terms with himself.
To be sure, a Scotchman is on good terms with himself when he is
conceited. Butler wanted people to be on good terms with their
senses and appetites and everything else that goes into our
<ins class="corr" title="Transcriber’s Note—Period at end of “make-up as men” changed to comma.">make-up as men</ins>,
to all of which Scotch conceit is the enemy. For this he was always
fighting, and he began to fight at Heatherleigh’s Art School.
He found us, as he thought, enslaved by this or that convention
or illusion and by his mockeries and his wit worked for our
liberation.</p>
<p>He always occupied one place in the school
chosen so that he could be as close as possible to the
model and might paint with small brushes his kind
of John Bellini art. There he would stand very
intent and mostly quite silent, intent also on our
casual conversation, watchful for the moment when
he could make some sally of wit that would crush
his victim. He had thick eyebrows and grey eyes,—or
were they light hazel? These eyes would
sometimes look tired as he plied his hopeless task
of learning how to paint. But the discovery of any<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</SPAN></span>
mental slavery or insincerity among our band of
students would bring a dangerous light into them,
and he would say things that perhaps hurt very
much men who were absolutely sincere, however
mistaken. Then Butler, who respected, as he often
told me, every kind of sincerity, would humble
himself and make apologies that were not always
accepted, and in the grey eyes, like a little fire on a
cold hearth, I would see a melting kindness that it
must have been hard to resist. The virtuous are
not always the generous, neither are they always
as wise as Solomon.</p>
<p>At that time I was a very busy student working
from morning to night, otherwise I should have tried
to see more of Butler. There is nothing so winning
as a look of helpful kindness in a mocking face.
Besides, he was a good deal my senior and seniority
is attractive to ingenuous youth; and I was then
ingenuous. I sometimes think I have lost all my
opportunities; the chance of knowing Butler well
was one of these. Slowly I have come to feel that
affection for human nature which is at the root of all
poetry and art, whether the poet be pessimist or
optimist. Had I stayed much with Butler I should
have learned my lesson almost at once. Matthew
Arnold’s “sweetness and light” was not much to
his taste, and he cared nothing for the high ethics of
Wordsworth. An affectionate mother, such as we
have among the peasants of Ireland, where mother-love<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</SPAN></span>
is a passion, does not want her children to be
good half as much as she wants them to be happy.
It was so Butler regarded poor, struggling and
deceived human nature. <em>There</em> was the source of
his “good nature” and of his influence. In this
he was pre-eminently English of the English, and in
this there was nothing of the system maker or the
philanthropist. Nor was he a philosopher or anything
else except a mere man touching and handling
the concrete matters of everyday life. With tenderness
of humour and a most real poetry he touched,
healingly, all the sores of ailing humanity.</p>
<p>Butler liked women but disapproved of marriage.
He liked women because, as I heard him say, they
are so good natured. They would laugh with him
but never at him. Then they are obedient and
teachable and the dominie within him liked pupils.
His attitude towards them was a smiling indulgence.
The charming women of those backward days were
still in the Middle Ages, apologetic, almost penitential,
as if they asked pardon for being so beautiful
or so merry and engaging, and did not a bit mind
if Butler regarded them as inferior, especially as
towards them he was always kindly and fatherly and
innocent. It is quite easy to see why Butler disliked
marriage; it would have curtailed his freedom to
follow out all his queer vagaries of Butlerian thought
and inclination. This consideration does not affect
the ordinary Englishman of coarser grain, tenacious<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</SPAN></span>
of his ancient right to do what he likes with his
own, his own being his wife and children and
servants and “all that he possesses.” The ordinary
Englishman lives alone in his English home, lord
and master of it, with his wife second in command.
Butler, of course, could not so live; therefore to
keep his liberty he dismissed forever the thought of
a married home. Had he married I have no doubt
he would have chosen a helpmate not likely to
dispute his supremacy. I knew Miss Savage, the
model for his good woman in “The Way of All
Flesh.” She was a student at the art school and
not very young, and she was lame; life had disciplined
her. She was fair, with a roundish face
and light blue eyes that were very sensitive and full
of light; a small head, her features charmingly
mobile and harmonious. She radiated goodness
and sense. She kept herself very much to herself,
yet all liked her, even though we never spoke to her.
Butler soon discovered that she laughed easily; but
as usual he was cautious. One day he consulted me
as to whether he could with safety ask her a school-boy
riddle he had picked up somewhere, a school-boy
riddle in that, though quite innocent, it was not
altogether nice. I don’t remember how I advised,
only that they became fast friends.</p>
<p>Though he avoided marriage, his flesh was weak.
“I have a little needle-woman, a good little thing.
I have given her a sewing machine. I go to see<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</SPAN></span>
her.” As he made his confession he retired backwards,
bowing his head several times as in mockery
of himself and acknowledgment of a sad necessity
from which even he was not exempt. For it was
given to him also to tread “The Way of All Flesh.”
It was always part of his philosophy that he should
confess his sins, besides being a necessity to his
social nature and one of his most engaging qualities.</p>
<p>Though he professed to despise Greek plays he
was a good classical scholar. Outside the classics
he had read nothing except Shakespeare and “The
Origin of Species” and the Bible. For him “The
Origin of Species” was the book of books. If he
took a fancy to a student he would watch him for a
few days and then approach him with cautious
ceremony—he was always ceremonious—and ask
him if he had read <em>the book</em> and perhaps offer to
lend it to him. I am proud to remember that he
lent it to me. “The Origin of Species” had, as he
told me, completely destroyed his belief in a personal
God; so occasionally instead of the usual
question he would ask the student if he believed in
God. In this he did not confine himself to students.
There was a nude model named Moseley who often
sat to us at Heatherleigh’s. He liked this model,
in whom he found a whimsical uprightness that
appealed to his sense of things. Once in the deep
silence of the class I heard him asking, “Moseley,
do you believe in God?” Without altering a<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</SPAN></span>
muscle or a change of expression, Moseley replied,
“No, sir, don’t believe in old Bogey.” The form
of the answer was unexpected; its cheerful cockney
impudence was beyond even Butler’s reach of
courage. He retired in confusion, and we laughed.
We liked a laugh at Butler’s expense. Besides, in
those days most of us were orthodox; in fact had
never given a thought to the question of Deity. But
that fear kept them quiet, there were some valiant
spirits who would have cried out against him, since
then as well as now, in America as well as in
England, an orthodox inertia was characteristic of
artists. They do not go to church, they never give
a thought to religion, but they are profoundly
orthodox in a deep, untroubled somnolency. I
remember that one man, a very successful student,
did engage in controversy and was highly sentimental
in a dandified, affected way. Butler’s reply
was one word repeated several times—“Pooh!”
that ended it. I have no doubt that that gentleman
still retains his orthodoxy. When a belief rests on
nothing you cannot knock away its foundations.</p>
<p>Butler’s father was a wealthy dean of the Church
of England, and, I fancy, pompous and authoritative.
He told me that his father never became
excited unless the dinner was late. When he broke
away from orthodoxy and announced his intention
of becoming an artist instead of a clergyman, his
family refused him all assistance. Nor is it true<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</SPAN></span>
that his father helped him in his New Zealand
venture. He himself told me that he managed to
borrow from friends £10,000, and that he was more
proud of that than of anything else in his life. He
stayed in New Zealand four years, after which a
lucky turn on the market enabled him to return to
England and repay the money, while keeping
enough to support himself in his pursuit of art. He
liked to tell of his New Zealand life and of his
hatred of sheep. They were always getting lost, so
that he said the word “sheep” would be found
engraved on his heart. He did not know one of his
horses from another or from anybody else’s horse,
and said he was like the Lord, whose delight is not
in the strength of a horse.</p>
<p>Sam Butler’s desire for truth and his stripping
away from life and belief all the veils of illusion was
the characteristic of a man truly poetic. He and
his pupil, G. B. Shaw, by their passion for sincerity,
help the imaginative life. When Michael Angelo
maintained that only the Italians understood art,
Vittoria Colonna pointed out that the German pictures
touched the feelings. “Yes,” he replied,
“because of the weakness of our sensibilities.”
Poetry and the imaginative life can only flourish
where truth is of supreme moment; an education
which contents itself with half-knowledge and half-thought
will inevitably produce a crowd of sentimentalists
and false poets and rhetoricians. The<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</SPAN></span>
great artist and the great poet have rigorous minds.
Michael Angelo said of those German pictures that
they were only fit for “women, ecclesiastics and
people of quality.” After all a poet must believe,
and without rigorous thinking there is no sense of
belief.</p>
<p>To know things thoroughly, or not at all,—this
was the habit of Butler’s mind, derived from his
classical education, in which the whole stress is on
the minutiæ of scholarship. For instance, he told
me that he never studied music till he was twenty-one
years of age, after which he gave to it every
moment he could spare. Yet he only cared for
Händel, content that all the rest should be to him
an unknown world. What he could not study
thoroughly he would not study at all. In his eyes
superficial knowledge was superficial ignorance and
the mental habits engendered by it disastrous.
Among painters he valued chiefly those who, like
John Bellini, are thorough to minuteness. Though
he professed to despise style he was a precisian in
words. At a restaurant which he and I frequented
for our midday meal he met a man who said he
never “used” hasty pudding. This application of
the verb “use” was to him a source of endless
amusement. I have heard him tell the story many
times.</p>
<p>I think he read Shakespeare continually. I know
he read no other poetry, although he did glance<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</SPAN></span>
once a little wistfully at Whitman,—“the catalogue
man,” he called him. All the same he was a
genuine Englishman and brooded in the imaginative
mood of a self-centred solitude which could not
be shared with anyone, as the sympathetic Frenchman
lives in the imaginative mood of an expansive
existence which he would share with everyone.</p>
<p>I remember the last time I saw Butler. I was
sitting at breakfast, alone, in a lodging in an out of
the way part of London, having come from Ireland
the night before after an absence of seven or eight
years. I saw him passing and in glad surprise at
once raised the window, meaning to hail him. But
I reflected sadly and changed my mind, closing the
window and returning to my breakfast, as I thought:
“God forbid that I should intrude myself uninvited
on any Englishman.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</SPAN></span><br/>
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</SPAN></span></p>
</div>
<hr class="chap" />
<h2 class="no-brk"><SPAN name="BACK_TO_THE_HOME" id="BACK_TO_THE_HOME">BACK TO THE HOME</SPAN></h2>
<div class="figleft"> <ANTIMG src="images/i_023.png" width-obs="89" height-obs="90" alt="E" /></div>
<p class="pfirst">VERYWHERE or almost everywhere
among English-speaking peoples the
monarchical principle is under notice to
quit. In the school it is the boy and not
the master who rules; even in the courts the judges
interpreting the law go cautiously, in fear of public
disfavour; finally, change has reached the home and
the family, which were wont to be a dual monarchy—the
mother ruling within the house and the father
his own world outside. Just as business is a matter
of committees and syndicates and corporations—the
individual man a mere wheel or pulley in some
immense machine which is controlled by a cold-blooded
arithmetician—so, inside the home, the
mother is superseded by an expert, some specialist
in up-to-date science or quackery who occupies her
place and asks to sit where she sat. Can we wonder
that she sometimes leaves vacant her chair and goes
in pursuit of distraction?</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>It is a curious change and means much; for one
thing, the world has lost its two most picturesque
figures—the master of the house and its mistress.
When hospitality was hospitality, it meant that you
were admitted for a brief while to bask in the smiles
of two gracious sovereigns—the lord and the lady
of the house that entertained you—their good-will,
radiating forth to warm you, the real attraction, to
which the wine and the food and the guests were
only secondary, so much heart on their side creating
a heart within your own narrow ribs. Now all is
changed, and the entertainment is more important
than the entertainers. We come to be pleased, we
no longer come to please; the old delicious autocracy
with its smiling court of sympathetic and affectionate
guests has tumbled into the dust, the feelings of
host and hostess, the home cookery and the old-fashioned
house with its gathered associations are
nothing to us; we demand to dine where the food
and drink are up to date, so we dine at a restaurant,
where are noise, distraction and confusion. I
myself would sooner dine in a good man’s kitchen.
Personal rule is at an end. The host used authoritatively
to lead the talking and the hostess controlled
it, for, though too busy to talk, she was never too
busy to listen, and the guests took care that the
conversation flowed in her direction and sought her
approval. In my youth, after the dinner-things
were removed, we sat around an ancient mahogany<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</SPAN></span>
table, on which there was not, as in later times, any
garish white cloth. It would have been gloomy
but for the many-coloured reflections cast into its
polished depths from wine-filled glasses and decanters
and from the faces and dresses of the
guests. Overhead were candelabra, the sole light
in the room; outside the circle of diners such deep
shadows that the faces looked like portraits by
Rembrandt; and when, at the proper moment, the
hostess and her ladies swept out of the room, leaving
us to our men-talk, how lean would fall the entertainment!
And it was our hostess we missed, so
much divinity did hedge her.</p>
<p>The monarchical principle is extinct in the home,
it is likewise extinct in the schools. I was educated
at a school where the master ruled by terror. He
was a Scotchman and knew no other method, and
we were not in the least bit democratic. But if we
trembled before him we did not fear one another.
There were between fifty and sixty of us, a curious
collection of diversities; not a boy in the place who
had not something marked in him, either by his
own strength or because of his home individuality.
It was a time when parents had little money and
travelling expenses were heavy, so that holidays
were scanty and far apart. For instance, we never
went home at Christmas. The cheap railway had
not yet everywhere supplanted the mail coach.
Yet we lived haunted by the thought of our homes,—it<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</SPAN></span>
possessed us, it obsessed us, it was our food
and drink with which we fed our imaginations and
spiritually nourished ourselves. We would talk incessantly
to one another of our homes; and friendships,
our only solace in that abode of sternness,
were made up of similarities of taste and experience
in the matter of homes. The methods of education
were, if you like, brutal; but the brutality made our
homes all the dearer. We leaned heavily on the
thought of our homes; while in our happiness, as
in our misery, we possessed a faculty of concentration
unknown to boys educated in the latitudinarian
methods of the modern schools. Whether it was
our first Latin author, Cornelius Nepos, or our Latin
exercises, or the horrible Latin grammar of that
period, or the big Latin dictionary or Greek lexicon—implements
of education whose repulsiveness was
supposed to add to their efficiency—or our letters
from home, or our long talks of home and yearnings
for home—no matter what the subject, we brought
to it an intensity that would have been foreign to the
careless boys of this effeminate age. I remember a
boy under twelve who talked to me in whispers of
his father and mother not being friendly, and of his
mother preferring to him his younger brother.
There was another boy whose trouble was that
there was so little money at home. There was yet
another very little boy, who would take me aside
and read long letters from a beautiful sister married<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</SPAN></span>
to a military officer in India. Depend upon it,
there is nothing that concentrates the mind like
having for schoolmaster a conscientious Scotchman
teaching Greek and Latin in the old clumsy
methods.</p>
<p>A young boy is mostly regarded as something
quite outside the pale of sympathy and understanding.
Only his mother can endure him, and
she because, as many think, love has made her
blind. Yet in himself he is of all beings the most
ingenuously and ingeniously human, and a veritable
fountain of imaginative desire, who, if he do but
retain his spontaneity, may become a Charles Lamb
or a Coleridge or a Shelley; or, if he be built on the
grand scale, a Dante or a Michael Angelo. The
mission of the modern school is for the boys themselves
to take in hand this little boy and, by force
of their own rude animalism and with joyous pressure,
strip him of everything exceptional and compel
him to take on another likeness. I remember
an English lady telling me that she had been to visit
a great public school to see her son, a little boy.
She told me that at a distance she could not distinguish
him from any other boy; and she smiled
helplessly as she added that it was the ambition of
every little boy in that famous school to be exactly
like the other little boys. And yet we wonder that
the world no longer produces distinguished individualities.
This mother knew that her boy would<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</SPAN></span>
come back to her the average boy, to grow into the
average man, like his father, like his uncle, like
everybody else. A friend of mine, a most interesting
man, very happy in his hobbies and in his
dreams and visions and beliefs, a poet though without
learning, and without the sweet accomplishment
of verse, lamented that he had not been kept longer
at school, where, as he said, he might have had all
the “nonsense knocked out of him.” The poor
fellow does not know how happy and interesting he
is; he only knows that his wife and all his friends
find him different from other people and on this
account disapprove of him. Yet there was an old
French artist in 1830 who advised his friends to
cultivate their faults carefully.</p>
<p>The old methods were brutal and made the boys
brutal, yet they, at any rate, did not break down
and insidiously destroy singularity of character as
is being done every day by the democratic methods
of modern schools. A celebrated master of Eton
in the eighteenth century said, “My business is to
teach Greek, not morality.” In that robust century
people did not take much thought about one another.
You might be unhappy and all astray, but
they let you alone; provided you did your Greek
right, your morals were your own affair. Chatham
may have left Eton a “cowed” boy, as he implied
he did, yet he brought with him an individuality of
a quality so angular and so challenging that it is<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</SPAN></span>
impossible to believe it could have survived had it
been ground between the upper and nether millstones
of modern school-boy life. These schools,
both in America and in England, with their great
prestige and with the boys in full control, have
become so powerful in moulding character that it
is no longer accurate to say “the boy is father of
the man,” but rather, “the school-boy is father of
the man.” In Ireland things are different. The old
brutal methods being discarded, the boys do not
fear the master, neither do they fear each other,
and the explanation is that the Irishman, man and
boy, gentle and simple, is much more of an aristocrat
than a democrat. He belongs to his home and
to his family; he has the passion for home and
family, he passes through school or college without
really belonging to either of them.</p>
<p>For that reason the home among the Irish remains
stronger than any school or college, exactly the
reverse of what has happened in England and may
happen in America. When I say an Irishman,
gentle or simple, is an aristocrat, I do not mean that
he is a person of class or wants to be one, or that he
bears the slightest resemblance to the modern
English nobleman, but I do mean that he likes to
think that he is a person of distinction, and that he
differs from all other men, and values himself accordingly.
Nature herself would, if we did not
thwart her, evolve each man on a different plan; as<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</SPAN></span>
she makes every leaf and every twig and every tree
in the forest different from all its fellows. She has
an Irish delight in diversity, and smiles to see her
sturdy children each fighting for its own hand.</p>
<p>The typical Irish family is poor, ambitious, and
intellectual; and all have the national habit, once
indigenous in “Merry England,” of much conversation.
In modern England they like a dull man
and so they like a dull boy. We like bright men
and bright boys. When there is a dull boy we send
him to England and put him into business where
he may sink or swim; but a bright boy is a different
story. Quickly he becomes the family confidant,
learning all about the family necessities; with so
much frank conversation it cannot be otherwise.
He knows every detail in the school bills and what
it will cost to put him through the university, and
how that cost can be reduced by winning scholarships
and prizes. As he grows older he watches,
like an expert, the younger brothers coming on, and
is eager to advise in his young wisdom as to their
prospects. He studies constantly, perhaps overworks
himself while his mother and sisters keep
watch; and yet he is too serious, and they on their
side are too anxious for compliments. It is indeed
characteristic of the Irish mother that, unlike the
flattering mothers of England, she loves too
anxiously to admire her children; with her intimate
knowledge there goes a cautious judgment. The<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</SPAN></span>
family habit of conversation into which he enters
with the arrogance of his tender years gives him the
chance of vitalizing his newly acquired knowledge.
Father, mother, brothers and sisters are all on his
mind; and the family fortunes are a responsibility.
He is not dull-witted, as are those who go into business
to exercise the will in plodding along some
prescribed path; on the contrary, his intellect is in
constant exercise. He is full of intellectual curiosity,
so much conversation keeping it alive, and
therein is unlike the English or the American boy.
Indeed, he experiences a constant temptation to
spend in varied reading the time that should be
given to restricted study. He is at once sceptical
and credulous, but, provided his opinions are expressed
gaily and frankly, no one minds. With us
intellect takes the place which in the English home
is occupied by the business faculty. We love the
valour of the free intellect; so that, the more audacious
his opinion, the higher rise the family hopes.
He and all his family approve of amusement—to do
so is an Irish tradition unbroken from the days
before St. Patrick; but they have none. They are
too poor and too busy; or rather they have a great
deal, but it is found in boyish friendships and in the
bonds of the strongest family affection, inevitable
because they are Irish and because they have hopes
that make them dependent upon one another. The
long family talks over the fire, the long talks between<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</SPAN></span>
clever boys on country walks—these are not
the least exciting amusements—even though they
bear no resemblance to what is called “sport.”</p>
<p>These are the gifts of the Irish home; among the
poor, affection infinite as the sea, which, because of
an idleness which is not their fault, has had full
scope to grow into an intensity of longing that makes
it sometimes hungry as the sea; among the better-off,
ambition also and a free intellect; and in everybody
an ancient philosophy of human nature which
warms rather than chills human relations.</p>
<p>The English boy has an entirely different history.
He enters some famous historical school, anxious,
like his parents and all his aunts and cousins, that
he be stamped and sealed with its approval. His
desire is to be an Eton, Harrow, or Rugby boy,
after which he will become an Oxford or Cambridge
man, marked in his accent, clothes, and manner
with the sign-manual of his university. For the
Irish boy this is as impossible as it is repugnant.
His home is stronger than his school and his college.
In the great English schools the boys manage one
another; a system of rules and of etiquette has
democratically grown up which all must obey; this
kind of docility is English and not Irish. Our boys
cannot thus surrender themselves, for behind the
Irish boy is the drama of a full home life. There
is no such drama in English home life—it is prosperous,
uneventful, and lies icily cold in the lap of<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</SPAN></span>
law. The Irish home, in which so much happens,
awaits its novelist; but, alas! English readers won’t
read novels about Ireland, and Irish readers are too
few to make their custom worth anybody’s attention.
All we know is that the Irishman is, boy and
man, a detached personality. He is often the
gayest and most sociable of beings, and a true
comrade, and he may be able to adapt himself to
every situation, yet he remains apart; even with his
friends he is inscrutable, he cannot be read. And
this to my mind is right, for no one should be able
to read another’s secret, except the mother who bore
him, and sometimes a sweetheart. The ordinary
well-to-do Englishman has no secrets, for you can
read them all in his bank-book, in his Catechism,
in the rules of his club and the laws of his country.
He is an admirable citizen on whom you can calculate
as on a railway time-table. The English
mother when she parts from her boy at the school
doors may sigh to think that she has lost her boy,
yet be proud to think that he will return remodelled
into the smart Eton or Harrow boy. The Irish
mother has no such hopes and no such fears; her
boy will come back what he was when he left her
side, and though he go to India, and rule provinces,
with many well-trained public-school Englishmen
working under him, he will still remain the passionate
Irish boy of her heart’s desire.</p>
<p>The great factor in the Irish education is not the<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</SPAN></span>
school, but the Irish home, unique in its combination
of small means, intellect, and ambition with
conversation. Without this conversation the home
would not be Irish. From every manor-house and
cabin ascends the incense of pleasant talk; it is that
in which we most excel. With us all journeys end
in talkers’ meeting; “we are the greatest talkers
since the Greeks,” said Oscar Wilde. When any
Irish reform is proposed—and they are innumerable—I
always ask, how will it affect our conversation?
France has her art and literature, England her
House of Lords, and America her vast initiative;
we have our conversation. We watch impatiently
for the meals, because we are hungry and thirsty
for conversation; not for argument’s sake or to
improve ourselves, but because we spontaneously
like one another. We like human voices and faces
and the smiles and gestures and all the little drama
of household colloquy, varying every moment from
serious to gay, with skill, with finesse; we like
human nature for its own sake, and we like it vocal—that
is why we talk; we even like our enemies,
on the Irish principle that it is “better to be quarrelling
than to be lonesome.” Arthur Symons,
staying in a pilot’s cottage on the west of Ireland,
said to my daughter: “I don’t believe these people
ever go to bed.” No, they have so much to say to
one another.</p>
<p>“England,” said Bernard Shaw, “cannot do<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</SPAN></span>
without its Irish and Scots to-day because it cannot
do without at least a little sanity.” Both these
nations are conversational.</p>
<p>The home must play its part vigorously if the race
is to be saved for affection and happiness, and if we
would bring back the conditions from which spring
art and poetry.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</SPAN></span><br/>
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</SPAN></span></p>
</div>
<hr class="chap" />
<h2 class="no-brk"><SPAN name="WHY_THE_ENGLISHMAN_IS_HAPPY" id="WHY_THE_ENGLISHMAN_IS_HAPPY">WHY THE ENGLISHMAN IS HAPPY</SPAN></h2>
<p class="pfs150"><span class="smcap">An Irishman’s Notes on the Saxon Temperament</span></p>
<div class="figleft"> <ANTIMG src="images/i_037.png" width-obs="89" height-obs="90" alt="I" /></div>
<p class="pfirst">N the long quest for self-knowledge and
self-fulfilment there are two types of
men and two methods. There are some
who would have the individual man
care only for himself morning, noon, and night, for
his spirit, his mind, his body, his temporal and
eternal welfare. There are others who would say
he should forget himself and lose himself in great
ideas, great causes, great enthusiasms, in passionate
love or humanitarianism, or even in the anger of
battle. Of these two methods the second is found
in France while the first is the Englishman’s creed.</p>
<p>The English are a fortunate people, or seemed so
in the happy past, their primal good fortune being
that they lived and grew up on an island surrounded
by stormy seas and fenced in by high cliffs. Their
second good fortune sprang out of the first; they
never submitted themselves to a strong central<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</SPAN></span>
government. Of all people in the known world,
they were the least governed; of all men the Englishman
was the freest, little more being required of
him than that he should live on good terms with his
neighbours. Doubtless one of these neighbours was
the brutal Norman noble who regarded him as an
inferior being of an inferior race, and as a landlord
oppressed him. Outside this relation of landlord
and tenant, and of superior and inferior, he lived a
free man among his fellows without, indeed, the
dignity and honour of being a soldier, but also without
his constant subjection and unrelaxing discipline.
He was a boor, but his thoughts were his
own; and his language, being different from that of
his oppressor, afforded him an additional protection.
He lived in his own world—he lived apart among
his own race and kindred.</p>
<p>The other nations on the continent of Europe,
notably France, lay open to one another’s ravages;
and for that reason had always to remain under
arms, every man a soldier, martial law superseding
all other laws. However England might war with
other nations, however she might despoil them, pursuit
and revenge were impossible; behind her cliffs
she was safe. No matter how great the cloud of
hatred or what it threatened, she lived in security
and laughed at her enemies. The peasant returned
in peace to his village and his plough, the merchant
to his shop, and the noble to his castle; while crimes<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</SPAN></span>
that could not be punished left no visitings of
remorse. The English grew in liberty and in the
arts of peace while other nations grew in the arts of
war and lost their liberty. The English poor man
was never taught his military dignity, but he was
taught his social inferiority; yet, while he bowed
down, as he still does, before his social superior,
his thoughts remained free; the better part of liberty
remained to him. Froissart was astonished at the
squalor in which the English peasant lived; yet, had
he looked a little closer, he would have seen that
under the smouldering ashes on his hearth a fire
was burning that had long been extinct in his own
country.</p>
<p>The French government was a military despotism,
and since tyranny begets tyranny and seeks to
extend itself, it speedily drew to itself the forces of
religion, art and education, and allied them in one
vast conspiracy against the forces of freedom; so
that from the first the people were trained in submission
to power, authority and tradition. It was
an eager and spontaneous submission, the soldier
proud to follow his captain, the student eager to
listen to his teacher, and the Catholic anxious to
obey the command of his priest. The people were
accomplices in their own enthralment; the more so
since there was this discretion reserved in the exercise
of dominion: all were free to think out and
draw their own conclusions, provided that the State,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</SPAN></span>
the Church, and the academies furnished the premises.
Deductive logic was free; inductive logic,
the higher order, the kings, soldiers, magistrates
and statesmen kept in their own hands. As time
advanced the French became a nation of teachers
and orators as well as soldiers, while the creative
impulse was everywhere arrested and hampered
Welded together and bound and clamped into a
nation by their military and ecclesiastical organizations,
the French rapidly acquired the instinct of
solidarity; and the individual dwindled until he
became a mere unit of the state. This feeling of
solidarity combined with the free exercise of deductive
logic, resulting in a fertility of beautiful ideas—beautiful
as rainbows on a stormy sky—and the
missionary habit. Of all men the Frenchman is the
most picturesque and the most attractive, as he is
also the most eloquent and the most persuasive. In
literature, in life, in everything, the French genius
is social and sympathetic and propagandist.</p>
<p>The Englishman is the contrary of all this. He
has a passion for liberty and cares little for equality,
fraternity, or any of the ideals which are the glory
of the French intellect. He is, indeed, so entirely
without the faculty of ideas that even his feeling for
liberty has never become an idea or a doctrine; he
has no intellectual cognizance of it; it is merely his
habit. A something which from long use has
grown into him and become part almost of his<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</SPAN></span>
physiology, it is in his blood and in his bones and
remains by him always, keeping vigilant watch and
ward. But it is for himself alone; it is not for
universal application; it is not his philosophy. So
that when he robs another nation, as in the case of
India or Ireland, and, in order to facilitate the theft,
first takes away that nation’s liberty, his conscience
does not smite him, for by liberty he always means
English liberty, which includes the privilege of
robbing any nation that is weak enough to stand it.
To me a Frenchman is always like a student; either
as he is when he works diligently at his studies or
as he is when he plays truant, breaks away from
discipline, and defies his teachers. An Englishman,
on the other hand, is a person untutored, who has
never been either to school or to college; he has
neither the attractiveness of the diligent student nor
the excesses of the rebel student. He is still almost
what he was when he came first from his Maker’s
hands.</p>
<p>Besides his exemption from military organization
and a central government, there is yet another fact
to be noted in the Englishman’s history. A peaceful
immigration into his country has been as difficult
as a warlike invasion. In other countries, when the
population was reduced by plague and pestilence,
the void was quickly filled up by an inrush of
hungry foreigners; in England this was impossible.
There a sudden fall in population meant a sudden<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</SPAN></span>
rise in the abundance of food, because there was
no one to come from outside to take the food out of
men’s mouths. The population of mediæval
England remained always small. The Englishman’s
native joviality and ease of heart were his song of
triumph over a condition in which, if he managed
to survive, he lived easily and fed well and clothed
himself warmly. If other people died, so much the
worse for them and the better for him. To this day
the Englishman takes extraordinary care of his
health. The French and Irish contempt for death
is to him a continual and a shocking surprise. He
never needed to work hard; he faced no great
struggles; he merely took care of his health.</p>
<p>In those far-off days of ease, little work, and
much mortality the Englishman acquired all his
habits, all his positive and negative qualities,
together with that fear of death which we know
oppressed Dr. Johnson; and though the last hundred
years have much blunted his characteristics, the
pattern still remains. He is still given to much
self-contemplation in its various forms of self-complacency,
self-examination, self-condemnation,
and self-exultation. He talks continually of himself;
deprived of that subject and of what is akin to
it, he is a silent man. Not to be the subject of
conversation, neither to be praised nor abused, is
to him a disconcerting experience. He is not vain;
it is merely that his occupation is gone. The<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</SPAN></span>
Americans are too busy with their own growing
fortunes to remember his existence, and for that
reason he is, here in New York, either so gentle
and sad or so peppery and quarrelsome as to be
quite unrecognizable. He is no longer himself.
In his own country he is an unwearied egotist.
When pleased it is with himself, when displeased
it is still with himself. With his neighbours he is
often sulky; yet his worst quarrels are with himself,
and therefore the hardest to reconcile. His
variations are variations not of idea, but of mood.
The French live in a ferment of opinion; it is their
atmosphere—man contending against man with
noise, vociferation, oratory, and much action and
movement. Among the English there is always
the silence of inward communing, the stillness of a
people overweighted with meditation. In France
new schools of art and movements in literature are
the triumphs or—it may be—the eccentricities and
freaks of the logical process. In England such
movements mean the welcome or unwelcome
emergence into light of a new species. French
impressionism was ushered into the world with loud
argument. Turner’s art was something inscrutable
and mysterious, the expression of a temperament
that did not argue and looked for no converts.
Under any strong excitement the Englishman withdraws
into himself as into the security of his own
home. The Frenchman, on the contrary, gets<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</SPAN></span>
away from himself into the world of friends and
ideas and starts a propaganda to embrace the
world. He seeks to impress; his literature and art
are full of dramatic surprises, while English art and
literature have always avoided startling effects; and,
if they impress, do so accidentally, as a tall mountain
might the people who lived in the valley.
They continually spring forth from the mysterious
depths of personality, and, concerning themselves
only with moods of feeling, rely for expression on
rhythm and music. A personality cannot explain
itself or account for itself; it can only cure its ache
and soothe its irritability by the music—the long-drawn-out
or fantastic music of artistic creation.
French art and literature concern themselves with
ideas, and their effort is to make these brilliant,
orderly and specious, using the emphasis and
animation and sonorousness of art rather that its
deeper music. So that in France they watch for a
distinguished intellect, while in England we look
for an individuality that is at once powerful,
strange, and intimate, its expression intelligible
only to those who have explored the farthest
recesses of consciousness. In France we find a
garden, in England a wilderness. Yet, do not
forget, the gardener will often visit the wilderness
in search for new plants and shrubs. The inductive
mind sows that which the deductive mind plants
out and waters.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>The egotist is popularly supposed to be a
wearisome chatterbox incessantly talking about
himself; and such men do abound in England. An
egotist is any man who habitually and instinctively
makes himself, his likings and dislikings, the sole
test of truth; and it is only when there is some
streak of folly or childishness that he becomes the
garrulous chatterbox. Of these men some are
delightful humorists, as was Charles Lamb, or
undelightful, as was his boisterous brother John.
Among them are, in fact, all sorts, including all
the bores, cranks and faddists, with the innumerable
company of monologists; including also the
great pioneers and forerunners of thought in poetry
and art: the Shakespeares, Turners, Hogarths, and
Constables.</p>
<p>Socially, the egotist, where there is not some
great compensating charm, is a failure; he does not
amalgamate; he is ever an alien in the company, a
difficult person. You don’t know whether to make
much of him or drop him altogether. At a dinner-party
the Englishman is apt to be that sad mistake,
a guest who has to be apologized for. Lovers are
always poor company except with each other. This
is proverbial, and the Englishman is always in
love—that is, with himself. The sociable man, the
welcome guest, is in love with other people. As
it is in the lighter matters of social intercourse, so
it is in graver matters. Gladstone, who, as a<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</SPAN></span>
Scotchman in England, was an acute critic, once
wrote that the Englishman needed a great deal of
discipline; and this is true. A community whose
members are not spontaneously amenable to one
another’s feelings must have definite rules laid
down and enforced by definite penalties. On the
other hand, the Frenchman, with his social impulses
and social training, knows “how to behave.” He
does not need to get rules by heart, for he has
intuition; and where he has not this inner light he
turns naturally to reason, the great sociable spirit,
the friendly arbiter, the wise judge before whom all
men are equal. The English egotist has not this
social impulse; neither does he willingly appeal to
reason. Latterly he has become saturated with
class feeling, which is neither sociable nor reasonable;
but his original instinct, to which he
constantly returns, is to regard himself as neither
a superior nor an inferior, but different; a humorist
who cannot be classed and to whom no general
rules can apply; and such a man will not readily
appeal to a tribunal before which all men are
equal.</p>
<p>The Frenchman is a gentleman; he has the finer
instinct, the finer training, and the finer intelligence;
wanting these, the Englishman has to be taught by
the cumbrous methods of reward and punishment;
he learns under the whip and becomes more like a
well-trained animal than a reasonable human being.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</SPAN></span>
Yet—such is the blessedness of mere habit—even
he ends by doing quite cheerfully what he learned
most unwillingly. Legality, hard-and-fast rules
that must not be broken and that are interpreted in
the narrowest spirit, depressing enough in all conscience
although they be, are to him an enjoyment
and a matter of incessant thought; since if they
circumscribe, they also define and secure the spaces
of personal liberty. They are his substitute for
ideas, and, if they excite no enthusiasm and are
some of them admittedly bad, all the same, he
makes it his glad duty to obey them. Outside
these laws he is intractable and inclined to be
surly, quarrels with his neighbours, and is as
jealous and suspicious of his rights as a dog with a
bone. Yet the Englishman is not unhappy. He
has the happiness of a perpetual self-complacency.
Indeed, your self-absorbed egotist will sometimes
extract enjoyment of a kind out of the consciousness
that he is a wet blanket and a perpetual embarrassment
and kill-joy; it does not quicken the pulses,
but it flatters his sense of power, and, strange as it
may seem, his sense of hatred. At any rate, I
have met such men both in England and elsewhere.
And yet there is another side to the picture; for
this self-contained egotist, when trained in a good
school and taught the amenities of good behaviour,
and when he has received the discipline which
Gladstone said he so much needed, utters the best<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</SPAN></span>
kind of talk, since it flows not out of the logic
which divides, but out of the inner personality
which makes the whole world kin. There is in his
conversation almost always a flavour of the intimate
and the confidential. He listens well, too, and
never contradicts or seeks to convince. Indeed, it
disappoints him to find one opinion where he
thought there had been two. Cultivated Englishmen
talking together are like men sitting in the
woods through a long summer’s night and listening
during the intervals of silence to the noise made by
a near-by stream or of a wind among the branches
or to the singing of a nightingale. So always
should mortals talk: clamorous and confident
argument are the resource of the intellectual half-breed.</p>
<p>Out of his habit of mind the egotist gains two
valuable qualities. First of all he learns how to
manage himself. This, of course, is not the same
as the high and difficult art of self-mastery, yet it
counts for much that a man should know how to
get the best and leave out the worst from his life,
even though that life be in its essential mean and
meagre or vicious and self-indulgent. Self-management,
smooth and adroit, is eminently the Englishman’s
accomplishment. The other quality is still
more important; the egotist makes the best of all
husbands if regard be had to the ordinary woman’s
needs; for what are these if they are not all summed<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</SPAN></span>
up in the one word—companionship? Now a wife
cannot find a sufficing companionship in her
husband’s business concerns. Here she is beaten
by the confidential clerk. There is, however, one
kind of friendship, one kind of companionship,
which she alone can supply in the required
abundance; it is when the husband talks of himself.
Here is the chamber into which the wife enters
willingly when everybody else keeps away: the
husband’s talk of his pains and aches and tribulations.
There is the pain in his knee or his elbow,
or the never-to-be-sufficiently-indicated pain in his
head or his back, or his cough, and how it differs
from every previous cough in his experience, or
bears a dangerous resemblance to some other
body’s cough, together with the innumerable aches
of his wounded and exaggerated self-love. All this
wearisome detail about what is mostly nothing at
all and which everybody else flees from, the
“pleasing wife” listens to with an attentive and
intelligent and credulous ear. It is her duty, or
so she thinks it, and the greater the intelligence
the greater the credulity. There are happy wives
married to husbands whom it would bore to talk
about themselves, but the happiest woman, in
whom content ripens to its fullest, is the egotist’s
wife. Like a bee in a flower, she hides herself
almost out of sight in wifely devotion. He finds
happiness in living in and for himself, she in living<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</SPAN></span>
out of herself and in him. Both are pleased. This
is English conjugal life as I have observed it; and
here in perfection we have side by side our two
methods of human growth.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</SPAN></span></p>
</div>
<hr class="chap" />
<h2 class="no-brk"><SPAN name="SYNGE_AND_THE_IRISH" id="SYNGE_AND_THE_IRISH">SYNGE AND THE IRISH.</SPAN></h2>
<div class="figleft"> <ANTIMG src="images/i_051.png" width-obs="90" height-obs="90" alt="T" /></div>
<p class="pfirst">HE acrimonious dispute carried on in the
newspapers over John M. Synge and
his plays is the eternal dispute between
the man of prose and the man of
imagination. Synge’s plays, his prefaces to his
plays, and his book on the Aran Islands, like his
conversation, describe a little community rich in
natural poetry, in fancy, in wild humour, and in
wild philosophy; as wild flowers among rocks, these
qualities spring out of their lives of incessant danger
and incessant leisure; there are also bitter herbs.
When I used to listen to Synge’s conversation, so
rare and sudden, as now when I read or listen to
what he has written, I can say to myself, “Here
among these peasants is the one spot in the British
Islands, the one spot among English-speaking
people, where Shakespeare would have found himself
a happy guest.”</p>
<p>The people in Mr. Shaw’s plays would not have
bored him, only because nothing human would have
ever bored Shakespeare; but they would not have
inspired him. And though in their company he<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</SPAN></span>
might have stayed for a time and been perhaps as
witty as Oscar Wilde or Shaw, the lyrical Shakespeare,
the poetical and creating Shakespeare,
would soon have tired of their arid gaieties, and
have gone to sit with the courteous peasants round
their turf fires, that he might listen to their words,
musical sentences, musical names, folk tales, and
tales of apparitions, embodying images and thoughts
and theories of life and a whole variegated world
of lovely or bitter and sometimes savage emotion
out of which to construct poetical drama—a very
different thing from the drama of wit or satire or
sensationalism whose inspiration is prose.</p>
<p>It was Synge’s luck that he found this people
before the modern reformer had improved them off
the face of the earth. Each of us has his destiny,
and this was his. Every event in his life and every
chance encounter did but help to push him along
till he found his real self by living among them in
the intimacy of their family life and in the closer
intimacy that came from speaking with them a
language into which they put their inmost feelings
and longings, using English for what was merely
external. It was his destiny to know these people
and reveal them, and then die; and to be denounced
as an obscene and indecent writer and artist by a
set of people who will not listen and therefore cannot
know, and whose service to Ireland consists in
striving to shout down every distinguished Irishman.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>Synge’s people are primitive in the sense that
they are unspoiled. A lady of fashion among the
Chinese would regard the foot of a European woman
as primitive; we think it is unspoiled. Synge’s
offence consists in showing that these people have
never been moulded into the pattern that finds
favour with the convent parlour and in the fashionable
drawing-room. New York is proud of its
progress and makes pretensions to high culture; and
yet New York might do worse than turn aside and
learn of these humble people. A young girl told
a friend of mine that what she and her companions
always look forward to in Ireland are the long
winter evenings around the kitchen fire when the
neighbours come in to talk. I fancy all New York
is in constant conspiracy to cut as short as possible
its dull winter evenings.</p>
<p>In Ireland we are still medieval, and think that
how to live is more important than how to get a
living. When I was a young man if I announced
that I intended next morning at break of day to
start on some enterprise of amusement, or it might
be of high duty, the whole family would get up to
see me off; but if it were on some matter of mere
commercial gain, I would breakfast in the care of
the servants. It was thus through the whole of
Irish life. If Curran, for instance, fought a duel in
Phœnix Park at some unearthly hour, five hundred
sleepy Dublin citizens would rouse themselves out<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</SPAN></span>
of their beds and be there to see the fight, to witness
the courage of the combatants and enjoy the wit of
Curran, that never failed when danger threatened—and
in those days and in that country people shot
to kill. We Irish are still what we’ve always been,
a people of leisure; like people sitting at a play, we
watch the game of life, we enjoy our neighbours,
whether we love or hate them.</p>
<p>Because of this enjoyment of the spectacle of life,
we have produced the ablest dramatists of latter-day
England: Farquhar, Goldsmith, Sheridan,
Oscar Wilde, G. B. Shaw, and finally John Synge.
And of these, Synge, though he died so young, is
the greatest. He stands apart from them all, because
he portrays peasant poetry and passion, and
a humour which cuts deep into the mystery and
terror of life. In the other dramatists we have
abundance of wit and liveliness, great powers of
enjoyment, and a commendable contempt for the
prudential virtues; but there is also a denial of
spirituality and but a modicum of poetry; the deeper
feelings are never sounded, while their pathos is
only a dainty pity, not the genuine article: not one
of them could have written “Riders to the Sea.”
Behind the Irish humour and pity are will and
intellect, as in Swift. In the drawing-room plays
of Synge’s predecessors there is merely the sensitive
nature, so easily chilled by what is not nice, becoming,
and charming. Those who object to Synge’s<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</SPAN></span>
plays are suffering from the delicate stomach of
people who have lived effeminate lives. Dr. Swift
would have come to Synge’s plays and applauded
them.</p>
<p>A good many years ago cultivated people and
others began to take an interest in the Irish peasant;
it added something to the gaiety of London and
Dublin drawing-rooms. But socialism and communism,
the labour party and anarchy, had not then
been invented to teach people the seriousness of
starving poverty. So Carleton and other writers
set to work to exploit the Irish peasant and make
him into something “fit for a lady’s chamber.”
Hence has arisen the foolish tradition that the Irish
are all gentleness and innocence, and, though
wildly amusing, still within the bounds of good
taste; hence also came the comic Irishman, a buffoon
without seriousness who lived by making
laughter for his patrons.</p>
<p>Synge’s plays exist to prove the contrary of all
this. And yet there is some truth in the picture.
The Irish character has a side which is turned
toward spirituality and poetry, a musical instrument
exquisitely attuned to the beauties of nature
and life. Among this fighting race, square-chinned
and with short features, is scattered another type,
with long, oval faces and soft eyes, born to all
hoping gentleness and affection, with imagination
fed on the mysteries of life and death and religion.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</SPAN></span>
This type Stella might have discovered had she not
been too English; Swift could not, because probably
he frightened it away. Yet Dr. Goldsmith was as
true an Irishman as Dr. Swift. How vividly Synge
knew this side of the Irish mind is shown in his
book on the Aran Islands. The other side is in his
plays.</p>
<p>“A picture,” said Blake, “should be like a
lawyer presenting a writ.” Synge presents us with
such a picture. Let us be patient; people brought
up on the literature of good taste cannot be expected
all at once to enjoy the literature of power.</p>
<p>“I can look at a knot in a piece of wood until I
am frightened by it,” so spake William Blake.
This is the creative imagination, and it is that of
folklore and of the Aran Islands. These people
know no distinction between natural and supernatural;
they believe everything to be carried on by
miracle; and the civilized man who does not know
that behind all science and reason and all moral
systems there is a something transcending all knowledge
and which is a continued miracle of love and
beauty is not only incapable of culture, he is incapable
of desiring it. To him the Bible is as
inscrutable as Shelley. These peasants are not as
well educated as, say, Mr. Rockefeller, yet they
have this feeling, this feeling which is the religion
of children and poets, and which is not subject for<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</SPAN></span>
reason at all—even though it be the source of our
whole intellectual life.</p>
<p>False education is like the pressure which the
Chinese mother applies to the feet of her infant.
True education liberates. The industrial movement
would turn these peasants into smug artisans, without
a thought that consoles or a hope that elevates,
greedy, envious, and covetous, seeking only the
triumphs of selfishness. And yet man is naturally
a singing bird; sometimes he is singing in a cage of
childish and brutish ignorance; and sometimes,
though the cage be roomy and handsome, he does
not sing at all, has not the heart to do so. True
education would liberate him so that he could sing
in the open sky of knowledge and power and desire.</p>
<p>Synge says of these people that they have “some
of the emotions thought peculiar to people who
have lived with the arts.” He also speaks of “the
singularly spiritual expression which is so marked”
on the faces of some of these women. And again
he says that “they are a people whose lives have
the strange quality that is found in the oldest legend
and poetry.” A priest told me that on his return
from America the servant said she was glad to see
him back, “for,” said she, “while you were away
there was a colour of loneliness in the air.” In
these people’s words, as in their lives, is the colour
of beauty, as the blue sky reflects itself in every
little pool of water among the rocks.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>As to Synge’s great comedy, “The Playboy of
the Western World,” could Synge have chosen a
better type for his hero than Christy Mahon?
Despite certain newspaper critics who have written
of the play, he is neither a weakling nor a fool, but
a young poet in the supreme difficulty of getting
born; only in this case the struggle is a little worse
than usual. He has a drink-maddened father of
great strength and most violent passions, whose
cruelty, backed by his strength, has driven away
all his family except this young boy. Of course,
Christy has no education, and his circumstances are
altogether so dreadful that to live at all he must
live the life of the imagination, wandering on the
hills poaching and snaring rabbits. Finally he
strikes his father with a spade, and in his terror
runs away from home. After travelling for many
days he arrives in Mayo and finds himself a hero;
not because he is a murderer, but because he is a
good-looking fellow in distress, and, as the sequel
proves, spirited withal and athletic. His talk about
the murder is a sudden freak of self-advertisement;
no one so cunning as your young poet! Besides,
he liked to be frightening himself. No one really
believes it, and the Widow Quinn is scornfully
sceptical; and when, later on, as they think, he
actually murders his father, every one turns against
him—his sweetheart, though it breaks her heart,
joining actively in handing him over to justice.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>In every well-constructed drama there is some
central point of interest around which all the other
incidents are grouped. The personality of the girl
Pegeen, Christy’s sweetheart, is here the central
interest. She towers over every one, not only by
her force, but by her maidenly purity and Diana-like
fierceness; nothing, neither the coarseness she
herself utters in wild humour, nor what the others
say or do, can soil her sunshine. And in the love-talk
between the lovers, he is all imagination and
poet’s make-believe, and she all heart and passion
and actuality, which is the peasant woman’s good
sense! It is among peasants of the west of Ireland
that the poetical dramatist must henceforth find his
opportunity. Young gentlemen and young ladies
in America have doctrinaire minds; they have
grown up attending classes and listening to lectures
in the atmosphere of a specious self-improvement,
and know nothing of the surroundings amid which
this peasant girl grew up straight and tall as a young
tree. Some day people will recognize in this play
Synge’s tribute to the Irish peasant girl. “And to
think it’s me is talking sweetly, Christy Mahon, and
I the fright of seven townlands for my biting tongue.
Well, the heart’s a wonder, and I’m thinking there
won’t be our like in Mayo for gallant lovers from
this hour.”</p>
<p>The peasants of the west of Ireland are like
Christy Mahon; sorrow and danger and ignorance<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</SPAN></span>
are their daily portion, yet like him they live the
life of the imagination. Liberate them from what
oppresses, but so that they may still live the life of
the imagination.</p>
<p>Synge’s history was peculiar. He took up music
as his profession and studied it in Germany, Rome,
and Paris; and having only a very small income, for
economy’s sake always lived with poor people. In
Paris he stayed with a man cook and his wife, who
was a <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">couturière</i>. He told me that they had but
one sitting-room, in which the man did his cooking
and the wife her sewing, with another sewing-woman
who helped. When, as sometimes happened,
a large order for hats came in, Synge, who
by this time had given up music for philology, would
drop his studies and apply himself also to hat-making,
bending wires, etc. After a year or so he
moved into a hotel, where he met my son, who
urged him to leave Paris for the west of Ireland and
apply himself to the study of Irish. Among these
western peasants he thenceforth spent a great part
of every winter, living as one of the family, they
calling one another by their Christian names; and
he told me that he would rather live among them
than in the best hotel.</p>
<p>Synge was morally one of the most fastidious men
I ever met, at once too sensitive and too proud and
passionate for anything unworthy. He was a well-built,
muscular man, with broad shoulders, carrying<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</SPAN></span>
his head finely. He had large, light-hazel eyes
which looked straight at you. His conversation,
like his book on the Aran Islands, had the charm of
entire sincerity, a quality rare among men and
artists, though it be the one without which nothing
else matters. He neither deceived himself nor anybody
else, and yet he had the enthusiasm of the
poet. In this combination of enthusiasm and
veracity he was like that other great Irishman,
Michael Davitt. Like Davitt, also, he was without
any desire to be pugnacious; resolute, yet essentially
gentle, he was a man of peace.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</SPAN></span><br/>
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</SPAN></span></p>
</div>
<hr class="chap" />
<h2 class="no-brk"><SPAN name="THE_MODERN_WOMAN" id="THE_MODERN_WOMAN">THE MODERN WOMAN</SPAN></h2>
<p class="pfs150"><span class="smcap">Reflections on a New and Interesting Type</span></p>
<div class="figleft"> <ANTIMG src="images/i_063.png" width-obs="90" height-obs="90" alt="Q" /></div>
<p class="pfirst">UEEN Elizabeth, we know, had
many lovers, but was herself never in
love; and so she was able to get the
better of her cousin, Mary Queen of
Scots, who, poor soul! allowed herself to be
ensnared by the tender passion. Queen Elizabeth,
on the historic page, is a monster. Yet what was
singular in her is now quite general.</p>
<p>It has been America which has given the world,
this strange type; like everything else that happens
in this country, she has sprung suddenly upon us,
as if she had neither father nor mother nor any
visible ancestry.</p>
<p>She may be in a minority, yet she is not difficult
to discover, for she is most active, showing herself
everywhere. Nor is it difficult to describe her,
since she spends much of her time in describing
herself. In the first place, like the orator, she is
made rather than born; indeed, she is herself a good<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</SPAN></span>
deal of an orator, always being ready to harangue
her friends, explaining and enforcing her ideas.
Self-improvement is her passion; improvement in
what direction? you will ask. She herself does not
know. Meantime she insists on absolute personal
liberty—moral, physical, mental, and also political.
That she may be free she places a ban on the senses
and upon sex; either of these would put her back
under subjugation. She announces herself to be
eager for affection, but its object must be some
person who is supernaturally perfect and complete;
anything else would be illogical and unworthy and
enslaving. And while her mother dreamed of a
life of love and duty in a world where both are
necessary because of its sorrowful imperfections,
she will be satisfied with nothing less than a perfect
love and a perfect affection. At the same time,
while resolved on liberty she does not forget that
she is born into a business community; therefore
she has adopted the business man’s creed—efficiency:
“Whatsoever thou doest, do it with all
thy might.”</p>
<p>The young men know liberty to be a chimera—that
vision has never flattered their eyes. Life to
them means hard work and obedience and a constant
struggle in circumstances where everything is
compromise, and where even honesty is not always
the best policy; and as to success and the making
of money, even the greatest energy will not suffice<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</SPAN></span>
if there be not good luck and the opportunity.
Unlike the women, these young men have their
dreams, for dreams are the solace of labour and
abstinence: dreams, first of all, of success and
fortune, of which they constantly speak; and then
another dream not so easy to talk about: that each
may marry some day the girl of his choice.</p>
<p>Here you have American life as it is among the
young. The man under discipline and a dreamer;
the woman a triumphant egotist, and without any
dreams at all. And as to this liberty which she
haughtily demands, what is it, among the girls,
except the right to choose and dismiss her teachers,
abandoning everything and everybody as soon as
she ceases to feel interested? Never having been
curbed, she has not learned to prefer another to
herself. In vain nature cries out within her for the
sweet burden of service and sacrifice; she is much
too busy listening to her own voice, repeating its
new catch words: “I will be myself. I belong to
myself, I must lead my own life.” Once she enters
society and becomes a woman and meets men, she
acquires a very definite purpose, and goes straight
for it. Since she will not serve the men, let the
men serve her. “The American woman,” said a
languidly insolent Englishman to me, “are interesting;
the men are nonentities.” In the Englishman’s
conception, the man who does not take the
upper hand with his women is a poor creature.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>The ladies in England do not like the modern
American woman. Her success with their own
menkind is bitter to bear; yet they envy her. For
these men are serving woman as they never served
before; and it is precisely because, like the Englishman,
the modern woman is herself an egotist.
Egoism the Englishman understands: it has always
been his honoured creed and his practice; and here
at last is a woman who, because of her frank
selfishness, is perfectly intelligible; no longer the
mystery she used to be, but simple like a child’s
puzzle. Her frantic, brand-new egoism is not quite
the sober article he patronizes for himself, but it
delights him nevertheless, because it is so like his
own daily contest with antagonists whom he must
overcome in business. And here is a beautiful
enemy, whom he must both overcome and capture
and carry away with him as a prize of war; to be
the ornament of his house and a delight to the
eyes, to be his courtier, his worshipper, his wife;
and as to the extravagance of her egoism, he feels
that as a man he can soon teach her a different
lesson, so that she will settle back into tameness
and play her woman’s part, and be his English
wife. And even if she does not, consider what an
advantage it is to have within doors a wife who is
perfectly intelligible, and with whom he knows
what to do! Why, he can be as logical in his own
home as in his place of business. The woman used<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</SPAN></span>
to be the greatest mystery in the world—you might
defy her, or be kind and yield to her, or crush her
with your iron will; but you couldn’t understand
her. No man could read that riddle. The writers
of comedy, the writers of tragedy, all tried their
hands at it. Satirists and wits were never tired of
the fascinating theme. Yet it was all guess-work.
No one pretended to know, and the husbands least
of all. Henry the Eighth, who cut off the heads
of his wives, knew no more than last year’s lover.
Such used to be woman. Now she is as easy to
read as an old almanac. Watch her as she paces
Fifth Avenue, with her businesslike air. How
bright her eyes, and yet hard as jewels! Her
smile how thin-lipped! and her figure that of a
young athlete. Her mode of dress and of personal
array, how smart and efficient and almost military!
She is the very embodiment of briskness, and of
commanding decision. But all the lines of allurement
are vanished, and she no longer undulates
with slow grace. She is not feline, neither is she
deerlike; and she no longer caresses, for her voice
is as uncompromising as her style of dress. The
ordinary man, unless he was a gentleman of the
old school, or a high-placed nobleman, or an Irish
peasant, has always despised the arts of pleasing,
until some charming woman has taken him in
hand; but the modern woman has ceased to instruct
him, and has become his imitator, so that her<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</SPAN></span>
manners are almost as intimidating as those of the
successful business man. Where is that threefold
charm of mystery, subtlety and concealment, under
which womanhood was wont to veil its powers;
and while so many bow down before the conquering
woman, where are the poets? The astronomers,
the mathematicians, the scientists, the men of business,
the lawyers, especially the lawyers, <em>are</em> at
her feet, but no music comes from the poet; and
she—is she so happy?</p>
<p>Egoism is unhappiness for man and woman.
Talleyrand called Napoleon “the unamusable.”
It used to be the man who was egotist and the
woman who served, for she said: Our mission is
to please. Hence her all-prevailing charm, and
hence also her invincible happiness, for happiness
is the denial of egoism. However it be at other
times, the happy woman and the happy man are
righteous—in man’s sight and in God’s.</p>
<p>Happiness is the secret known only to poets and
to women; and it was the women who taught it to
the poets. Mere man knows little about it; least of
all the successful man, for risking everything he
has mostly lost everything; under his prosperity
there is generally distaste. And how sorrow and
disaster can at times degrade a man we all know;
he becomes gloomy, bitter, or drearily self-contained,
or he drops into dissipation and becomes
vulgar. The woman, on the other hand, finds in<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</SPAN></span>
disaster her opportunity; and sorrow, which the
woman’s life seldom escapes, however it be with
the men, only intensifies her womanhood, so that
she anticipates a later wisdom, and luminously
refuses to recognize any distinction except that
between the happy and the unhappy. There are
only two people who are perfectly content—a
woman busy in her home and a poet among his
rhymes. They have the secret; they share it between
them; they break bread together, they are of
the company, even though the poet knows nothing
of domestic life nor the other of rhymes. The
true, the natural woman is like a bird, she has
wings. When she is a young girl she is like a bird
just spreading her wings for flight; when she is a
matured woman she is like a bird in full flight:
desire gives her wings, and stirs within her the
creative impulse; and nothing can stop her strong
flight towards happiness. She has the creative
gifts—wherever her eye lights, there is happiness—she
gilds with “heavenly alchemy” whatever she
touches.</p>
<p>The resolute, practical man puts away the
thought of happiness, and for it substitutes pleasures,
which are the gratification of the senses, and
his unquenchable thirst for variety and movement.
These gratifications he can resign with little effort—mere
pleasure is ashes in the mouth, while the
other he thinks would unnerve him; that is for<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</SPAN></span>
poets, he will tell you. The woman does not
believe in pleasures, she believes in happiness. A
supreme belief in happiness is the woman’s soul.
It awakens in her the moment she is in love or has
a child, and accompanies her everywhere. It explains,
I think, the curious self-centredness of her
mind, and that strange aloofness which seems to
envelop her who has husband and children. In
her presence we talk of this and that, and do this
and that, and she watches us with eyes in which
is the light of knowledge and foreknowledge.</p>
<p>The man is a worker and a fighter; with strenuous
effort he pushes along the car of progress, and
dies under its wheels; and we make lamentations.
But these women should be carried to their graves
with song of hope and wistful triumph; any other
kind of music would be wounding to our recollections.
A man talks mysticism and he argues; and
I am bored. A woman looks and perhaps smiles,
and almost as by the touching of hands communicates
her own unfading hopes. She does not use
words, and we do not oppose her with words.</p>
<p>Long ago people talked much of ladies’ eyes,
and ancient Homer, as we know, sang of the x-eyed
Juno and the azure-eyed Minerva. Now
ladies’ eyes are too bright and too exacting to be so
eloquent, so persuading; and for all her dominating
ways she is not the queen she was, nor for all her
witchlike effectiveness is she so calmly beautiful.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</SPAN></span>
By turning egotist she has dropped down to our
level. She is one of us.</p>
<p>And yet the modern woman is right and has
arrived in the nick of time; she is needed because
the modern man is not always a gentleman. Some
fifteen years ago I was witness to a strange scene
on Kew Bridge, outside London, one Sunday morning.
A line of five young ladies came riding by on
cycles, wearing bloomers. This excited the loud
derision of some loafers, some half-breeds, standing
together on the side-path, and one of them said
something, I did not know what, but the last of the
girls heard it and understood. She stopped, and,
carefully adjusting her machine so that it stood up
against the curb of the side-path, walked back to
the young man and asked him if he had used the
offensive words; she then knocked him down, and
he fell, probably not so much because of her
strength as because of his own surprise. Sheepishly
he got up, brushing his clothes, and his companions
laughed as sheepishly, while she remounted
and rode after her friends. Here was the modern
woman but immature, effective on this occasion,
yet much too crude for anything except a guerrilla
war. In Belfast, famous for its bad manners, every
one tries to be “boss” over some one else; yet if
every one can’t be “boss” in Belfast, there is no
man even now who cannot find, both in Belfast
and New York and everywhere else, a woman<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</SPAN></span>
whom he may “boss.” This is one of the solid
comforts of the masculine existence; but young
ladies teaching in the public schools are watching
sympathetically the career of the modern woman.</p>
<p>It insults a woman nowadays to say that the
woman’s destiny is to be always dependent on
some man; but we who say this know perfectly
well that it is equally true to say of the man that it
is his destiny to be dependent on some woman.
These two must patch up their differences. Man
must yield to woman equality and dignity; and she
must take him back into favour. There is no such
companionship as that between a man and a
woman. She brings her wisdom, traditional with
her sex, and derived from a long study of the
question how to live, and he brings his energy,
derived from his long study of how to make a
living. When energy makes him say, Let us forget
the present and think about the future, she will
reply: Let us enjoy the present—am I not young?
Is not the childhood of these children exquisite?</p>
<p>People forget or do not know that man’s desire
for liberty is not greater than his desire for restraint.
By practising the art of happiness he gets both.
The gratification of all the desires, tempered each
by each, is happiness—hope restrained by memory
and the lust of the flesh by affection and sympathy;
herein is richest harmony and a servitude which
is perfect freedom. Pleasure is the gratification of<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</SPAN></span>
some one desire pushed to excess and followed by
weariness and satiety; and while pleasure overwhelms
intellect and silences it, happiness makes
intellect supreme. Happiness enforces discipline
spontaneously; pleasure relaxes it and brings on
licence, which is the shadow of liberty and its final
destruction.</p>
<p>It is character, they say, that saves the world.
Does this mean the will that is strong to grasp and
hold? If so, then I know of something infinitely
greater: the full and varied knowledge that comes
from the whole complex human personality—every
instrument in the orchestra—being developed
in our consciousness, so that no single desire is
“refused a hearing,” as in a good democracy
where every citizen has his rights secured. Here
we have the benign wisdom of Shakespeare and
of good women, and its motive is the deliberate
search for happiness; it kindles the heart and shines
in the eyes of a beautiful woman when she goes
about in her home and among her friends and
neighbours—beautiful and a sceptre-bearing queen;
because in a world where every one runs mad after
this and that falsehood, she stands for the simple
truth of human happiness and all its possibilities.
Wisdom is better than force, and supersedes it.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</SPAN></span><br/>
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</SPAN></span></p>
</div>
<hr class="chap" />
<h2 class="no-brk"><SPAN name="WATTS_AND_THE_METHOD_OF_ART" id="WATTS_AND_THE_METHOD_OF_ART">WATTS AND THE METHOD OF ART.</SPAN><SPAN name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></SPAN><SPAN href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</SPAN></h2>
<div class="figleft"> <ANTIMG src="images/i_075.png" width-obs="90" height-obs="90" alt="I" /></div>
<p class="pfirst"> have often wished that some great
painter had written his autobiography,
beginning with his earliest childhood.
Saints and sinners have left us their
memoirs in more than sufficient detail; and we
have also the autobiographies of many famous
writers.</p>
<p>As yet we have not had the confessions of the
Painter; for I am sure they would be called confessions,
since it would have been with a sense of
shame that these men, including the magnificent
Michael Angelo himself, would have confessed their
failures at school to learn as other boys learned, and
receive, as other boys did, instruction from their
teachers.</p>
<p>We are all familiar with instances of boys who,
exceptionally quick and clever to ordinary observation,
are almost unteachable at school. It would be
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</SPAN></span>thought cruel, as well as impossible, to attempt
teaching grammar and arithmetic to a young
musical genius in a concert-room where musicians
were playing; yet this is precisely what is done every
time we try to teach grammar and such things to a
boy with the eyes of a painter. Time and experience
have at last taught us to be respectful and
tender with the musical mind; we accept, and we
understand it; and the boy with the wonderful ear
is caught up and carried away and instructed and
fondled, and the world is made smooth for him.
But how about the boy with the wonderful eye?
And yet the musical boy is only tempted when
music is actually being played, whereas this other
is never free from solicitation, since to him there is
always, except in the dark, colour and form and
light and shade. He will know the shape and
surface of every object in his schoolroom, and how
light falls on desk and table; he will know among
his school-fellows all the profiles and all the front
faces, what colour the eyes are, and how they are
shaped; every detail of form and colour will be
familiar to him, since to watch these things and to
draw from them a continuous, intellectual intoxication
is the very purpose for which he has been
created; for with him the eyes are the gates of
wisdom; and with young children these eyes are so
thronged by wisdom trying to get in that all their
time is taken up in opening the gates to its inrush.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>In this progress of the painter—in this preparation
for what, if the conditions are favourable, ought to
be the solemn business of painting or sculpture—there
will be various stages. At first it will be all
observation; after that will come a time in which
the boy will make inferences; to him the face will
be the index of the mind; and, looking round on
master and boy, he will be a physiognomist who
has never heard of Lavater, or a craniologist or
phrenologist, until some happy moment when,
having exhausted his interest in scientific inquiry,
there will burst upon him the glorious world of
intellectual desire.</p>
<p>A friend of mine—an old painter, who went to
school in the North of Scotland—described to me
his experience. The dominie had one morning
been particularly drastic in his methods, and this
led to great concentration of thought among the
pupils, while at the same time it did not in the least
alter the usual current of their ideas. My friend,
for instance, busied himself as usual, observing
form and colour, only with a keener zest and, as I
have said, a more concentrated purpose. It was a
spring morning, and, for the first time that year, a
ray of sunshine came into the room, making a
square of yellow light on the dusty floor at his feet.
It was only at that particular period of the year such
a thing was possible: later on there would be too
many leaves on the trees, and in winter the sun was<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</SPAN></span>
not in that quarter of the heavens. My friend was
an unhappy and anxious schoolboy, but the events
of that morning and the menaces of the dominie,
combined with the sudden sunlight at his feet, made
a new boy of him, and he looked at the square of
brightness which stirred his heart. He received, as
it were, his mystical message; and some time afterwards,
leaving school, he became a landscape-painter.</p>
<p>With a man like Mr. Watts the world of desire
would have burst differently. He was the greatest
figure-painter England has ever produced. With
the exception of Blake, who hardly counts, I may
say he was the one painter who worked in the grand
manner and on great subjects. Years ago, by a
happy accident, I met him in my studio. I
remember his handsome face and a certain air, as
it seemed to me, of imperious detachment; in his
voice also there was a touch of austerity. He
looked at my pictures without a word, till I asked
him for his opinion. It then came clear, frank, and
to the point. I did not tell him what, nevertheless,
was the fact—that, though I had never seen him
before, I had been his diligent pupil for years, and
that from him first I learned the true meaning of
painting, and why I, or indeed anyone else, had
been induced to take up the craft.</p>
<p>All his days Watts was a hermit and a recluse;<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</SPAN></span>
had he loved life and enjoyed it, he would have
lived in it and painted it, as Hogarth lived and
painted; yet he loved his fellow-man, and sought
unweariedly whatever made for his happiness:
indeed it might be said that he painted because he
loved his fellow-man. With such a man the world
of desire must have burst in some scene that excited
his indignation or his pity, or his moral admiration
and love, and from that moment he would become
a dreamer who incessantly re-builds life, according
to the dictates of a kindled imagination; for since
the eye finds what it looks for, the world of desire
becomes in the self-same moment the world of
creation; the desiring eye is the creating eye: the
world itself is neither beautiful nor ugly; it is a
formless vast out of which we create, according to
our desires, new worlds; the madman and the poet
look out on the same scene, but where the one finds
ugliness the other finds beauty; and the world Watts
looked out on was the world of men when they
suffer or when they strive together in serious
purpose.</p>
<p>In speaking about Watts, I would begin with his
portraits. As regards these, there is no controversy;
some people harden their hearts against his
pictures, but no one denies his portraits. Now it
seems to me that the genius of portrait-painting is
largely a genius for friendship; at any rate, I am
quite sure that the best portraits will be painted<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</SPAN></span>
where the relation of the sitter and the painter is
one of friendship; and it considerably helps my
argument to know that in Watts’ case he mostly
painted people whom he had himself invited to sit.</p>
<p>The technique of portrait-painting is mainly a
technique of interpretation; to get the colour, to
model the face adequately, this to the practised
hand is comparatively easy; to so paint that people
should, perforce, see the particular curve, the particular
shadow, and the particular shape of brow or
eye that interest the painter; here is the true difficulty,
here the true enjoyment and exquisite triumph
of the painter.</p>
<p>In his early portraits there is little attempt at this
interpretation. There is, indeed, the charm of
atmosphere never absent from Watts’ work at any
time, and there is a very obvious decorative purpose;
but these early portraits do not grip the attention
as the later portraits do, because the technique
of interpretation is lacking.</p>
<p>I have heard people say they liked his male portraits
better than his portraits of women, but I
cannot share this preference; each in its degree is
perfect. Watts will paint a young lady in fashionable
evening attire—surely the most modern and
up-to-date arrangement possible—and he will so
paint her, so gild her with the heavenly alchemy of
his art, that she shall appear like a Venetian beauty
gazing at us from the page of history.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>Indeed, over all his portraits, whether of men or
women, he spreads a sort of dim religious light; so
that while painted with Dutch realism, they yet
seem to come to us out of the mists of memory and
romance.</p>
<p>Before speaking of his pictures of imagination, I
will discuss a little the whole purpose of art and
artists.</p>
<p>The moralist says: I teach morality, without
which society would not hold together.</p>
<p>The trader says: I teach trade, without which
there would be no wealth, and life would not be
worth living.</p>
<p>The religious teacher: I teach religion, without
which people would forget that there was another
world or a judgment to come.</p>
<p>And the scientist says: I teach truth, which is the
basis of everything.</p>
<p>What can the artist say for himself in presence of
this congress of teachers, before whom we stand
silent with hats off in age-long reverence?</p>
<p>First, what is his record?</p>
<p>He works only to please himself, and regards it
as the most egregious folly—indeed, a kind of
wickedness—to try and please anybody else; he
admires wrong as often as right; at one time he
occupies himself with the things of the spirit, and
again he turns just as eagerly to the things of sense;
without conscience and without scruple he flatters in<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</SPAN></span>
turn every passion and every instinct, good or bad;
he will make the unhappy more unhappy, and the
wicked he will make worse; he inculcates no lessons,
and preaches no dogma; yet often the noble
will become nobler for his companionship.</p>
<p>He is to be found in every community; among the
sinners he is a sort of father confessor, whose absolution
is light, so that you may confess all your sins
to him, and you may still go on sinning; he will
laugh at the faces of the good, finding them guilty
of self-complacency, of formalism, of insincerity, of
prudence, of cowardice, of half-heartedness; indeed
he is often much more respectful to sinners than he
is to good people of the earth; and withal is it not
from the hands of the painter and the poet that, as
in some royal caprice, the hero receives his crown?</p>
<p>This strange creature with the dubious record;
what use is he in the scheme of things? He seems
to stand outside the whole circle of the utilities.</p>
<p>Why there is morality, why there is commerce,
and why there is science, and why there is religion;
these questions are easy to answer. But why there
are painters, and sculptors, and poets, and musicians,
is another mystery; it is as if you asked me
why there are billions of suns rolling through illimitable
space.</p>
<p>Among these august teachers the mere artist
stands like another Lucifer among the angels. And<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</SPAN></span>
yet all these teachers, high and mighty though they
be, pay to the artist continual court, and would fain
make him one of themselves: would indeed rescue
him as a very wanton from his bad surroundings,
and persuade him to live with them always; and
this partly because human nature is strong within
them, and they love the craft we practise, and partly
because they recognize that where men are gathered
together the artist—that is, the poet, the painter, the
musician, and the sculptor—wields, for good or
evil, the mightiest power on earth. Where is the
theologian that the poet does not help? Where is
the moralist? At the present moment, here in this
exhibition, it seems to me that, in their astute way,
the theologian, the moralist, and even the metaphysician,
all think that they have patched up an
admirable working arrangement with one of the
greatest of our artists.</p>
<p>The titles “Love and Death,” “Time, Death,
and Judgment,” “The Temptation of Eve,” “The
Penitence of Eve,” “The Contrition of Cain,” etc.,
do perhaps explain the facts that in Scotland Presbyterian
ministers crowded the Watts’ Gallery;
and also that here in Dublin, for the first time in the
history of our animated city, a splendid collection of
pictures has been shown, and the voice of detraction
and malignant criticism remains silent.</p>
<p>Well! do these pictures teach anything? Has
Mr. Watts been captured? Is he a theologian or a<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</SPAN></span>
moralist, or a metaphysician? Or is he merely a
highly-gifted man, working out his salvation by way
of art?</p>
<p>Take his two pictures of Eve. In all this collection
there are none more poetical.</p>
<p>In the first of these, “The Temptation,” what
have we? A woman in the fulness of her magnificent
animalism, and we have this animalism in
the moment of its highest provocation. She seems
to curl herself and to quiver with delight as she
listens to the whispers of the subtle serpent; how
voluptuously she leans over to the tempter, her body
elastic with health and vitality. It is womanhood;
it is splendid animalism, as yet untouched by conscience
or doubt, and unchilled by the thoughts of
death; all about her summer flowers and rich perfumes.
At her feet a leopard rolls, itself a faint
echo or reverberation of her vast personality.</p>
<p>It is the merest sophistry to call this moral teaching;
it celebrates the deliciousness of temptation as
Pindar, the ancient poet, celebrates the wine-cup.
In both these pictures Watts celebrates the beauty
of the nude and the beauty of the flesh. Leighton
would have painted Eve grand and statuesque—a
figure out of the penumbra of that decorative world
where nothing is quite real. But this woman,
colossal and demi-god though she be, is as real as
one of his portraits—that of J. S. Mill, for instance,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</SPAN></span>
or the Earl of Ripon. She is so real, that you feel
almost that you could touch her golden flesh, and
hear her cries and murmurs of delight; while the
other Eve is so realistically painted that it might be
said she weeps audibly.</p>
<p>Next take his picture of Paolo and Francesca.
Of all pictures in this gallery it is the most complete,
possibly because his friends liked it, and gave him
the encouragement all artists need. It is at once
beautifully imaginative and a piece of charming
decoration. But these poor guilty lovers, these
wrecks of humanity, these fragments of tenuity,
afloat on the winds like dead leaves, like lightest
gossamer, teach no moral lesson. This picture
illustrates afresh the sad fate of true lovers, and
makes their punishment tender and beautiful. I
should like to have had John Knox’s opinion of
this picture. There was a certain grimness, a certain
severity in the painter. A meeting between
these two champions would have been interesting.</p>
<p>Yet we are so hemmed about with difficulty, and
so bewildered by a multitude of counsellors, and
have got so much into the pestilent habit of seeking
guidance everywhere, that one must needs find a
moral even in the bosom of a rose.</p>
<p>Therefore—although it be quite unnecessary to
the true appreciation of art—I will, reluctantly as it
were, entirely on my own responsibility, pluck
some moral guidance from imaginative art.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>If morality frames for our guidance rules of conduct
which, if we do not obey, we are to be punished—if
it bids us shun temptation and remove
temptation from our path and from the paths of all
the world—Art, on the contrary, seems to say, with
all its strength and with all its voices: “Seek
temptation; run to meet it; we are here to be
tempted.” Art does not say—“Be happy, or be
miserable, or be wise, or be prudent”; but it says—“Live,
have it out with fortune, don’t spare yourself,
be no laggard or coward, have no fear.” And
this also is part of the message: “Abide where
Watts lived, and where the true artist always lived—on
the high table-lands, in the unshaded sunshine
of intellectual happiness—never descending into the
valleys, where hang, mist-like, the languors and
lethargies, the low miseries, sensualities, and
adulteries which afflict human nature when it is
defeated, discouraged, disintegrated.”</p>
<p>At the end of this room there is a large picture
enormously impressive—“Time, Death and
Judgment.” To be impressive is itself a great
artistic merit; yet I do not think this a great picture;
there is, indeed, a fine arrangement of colour, and
mass, and line, yet behind it all there is no energy
of conviction.</p>
<p>Time moves forward, a striding figure, carrying
a scythe; beside him walks Death, his wife, a weary
woman, tenderly gathering into her lap the flowers<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</SPAN></span>
of life; above these two figures is Judgment. These
figures are vague and conventional as regards any
meaning or intention they might convey. If this
picture has any meaning, it is as if Watts had said
to himself: “I am a figure-painter and will, by my
craft of figure-painting, translate into a picture the
kind of pleasing terror which is excited by watching
a fine sunset or listening to an oratorio.” This is
not art, as Michael Angelo gave it. Blake said a
picture should be like a lawyer presenting a writ.</p>
<p>“Love and Death” seems much finer—it grips
the attention at once. Before the other picture we
stand idly pensive; but here we want to get at the
root of the matter—to grope our way into the very
heart of the picture. There is the naked figure of
Love, wavering, falling backwards; and then
Death, this huge bulk; draped, and hooded, and
horrid. Is it man? Is it woman? and its face is
hidden; and is this because it was in the thought
of the painter that no one has ever seen the face of
Death except the piteous dead, who carry their
knowledge into the grave?</p>
<p>As regards a famous picture not in this collection—the
picture called “Hope”—I would say that
pleasing though it be, it owes its success mainly to
its faults; and that people like it because no one can
say exactly what it means. A man who really
lived by hope—a Krapotkin or a William Morris—would
find its vagueness utterly displeasing.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>England likes her artists to preserve a soft, indefinite
touch, because in her world of action and
practical effort ideas must not be pushed too far,
and compromise rules. Art, on the contrary, does
not like half thoughts—she will have a positive yea
or nay. If thought is not pursued to its furthest
bourne and limit, the picture lacks energy, and is
without effect. In Art, as in everything else,
energy is the true solvent.</p>
<p>In my mind, pictures of this kind are meant to
hang in the rooms of the idle rich—because intended
for people who wish, without effort, to indulge
themselves—and see all things past, present, and
to come, rosily and smilingly, however falsely.
There are artists, poets, and painters—and in this
case Watts is among them—who seem to keep in
stock a sort of pharmacopœia of drugs and opiates
and soothing mixtures to be served out as required.
Michael Angelo owed his terribleness, his black
melancholy, to the fact that in his pride he would
not accept any soothing mixtures; he faced all the
facts of life.</p>
<p>Now, let me say a word in reply to those who are
so ready to point out defects in Watts’ technique.
To find fault is easy—is at all times easy. In this
vivacious city it is a special accomplishment,
where, indeed, everyone has learned logic, but no
one has learned enthusiasm, and few care for the
ideal or for poetry.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>In answer to these people I would enter a plea of
confession and avoidance.</p>
<p>Granted all they say about these faults, I would
ask, in all the roll of English painters, is there one
who would have given us that magnificent Eve of
the Temptation? How royally she leans forward as
she stoops to her fate: what swing and what pose
in her movement. In the strain, in the ecstacy of
her sinning, every nerve and every muscle seems
to tremble. Not Millais, nor Leighton, nor Alma
Tadema—far more accomplished artists than Watts—could
have done it; nor Reynolds, nor Gainsborough,
nor Vandyke. None of these men had
the technique to do what Watts has here done.
Watts triumphs by his technique.</p>
<p>But it has not been always so in Watts’ work.
When not roused to great exertion by his theme,
he fell away into carelessness and into haste. You
see, this man who lived so long a life had such a
teeming mind that his hands could not work fast
enough.</p>
<p>And here let me allude for a moment to Watts
the man. All accounts that have reached us
represent him as singularly humble and modest.
It was so with Michael Angelo, and it is so with
all men who work among great ideas. When The
Last Judgment was finished, and all Italy burst
into praise, and princes, cardinals, and poets, vied
with each other in presenting homage, Michael<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</SPAN></span>
Angelo waved them off with scorn. “If,” he said,
“I carried Paradise in my bosom, these words
would be too much”; and he wrote in reply to one
of them: “I am merely a poor man, working in
the Art God has given me, and trying to lengthen
out my life.” When an artist or poet gives himself
airs, puts on side, as we say, it is because,
like Lord Byron, he is working away from great
ideas, and because in all simplicity and good faith
he finds nothing which asks his reverence, nothing
greater than his own fortunes and his own
sensations. Art for Art’s sake is for those who hate
life, as many poets do, or who hate ideas, as again
many poets do. The great artist is also a man like
unto ourselves, and great personality is the material
out of which is woven all his Art.</p>
<p>Now, let me offer most respectfully a startling
opinion. I think that as a religious painter Watts
failed; and that he failed because he was bound to
fail.</p>
<p>The spiritual world is as much with us as it was
with the people of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries; but we seek to explore its recesses, by
tabulated observation, by sequences of thought, by
scientific guesses, and carefully planned experiments:
things not to be expressed in pictorial or
plastic forms, even though Michael Angelo has said
everything might be expressed as sculpture.</p>
<p>Is it that Nature never repeats herself? She has<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</SPAN></span>
produced her religious painter; his day is over; and
Watts was trying to do what was impossible.</p>
<p>In those far-off days people believed—and
actually, with the most vivid realisation, believed—at
one and the same time in angels, archangels,
and saints, and gods, and goddesses, and prophets,
and sybils, and fiends of the under-world, and all
the machinery of the supernatural, including angels,
such as that which Watts has painted in the picture
“Love and Life”; and the painter who painted
those images worked under the exacting criticism
of an alert and expectant people. Now, in place
of these beautiful or terrible personages, we have
substituted the forces of nature.</p>
<p>Examine his picture called “Love and Life.”
It is a vast subject. The whole mind of the
civilized world is groping a way among its
problems. But this picture is wholly inadequate.
Life is represented as a feeble mendicant sort of
creature, blindly stumbling up rocky stairs. This
is a poor image of life. Milton would have scorned
it. Watts should have remembered his own
“Eve.” And “Love” is represented as a strong
angel. It is precisely because Love is not a strong
angel that all the trouble is upon us. If his picture
of “Hope” should be placed in a lady’s boudoir,
this picture should hang in the cabinets of those
who think life is to be saved merely by the clasping
of hands and turning eyes heavenward.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>In “Eve’s Repentance” there is a cold light
bursting through the blue clouds, and shining over
the back and shoulders. We have here the old
Venetian harmony of blue and yellow and white;
and because of it, in some subtle way, we have an
enhanced sense of the warmth of the palpitating,
naked flesh. But, bless you! this is not all. By
this light breaking through the clouds, Watts
symbolizes that there is redemption for sinners.
And who is interested? Compare this symbolism
with that in Michael Angelo’s picture, where the
just-created and half-awakened Adam raises his
arm in superb languor to receive Divine knowledge
by the touching of God’s forefinger. I do not here
include the picture “Love and Death,” because it
does not seem to me in any sense a religious picture.
It suggests no dogma nor mystical theory, nor is
there any kind of sentiment. The artist, by his
labour, has placed before us in monumental
effectiveness certain facts now and always with us.
It is a great picture, but it is not a religious picture.</p>
<p>Watts is a portrait-painter beyond all praise; he is
singular among all painters for the interest he
imparts to his subject. Before most portraits people
stand and say, “What dull things portraits are!
why are they ever exhibited?” or perhaps they
say, “What a clever painter! but what an ugly
man to paint!” In presence of a Watts we are<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</SPAN></span>
interested in a face; we feel liking or aversion, or a
tantalizing curiosity.</p>
<p>In Watts’ portraits craftsmanship attains its
perfection, because here he worked in an atmosphere
of exacting criticism; everyone understands
a portrait, and the stupidest is interested when it is
his own portrait.</p>
<p>When Watts painted his imaginative work, it
was done in an atmosphere of polite indifference.
It is a strange paradox that Watts lived surrounded
by the most distinguished and intellectual society
of his time, and yet he worked in solitude. When
he went wrong, there was no one to tell him; and
when he was right, equally there was no response.
They were interested in the artist, but not in his
art. This lofty-minded recluse, who laboured by
his painting to give the world great thoughts, impressed
these cultivated worldlings: they were
interested in the man, but neither in his thoughts
nor in his pictures. At a private view in the
Grosvenor Gallery a friend of mine overheard Watts
saying to a lady: “Everyone is interested in my
velvet coat, but no one asks me about my pictures.”</p>
<p>It was not so in ancient Italy. When Michael
Angelo, at the imperious command of the impetuous
Pope Julius, uncovered half his work on
the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he stood to
receive the judgment of a people who were superstitious,
ignorant men of violence, men of war,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</SPAN></span>
homicidal, but each one of them impassioned for
Art.</p>
<p>“Italy,” said the Spanish painter to Michael
Angelo, “produces the best Art, because Italians
hate mediocrity.” We are clay in the hands of
the potter. We may affect to be proud and solitary
as Lucifer, but in vain; the artist gives that he
may receive; to seek sympathy and desire companionship
is as instinctive as hunger and thirst.
To the true artist exacting criticism is comforting
as mother’s love; and, wanting this exacting
criticism, Watts fell away into slackness of work
and of thought.</p>
<p>We can only say that had he lived in Dublin his
fate would have been worse. Indifference, however
polite and respectful, is bad: but destructive
criticism kills.</p>
<p>There was once a small but mighty nation, now
numerous as the sands of the seashore, and no
longer so interesting. To this nation was born a
poet, and they made him the poet of all time. They
took him and taught him all they knew—and they
had great things to teach; and when, at their command,
he made great dramas, they stood at his
elbow; and everything they gave him he gave back
to them tenfold.</p>
<p>England was then Shakespeare’s land.</p>
<p>The poet is always amongst us: the difficulty is<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</SPAN></span>
how to find him; he is like the proverbial needle
in a bundle of hay.</p>
<p>But one thing is certain—logicians without love
will not find him; they leave a desolation, and call
it peace—nay, they call it culture. Critics of this
sort will allow nothing to exist except themselves.
No; I am wrong. There is one thing they admire
more even than themselves—the <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">fait accompli</i>, a
mundane success. Had Watts been born in Dublin,
he would have read for the “Indian Civil,” and
perhaps—passed.</p>
<p class="right">
<span class="smcap">J. B. Yeats, r.h.a</span>.<br/></p>
<p>1907.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</SPAN></span></p>
</div>
<hr class="chap" />
<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTE:</h3>
<div class="footnote">
<p><SPAN name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></SPAN><SPAN href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></SPAN> A report of a lecture delivered in the spring of 1907 at the
Hibernian Academy, Dublin.</p>
</div>
</div>
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<hr class="chap" />
<div class="transnote">
<p class="center">Transcriber’s Notes</p>
<ol>
<li>The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the
public domain.</li>
<li>Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text,
and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.</li>
<li><SPAN href="#Front_Matter">Front Matter</SPAN> “The thanks The Talbot Press, Limited” changed to
“The thanks of The Talbot Press, Limited”.</li>
<li><SPAN href="#Page_13">Page 13</SPAN> Period at end of “make-up as men” changed to comma.</li>
</ol></div>
<SPAN name="endofbook"></SPAN>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />