John Butler Yeats

“ Of course I know that there are cheerful people who adore ugliness. Such people have so much animal spirit that they are like many schoolboys who want to frighten their maiden aunt, but ugliness of the intense and passionate kind comes out of the entrails of the angry and the unhappy.
When cheerful artists revel in the ugly what they write or paint is purely mechanical, but whether an artist has the genuine passion and can't help himself, or is only pretending to it, such men are a weariness to any man with any tincture of a romantic imagination. ”

“ To compare it with a drawing-room is to remember the difference between a fishing lugger built and rigged and shaped for storm and angry sea, and a spic and span yacht which never leaves the harbour except in the summer time when the seas are safe and the winds gentle.
If the sweet-tempered men keep romance alive, it is the cross-tempered, contentious men without affection who grub into the secret places to find the poison and infection of ugliness. These people desire to destroy everywhere the vision of happiness, and to make war on its prophets and champions. ”

“ He is what is called well-bred. The individual man of entire sincerity has to wrestle with himself, unless transported by rage or passion; he has so much mind to make up, with none to help him and no guide except his conscience; and conscience after all, is but a feeble glimmer in a labyrinthine cavern of darkness.
I think it was Shakespeare the poet, and not the thinking Shakespeare or the wise Shakespeare, who made that discovery about the importance of self-loyalty, for it is the root of every kind of poetical distinction, and without distinction poetry is of little avail. ”

“ Terror is a delightful feeling if beauty be added to it. The Hebraic conception of Jehovah fascinates the imagination, because it combines terror with its beauty. If children are frightened by a thunder-storm, take them to a window and bid them watch the lightening play among the clouds, and their fears will change into a kind of exultation more delightful than listening to a fairy tale. Beauty cleanses feeling. What more distressing, what more profoundly disturbing than the ache inspired by sex passion; yet add romance and beauty, and while the feeling remains, the ache is gone. ”

“ George on a race-course, above all if mounted on a wild and splendid race-horse, was a transformed being. Puritanism was shattered, torn away, a mere rag of antediluvianism. Then he loved all men, he loved humanity, he loved even himself: a natural man, such as he was meant to be, a pleasant self-esteem, without aggressiveness, smiling from every gesture. I never saw any man on horseback to compare with him, horse and man made a unity of grace and strength. ”

“ A tragedy acted on the stage inspires pity and terror, but if that play be written by Shakespeare these feelings are cleansed—they remain, but the ache is gone. Laughter also, like beauty, cleanses the feelings. Its special value, I think, is as a cure for anger. Yet it does not destroy the anger. The energy is still there, but changed into merriment. There is the sunshine of beauty and the sunshine of laughter, and in the great writers they often mingle and become one. All through the beauty of 'Romeo and Juliet' laughter vibrates so that we do not know whether to laugh or to cry. ”

“ This is the unique charm of poetry and the inspiration of what, from time immemorial, people have agreed to call love, which is the true bond between man and man that will survive all others. Its perfect and complete expression is beauty, as ugliness is the expression of hatred or contempt or fear.
Goethe said of himself that he could not hate, and was ill-advised enough to think it a blemish. If a poet hates, as sometime happens, love is not far away. We have the invention of the Sirens, who, though they have fish tails, are beautiful women ”

“ The Sun stands for ambition and intellect and power, and the Moon for the poetry of affection, which being insatiable, brings regret and the consciousness of a forced resignation. In those days if my mother was the Moon my father was the Sun, shining aloft in my sky. It was my father who made me the artist I am, and kindled the sort of ambition I have transmitted to my sons. ”

“ It was a shock to pass from a society, where people enjoy themselves and laugh gaily, not being at all concerned about moral issues, to a society where no one thought of enjoyment, and if they laughed did so with a grim humour that was not always good-natured, where the air itself was heavy with moral disapprobation of the world generally and of themselves in particular. ”

“ Until the last week came, we brothers scattered, each bent upon his own particular enjoyment. When that week came, we went about together, made good companions by an identical mournfulness; and our mother was as sad as we were.
Is a boarding-school a good institution for any boy? Certainly it is a complete antidote to home influence, and is that desirable? A boarding-school develops selfishness. Every boy for himself. Does one acquire self-control? In such a school as mine the discipline from without was too searching and too constant for that other discipline from within to have a chance. ”

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

“ My wife, once meeting an old man who in his youth had associated much with my father, judged it a good opportunity to ask about him, and whether he was a good preacher. The answer came promptly: 'Yes, good—but flighty—flighty.' I do think that romance, which is pleasant beauty, unlike the austere beauty of the classical school, is born of sweet-tempered men. My father was sweet-tempered, and affectionate, also he constantly read Shelley, and, no less, Shelley's antidote, Charles Lamb. To be with him was to be caught up into a web of delicious visionary hopefulness. ”

“ The fish is too remote; we cannot guess its thoughts, it inspires no curiosity. To wander along a river bank and with your utmost dexterity cast your flics lightly here and there over the surface of a deep pool and watch for the yellow gleam of the fish as it rises, is there anything so fascinating as this gambling in dark waters? I knew a man who died an enviable death. He was a distinguished Dublin barrister, a man of imagination, and he loved salmon fishing. ”

“ In my youth I would sometimes hear people say with self-complacency that there was no gentleman the equal of an Irish gentleman. The boast was not altogether foolish. We all know the type of Christian and Saint who has no manners. These men had manners and cultivated them as part and parcel of the Christian ideal. Back in the misty past I can see those quiet figures of a now forgotten civilisation, whose gentility differed from that of the English as light from darkness, and one especially, Sir Andrew Hart, who was Vice-Provost of Trinity College Dublin, and a learned mathematician. ”

“ Poets, being all compact of imagination and dream, are attached to the quiet of the soul; and ugliness is exhausting, while love and beauty replenish the wells. I think that but for some accident every great poet would have attained to length of years, and every minor poet also, while artists and poets of hate died young. My old school fellow, though delicate both as a boy and a man, lived to be long past seventy. ”

“ The Englishman is proud of his empire on which the sun never sets. The good Irishman loves Ireland as in Shakespeare's day the Englishman loved England, affection not vanity the essence of the relation. The historic sense, which is so fatally lacking in America, abounds among the Irish peasants when they gather in their cottages and talk together and scheme, and hope intensifies this affection. The American, like the Englishman, is very proud of his vast country, its wealth and its millions of people. ”

“ Does anyone know what was Shakespeare's opinion of Juliet? Did he know himself? Milton would not have kept silent.
Such people are a continual novelty. Had intellect been the dominating thing in this personality, I should soon have grown tired. Intellect is always the same. There are not two ways of doing the fifth proposition of Euclid or of stating the theory of rent. You just know it or you don't know it. But when it comes to a matter of feeling and of the instincts and desires and the multitudinous sensibilities, no two men are alike. ”

“ Now-a-days people are brought up in a world of reason and science: is it any wonder that intricate and delicate and difficult verse should give way to the poetry of rhetoric and a moral uplift? People used to amuse themselves by bracing or relaxing their souls in the vast and shadowy world of solitary fantasy: now we do better—at any rate it is easier—we set about reforming our neighbours. When I first arrived at that English School I was greatly surprised by English mispronunciation. ”

“ Perhaps too much education is as bad as none at all. The poet probably had none but what he picked up for himself. A well-stored memory is something like too much orthodoxy. It captures the whole man and arrests the dreaming faculty and inhibits initiative.
There is yet another memory which comes to me from Trinity College and comes pleasantly. I lost my orthodoxy. I was reading Butler's Analogy, that delectable book which, by my fathers account he, and some other man alone understood, when I suddenly amazed myself by coming to the conclusion that revealed religion was myth and fable. ”

“ My niece writes to me of the 'appalling commonness of the Australian mind.' The Irish peasant mind is not common, is indeed so interesting that the peasants in the west of Ireland can enjoy themselves in solitude, poetized, if I may use such a word, by their religion, by their folk lore, and by their national history, and by living under a changeable sky which, from north to south and from west to east is a perpetual decoration like the scenery in some vast theatre. ”

“ My criticism is that both these poets are lacking in the entire sincerity of the greatest poets, that because Keats has this entire sincerity he is better than either. I find, indeed, in Shelley and Swinburne activity, animation, eloquence. I find in Keats force as of mother nature. 'What man,' says the Bible, 'by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?'
Yet let any young poet stay for a while among the puritans and practise all the restraints of self-loyalty, and he will turn his sociable activity and animated sympathy into something which is much better, namely force. ”

“ Synge, spiritually the most fastidious man I ever knew and the proudest, who turned away from modern French literature, told me that he preferred their society to the comforts of the best hotel. They are so happy in themselves and in each other's conversation that they are conservative, as conservative as the people behind the barriers of privilege. It is, the people with 'common minds' who quarrel with themselves and with life, and are a homeless people and seek for change, for experiment and for progress. It is the unhappy people who make the world go round. ”

“ It is a foolish question, yet I wonder did Shakespeare undergo that kind of discipline?
It is evident from what I have written that to live amongst my people was pleasanter, but that to live amongst the Pollexfens was good training. Which of these two civilizations was best for the human product I have never, in my own mind, been able to decide. What we all seek is neither happiness nor pleasure but to be ourselves through and through. ”

“ Lonely spinsters sometime suffer from the thought that they've lived wasted lives. It must have soothed Betsy's last moments to remember how she could raise blood blisters on little boys' hands.
My conscience once played me a very nasty trick. As you may suppose the greatest crime next to setting the school on fire, or running away, or something of that sort, was to tell a lie. If a little boy told a lie he was birched for it, and possibly went to hell hereafter. Telling a lie is sometimes a little boy's greatest temptation, and the elders have decided that it is the greatest crime. ”

“ Poets must not meddle with opinions. The poet who becomes a fighting man circumscribes his activity and coarsens his mind. Milton's poetical genius never recovered the six political pamphlets he wrote. When I think of the poetical mind I think of an oak tree that all night and all day is drawing nourishment from the earth about its roots. A tree not so nourished, and with its roots not pressed deep down into the earth, would soon be overthrown soon laid prostrate by the storms of the upper air. ”

“ Yet it is among people of this sort, whose imagination is vivid and whose will has been broken by dreams & visions, that the arts have always flourished. And remember if these peasants have not the will power which has made the dull people of Belfast such an edifying success, all the same they have their own intensity, and I myself and there are more like me, would rather listen to a Mayo man whistling a tune, or telling a fairy tale or ghost story, than to the greatest man out of Belfast or Liverpool, talking of his commercial triumphs. ”

“ Yet human nature is never more interesting than when undergoing this kind of ordeal. To meet a man in the pleasant ways of acquaintanceship is interesting and exciting, to visit him in prison may be painful, but it is enthralling; for which reason, though I hate puritanism, I don't think I would like it to be entirely removed from the world, unless it be the Belfast variety, which like the east wind is good for neither man nor beast. ”