Chapter II: Part 2

Some remnants of the old superstitions, assiduously poured into my soul by Miss Emma Davenport, still hung about me, and I used to pray to God for letters from home. I could, in all seriousness, debate with myself whether there was any sense in praying when I knew that the time had passed for posting that particular letter that I hoped for. My mother wrote constantly, but could not write often enough to keep pace with my longings. Occasionally my father wrote in his eloquent and intellectual way and fired me with enthusiasm, so that I walked as if I had wings to my feet. 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. 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. Every night, when the whole house was quiet, and the servants gone to bed, he would sit for a while beside the kitchen fire and I would be with him. He never smoked during the day, and not for worlds would he have smoked in any part of the house except the kitchen; and yet he considered himself a great smoker. He used a new clay pipe, and as he waved the smoke aside with his hand, he would talk of the men he had known--his fellow-students--of Archer Butler the Platonist, and of a man called Gray who was, I think, an astronomer, and of his friend Isaac Butt, that man of genius engulfed and lost in law and politics. And he would talk of his youth and boyhood in the West of Ireland where he had fished and shot and hunted, and had not a care. Of how he would, on the first day of the grouse shooting, climb to the top of a high mountain seven miles away, and be there in the dark with his dogs and attendants, waiting for the dawn to break.

There are men with a social gift who must dominate their company, expecting others to woo them. This was not my father's way. Rather would he lure you on till you believed, not in him, about which he did not care, but in your own self. It was he who wooed his company not they him. Naturally I found his conversation enthralling. His country neighbours round about and his own friends & relations, would complain that he used strange words; and so he did, and for that reason I was the more pleased. A new word was to him, as to me, a pearl of discovery, fished up out of some strange book he had been reading, and we would enjoy it together. My mind often goes back into that wide kitchen, and again I sit with him beside the fire, a little table for his tobacco and whiskey at his side and on it a single candle throwing a feeble light. The kitchen is the best room in the house. 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. Among such people my father was silent and helpless. I think I am more venturesome.

Everybody was happy in Shakespeare's time. When the French Revolution had spent its force, and Napoleon was at St. Helena, unhappiness was in Paris, and from out of its thick cloud came the realistic wave. 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. I have seen drawings & read prose done with an appetite for the ugly that reminded me of the dogs that licked the sores of Lazarus.

My father was as forgiving as Shakespeare in the Sonnets, and he could forget. The artist within him incessantly arranged and rearranged life, so that he lived in fairyland. Sometimes my father's and another man's account of the same incident would widely differ; but I always preferred what my father said. William Morris told my son that Kipling when a boy would come home from a days walk with stories of the day's adventures which were all fiction. I wonder if Shakespeare would always cleave to the truth in the common matters of every day. At no time did I lose respect for my father, I knew with him it was only the gentle sport of 'make believe' without which life would be intolerable to men who live by their affections. Saints and lovers and men governed by affection, poets and artists, all live in phantasy, its falsehood truer than any reality. By such falsehood we got nearer to truth. His charm to me was his veracious intellect. He would lie neither to please the sentimentalists nor the moralists. What talent I have for honest thinking I learned from him.

Like every Evangelical clergyman of his kind, he regarded the Catholic Church as the Enemy, yet he never disliked it, I am convinced, as he did the Presbyterian. On leaving the University he became Curate to a clergyman in the North of Ireland. His Rector was a learned man who had published translations in verse from some early Italian poet. He was also a very bad-tempered man. I have noticed that this kind of man finds a great attraction in men who are of sweet and placable temper, as perhaps the evil angels love the righteous whom they incessantly torment and tempt but cannot persuade. The first quarrel arose because my father rode all about the parish on a spirited horse and refused to desist. The Rector wrote to him that he had hired a Curate and not a jockey. The next quarrel was about my father's preaching. Evangelicism was at the time fashionable among men of intellect, & the Rector hated Evangelicism. My father gave me an amusing account of the quarrel. He was staying, as he often did, in the Rector's house, and it was Sunday morning. There was a rapid interchange of letters beginning at six in the morning, and the argument was continued at breakfast, the ladies all on my father's side. Finally the Rector said he would preach himself that morning. As luck would have it, choosing at random among his stock of ready-made sermons, he took with him a sermon tainted with the abominable doctrine. My father described the smile that went round the Rector's pew.

The Rector did, as I have said, after his hot-tempered way, love my father, and when my father told him that he had lost some of his income and could no longer stay in the parish, where he was, paid but a pittance, the Rector worked himself into a rage and refused to bid him good bye. Yet, some years afterwards, when my father preached in some Cathedral, he saw his old Rector coming towards him with outstretched hands, to suggest that he have the sermon printed and published.

The letters of English women are mostly dull, they are too ceremonious for the ease and freshness of letter writing. Irish women take life gaily & themselves lightly, with no latent puritanism and its suggestion of self-importance, to retard their pens. My mother's letters were a joy to all her family, and my father wrote copiously and eloquently. I remember every letter by either of them would end with the words 'burn this,' and the injunction was too well carried out. I don't think that of all these letters there is even one extant. Nothing delighted my father more than to write speeches and letters for his friends. Sometimes they were business letters, but more often speeches for some family gathering--perhaps there had been a quarrel, and all the clans were to meet at a marriage. The difficulty was to make a speech that would offend nobody and might reconcile their differences. My father would undertake the task with the greatest animation, and as he would not go himself to the wedding, others would come and tell him of the wonderful cleverness of the speaker, and how surprised they were, and of the blessed effects, and he and my mother would keep the secret.

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. Was it not all set out in the Bible and quite clear to those having faith?

Romantic temper and high vitality had endowed my father with a natural intrepidity. When therefore cholera came to Ireland where it attained a mortality higher than anywhere else in the Kingdom, he went fearlessly among the people, consoling them with religious hope and comforting them also in many secular ways. I have been told that again and again he would take the sick man in his arms, and hold him up, as he prayed and administered the Sacrament, and this at a time when cholera was supposed to be virulently infectious. This was never forgotten to him in the parish. The poor have long memories.

To be fond of fishing ran in the family, but my father I think preferred grouse shooting. Arthur Corbet, my mother's brother, a big athletic man with a short temper, had because of a very bad stammer become a clerk in the Bank of Ireland which all his life he regarded as an insult inflicted upon him by cruel destiny. He would walk fourteen Irish miles to a pretty sequestered village high up among the mountains, fish all day, and at night return walking all those miles carrying a load of fish. I don't think my father would have endured that fatigue for a day's fishing, and my uncle would sometimes say that he had not the true zest. The friends of my youth used to measure a man by his taste in shooting, fishing, or hunting, and there were noisy and dismal circles where men were measured by their capacity for drinking. When I was asked by the people compiling 'Who's who' what was my favourite pastime, I replied that I had none, but would like a little fishing. It was not inserted, being considered, I suppose, too frivolous for the solemn emptiness of that useful book. I do not like fishing with bait because of the nauseous handling of the worms; and in shooting the sight of the bird alive and wounded in one's hand is painful for the nerves. But no one minds the flapping and writhing of the fish taken out of his element. 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. He had just hooked a salmon and was playing it when he had a heart seizure. As he lay in a friend's arms, with his dying eyes he watched that fish being played and landed. He went to his death charioted to the next world in a fisherman's dream.

Mr. F. B., my cousin, had a very pretty country house and demesne on the banks of Lough Dan, County Wicklow, and was the Squire of the district, a sort of County Wicklow Sir Roger de Coverly. He had a little flock of children and a wife upon whom he depended a good deal. Every day she took the children for a walk, and if she stayed away a long time, as would occasionally happen on a fine day, and he missed her, he would bring out the dinner-gong and beat it, sending its mellow voice rolling among the hills. And his wife would say 'We must return, my dears, I hear your father calling.' Everyone liked that house and its despotically indulgent master and gentle mistress and the happy children who are now old people. Everything about that house partook of a sort of civility not to be found every where. The coachman, when required to yoke the car, would come out of the stable yard to the front of the house and give a loud halloo, and having done so would go back, and you would hear presently from far away down in the valley of the demesne the rapid hoof-beats of a horse, a handsome grey horse I remember, and like rushing wind he would gallop past you into the yard behind the house, eager to leave the solitude of his pasturage for the open road. There were other horses, and there were dogs and cats, all pleasant and friendly. And there were beehives that made a pleasant hum in the summer air, and there was a pony which no one in the house, not even the coachman, could catch. 'Herself', the mistress of the house, would have to come out on to the lawn, and he would let himself be taken and she would lead him to the coachman. There was also a wise old donkey, who, when we dined, would thrust his head through the window and ask to be fed. Dining there, I said 'Don't give him any thing and see what he will do.' 'He will come into the hall' they said, and when we heard him blundering about in that not particularly spacious place, I wanted them to try him further, but they said 'No, for he will bray'.

Why did people like staying in that house? Partly because of the great natural beauty by which it was surrounded, and partly because of the great cordiality of your welcome from all that numerous company of men women and children. And yet there was something else. It was that they were a quaintly interesting people, not modern at all, just mediæval, who stirred the historical sense and made you think of some golden age when no one was in a hurry and so all had time to enjoy themselves, and for the sake of enjoyment to be courteous and witty and pleasant. There was an old butler and an old French woman who did the cooking. Indeed everything flavoured of 'tanned antiquity' except the brood of pretty children, who, as I remember, did on my first visit keep all together, bright and gay, with a life of their own, and rather silent. I was at the awkward age when a boy becomes self-conscious and is at his ease with no one.

Certain sour-faced socialists would explain everything by the economic situation--yet surely here was poetry pure and simple--nothing but poetry. It was on Lough Dan I caught my first trout, just under a dark cliff rising straight out of the water. And many a fish I've caught in that spot. I was staying there with my father and mother when my father was seized with rheumatic fever, further aggravated by gout, and I helped my mother to nurse him. Some years afterwards I myself had that fever. I know all about it. Your soul turns to blackness, wrath overpowers you and fills you with a sort of devilry. For a few days I was as Swift or Carlyle at their fiercest. I hated everyone. I had such insight and gift of utterance that I knew how to wound anyone who approached me. It is not surprising, therefore, that my father, suffering from this fever, should for once have been unreasonable. He asked me to move him in bed. In a great flutter of fear and anxiety I tried to do so. If you touched him he groaned, and though I tried my very best I could not satisfy him. Beside himself with pain and with my awkwardness, he called out impatiently 'Place me diagonally in the bed.' The word 'diagonal' I knew only in Euclid. Yet he would only repeat 'Place me diagonally.' Afterwards, amidst all his pain, he laughed and apologised, and said that he got the word, not from Euclid at all but from Tristram Shandy, where years afterwards I found it. When they had retired behind their bed-curtains, Mrs. Shandy said to Mr. Shandy 'I think Uncle Toby is going to be married.' Then said Mr. Shandy 'He won't be able to lie diagonally in bed any more.'

It was always an annoyance to Mr. Shandy that he could not puzzle Mrs. Shandy, because she never bestowed a further thought upon anything that she did not understand at once. But my father, when he flung at me the word 'diagonal,' knew that he was inflicting on me the pain of puzzledom and that was a passing satisfaction to him, even though the effect was to increase my awkwardness and prolong his own discomfort. Is it because of the sociable instinct that when we are ourselves in pain we desire to share it with somebody else? A man worried about his business doesn't like his smiling wife to go on smiling, and yet if she doesn't smile, it is a breach of all the proprieties that should control a wife's behaviour.

People will sometimes say that religious conversion effects a change of heart. I very much doubt it. Under religion people remain what they were before only they are more so. The influence of Wesley reached the middle and lower classes among the English; & commercial before, they became more commercial. The commercial instinct of selfishness was able henceforth to call itself a duty, and took on religious airs; and a large part of the religion of Belfast may be stated in a single sentence 'The man who sells his cow too cheap goes to Hell.' But when Wesleyism affected the Irish leisured class, gentlemen before, they remained gentlemen, only with more refinement of heart and a more subtle sympathy. The wild men, described by Charles Lever, who cared for nothing except romance and courage and personal glory, now walked in the footsteps of their Lord and Master. 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. I painted his portrait, and one day, as I looked at him and admired his proud and distinguished profile, I said 'Sir Andrew, I am sure nature intended you to have been the leader of a tribe of insurgents in the Caucasus.' His laugh did not repudiate the suggestion. Yet he had the gentlest manners, imposing restraint on others by the restraint he imposed on himself. My father sometimes said that if a man is rude to you it is always your own fault, and I remember a bumptious man from Belfast, a cousin of my own, who would complain that he could not get men to be civil to him. Sir Andrew was a man singularly handsome, very tall, with great strength and endurance. He told me that on the night of the great storm of 1839 he walked thirty miles, the weather being so dreadful that no one would lend him a horse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps in the councils of the Eternal, or whatever you call the Providence who shapes our ends, no time is lost and nothing whatever wasted. Looking back on my uncle's long and pleasant life, ending in a close so sombre, I will pass no judgement on the ways of Providence, beyond saying that he was by nature a good man and deserved to be happy to the end. He was fond of his friends, and wished to be only good to them, and with his money he benefited hundreds. There are people who if they do anything for you do thereby fix a hook in your jaws which you can never get rid of. I think when he did you a kindness he forgot about it and wished you to forget it. Of course his sympathies were extremely narrow and did not extend beyond his relations and friends. Humanitarism, which I had learned from Mill's philosophy, I would not have dared speak of in his presence. Theory was my uncle's aversion; an old Tory, he regarded theory as the Enemy. He was extraordinarily fond of children. When we lived in the North of Ireland, his advent among us was a radiant event. I can remember that one late winter's evening, when with my mother and father he had just left for the mail coach that was to take him to Dublin, out of pure affection and loneliness I went over to the table and drank out of his tea-cup.

Having now spoken of the master of Sandymount Castle, let me now speak of one whom my eldest sister called the Deputy Master, old Michael, who for more than forty years was my uncle's butler. It was my mother who hired him when he was a young man with black hair and blue eyes. Some weeks afterwards he was found drunk. He at once, at my uncle's demand, took the pledge, and never after broke it, even though we youngsters, out of pure mischief, often tried to tempt him. I remember him as a man of white hair with an amusing resemblance to John Stuart Mill--I say amusing because Michael was short in stature and sturdily built, whereas we all know J. S. M. was tall and slender. Before coming to my uncle he had been butler to an English general whom he left because 'the Mistress had insulted his religion,' which so distressed the general that he had insisted on Michael driving from the house in the family carriage. Michael himself told me this, and that when he had got to some distance from the house, he transferred himself to a Dublin jaunting-car. He was a perfect servant, yet I never knew a man of greater self-respect. The Irish make good servants and their gentry make good masters, because both are still mediævalists, and belong to an age when it was accepted by everybody from the king to the peasant that to serve is honourable. My uncle's manner with all his servants was brief and authoritative, as though he could still send them to the guardroom, and these relations with Michael never relaxed during all the forty years. All the same Michael was Deputy Master. Sometimes when we were at dinner and Michael attending us, he would say 'Mr. So-and-So called to day' & my uncle would invariably reply 'Did you ask him to dinner?' 'Yes Sir'. My Uncle came to see me in London, a few years before his death, and after he had left Sandymount, and said 'When I told Michael of my intention, I declare to God I don't know which of us should have been most pitied.' When last I saw Michael he was ill and visibly failing. He came from his bed-room with a blanket around his shoulders but his bright blue eyes were the same as ever and he told me one of the old stories.

'Did I ever tell you, Mr. Johnnie, the story of Mr. O'Connell and the officer?'

I had heard it at least fifty times, but I said it was new to me. The officer was a witness called in some law case in which O'Connell was employed.

'Mr. Soldier' said O'Connell, 'what do you know of this matter?'

'I am not a soldier, I am an officer' said the witness. 'Then' said Mr. O'Connell 'Mr. Officer and no soldier, what do you know of this matter?'

Shortly before I left Ireland and law, to go to London and study art, and while my uncle was still at Sandymount, Michael told me a conversation he had with Butt. He said he was standing at the side door when he saw Butt at a distance, and that Butt came over to him and shook hands with him, and that he brought Butt into the oak room, and gave him luncheon and wine, and that Butt talked to him of many things and that finally Michael had said 'Now Sir, Mr. Johnnie is a Barrister, and you ought to do something for him,' and Butt answered 'Michael, I will.' And he did, in a way that, because of my resolution to go to England, was vain, but it would have been a substantial help to me.

At that time my uncle and Butt had not been on speaking terms for some years. In Butt's magnanimous mind and imagination were tides of feeling and of old memory connected with Sandymount and with those that had been its inmates that no quarrel could stand against. That was Butt all over. In the old days he and his family constantly came to Sandymount, and while his wife & children would scatter over the gardens and ground, he would stay inside talking to the old ladies. They liked especially playing backgammon with him. His reckless way of leaving blots stimulated their imagination and made them feel that he really was a man of genius. At this time he was the opponent of O'Connell and the hope of the Tories, and Disraeli had walked in the lobby of the House of Commons with his arm through his and said, 'Butt we must get you into the Cabinet.' Afterwards, when Butt had gone over to the Nationalists, my grandmother would say, 'I have a sneaking regard for Isaac Butt,' and her sister would say, 'Indeed I know you have.'

There was a something in Butt, was it poetical genius or intellectual power, was it the head or the heart, or was it merely primeval goodness, that no one could resist. It followed him everywhere, and it followed him into Court. I have seen a jury listening in constrained attitude of painful attention, with the air of men resolved to do their duty at any cost. Then the other Lawyer would cease to speak, and Butt would rise, and every man of them would smile, like watchers by a sick bed who at last saw arrive a great doctor who could work miracles, and Butt would explain things in a language so simple that the dullest brain among them would understand. It was part of his genius that he understood simple people. It was well-known among solicitors that in a case in which his feelings were not concerned he was no better than any other barrister, but that where they were concerned he was irresistible. My father was present at a dinner where there were assembled all the magnates of the Irish Bar, and one and all declared that they never knew how a case would go until they had heard Butt's speech, and, if I remember rightly. Butt at this time was not over thirty years of age. There had been a murder in County Donegal of which Butt was a native, and the family did not wish him to take a part in the defence. Friends of the accused called on him and, to put them off, he asked what he thought was an impossible fee. They went away disappointed. Butt's imagination caught fire from what they told him, and all night he walked his library thinking about it, and when, contrary to his expectations, the men called in the morning with the money, he had convinced himself and undertook the defence, and so moving was his speech, that the jury, all of them Presbyterians, when they left the Court and entered the Jury Room, fell on their knees and prayed for guidance and help. The man was acquitted. A friend of mine living in London, who had been a Dublin solicitor in large practice, told me the following story. The Dublin Corporation at the time he spoke of was composed of Protestants, and in a very important case, for which my friend was solicitor, wanted to employ Butt. He and his clients sought him everywhere and could not find him. There was Sir This and Sir That--men whose names he spoke with a kind of awe, yet neither he nor they could find Butt. Then, receiving certain hints and rumours, they took cars and cabs and drove many miles out of Dublin into the country & did at last find Butt, down on his hands and knees in a field, studying a water-course, all on the behalf of the poor ragged man who was standing beside him--a case, said my friend, for which he wouldn't get five pounds, and at this time Butt was a Tory politician, pledged to the service of the rich and powerful. My friend was a big, heavily-built man, with a wheezy voice and irritable eyes, punctiliously honest and truthful. He hated Home Rule and he loathed the Catholic Church, a bitter Protestant of the Cromwellian type, yet he liked to talk about Butt, and would rail against the people who deserted him. I have often heard him say 'Of all the men I've ever known. Butt had the best qualities.' The relation between these two men was like that between Timon of Athens and his steward. With Flavius my friend might have said:

'O Monument And wonder of good deeds evilly bestowed'

Archer Butler, in his day a famous Platonist, once said in my father's hearing, 'Butt, I leave you to the God who made you.' And so said all men, the reason being, I think, that in Butt himself was such a fountain of naturalness and humanity that people said 'This is the thing itself, compared to which our moral codes are only the scaffolding.'

Archer Butler had just been appointed, by the Board of Trinity College, Professor of Moral Philosophy. Butt knew that he had written an erotic poem, very mild for these days but very terrible in those Victorian days, and he went to congratulate him, bringing a copy of the Dublin University Review with this identical poem inserted. Butt said to him 'Why on earth did you do such a thing as publish this poem?' Butler was in consternation and believed himself lost. At this time the magazine was very famous and widely read, publishing, as it did, the stories of Lever and Carleton. It was of course a joke, for the copy showed to Butler was the only one that contained the poem, and all contrived by Butt who at that time was editor of the magazine. When Butt was Member for Harwich, and the hope of the Tories, being as yet untouched by any Irish heresies, Mrs. Butt, my father and mother, uncle Robert Corbet, a cousin and I, all went in a body to visit Madame Tussaud's Wax-work Exhibition. As we passed along among these figures, ghastly by an imitation of life which seemed to be its sad mockery, Butt constituted himself our guide, telling strange histories, partly true but mostly imaginary. At all times Butt shone in this kind of inventions. A crowd of strangers drew near, among them a little Clergyman particularly active and vociferous in his applause and encouragement, and Butt was in his element. Mrs. Butt at this time was young, as were all the party, and the situation amused her so much that she sat down on a chair, the better to enjoy her laughter. Seeing this Butt made pointed and appealing allusions, and the crowd gave her black looks, which only increased her merriment. My matter of fact cousin did not know that a joke was in progress, and when the little Clergyman approached him and said 'What a remarkable guide they keep in this establishment' he was shocked and said 'He's not a guide, he is the member for Harwich.' The crowd melted away, and Butt was indignant. 'Why' he said 'I meant to have got sixpence apiece all round.'

The Irish spurn convention and are called cynical, and the English make of it a religion and for their pains are called hypocrites. The fact being that, while the English like the beaten way, we prefer the untrodden way that leads to the surprising.

Trinity College Dublin did very little for me, which is entirely my own fault, neither did Trinity College Dublin inspire me with affection, and that was the fault of Trinity College Dublin. One night, in the College park, walking under the stars with that brilliant scientist George Fitzgerald, I saw him look round at some new buildings just erected and with a snap of satisfaction he said, 'No ornament, that is one good thing.' I made the obvious retort 'How is Trinity College Dublin to inspire affection, if it is not made beautiful in its buildings, its quadrangle, its trees and its park.' He gave a grunting assent. Had he not been in a controversial mood, and ascetic for severe science, he would have responded generously; for he was a true scientist, that is, a poet as well. Trinity College inspires no love; outside what it has done for learning and mathematics and things purely intellectual it has a lean history. Still youth is youth, and the time of youth is pleasant to look back upon. Fitzgerald, I have said, had a poetical mind, and that means among other things that he took humanity in the lump. Indeed I never knew any of that distinguished family that did not love the sinner as much as they deplored the sin, & in this surely they showed themselves to be Irish of the Irish. I leave it to others to explain, for it is a quality which is not English or Scotch. Think of it, to love the sinner! What a reach of mind it demands and what patience and long practice in the right kind of sensibilities; remember Thomas Carlyle and how he hated the sinner, being a sort of Public Executioner everywhere and anywhere. I recall that when he died in the fullness of his glory and success, and we all praised him, it was old Baron Fitzgerald, the uncle of George Fitzgerald, who shocked us by calling out at his dinner-table. 'The great Sham is dead, what is to be done with the great Sham?' Yet Carlyle's hatred for the sinner was not sham but an active quality of fierce anger for the encouragement of which and its sustenance he had ransacked history and philosophy. I once saw him in the flesh in London, in the Chelsea district, an old man, tottering along very rapidly, wearing a blue frock coat with a large red rose in his buttonhole. Instantly I saw who it was and stopped and turned round to watch him as he receded, and he also turned round and looked at me, and I saw his face, his ruddy cheeks and blue eyes, charged I thought with a smouldering irascibility, and yet I could see the benevolence that, had it not been Scotch and further infected by Prussian rigours, would have brought pity and tenderness to drown that wrath. Yet it was wrath, and bore no resemblance to the cold and treacherous cruelty of Froude, in whose long horse-face was neither irascibility nor pity. While I stood there watching the old sage, a British workman passed, his bag of tools over his shoulder, and said in an aside--'A rare old file that!'

There was a man named Thomas Allingham, a brother to the poet who mentions him somewhere, as a man who had won a great reputation in Trinity College Dublin but who was without any creative ability. If he could not create he could write imitations of his brother's poems and publish them with the poet's initials in the country newspaper of Ballyshannon where these brothers were born. The poet was extraordinary fastidious and exacting in all matters of style, never satisfied with anything he wrote, and he was much the elder brother, claiming all the rights of an elder brother who is fastidious about style. I knew Thomas and was often in his rooms and very soon became aware of the spirit of mischief that dwelt behind his gray eyes and half-closed heavy eyelids. A Ballyshannon paper was declining, and its editor was a friend of Allingham's. Allingham returning to College sought out a congenial spirit named Green, and together they started to revive the paper by an acrimonious controversy over the words 'telegram' and 'telegraph.' One wrote a letter to that paper saying it should be 'telegraph' & the other that it should be 'telegram.' I've seen them sitting together over Allingham's fire, concocting lying paragraphs and offensive epithets to be used against each other. Returning to Ballyshannon for his vacation Allingham sowed in the general ear whispers and rumours as to impending law suits. His next transformation was to become evangelical and pious. He was a man of extraordinary mental power and this was all that he made of it. 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.