Four Years | Page 2

his youth,
he chose some theme from poetic tradition, he would soon weary and
leave it unfinished. I had seen the change coming bit by bit and its
defence elaborated by young men fresh from the Paris art- schools. 'We
must paint what is in front of us,' or 'A man must be of his own time,'
they would say, and if I spoke of Blake or Rossetti they would point
out his bad drawing and tell me to admire Carolus Duran and
Bastien-Lepage. Then, too, they were very ignorant men; they read
nothing, for nothing mattered but 'Knowing how to paint,' being in
reaction against a generation that seemed to have wasted its time upon
so many things. I thought myself alone in hating these young men, now
indeed getting towards middle life, their contempt for the past, their
monopoly of the future, but in a few months I was to discover others of
my own age, who thought as I did, for it is not true that youth looks
before it with the mechanical gaze of a well-drilled soldier. Its quarrel
is not with the past, but with the present, where its elders are so
obviously powerful, and no cause seems lost if it seem to threaten that
power. Does cultivated youth ever really love the future, where the eye
can discover no persecuted Royalty hidden among oak leaves, though
from it certainly does come so much proletarian rhetoric? I was unlike
others of my generation in one thing only. I am very religious, and
deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the
simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion,
almost an infallible church, out of poetic tradition: a fardel of stories,
and of personages, and of emotions, a bundle of images and of masks
passed on from generation to generation by poets & painters with some
help from philosophers and theologians. I wished for a world where I
could discover this tradition perpetually, and not in pictures and in
poems only, but in tiles round the chimney-piece and in the hangings
that kept out the draught. I had even created a dogma: 'Because those
imaginary people are created out of the deepest instinct of man, to be
his measure and his norm, whatever I can imagine those mouths
speaking may be the nearest I can go to truth.' When I listened they
seemed always to speak of one thing only: they, their loves, every
incident of their lives, were steeped in the supernatural. Could even
Titian's 'Ariosto' that I loved beyond other portraits, have its grave look,
as if waiting for some perfect final event, if the painters, before Titian,

had not learned portraiture, while painting into the corner of
compositions, full of saints and Madonnas, their kneeling patrons? At
seventeen years old I was already an old-fashioned brass cannon full of
shot, and nothing kept me from going off but a doubt as to my capacity
to shoot straight.

III
I was not an industrious student and knew only what I had found by
accident, and I had found "nothing I cared for after Titian--and Titian I
knew chiefly from a copy of 'the supper of Emmaus' in Dublin--till
Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites;" and among my father's friends were no
Pre-Raphaelites. Some indeed had come to Bedford Park in the
enthusiasm of the first building, and others to be near those that had.
There was Todhunter, a well-off man who had bought my father's
pictures while my father was still Pre- Raphaelite. Once a Dublin
doctor he was a poet and a writer of poetical plays: a tall, sallow, lank,
melancholy man, a good scholar and a good intellect; and with him my
father carried on a warm exasperated friendship, fed I think by old
memories and wasted by quarrels over matters of opinion. Of all the
survivors he was the most dejected, and the least estranged, and I
remember encouraging him, with a sense of worship shared, to buy a
very expensive carpet designed by Morris. He displayed it without
strong liking and would have agreed had there been any to find fault. If
he had liked anything strongly he might have been a famous man, for a
few years later he was to write, under some casual patriotic impulse,
certain excellent verses now in all Irish anthologies; but with him every
book was a new planting and not a new bud on an old bough. He had I
think no peace in himself. But my father's chief friend was York Powell,
a famous Oxford Professor of history, a broad-built, broad-headed,
brown-bearded man, clothed in heavy blue cloth and looking, but for
his glasses and the dim sight of a student, like some captain in the
merchant service. One