speak of the club, "We had such and such
ideas, such and such a quarrel with the great Victorians, we set before us
such and such aims," as though we had many philosophical ideas. I say this
because I am ashamed to admit that I had these ideas and that whenever I
began to talk of them a gloomy silence fell upon the room. A young Irish
poet, who wrote excellently but had the worst manners, was to say a few
years later, "You do not talk like a poet, you talk like a man of
letters," and if all the Rhymers had not been polite, if most of them had
not been to Oxford or Cambridge, the greater number would have said the
same thing. I was full of thought, often very abstract thought, longing
all the while to be full of images, because I had gone to the art school
instead of a university. Yet even if I had gone to a university, and
learned all the classical foundations of English literature and English
culture, all that great erudition which once accepted frees the mind from
restlessness, I should have had to give up my Irish subject matter, or
attempt to found a new tradition. Lacking sufficient recognized precedent
I must needs find out some reason for all I did. I knew almost from the
start that to overflow with reasons was to be not quite well-born, and
when I could I hid them, as men hide a disagreeable ancestry; and that
there was no help for it seeing that my country was not born at all. I was
of those doomed to imperfect achievement, and under a curse, as it were,
like some race of birds compelled to spend the time, needed for the making
of the nest, in argument as to the convenience of moss and twig and
lichen. Le Gallienne and Davidson, and even Symons, were provincial at
their setting out, but their provincialism was curable, mine incurable;
while the one conviction shared by all the younger men, but principally by
Johnson and Home, who imposed their personalities upon us, was an
opposition to all ideas, all generalizations that can be explained and
debated. E---- fresh from Paris would sometimes say--"We are concerned
with nothing but impressions," but that itself was a generalization and
met but stony silence. Conversation constantly dwindled into "Do you like
so and so's last book?" "No, I prefer the book before it," and I think
that but for its Irish members, who said whatever came into their heads,
the club would not have survived its first difficult months. I saw--now
ashamed that I saw "like a man of letters," now