fore one, because she knows that the
gifts she has to give are not worth troubling about. It is for her sake
that we must stir ourselves, but we would not trouble to get out of bed in
the morning, or to leave our chairs once we are in them, if she had not
her conjuring bag. She wanted a few verses from me, and because it would
not have seemed worth while taking so much trouble to see my books lie on
a few drawing-room tables, she filled my head with thoughts of making a
whole literature, and plucked me out of the Dublin art schools where I
should have stayed drawing from the round, and sent me into a library to
read bad translations from the Irish, and at last down into Connaught to
sit by turf fires. I wanted to write 'popular poetry' like those Irish
poets, for I believed that all good literatures were popular, and even
cherished the fancy that the Adelphi melodrama, which I had never seen,
might be good literature, and I hated what I called the coteries. I
thought that one must write without care, for that was of the coteries,
but with a gusty energy that would put all straight if it came out of the
right heart. I had a conviction, which indeed I have still, that one's
verses should hold, as in a mirror, the colours of one's own climate and
scenery in their right proportion; and, when I found my verses too full of
the reds and yellows Shelley gathered in Italy, I thought for two days of
setting things right, not as I should now by making my rhythms faint and
nervous and filling my images with a certain coldness, a certain wintry
wildness, but by eating little and sleeping upon a board. I felt indignant
with Matthew Arnold because he complained that somebody, who had
translated Homer into a ballad measure, had tried to write epic to the
tune of Yankee Doodle. It seemed to me that it did not matter what tune
one wrote to, so long as that gusty energy came often enough and strongly
enough. And I delighted in Victor Hugo's book upon Shakespeare, because he
abused critics and coteries and thought that Shakespeare wrote without
care or premeditation and to please everybody. I would indeed have had
every illusion had I believed in that straightforward logic, as of
newspaper articles, which so tickles the ears of the shopkeepers; but I
always knew that the line of Nature is crooked, that, though we dig the
canal beds as straight as we can, the rivers run hither and thither in
their wildness.

From that day to this I have been