y light that moved
me when a child. I persuaded myself that I had a passion for the dawn, and
this passion, though mainly histrionic like a child's play, an ambitious
game, had moments of sincerity. Years afterwards when I had finished "The
Wanderings of Oisin," dissatisfied with its yellow and its dull green,
with all that overcharged colour inherited from the romantic movement, I
deliberately reshaped my style, deliberately sought out an impression as
of cold light and tumbling clouds. I cast off traditional metaphors and
loosened my rhythm, and recognizing that all the criticism of life known
to me was alien and English, became as emotional as possible but with an
emotion which I described to myself as cold. It is a natural conviction
for a painter's son to believe that there may be a landscape symbolical
of some spiritual condition that awakens a hunger such as cats feel for
valerian.

XVIII

I was writing a long play on a fable suggested by one of my father's early
designs. A king's daughter loves a god seen in the luminous sky above her
garden in childhood, and to be worthy of him and put away mortality,
becomes without pity & commits crimes, and at last, having made her way to
the throne by murder, awaits the hour among her courtiers. One by one they
become chilly and drop dead, for, unseen by all but her, her god is
walking through the hall. At last he is at her throne's foot and she, her
mind in the garden once again, dies babbling like a child.

XIX

Once when I was sailing with my cousin, the boy who was our crew talked of
a music-hall at a neighbouring seaport, and how the girls there gave
themselves to men, and his language was as extravagant as though he
praised that courtezan after whom they named a city or the queen of Sheba
herself. Another day he wanted my cousin to sail some fifty miles along
the coast and put in near some cottages where he had heard there were
girls "and we would have a great welcome before us." He pleaded with
excitement (I imagine that his eyes shone) but hardly hoped to persuade
us, and perhaps but played with fabulous images of life and of sex. A
young jockey and horse-trainer, who had trained some horses for my uncle,
once talked to me of wicked England while we cooked a turkey for our
Christmas dinner making it twist about on a string in front of his
harness-room fire. He had met two lords in England where he had gone
racing, who "always exchanged wives when they went t