me
underground place where there are beds with people in the beds; a girl
half rising from one has seized his hand and is kissing it. I have
forgotten its story, but the strange old man and the intensity in the
girl's figure are vivid as in my childhood. There is some passage, I
believe in the Bible, about a man who saved a city and went away and was
never heard of again and here he was in another design, an old ragged
beggar in the market-place laughing at his own statue. But my father would
say: "I must paint what I see in front of me. Of course I shall really
paint something different because my nature will come in unconsciously."
Sometimes I would try to argue with him, for I had come to think the
philosophy of his fellow-artists and himself a misunderstanding created by
Victorian science, and science I had grown to hate with a monkish hate;
but no good came of it, and in a moment I would unsay what I had said and
pretend that I did not really believe it. My father was painting many fine
portraits, Dublin leaders of the bar, college notabilities, or chance
comers whom he would paint for nothing if he liked their heads; but all
displeased me. In my heart I thought that only beautiful things should be
painted, and that only ancient things and the stuff of dreams were
beautiful. And I almost quarrelled with my father when he made a large
water-colour, one of his finest pictures and now lost, of a consumptive
beggar girl. And a picture at the Hibernian Academy of cocottes with
yellow faces sitting before a cafe by some follower of Manet's made me
miserable for days, but I was happy when partly through my father's
planning some Whistlers were brought over and exhibited, and did not agree
when my father said: "imagine making your old mother an arrangement in
gray!" I did not care for mere reality and believed that creation should
be conscious, and yet I could only imitate my father. I could not compose
anything but a portrait and even to-day I constantly see people as a
portrait painter, posing them in the mind's eye before such and such a
background. Meanwhile I was still very much of a child, sometimes drawing
with an elaborate frenzy, simulating what I believed of inspiration and
sometimes walking with an artificial stride in memory of Hamlet and
stopping at shop windows to look at my tie gathered into a loose
sailor-knot and to regret that it could not be always blown out by the
wind like Byron's tie in the picture. I h