illicitly; and
when through the practice of my art I discovered that certain images about
the love of woman were the properties of a school, I but changed my fancy
and thought of him as very wise.

I was constantly troubled about philosophic questions. I would say to my
fellow students at the Art school, "poetry and sculpture exist to keep our
passions alive;" and somebody would say, "we would be much better without
our passions." Or I would have a week's anxiety over the problem: do the
arts make us happier, or more sensitive and therefore more unhappy. And I
would say to Hughes or Sheppard, "if I cannot be certain they make us
happier I will never write again." If I spoke of these things to Dowden he
would put the question away with good-humoured irony: he seemed to
condescend to everybody and everything and was now my sage. I was about to
learn that if a man is to write lyric poetry he must be shaped by nature
and art to some one out of half-a-dozen traditional poses, and be lover or
saint, sage or sensualist, or mere mocker of all life; and that none but
that stroke of luckless luck can open before him the accumulated
expression of the world. And this thought before it could be knowledge was
an instinct.

I was vexed when my father called Dowden's irony timidity, but after many
years his impression has not changed for he wrote to me but a few months
ago, "it was like talking to a priest. One had to be careful not to remind
him of his sacrifice." Once after breakfast Dowden read us some chapters
of the unpublished "Life of Shelley," and I who had made the "Prometheus
Unbound" my sacred book was delighted with all he read. I was chilled,
however, when he explained that he had lost his liking for Shelley and
would not have written it but for an old promise to the Shelley family.
When it was published, Matthew Arnold made sport of certain
conventionalities and extravagances that were, my father and I had come to
see, the violence or clumsiness of a conscientious man hiding from himself
a lack of sympathy. He had abandoned too, or was about to abandon, what
was to have been his master-work, "The Life of Goethe," though in his
youth a lecture course at Alexandra College that spoke too openly of
Goethe's loves had brought upon him the displeasure of our Protestant
Archbishop of Dublin. Only Wordsworth, he said, kept, more than all, his
early love.

Though my faith was shaken, it was only when he urged me to read George