from Mr. Yeats's autobiographical
volume, _Reveries over Childhood and Youth_, that, when he began to
write poetry as a boy, "my lines but seldom scanned, for I could not
understand the prosody in the books, although there were many lines
that, taken by themselves, had music." His genius, as a matter of fact,
was unconsciously seeking after new forms. Those who have read the first
draft of _Innisfree_ will remember how it gives one the impression of a
new imagination stumbling into utterance. Mr. Yeats has laboured his
verse into perfect music with a deliberateness like that of Flaubert in
writing prose.

_Reveries_ is the beautiful and fascinating story of his childhood and
youth, and the development of his genius. "I remember," he tells us,
"little of childhood but its pain. I have grown happier with every year
of life, as though gradually conquering something in myself." But there
is not much of the shadow of pain on these pages. They are full of the
portraits of fantastically remembered relations and of stories of home
and school related with fantastic humour. It is difficult to believe
that Mr. Yeats as a schoolboy "followed the career of a certain
professional runner for months, buying papers that would tell me if he
had won or lost," but here we see him even in the thick of a fight like
a boy in a school story. His father, however, seems to have had
infinitely more influence over him than his school environment.

It was his father who grew so angry when the infant poet was taught at
school to sing "Little drops of water," and who indignantly forbade him
to write a school essay on the subject of the capacity of men to rise on
stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things. Mr. Yeats's
upbringing in the home of an artist anti-Victorian to the finger-tips
was obviously such as would lead a boy to live self-consciously, and Mr.
Yeats tells us that when he was a boy at school he used to feel "as
proud of myself as a March cock when it crows to its first sunrise." He
remembers how one day he looked at his schoolfellows on the
playing-field and said to himself, "If when I grow up I am as clever
among grown-up men as I am among these boys, I shall be a famous man."
Another sentence about these days suggests what a difficult inarticulate
genius was his. "My thoughts," he says, "were a great excitement, but
when I tried to do anything with them, it was like trying to pack a
balloon into a shed in a high wind."

T