Abstract
It was at William Morris’s house on the Mall in Hammersmith, one Sunday night all but fifty years ago that I met Willie Yeats (as we called him then) for the first time. There had been a Socialist League lecture in the long-hut at the top of Morris’s garden, and I was invited to supper afterwards’ by that hospitable poet—memorable occasion for a young newcomer from the north country. A raw recruit in the London literary campaign, I held the author of The Earthly Paradise2 in some awe, and as he sat there at the top of the long supper-table he looked friendly but formidable. He might have passed for some great Norseman, and the setting with P.R.B.3 pictures and old tapestry on the walls helped to bear out the effect of the host of this viking feast. The bare oak table was lavishly spread, and the guests were numerous and strangely varied, foreigners like Prince Kropotkin,4 most urbane of revolutionaries, and opposite him a noticeably alert figure, ginger-bearded, Jaeger-clad-Bernard Shaw to wit (whose acquaintance I had just made in the lecture hut).
Fortnightly Review (London) CXLIV, N.S. CXXXVIII (July 1935) 52–7.
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Notes
Thomas William Rolleston (1857–1920), Irish journalist and writer; editor of A Treasury of Irish Poetry (1900); and author of Sea Spray (verse, 1909) and Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race (1911). Yeats first met Rolleston at the Contemporary Club. Rolleston wrote a severe criticism of Yeats’s The Wanderings of Oisin, which he found weak in the handling of the longer metres and defective in expression in many passages. In London Yeats prepared a scheme for the publication of a series of books on the lines of the old National Library Society, which Rolleston, with the assistance of Yeats, had lately founded. Unlike Yeats’s Dublin organisation, the Irish Literary Society included Unionists and anti-Parnellites among its members, and presently Rolleston intervened and collected a group of learned men, many of them Yeats’s political opponents, who decided that the one really necessary thing was to raise money for the publication of books of Irish scholarship. Not having set his thoughts on books for scholars but on popular imaginative literature, Yeats crossed to Ireland in a passion. For details of Rolleston’s life see C. H. Rolleston, Portrait of an Irishman; A Biographical Sketch of T. W. Rolleston (1939).
If there was one thing the writers and artists of the 1890s loved pre-eminently, it was the city. John Davidson wrote In a Music Hall and Other Poems (1891) and Fleet Street Eclogues (1893–6)
Whistler revealed the beauty of London by night. W. E. Henley wrote London Voluntaries (1892).
Arthur Symons wrote Silhouettes (1892) and London Nights (1895). Stephen Phillips set himself deliberately to express modern London in verse. Laurence Binyon wrote London Visions (1896–9). Lionel Johnson’s most characteristic poem was suggested by a statue of King Charles at Charing Cross. Richard Le Gallienne hailed London, London, our delight, Great flower that opens but at night… ‘There was a demure poetry about her,’ said Max Beerbohm once of the London of his youth; ‘one could think of her as “her”; nowadays she cannot be called “she”: she is essentially “it”.’
Florence Farr (1860–1917), British actress, producer and manager. Yeats’s sense of the importance of the theatre was strengthened by two events: his meeting Maud Gonne, and his delight at the verse-speaking of Florence Farr, who produced his first acted play, The Land of Heart’s Desire. In 1899 she created the part of Aleel the minstrel in The Countess Cathleen on its first production in Dublin, a role that allowed her and Yeats to test their theories of reading or intoning verse to the psaltery in a monotonous chant-like manner and ‘a rhythmic dreaminess of movement and gesture’. See Clifford Bax, ed., Florence Farr, Bernard Shaw and W. B. Yeats (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1941) and Florence Farr, Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats: Letters (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1942; London: Home and Van Thal, 1946).
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© 1977 Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Rhys, E. (1977). W. B. Yeats: Early Recollections. In: Mikhail, E.H. (eds) W. B. Yeats. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02992-1_11
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