Yeats as a Painter Saw Him

Abstract

I remember going one day to see George Moore, who greeted me with, ‘I am so glad you have come. I can only think when I am talking!’ Yeats could also think in solitude, but ideas, when he was in the mood for talking, seldom failed him. He liked women to be among his audience. A man is at his best talking to women, he said once. So at Woburn Buildings there was usually a circle of green-clad ladies seated on the floor, while he intoned his poems, and Florence Farr plucked at the single string of a rough, primitive instrument, designed by Yeats himself. In those days he was absorbecj by spiritualism, and by magic too, affecting to believe in the power of certain words to evoke spirits. He hinted that he had got into communion with dark forces, and told of drawing a circle, from within which he called up spirits, spirits he believed to be on the point of materialising. He told too of an uneducated girl who, going into a trance, spoke literary Chinese. I wondered how Yeats could identify the language!