The Yeats I Knew

Abstract

As he walked along the street or appeared in the Abbey Theater or at any one of the innumerable literary and dramatic societies, he stood out from the indifferently dressed men around him as carefully garbed, with a studied bohemian elegance, an elegance influenced, no doubt, by the aesthetics of the nineties and by Oscar Wilde.¹ Sometimes he would be in dead black, with a flowing tie, sometimes in a strange shade of brown; in the evenings he wore a black or brown velvet jacket. This dressing set off his personality, as did his rhythmic speech and his gestures. I suppose there was a great deal that was studied about his appearance in those days, and the charge of posing that was often leveled at him had a certain foundation—that is, if one had not enough insight to take the whole personality into consideration. A good deal of his posing was due to the fact that he really was not very much at home with ordinary people, did not know much about life as lived by the rest of us and had not a great variety of friends. Then, human energy and human interest even in the most powerful personalities are limited, and unless people can put on some mask, the outstanding ones can be drained of energy by the demands upon them of people and of the world. Yeats, then, played the role of the artist, the man who devoted his life to the practice of art and the furthering of art. It was often said of him in Dublin that Lady Gregory’s influence had made him snobbish; I really do not think he needed any external influence to make him snobbish; at this period he was afflicted with a variety of snobbishnesses that were a sight to behold and an experience to encounter. First of all, his genius, the nature of his intellectual interests, placed him to some extent apart from the bulk of humanity; then, in addition to the common Irish notion of high descent, he had, like Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, the ideas of the romantic poets of a noble and chivalrous ancestry, an ancestry devoted to high causes.

Extracted from Life and the Dream: Memories of a Literary Life in Europe and America (London: Macmillan; New York: Doubleday, 1947; Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1964) pp.127–45.