One of Ireland's many tricks is to fade away to a little speck down on the horizon of our lives, and then to return suddenly in tremendous bulk, frightening us. My words were: In another ten years it will be time enough to think of Ireland again. But Ireland rarely stays away so long. As well as I can reckon, it was about five years after my meditation in the Temple that W. B. Yeats, the Irish poet, came to see me in my flat in Victoria Street, followed by Edward. My surprise was great at seeing them arrive together, not knowing that they even knew each other; and while staring at them I remembered they had met in my rooms in the King's Bench Walk. But how often had Edward met my friends and liked them, in a way, yet not enough to compel him to hook himself on to them by a letter or a visit? He is one of those self-sufficing men who drift easily into the solitude of a pipe or a book; yet he is cheerful, talkative, and forthcoming when one goes to see him. Our fellowship began in boyhood, and there is affection on his side as well as mine, I am sure of that; all the same he has contributed few visits to the maintenance of our friendship. It is I that go to him, and it was this knowledge of the indolence of his character that caused me to wonder at seeing him arrive with Yeats. Perhaps seeing them together stirred some fugitive jealousy in me, which passed away when the servant brought in the lamp, for, with the light behind them, my visitors appeared a twain as fantastic as anything ever seen in Japanese prints—Edward great in girth as an owl (he is nearly as neckless), blinking behind his glasses, and Yeats lank as a rook, a-dream in black silhouette on the flowered wallpaper.

But rooks and owls do not roost together, nor have they a habit or an instinct in common. A mere doorstep casualty, I said, and began to prepare a conversation suitable to both, which was, however checked by the fateful appearance they presented, sitting side by side, anxious to speak, yet afraid. They had clearly come to me on some great business! But about what, about what? I waited for the servant to leave the room, and as soon as the door was closed they broke forth, telling together that they had decided to found a Literary Theatre in Dublin; so I sat like one confounded, saying to myself: Of course they know nothing of Independent Theatres, and, in view of my own difficulties in gathering sufficient audience for two or three performances, pity began to stir in me for their forlorn project. A forlorn thing it was surely to bring literary plays to Dublin!... Dublin of all cities in the world!

It is Yeats, I said, who has persuaded dear Edward, and looking from one to the other, I thought how the cunning rook had enticed the profound owl from his belfry—an owl that has stayed out too late, and is nervous lest he should not be able to find his way back; perplexed, too, by other considerations, lest the Dean and Chapter, having heard of the strange company he is keeping, may have, during his absence, bricked up the entrance to his roost.

As I was thinking these things, Yeats tilted his chair in such dangerous fashion that I had to ask him to desist, and I was sorry to have to do that, so much like a rook did he seem when the chair was on its hind legs. But if ever there was a moment for seriousness, this was one, so I treated them to a full account of the Independent Theatre, begging them not to waste their plays upon Dublin. It would give me no pleasure whatever to produce my plays in London, Edward said. I have done with London. Martyn would prefer the applause of our own people, murmured Yeats, and he began to speak of the by-streets, and the lanes, and the alleys, and how one feels at home when one is among one's own people.

Ninety-nine is the beginning of the Celtic Renaissance, said Edward.

I am glad to hear it, I answered; the Celt wants a Renaissance, and badly; he has been going down in the world for the last two thousand years. We are thinking, said Yeats, of putting a dialogue in Irish before our play ... Usheen and Patrick. Irish spoken on the stage in Dublin! You are not—Interrupting me, Edward began to blurt out that a change had come, that Dublin was no longer a city of barristers, judges, and officials pursuing a round of mean interests and trivial amusements, but the capital of the Celtic Renaissance.

With all the arts for crown—a new Florence, I said, looking at Edward incredulously, scornfully perhaps, for to give a Literary Theatre to Dublin seemed to me like giving a mule a holiday, and when he pressed me to say if I were with them, I answered with reluctance that I was not; whereupon, and without further entreaty, the twain took up their hats and staves, and they were by the open door before I could beg them not to march away like that, but to give me time to digest what they had been saying to me, and for a moment I walked to and forth, troubled by the temptation, for I am naturally propense to thrust my finger into every literary pie-dish. Something was going on in Ireland for sure, and remembering the literary tone that had crept into a certain Dublin newspaper—somebody sent me the Express on Saturdays—I said, I'm with you, but only platonically. You must promise not to ask me to rehearse your plays. I spoke again about the Independent Theatre, and of the misery I had escaped from when I cut the painter.

But you'll come to Ireland to see our plays, said Edward. Come to Ireland! and I looked at Edward suspiciously; a still more suspicious glance fell upon Yeats. Come to Ireland! Ireland and I have ever been strangers, without an idea in common. It never does an Irishman any good to return to Ireland ... and we know it.

One of the oldest of our stories, Yeats began. Whenever he spoke these words a thrill came over me; I knew they would lead me through accounts of strange rites and prophecies, and at that time I believed that Yeats, by some power of divination, or of ancestral memory, understood the hidden meaning of the legends, and whenever he began to tell them I became impatient of interruption. But it was now myself that interrupted, for, however great the legend he was about to tell, and however subtle his interpretation, it would be impossible for me to give him my attention until I had been told how he had met Edward, and all the circumstances of the meeting, and how they had arrived at an agreement to found an Irish Literary Theatre. The story was disappointingly short and simple. When Yeats had said that he had spent the summer at Coole with Lady Gregory I saw it all; Coole is but three miles from Tillyra: Edward is often at Coole; Lady Gregory and Yeats are often at Tillyra; Yeats and Edward had written plays—the drama brings strange fowls to roost.

So an owl and a rook have agreed to build in Dublin. A strange nest indeed they will put together, one bringing sticks, and the other—with what materials does the owl build? My thoughts hurried on, impatient to speculate on what would happen when the shells began to chip. Would the young owls cast out the young rooks, or would the young rooks cast out the young owls, and what view would the beholders take of this wondrous hatching? And what view would the Church?

So it was in Galway the nest was builded, and Lady Gregory elected to the secretaryship, I said. The introduction of Lady Gregory's name gave me pause.... And you have come over to find actors, and rehearse your plays. Wonderful, Edward, wonderful! I admire you both, and am with you, but on my conditions. You will remember them? And now tell me, do you think you'll find an audience in Dublin capable of appreciating The Heather Field?

Ideas are only appreciated in Ireland, Edward answered, somewhat defiantly.

I begged them to stay to dinner, for I wanted to hear about Ireland, but they went away, speaking of an appointment with Miss Vernon—that name or some other name—a lady who was helping them to collect a cast.

As soon as they had news they could come to me again. And on this I returned to my room deliciously excited, thrilling all over at the thought of an Irish Literary Theatre, and my own participation in the Celtic Renaissance brought about by Yeats. So the drama, I muttered, was not dead but sleeping, and while the hour before dinner was going by, I recalled an evening I had spent about two years ago in the Avenue Theatre, and it amused me to remember the amazement with which I watched Yeats marching round the dress circle after the performance of his little one-act play, The Land of Heart's Desire. His play neither pleased nor displeased; it struck me as an inoffensive trifle, but himself had provoked a violent antipathy as he strode to and forth at the back of the dress circle, a long black cloak drooping from his shoulders, a soft black sombrero on his head, a voluminous black silk tie flowing from his collar, loose black trousers dragging untidily over his long, heavy feet—a man of such excessive appearance that I could not do otherwise—could I?—than to mistake him for an Irish parody of the poetry that I had seen all my life strutting its rhythmic way in the alleys of the Luxembourg Gardens, preening its rhymes by the fountains, excessive in habit and gait.

As far back as the days when I was a Frenchman, I had begun to notice that whosoever adorns himself will soon begin to adorn his verses, so robbing them of that intimate sense of life which we admire in Verlaine: his verses proclaim him to have been a man of modest appearance. Never did Hugo or Banville affect any eccentricity of dress—and there are others. But let us be content with the theory, and refrain from collecting facts to support it, for in doing so we shall come upon exceptions, and these will have to be explained away. Suffice it to say, therefore, that Yeats's appearance at the Avenue Theatre confirmed me in the belief that his art could not be anything more than a pretty externality, if it were as much, and I declined to allow Nettleship to introduce me to him. No, my good friend, I don't want to know him; he wouldn't interest me, not any more than the Book of Kells—not so much; Kells has at all events the merit of being archaic, whereas—No, no; to speak to him would make me 'eave—if I may quote a girl whom I heard speaking in the street yesterday.

It was months after, when I had forgotten all about Yeats, that my fingers distractedly picked up a small volume of verse out of the litter in Nettleship's room. Yeats! And after turning over a few pages, I called to Nettleship, who, taking advantage of my liking for the verses, begged again that he might be allowed to arrange a meeting, and, seduced by the strain of genuine music that seemed to whisper through the volume, I consented.

The Cheshire Cheese was chosen as a tryst, and we started for that tavern one summer afternoon, talking of poetry and painting by turns, stopping at the corner of the street to finish an argument or an anecdote. Oxford Street was all aglow in the sunset, and Nettleship told, as we edged our way through the crowds, how Yeats's great poem was woven out of the legends of the Fianna, and stopped to recite verses from it so often that when we arrived at the Cheshire Cheese we found the poet sitting in front of a large steak, eating abstractedly, I thought, as if he did not know what he was eating, hearing, if he heard at all, with only half an ear, the remonstrance that Nettleship addressed to him for having failed to choose Friday to dine at the Cheshire Cheese, it being the day when steak-and-kidney pudding was on at that tavern. He moved up the bench to make room for me as for a stranger: somebody overheard the unkind things I said at the Avenue Theatre and repeated them to him, I said to myself. However this may be, we shall have to get through the dinner as best we can.

Nettleship informed me that Yeats was writing a work on Blake, and the moment Blake's name was mentioned Yeats seemed altogether to forget the food before him, and very soon we were deep in a discussion regarding the Book of Thel, which Nettleship said was Blake's most effectual essay in metre. The designs that accompanied Blake's texts were known to me, and when the waiter brought us our steaks, Blake was lost sight of in the interest of the food, and in our interest in Yeats's interpretation of Blake's teaching.

But as the dinner at the Cheshire Cheese was given so that I should make Yeats's acquaintance, Nettleship withdrew from the conversation, leaving me to continue it, expecting, no doubt, that the combat of our wits would provide him with an entertainment as exciting as that of the cock-fights which used to take place a century ago in the adjoining yard. So there was no choice for me but to engage in disputation or to sulk, and the reader will agree that I did well to choose the former course, though the ground was all to my disadvantage, my knowledge of Blake being but accidental. There was however, no dread of combat in me, my adversary not inspiring the belief that he would prove a stout one, and feeling sure that without difficulty I could lay him dead before Nettleship, I rushed at him, all my feathers erect. Yeats parried a blow on which I counted, and he did this so quickly and with so much ease that he threw me at once. A dialectician, I muttered, of the very first rank; one of a different kind from any I have met before; and a little later I began to notice that Yeats was sparring beautifully, avoiding my rushes with great ease, evidently playing to tire me, with the intention of killing me presently with a single spur stroke. In the bout that ensued I was nearly worsted, but at the last an answer shot into my mind. Yeats would have discovered its weakness in a moment, and I might have fared ill, so it was a relief to me to notice that he seemed willing to drop our argument about Blake and to talk about something else. He was willing to do this, perhaps because he did not care to humiliate me, or it may have been that he wearied of talking about a literature to one who was imperfectly acquainted with it, or it may have been that I made a better show in argument than I thought for.

We might indulge in endless conjectures, and the simplest course will be to assume that the word dramatic led the conversation away from Blake. In Blake there is a great deal of drama, but in Yeats, as far as I knew his poetry, there was none, and his little play The Land of Heart's Desire did not convince me that there ever would be any; but Yeats's idea about Yeats was different from mine. About this time he was thinking of himself as a dramatist and was anxious for me to tell him what his chances were of obtaining a hearing for a literary play in London. The Land of Heart's Desire was not the only play he had written; there was another—a four-act play in verse, which my politeness said would give me much pleasure to read. I had met with many beautiful verses in the little volume picked up in Nettleship's rooms. Yeats bowed his acknowledgment of my compliments, and the smile of faint gratification that trickled round his shaven lips seemed a little too dignified; nor did I fail to notice that he refrained from any mention of my own writings, and wondering how Esther Waters would strike him, I continued the conversation, finding him at every turn a more enjoying fellow than any I had met for a long time. Very soon, however, it transpired that he was allowing me to talk of the subjects that interested me, without relinquishing for a moment his intention of returning to the subject that interested him, which was to discover what his chances were of getting a verse play produced in London. Two or three times I ignored his attempts to change the conversation, but at last yielded to his quiet persistency, and treated him to an account of the Independent Theatre and of its first performance organised by me, and, warming to my subject, I told him of the play that I had agreed to write if Mr G. R. Sims would give a hundred pounds for a stall from which he might watch the performance. The stipulated price brought the desired perplexity into Yeats's face, and it was amusing to add to his astonishment with—And I got the hundred pounds. As he was obviously waiting to hear the story of the hundred-pounds stall I told him that Sims was a popular dramatist, to whom a reporter had gone with a view to gathering his opinions regarding independent drama, and that in the course of Sims's remarks about Ibsen, allusion had been made to the ideas expressed by me regarding literature in drama; and, as if to give point to his belief in the limitations of dramatic art, he had said that he would give a hundred pounds if Mr George Moore would write an unconventional play for the Independent Theatre. The reporter came to me with his newspaper, and after reading his interview with Mr Sims, he asked me for my answer to Mr Sims's challenge. I am afraid Mr Sims is spoofing you. (In the 'nineties the word spoofing replaced the old word humbug, and of late years it seems to be heard less frequently; but as it evokes a time gone by, I may be excused for reviving it here.) If you write a play, the reporter answered, Mr Sims will not refuse to give the hundred pounds.

But he asks for an unconventional play, and who is to decide what is conventional? I notice, I said, picking up the paper, that he says the scenes which stirred the audience in Hedda Gabler are precisely those that are to be found in every melodrama. Mr Sims has succeeded in spoofing you, but he will not get me to write a play for him to repudiate as conventional. No, no, I can hear him saying, the play is as conventional as the last one I wrote for the Adelphi. I'll not pay for that.... But if Mr Sims wishes to help the independent drama, let him withdraw the word conventional or let him admit that he has been humbugging.

The reporter left me, and the next week's issue of the paper announced that Mr Sims had withdrawn the objectionable word, and that I had laid aside my novel and was writing the play.

So did I recount the literary history of The Strike at Arlingford to Yeats, who waited, expecting that I would give him some account of the performance of the play, but remembering him as he had appeared when on exhibition at the Avenue Theatre, it seemed to me that the moment had come for me to develop my aestheticism that an author should never show himself in a theatre while his own play was being performed. Yeats was of the opinion that it was only by watching the effect of the play upon the public that an author could learn his trade. He consented, however, and very graciously, to read The Strike at Arlingford, if I would send it to him, and went away, leaving me under the impression that he looked upon himself as the considerable author, and that to meet me at dinner at the Cheshire Cheese was a condescension on his part. He had somehow managed to dissipate, and, at the same time, to revive, my first opinion of him, but I am quick to overlook faults in whoever amuses and interests me, and this young man interested me more than Edward or Symons, my boon companions at that time. He was an instinctive mummer, a real dancing dog, and the dog on his hind legs is, after all, humanity; we are all on our hind legs striving to astonish somebody, and that is why I honour respectability; if there were nobody to shock our trade would come to an end, and for this reason I am secretly in favour of all the cardinal virtues. But this young man was advertising himself by his apparel, as the Irish middle classes do when they come to London bent on literature. They come in knee-breeches, in Jaeger, in velvet jackets, and this one was clothed like a Bible reader and chanted like one in his talk. All the same, I could see that among much Irish humbug there was in him a genuine love of his art, and he was more intelligent than his verses had led me to expect. All this I admitted to Nettleship as we walked up Fleet Street together. It even seemed difficult to deny to Nettleship, when he bade me goodbye at Charing Cross, that I should like to see the young man again, and all the way back to the Temple I asked myself if I should redeem my promise and send him The Strike at Arlingford. And I might have sent it if I had happened to find a copy in my bookcase, but I never keep copies of my own books. The trouble of writing to my publisher for the play was a serious one; the postman would bring it in a brown-paper parcel which I should have to open in order to write Yeats's name on the fly-leaf. I should have to tie the parcel up again, redirect it, and carry it to the post—and all this trouble for the sake of an opinion which would not be the slightest use to me when I had gotten it. It was enough to know that there was such a play on my publisher's shelves, and that a dramatic writer had paid a hundred pounds to see it. Why turn into the Vale of Yarrow, I muttered, and, rising from my table, I went to the window to watch the pigeons that were coming down from the roofs to gobble the corn a cabman was scattering for them.

Yeats was forgotten, and almost as completely as before, a stray memory of his subtle intelligence perhaps crossing my mind from time to time and a vague regret coming into it that he had dropped out of my life. But no effort was made to find him, and I did not see him again until we met at Symons's rooms—unexpectedly, for it was for a talk with Symons before bedtime that I had walked over from King's Bench Walk. But it was Yeats who opened the door; Symons was out, and would be back presently—he generally returned home about one. Wouldn't I come in? We fell to talking about Symons, who spent his evenings at the Alhambra and the Empire, watching the ballet. Having written Symbolism in Literature, he was now investigating the problem of symbolism in gesture. Or was it symbolism in rhythm or rhythmic symbolism? Even among men of letters conversation would be difficult were it not for the weakness of our absent friends, and to pass the time I told Yeats of an evening I had spent with Symons at the Empire two weeks ago, and how I had gone with him after to the Rose and Crown; and thinking to amuse him I reported the nonsense I had heard spoken of over tankards of ale by various contemporary poets. He hung dreamily over the fire, and fearing that he should think I had spoken unkindly of Symons—a thing I had no intention of doing (Symons being at the time one of my greatest friends)—I spoke of the pleasure I took in his society, and then of my admiration of his prose, so distinguished, so fine, and so subtle. The Temple clock clanging out the hour interrupted my eulogy. As Symons does not seem to return, I said, I must go home to bed. Yeats begged me to stay a little longer, and tempted by the manuscripts scattered about the floor, I sat down and asked him to tell me what he had been writing. He needed no pressing to talk of his work—a trait that I like in an author, for if I do not want to hear about a man's work I do not want to hear about himself. He told me that he was revising the stories that he had contributed to different magazines, and was writing some new ones, and together these were to form a book called The Secret Rose.

I am afraid I interrupted you.

No, I had struck work some time. I came upon a knot in one of the stories, one which I could not disentangle, at least not tonight.

I begged him to allow me to try to disentangle it, and when I succeeded, and to his satisfaction, I expected his face to light up; but it remained impassive, hieratic as ancient Egypt. Wherein now lies his difficulty? I asked myself. Being a poet, he must be able to find words, and we began to talk of the search for the right word.



But you don't want to write your stories in Irish, like Edward?

A smile trickled into his dark countenance, and I heard him say that he had no Irish. It was not for a different language that he yearned, but for a style. Morris had made one to suit his stories, and I learnt that one might be sought for and found among the Sligo peasants, only it would take years to discover it, and then he would be too old to use it.

You don't mean the brogue, the ugliest dialect in the world?

No dialect is ugly, he said; the bypaths are all beautiful. It is the broad road of the journalist that is ugly.

Such picturesqueness of speech enchants me, and the sensation was of a window being thrown suddenly open, and myself looking down some broad chase along which we would go together talking literature, I saying that very soon there would not be enough grammar left in England for literature. English was becoming a lean language. We have lost, Yeats, and I fear for ever, the second person singular of the verbs; thee and thou are only used by peasants, and the peasants use them incorrectly. In poetry, of course—Yeats shook his head—thee and thou were as impossible in verse as in prose, and the habit of English writers to allow their characters to thee and to thou each other had made the modern poetic drama ridiculous. Nor could he sympathise with me when I spoke of the lost subjunctive, and I understood him to be of the opinion that a language might lose all its grammar and still remain a vehicle for literature, the literary artist always finding material for his art in the country.

Like a landscape painter, I answered him. But we are losing our verbs, we no longer ascend and descend, we go up and we go down; birds still continue to alight, whereas human beings get out and get in.

Yeats answered that even in Shakespeare's time people were beginning to talk of the decline of language. No language, he said, was ever so grammatical as Latin, yet the language died; perhaps from excess of grammar. It is with idiom and not with grammar that the literary artist should concern himself; and, stroking his thin yellow hands slowly, he looked into the midnight fire, regretting he had no gift to learn living speech from those who knew it—the peasants. It was only from them one could learn to write, their speech being living speech, flowing out of the habits of their lives, struck out of life itself, he said, and I listened to him telling of a volume of folklore collected by him in Sligo; a welcome change truly is such after reading the Times, and he continued to drone out his little tales in his own incomparable fashion, muttering after each one of them, like an oracle that has spent itself—a beautiful story, a beautiful story! When he had muttered these words his mind seemed to fade away, and I could not but think that he was tired and would be happier tucked up in bed. But when I rose out of my chair he begged me to remain; I would if he would tell me another story. He began one, but Symons came in in the middle of it, tired after long symbolistic studies at the Empire, and so hungry that he began to eat bread and butter, sitting opposite to us and listening to what we were saying, without, however, giving us much of his attention. He seemed to like listening to Yeats talking about style, but I gathered from his detachment that he felt his own style had been formed years ago; a thing of beauty without doubt, but accidentally bestowed upon him, so much was it at variance with his appearance and his conversation; whereas Yeats and his style were the same thing; and his strange old-world appearance and his chanting voice enabled me to identify him with the stories he told me, and so completely that I could not do otherwise than believe that Angus, Étaine, Diarmuid, Deirdre, and the rest, were speaking through him. He is a lyre in their hands; they whisper through him as the wind through the original forest; but we are plantations, and came from England in the seventeenth century. There is more race in him than in any one I have seen for a long while, I muttered, while wending my way down the long stairs, across Fountain Court, through Pump Court, by the Temple Church, under the archway into King's Bench Walk.

It is pleasant to stay with a friend till the dusk, especially in summer; the blue dusk that begins between one and two is always wonderful; and that morning, after listening to many legends, it struck me, as I stood under the trees in King's Bench Walk, watching the receding stars, that I had discovered at last the boon companion I had been seeking ever since I came to live in London. A boon companion is as necessary to me as a valet is to Sir William Eden. Books do not help me to while away the time left over when I am not writing, and I am fain to take this opportunity to advise everybody to attend to his taste for reading; once it is lost it is hard to recover; and believe, if in nothing else, in this, that reading is becoming an increasing necessity. The plays that entertain us are few, the operas hardly more numerous; there are not always concerts, and one cannot choose the music that shall be played if one be not a King. To have music in the evenings at home we must choose for a wife one who can play Chopin, and modern education does not seem to have increased the number of these women. One meets one, misses her, and for ever after is forced to seek literary conversation; and literary conversation is difficult to get in London. One cannot talk literature in a club, or at a literary dinner; only with a boon companion; and my search is even a more difficult one than that of the light-o'-love who once told me that her great trouble in life was to find an amant de coeur. The confession amused me, the lady being exceedingly beautiful, but I understood her as soon as she explained all the necessary qualifications for the post. He must be in love with me, she said. As you are very polite, you will admit that there can be no difficulty about that. And I must be in love with him! Now you are beginning to understand. He must be able to give me his whole time, he must be sufficiently well off to take me out to dinner, to the theatre, to send me flowers.... Money, of course, I would not take from him.

Your trouble as you explain it is a revelation of life, I answered, but it is not greater than mine—she tossed her head—for what I am seeking in London at the present time is a boon companion. In many respects he must resemble your amant de coeur. He must like my company, and as you are very polite, you will admit there can be no difficulty about that. I shall have to enjoy his company; and so many other things are necessary that I am beginning to lose heart.

Mary pressed me to recapitulate my paragon, and to console her, for there is nothing so consoling as to find that one's neighbour's troubles are at least as great as one's own, I told her that my boon companion must be between thirty and fifty. Until a man reaches the age of thirty he is but a boy, without experience of life; I'd prefer him between thirty-five and forty; and my boon companion must be a bachelor or separated from his wife. How he spends his days concerns me not, only in the evenings do I want his company—at dinner about twice a week, for it is my pleasure to prolong the evenings into the small hours of the morning, talking literature and the other arts until the mouth refuses another cigar and the eyelids are heavy with sleep. You see, he must be a smoker, preferably a cigar rather than a cigarette smoker, but I lay no stress upon that particular point. I should prefer his appearance and manner to be that of a gentleman, but this is another point upon which I lay no particular stress. His first qualification is intelligence, and amongst women you will understand me better than any other, your lovers having always been men of intellect. Any one of them would suit me very well: you have loved, I think, Adrien Marcs, Coppée, and Becque.

Yes, and many others, she answered. You have required great works from your lovers, and have gotten them. But I do not require that my boon companion shall write nearly as well as any of the men you have honoured. My companion's literature concerns me much less than his conversation, and if it were not that only a man of letters can understand literature, I would say that I should not care if he had never put a pen to paper. I am interested much more in his critical than in his creative faculty; he must for my purpose be a man keenly critical, and he must be a witty man too, for to be able to distinguish between a badly and a well-written book is not enough—a professor of literature can do that ... occasionally. My man must be able to entertain me with unexpected sallies. I would not hear him speak of the verbal felicities of Keats, or of the truly noble diction of Milton, and I would ring and tell my servant to call a cab were I to catch him mumbling 'and with new-spangled ore, flames in the forehead of the morning sky.' If the subject were poetry, my boon companion would be expected by me to flash out unexpected images, saying that Keats reminded him of a great tabby-cat purring in the sun; and I would like to hear him mutter that there was too much rectory lawn in Tennyson; not that I would for a moment hold up the lawn and the cat as felicities of criticism. He would, I hope, be able to flash out something better. It is hard to find a simile when one is seeking for one. He would have to be interested in the other arts, and be able to talk about them intelligently, literature not being sufficient to while an evening away. And in every art he must be able to distinguish between washtubs and vases; he must know instinctively that Manet is all vase, and that Mr ——'s portraits are all wash-tub. When the conversation wanders from painting to sculpture, he must not be very concerned to talk about Rodin, and if he should speak of this sculptor, his praise should be measured: There is not the character of any country upon Rodin's sculpture; it is not French nor Italian; it would be impossible to say whence it came if one did not know. As a decorative artist he is without remarkable talent, and he too often parodies Michael Angelo. Michel Ange à la coule would be a phrase that would not displease me to hear, especially if it were followed by—Only the marvellous portraitist commands our admiration: the bronzes, not the marbles—they are but copies by Italian workmen, untouched by the master who alone, among masters, has never been able to put his hand to the chisel. A knowledge of music is commendable in a boon companion, else he must be unmusical like Yeats. It would be intolerable to hear him speak of Tristan and ask immediately after if Madame Butterfly were not a fine work, too.

With her enchanting smile, Mary admitted that my difficulties were not less than hers, and so I kissed her and returned, with some regret, next day to London and to dear Edward, who has served me as a boon companion ever since he came to live in the Temple. He likes late hours; he is a bachelor, a man of leisure, and has discovered at last what to admire and what to repudiate. But he is not very sure-footed on new ground, and being a heavy man, his stumblings are loud. Moreover, he is obsessed by a certain part of his person which he speaks of as his soul: it demands Mass in the morning, Vespers in the afternoon, and compels him to believe in the efficacy of Sacraments and the Pope's indulgences; and it forbids him to sit at dinner with me if I do not agree to abstain from flesh meat on Fridays, and from remarks regarding my feelings towards the ladies we meet in the railway-trains and hotels when we go abroad.

When Symons came to live in the Temple I looked forward to finding a boon companion in him. He is intelligent and well versed in literature, French and English; a man of somewhat yellowish temperament, whom a wicked fairy had cast for a parson; but there was a good fairy on the sill at the time, and when the wicked fairy had disappeared up the chimney she came in through the window, and bending over the cradle said: I bestow upon thee extraordinary literary gifts. Her words floated up the chimney and brought the wicked fairy down again as soon as the good fairy had departed. For some time she was puzzled to know what new mischief she should be up to; she could not rob the child of the good fairy's gift of expression in writing: but in thy talk, she said, thou shalt be as commonplace as Goldsmith, and flew away in a great passion.

Unlike Symons, Yeats is thinner in his writings than in his talk; very little of himself goes into his literature—very little can get into it, owing to the restrictions of his style; and these seemed to me to have crept closer in Rosa Alchemica inspiring me to prophesy one day to Symons that Yeats would end by losing himself in Mallarmé, whom he had never read.

Symons did not agree in my estimation of Yeats's talent, and I did not press the point, being only really concerned with Yeats in as far as he provided me with literary conversation. A more serious drawback was Yeats's lack of interest in the other arts. He admired and hung Blake's engravings about his room, but it was their literary bent rather than the rhythm of the spacing and the noble line that attracted him, I think. But I suppose one must not seek perfection outside of Paris, and in the Temple I was very glad of his company. He is absorbed by literature even more than Dujardin, that prince of boon companions, for literature has allowed Dujardin many love-stories, and every one has been paid for with a book (his literature is mainly unwritten); all the same, his women, though they have kept him from writing, have never been able to keep him from his friends; for our sakes he has had the courage only to be beguiled by such women as those whom he may treat like little slaves; and when one of these accompanies him to his beautiful summer residence at Fontainebleau, in those immemorial evenings, sad with the songs of many nightingales, she is never allowed to speak except when she is spoken to; and when she goes with him to Bayreuth, she has to walk with companions of her own sex, whilst the boon companion explains the mystery of The Ring, musical and literary. If I were to go to his lodgings on the eve of the performance of The Valkyrie and awaken Dujardin, he would push his wife aside as soon as he heard the object of my visit was to inquire from him why Wotan is angry with Brünnhilde because she gives her shield and buckler to Siegmund, wherewith Siegmund may fight Hunding on the mountain-side, and would rise up in bed and say to me: You do not know, then, that the Valkyrie are the wills of Wotan which fly forth to do his bidding? And if I said that I was not quite sure that I understood him, he would shake himself free from sleep and begin a metaphysical explanation for which he would find justification in the character of the motives. And then, if one were to say to Dujardin: Dujardin, in a certain scene in the second act of Siegfried, Wagner introduces the Question to Fate motive without any apparent warrant from the text to do so; I fear he used the motive because his score required the three grave notes, Dujardin would, for sure, begin to argue that though the libretto contained no explicit allusion to Fate in the text, yet Fate was implicit in it from the beginning of the scene, and, getting out of bed, he would take the volume from the little shelf at his head and read the entire scene before consenting to go to sleep.

And if one were to go to Yeats's bedside at three o'clock in the morning and beg him to explain a certain difficult passage, let us say, in the Jerusalem, he would raise himself up in bed like Dujardin, and, stroking his pale Buddhistic hands, begin to spin glittering threads of argument and explanation; instead of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, we should hear of the Rosicrucians and Jacob Boehm.

My boon companions are really strangely alike, though presenting diverse appearances. Were I to devote a volume to each, the casual reader would probably mutter as he closed the last, A strangely assorted set, but the more intelligent reader would be entertained by frequent analogies; many to his practised eye would keep cropping up: he would discover that Dujardin, though he has written a book in which he worships the massive materialism of ancient Rome, and derides the soft effusive Jewish schism known as Christianity, would, nevertheless, like to preserve a few Catholic monasteries for the use of his last days. At least a dozen would be necessary, for Dujardin admits that he would be not unlikely flung out of several before he reached the one in which he was fated to die in long white robe and sandal shoon, an impenitent exegetist, but an ardent Catholic, and perhaps to the last, a doubtful Christian. How often have I heard him mutter in his beard as he crosses the room: It would be a beautiful end ... in smock and sandal shoon! He is attracted by rite, and Yeats is too; but whereas Dujardin would like the magician to boil the pot for him, Yeats would cry:

Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble,



Rising from the low stool in the chimney-corner, he led me to a long box, and among the manuscript I discovered several packs of cards. As it could not be that Yeats was a clandestine bridge-player, I inquired the use the cards were put to, and learnt that they were specially designed for the casting of horoscopes. He spoke of his uncle, a celebrated occultist, whose predictions were always fulfilled, and related some of his own successes. All the same, he had been born under Aquarius, and the calculations of the movements of the stars in that constellation were so elaborate that he had abandoned the task for the moment, and was now seeking the influences of the Pleiades. He showed me some triangles drawn on plain sheets of cardboard, into which I was to look, while thinking of some primary colour—red, or blue, or green. His instructions were followed by me—why not?—but nothing came of the experiment; and then he selected a manuscript from the box, which he told me was the new rules of the Order of the Golden Door, written by himself. There was no need to tell me that, for I recognise always his undulating cadences. These rules had become necessary; an Order could not exist without rule, and heresy must be kept within bounds, though for his part he was prepared to grant every one such freedom of will as would not endanger the existence of the Order. The reading of the manuscript interested me, and I remember that one of its finest passages related to the use of vestments, Yeats maintaining with undeniable logic that the ancient priest put on his priestly robe as a means whereby he might raise himself out of the ordinary into an intenser life, but the Catholic priest puts on an embroidered habit because it is customary. A subtle intelligence which delighted me in times gone by, and I like now to think of the admiration with which I used to listen to Yeats talking in the chimney-corner, myself regretting the many eloquent phrases which floated beyond recall up the chimney, yet unable to banish from my mind the twenty-five men and women collected in the second pair back in West Kensington, engaged in the casting of horoscopes and experimenting in hypnotism.

As has been said before, analogies can be discovered in all my boon companions. Could it be otherwise, since they were all collected for my instruction and distraction? Yeats will sit up smoking and talking of literature just like Dujardin, Edward the same; and Yeats and Edward are both addicted to magic: it matters little that each cultivates a different magic, the essential is that they like magic. And looking towards the armchairs in which they had been sitting, I said: Yeats likes parlour magic, Edward cathedral magic. A queer pair, united for a moment in a common cause—the production of two plays: The Heather Field and The Countess Cathleen. The Heather Field I know, but The Countess Cathleen I have not read, and wondering what it might be like, I went to the bookcase and took down the volume.