Chapter 16 - Page 2

accepted, frees the mind from restlessness, I should have had
to give up my Irish subject matter, or attempt to found a new
tradition. Lacking sufficient recognised precedent I must needs
find out some reason for all I did. I knew almost from the start
that to overflow with reasons was to be not quite well-born, and
when I could I hid them, as men hide a disagreeable ancestry; and
that there was no help for it, seeing that my country was not born
at all. I was of those doomed to imperfect achievement, and under
a curse, as it were, like some race of birds compelled to spend
the time, needed for the making of the nest, in argument as to the
convenience of moss and twig and lichen. Le Gallienne and
Davidson, and even Symons, were provincial at their setting out,
but their provincialism was curable, mine incurable; while the one
conviction shared by all the younger men, but principally by
Johnson and Horne, who imposed their personalities upon us, was an
opposition to all ideas, all generalisations that can be explained
and debated. E... fresh from Paris would sometimes say--'We are
concerned with nothing but impressions,' but that itself was a
generalisation and met but stony silence. Conversation constantly
dwindled into 'Do you like so and so's last book?' 'No, I prefer
the book before it,' and I think that but for its Irish members,
who said whatever came into their heads, the club would not have
survived its first difficult months. I knew--now ashamed that I
thought 'like a man of letters,' now exasperated at their
indifference to the fashion of their own river bed--that Swinburne
in one way, Browning in another, and Tennyson in a third, had
filled their work with what I called 'impurities,' curiosities
about politics, about science, about history, about religion; and
that we must create once more the pure work.

Our clothes were for the most part unadventurous like our
conversation, though I indeed wore a brown velveteen coat, a loose
tie and a very old Inverness cape, discarded by my father twenty
years before and preserved by my Sligo-born mother whose actions
were unreasoning and habitual like the seasons. But no other
member of the club, except Le Gallienne, who wore a loose tie, and
Symons, who had an Inverness cape that was quite new & almost
fashionable, would have shown himself for the world in any costume
but 'that of an English gentleman.' 'One should be quite
unnoticeable,' Johnson explained to me. Those who conformed most
carefully to the fashion in their clothes generally departed
furthest from it in their hand-writing, which was small, neat and
studied, one poet--which I forget--having founded his upon the
handwriting of George Herbert. Dowson and Symons I was to know
better