BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS.
FOUR YEARS 1887-1891.
At the end of the eighties my father and mother, my brother andsisters and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were settled inBedford Park in a red-brick house with several wood mantlepiecescopied from marble mantlepieces by the brothers Adam, a balcony,and a little garden shadowed by a great horse-chestnut tree. Yearsbefore we had lived there, when the crooked, ostentatiouslypicturesque streets, with great trees casting great shadows, hadbeen anew enthusiasm: the Pre-Raphaelite movement at lastaffecting life. But now exaggerated criticism had taken the placeof enthusiasm; the tiled roofs, the first in modern London, weresaid to leak, which they did not, & the drains to be bad, thoughthat was no longer true; and I imagine that houses were cheap. Iremember feeling disappointed because the co-operative stores,with their little seventeenth century panes, were so like anycommon shop; and because the public house, called 'The Tabard'after Chaucer's Inn, was so plainly a common public house; andbecause the great sign of a trumpeter designed by Rooke, thePre-Raphaelite artist, had been freshened by some inferior hand. Thebig red-brick church had never pleased me, and I was accustomed,when I saw the wooden balustrade that ran along the slanting edgeof the roof, where nobody ever walked or could walk, to rememberthe opinion of some architect friend of my father's, that it hadbeen put there to keep the birds from falling off. Still, however,it had some village characters and helped us to feel not whollylost in the metropolis. I no longer went to church as a regularhabit, but go I sometimes did, for one Sunday morning I saw thesewords painted on a board in the porch: 'The congregation arerequested to kneel during prayers; the kneelers are afterwards tobe hung upon pegs provided for the purpose.' In front of everyseat hung a little cushion, and these cushions were called'kneelers.' Presently the joke ran through the community, wherethere were many artists, who considered religion at best anunimportant accessory to good architecture and who disliked thatparticular church.
I could not understand where the charm had gone that I had felt,when as a school-boy of twelve or thirteen, I had played among theunfinished houses, once leaving the marks of my two hands, blackedby a fall among some paint, upon a white balustrade. Sometimes Ithought it was because these were real houses, while my play hadbeen among toy-houses some day to be inhabited by imaginary peoplefull of the happiness that one can see in picture books. I was inall things Pre-Raphaelite. When I was fifteen or sixteen, myfather had told me about Rossetti and Blake and given me theirpoetry to read; & once in Liverpool on my way to Sligo, "I hadseen 'Dante's Dream' in the gallery there—a picture painted whenRossetti had lost his dramatic power, and to-day not very pleasingto me—and its colour, its people, its romantic architecture hadblotted all other pictures away." It was a perpetual bewildermentthat my father, who had begun life as a Pre-Raphaelite painter,now painted portraits of the first comer, children sellingnewspapers, or a consumptive girl with a basket offish upon herhead, and that when, moved perhaps by memory of his youth, hechose some theme from poetic tradition, he would soon weary andleave it unfinished. I had seen the change coming bit by bit andits defence elaborated by young men fresh from the Paris art-schools.'We must paint what is in front of us,' or 'A man must beof his own time,' they would say, and if I spoke of Blake orRossetti they would point out his bad drawing and tell me toadmire Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage. Th