us to believe that all things, his poetry with its Latin weight,
his religion with its constant reference to the Fathers of the Church, or
to the philosophers of the Church, almost his very courtesy were a study
and achievement of the intellect. Arthur Symons' poetry made him angry,
because it would substitute for that achievement, Parisian impressionism,
"a London fog, the blurred tawny lamplight, the red omnibus, the dreary
rain, the depressing mud, the glaring gin shop, the slatternly shivering
women, three dexterous stanzas telling you that and nothing more." I, on
the other hand, angered him by talking as if art existed for emotion only,
and for refutation he would quote the close of the Aeschylean Trilogy,
the trial of Orestes on the Acropolis. Yet at moments the thought came to
him that intellect, as he conceived it, was too much a thing of many
books, that it lacked lively experience. "Yeats," he has said to me, "You
need ten years in a library, but I have need of ten years in the
wilderness." When he said "Wilderness" I am certain, however, that he
thought of some historical, some bookish desert, the Thebaid, or the lands
about the Mareotic sea. His best poetry is natural and impassioned, but he
spoke little of it, but much about his prose, and would contend that I had
no right to consider words made to read, less natural than words made to
be spoken; and he delighted in a sentence in his book on Thomas Hardy,
that kept its vitality, as he contended, though two pages long. He
punctuated after the manner of the seventeenth century and was always
ready to spend an hour discussing the exact use of the colon. "One should
use a colon where other people use a semi-colon, a semi-colon where other
people use a comma," was, I think, but a condescension to my ignorance for
the matter was plainly beset with many subtleties.

VII

Not till some time in 1895 did I think he could ever drink too much for
his sobriety--though what he drank would certainly be too much for that of
most of the men whom I knew--I no more doubted his self-control, though we
were very intimate friends, than I doubted his memories of Cardinal
Newman. The discovery that he did was a great shock to me, and, I think,
altered my general view of the world. I had, by my friendship with
O'Leary, by my fight against Gavan Duffy, drawn the attention of a group
of men, who at that time controlled what remained of the old Fenian
movement in England and Scotla