W. B. Yeats
The Trembling of the Veil
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Table of contents
PREFACE
BOOK I FOUR YEARS 1887-1891
BOOK II IRELAND AFTER THE FALL OF PARNELL
BOOK III HODOS CAMELIONIS
BOOK IV THE TRAGIC GENERATION
BOOK V THE STIRRING OF THE BONES
PREFACE
I
have found in an old diary a quotation from Stephane Mallarmé,
saying that his epoch was troubled by the trembling of the veil of
the Temple. As those words were still true, during the years of my
life described in this book, I have chosen The Trembling of the Veil
for its title.Except
in one or two trivial details, where I have the warrant of old
friendship, I have not, without permission, quoted conversation or
described occurrence from the private life of named or recognisable
persons. I have not felt my freedom abated, for most of the friends
of my youth are dead and over the dead I have an historian’s
rights. They were artists and writers and certain among them men of
genius, and the life of a man of genius, because of his greater
sincerity, is often an experiment that needs analysis and record. At
least my generation so valued personality that it thought so. I have
said all the good I know and all the evil: I have kept nothing back
necessary to understanding.W.
B. YEATS.May,
1922.Thoor
Ballylee.
BOOK I FOUR YEARS 1887-1891
IAt
the end of the ’eighties my father and mother, my brother and
sisters and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were settled in
Bedford Park in a red-brick house with several mantelpieces of wood,
copied from marble mantelpieces designed by the brothers Adam, a
balcony and a little garden shadowed by a great horse-chestnut tree.
Years before we had lived there, when the crooked ostentatiously
picturesque streets with great trees casting great shadows had been a
new enthusiasm: the Pre-Raphaelite movement at last affecting life.
But now exaggerated criticism had taken the place of enthusiasm, the
tiled roofs, the first in modern London, were said to leak, which
they did not, and the drains to be bad, though that was no longer
true; and I imagine that houses were cheap. I remember feeling
disappointed because the co-operative stores, with their little
seventeenth century panes, had lost the romance they had when I had
passed them still unfinished on my way to school; and because the
public house, called The Tabard after Chaucer’s Inn, was so plainly
a common public house; and because the great sign of a trumpeter
designed by Rooke, the Pre-Raphaelite artist, had been freshened by
some inferior hand. The big red-brick church had never pleased me,
and I was accustomed, when I saw the wooden balustrade that ran along
the slanting edge of the roof where nobody ever walked or could walk,
to remember the opinion of some architect friend of my father’s,
that it had been put there to keep the birds from falling off. Still,
however, it had some village characters and helped us to feel not
wholly lost in the metropolis. I no longer went to church as a
regular habit, but go I sometimes did, for one Sunday morning I saw
these words painted on a board in the porch: “The congregation are
requested to kneel during prayers; the kneelers are afterwards to be
hung upon pegs provided for the purpose.” In front of every seat
hung a little cushion and these cushions were called “kneelers.”
Presently the joke ran through the community, where there were many
artists who considered religion at best an unimportant accessory to
good architecture and who disliked that particular church.
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Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
