Nos. 1 & 3 The Orchard: Paget family & John Todhunter

Location 2

Yeats wrote My glory was I had such friends. But it was his father’s friends who mattered in Bedford Park days. Particularly the two families living here at Number One and Number Three.

John Todhunter, at Number Three, studied at Trinity College Dublin as did Yeats’s father, John Butler Yeats, who had abandoned a law career to come to London and become an artist. Todhunter, likewise, gave up his medical vocation for that of poetry.

And next door, at Number One, lived Henry Marriott Paget and Henrietta Paget, who’d met at Heatherley’s Art School (where Yeats Senior studied painting).

Both families were involved in Bedford Park’s amateur dramatics. And when they decided to stage one of Todhunter’s plays, Henrietta persuaded her sister, the leading professional actor, Florence Farr, to join the cast.

Yeats was very impressed by Florence Farr’s acting and the two became lifelong friends. But he was struck by the fact that an Irish poet, Todhunter, was writing plays about Greek legends and Sicilian peasants, rather than on Irish themes.

In 1894 Florence Farr was funded by Annie Horniman to produce a season of West End plays, and asked Yeats, at a Christmas party here in The Orchard, to write a play that would include a part for her niece, Dorothy Paget.

Yeats wrote a drama about ordinary Sligo people in the grip of the fairy world. That work, Land of Heart’s Desire, was Yeats’s first staged play, and started him on a course that led to his co-founding the world-famous Abbey Theatre, backed by the same Annie Horniman.

The writer, George Bernard Shaw, maintained the Irish Literary Revival was born in Bedford Park. And Yeats’s father’s friends were central to that Revival, which was to play an important cultural part in the shaping of modern Ireland, and in post-colonial literature.

The role of art in society was a constant theme amongst Bedford Park artists, like the Yeatses, Todhunters and Pagets.

And it was still an issue for Yeats when he wrote “Lapis Lazuli” at the age of seventy-one. It’s a poem that reflects on the importance of all the arts in a world that had, by then, seen the Great War, the Easter Rising, a Russian Revolution, and much more. But it’s a poem that insists life can be both tragic and, at the same time, courageous, gay and beautiful.

Lapis Lazuli

(for Harry Clifton)

I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,
Of poets that are always gay,
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat.

All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
And all the drop scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages,
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.

On their own feet they came, or on shipboard,
Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,
Old civilisations put to the sword.
Then they and their wisdom went to rack:
No handiwork of Callimachus
Who handled marble as if it were bronze,
Made draperies that seemed to rise
When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;
His long lamp chimney shaped like the stem
Of a slender palm, stood but a day;
All things fall and are built again
And those that build them again are gay.
Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in Lapis Lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instrument.

Every discolouration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards, and I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.