Life [ top ] Works Bibliographical details [ top ] Commentary W. B. Yeats (2): In Memoirs (ed. Donoghue, 1972), Yeats mentions a stay of seven or ten days with Charles Johnston and his elder brother during which they made fire ballons [kites?], adding - in reference to Maud Gonne - I was not, it seem - not altogether - captive. (p.46.) Note: in this passage Yeats calls Johnson brilliant and speaks of his dwelling-place as Orange Ulster, an oblique reference to his father. W. B. Yeats (3): In his Autobiographies, Yeats noted of Johnstons native Ballykilbeg that everything was a matter of belief in Protestant salvation and Catholic damnation. (Autobiographies, 1955, p.91; See R. F. Foster, ‘Protestant Magic: W. B. Yeats and the Spell of Irish History [1990], rep. in Jonathan Allison, ed., Yeatss Political Identities, Michigan UP 1996, p.92.) [ top ] Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948), Ellmann, pp.61-63: one was Yeatss school-fellow, Charles Johnston, son of a Protestant Member of Parliament from Ulster, who had planned to be a missionary (p.42); Ellmann summarised Johnstons account of the seven rounds of the soul, in Esoteric Buddhism, Dublin Univ. Review (July, 1885), pp.144-45, and also cites his The Theosophical Movement, in Theosophical Quarterly [New York], V (July 1907), 16-26, detailing his credulous response to Sinnetts The Occult World, which Johnston met with in 1884: The entire reasonableness of the account there given of the life and growth of the soul, interwoven with the history of the world, came home with convincing force, and has remained with me ever since. (Ellmann, p.63). Note that Ellmann Yeats met with the book at Dowdens and showed it to Johnston, who almost immediately joined the Theosophical Lodge in London, of which Sinnett was now president, and brought back accounts of its activities to his Dublin friends, but Jeffares has Johnston show the book to Yeats. [ top ] Frank Tuohy, Yeats (1976), [Yeatss] fellow student still at High School, Charles Johnston, the son of an Ulster Member of Parliament [...] giving all his time to some sort of mysticism and [was] likely to fail his examination [...] Yeats felt accused of leading him astray [...] [Johnston] a brilliant classical student marked out for worldly success, was by this time determined to become a missionary in the South Seas. He and his sister, with a younger brother who followed in their wake, were the children of their fathers third marriage, ad were allowed a good deal of independence. To this they responded by becoming vegetarians, non-smokers and total abstainers. The sister founded a vegetarian restaurant [...] Katharine Tynan [...] who knew him well, said that Charlie Johnston introduced Theosophy to Dublin; Johnston had already discovered Sinnetts book The Occult World [...] Confronted with an enthusiasm like Johnstons, Yeats came to feel ashamed of his own lack of zeal [...] Charles Johnston beat all Ireland in the Intermediate examinations, and yet, when Yeats met him in America years afterwards, he told him There is nothing I cannot learn and nothing that I want to learn. (pp.31-32); Yeats, Johnston, and their friends founded the Dublin Hermetic Society [... &c ...] first meeting in a rented room in York St., on 15 June 1885 (p.33-34). [Gives account of the testing of Madame Blavatsky by Sinnett on behalf of Soc. for Psychical Research]; the 18-yr old Charles Johnston went to London to hear the investigators conclusions. The summing up [...] was unambiguous [one of the most accomplished, ingenious and interesting impostors of history]; Johnston went up to chairman F. W. H. Myers and told him that the whole thing was so scandalously unjust that, had I not been a member of the Theosophical Society, I should have joined it forthwith; Johnston gives digest of findings to Dublin society; Chatterji invited to address Dublin society (p.34); Johnston the most orthodox of the Dublin Theosophists, gives Yeats introduction to Madame Blavatsky (p.48). Note, Richard Ellmann (Yeats: Man and Masks, 1948), reporting the same, names the investigator as Hodgson and the circumstance that Blavatskys servants in India reveal the table-moving tricks that she had used; and further that Johnston was not alone in his fidelity. [p.64]; obtained charter from Sinnett for Lodge, throwing in his lot with Madame Blavatsky [ibid.]. A. N. Jeffares, New Commentary on the Poems of W B Yeats (1988), Yeatss school-fellow Charles Johnston read books by A. P. Sinnett; Hermetic Society, rooms in York St., incl. AE [George Russell]; another member was Charles Johnston, son of the MP for Ballykilbeg, Northern Ireland, a brilliant fellow pupil of Yeatss at the High School, Dublin, who married Madame Blavatskys niece. (p.5). See also a reference to John Eglinton, Yeats at the High School, Erasmian, XXX (June 1939) [New Comm., p.379.] [ top ] Quotations Ireland: Historic and Picturesque (1902): [...] I see in Ireland a miraculous and divine history, a life and destiny invisible, lying hid within her visible life. Like that throbbing presence of the night which whispers along the hills, this diviner whisper, this more miraculous and occult power, lurks in our apparent life. From the very gray of her morning, the children of Ireland were preoccupied with the invisible world; it was so in the darkest hours of our oppression and desolation; driven from this world, we took refuge in that; it was not the kingdom of heaven upon earth, but the children of earth seeking a refuge in heaven. So the same note rings and echoes through all our history; we live in the invisible world. If I rightly understand our mission and our destiny, it is this: To restore to other men the sense of that invisible; that world of our immortality; as of old our race went forth carrying the Galilean Evangel. We shall first learn, and then teach, that not with wealth can the soul of man be satisfied; that our enduring interest is not here but there, in the unseen, the hidden, the immortal, for whose purposes exist all the visible beauties of the world. If this be our mission and our purpose, well may our fair mysterious land deserve her name: Inis Fail, the Isle of Destiny. (p.22; captured from Gutenburg Project, 15 June 2004; [link].) [ top ] References [ top ] Notes Roy Foster suggests that the lapidary obituary notice on Yeats that appeared in the New York Evening Post (20 Jan. 1939) may have been a last shaft from his old schoolmate Charles Johnston: He ranked at his death as the First Poet of English. He was known more widely than any living Irishman except George Bernard Shaw. he was a writer of shining prose, poetic Irish plays, elegant essays, and constructive criticism of Irish art and letters. He was a Nationalist patriot when that took courage; he was a Senator of the Free State from 1922 to 1928; in 1923 he won the Nobel Prize. / Beyond that, he was a little daft. (Cited by Foster, op. cit., ftn.10, p.178.) [ top ] |