A Sixty-Year-Old Smiling Public Man

Abstract

A s Yeats approached his sixtieth year, the measure of his comfort became apparent in the cheerful broadening of his outlines. This but added importance to his signally remarkable appearance. Visiting him one evening in his aristocratic eighteenth-century house, Mlle Simone Téry, the gifted French journalist, was impressed by his style and care in dress. Twenty years before, Yeats had been tall and thin, and George Moore’s wicked tongue then compared his cloaked figure to a folded umbrella, point in air, left behind by some picnic party. But now his ampler lines moulded his black velvet coat for evening wear. There was a search for elegance in his silver-buckled shoes, in the wide black riband, attached to his tortoise-shell-rimmed glasses, which fell like a bar across his face ; and in the gold ring worn on his little finger. But more marked than these accessories was the elegance of his bearing, the noble carriage of his head, the harmony of his gestures; something of the ease and grace of a grand seigneur in his manners.