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Esson attended some rehearsals of The Well of the Saints and met up again withYeats, who took him out to one of A.E. George Russell's Sunday evening soireesin his cottage on the outskirts of Dublin, where, among other things, Esson metand was much taken with Sheamus O'Sullivan. Yet again, apparently, he had a longlate night walk back into town, this time with Yeats, and received the advice whichhe was to follow with religious enthusiasm for the rest of his writing life, 'Keep withinyour own borders!' 'If you want to do anything', Yeats said, 'you must regard yourown country as the centre of the universe.'5As I have said Esson had distinct cosmopolitan tastes. Yeats and Synge scarcelyknew how hard it was for him to think of Australia, and particularly Melbourne,where he had spent most of his life, as the centre of the universe.Esson had grown up in one of the few artistic communities which Australia hadthen to offer. He had been brought up with his uncle, the painter John Ford Paterson.He had mixed with painters and writers and had studied at Melbourne Universityand spent his youth drinking cheap wine and arguing about art with the bohemiansand writers who hung out at Fasoli's cafe in Lonsdale Street. With these influencesEsson developed his advanced tastes in art, and cultivated his aesthetic, Wildeansort of socialism. The .cultural historian David Walker, in Dream and Disillusion,presents a critical account of the contradictory attitudes towards his country whichEsson was developing. He was patriotic, but he had a deep dislike for the materialismand philistinism which he saw around him. He began to conceive of the role of theartist with something like the vision of the poet Seanchan in Yeats' The King'sThreshold. The artist was a specially imaginative and creative personality who wouldbring to a sordid and materialist country a vision which would 'kindle the flameof Australian nationhood.' Sitting in Fasoli's, however, Esson dreamed ofBloomsbury and Montmartre and the excitement there of being involved in anadvanced artistic community.So on that long walk back into Dublin Esson listened with mixed feelings to Yeats'advice. His devotion to the poet was extreme. He later wrote of Yeats, in letters. and articles, with almost religious awe, and expressed his willingness to consult hismaster, as an oracle, on 'every point of literary doctrine'.6He did in fact consult him on that night and Yeats, in effect, told him that heought to return to his materialist rootless country and work 'to conquer the outlyingprovinces and bring them within the kingdom of art. '7 This rather demanding advice,Esson later confessed, was not what he had come to hear:I loved Paris - the cafes, the cabarets, the theatres and restaurants, the violent arguments,the brilliant scenes, the late night walks down the hill from Montmartre. Australia appearedto be a far-off land, sometimes alluring, but rather vague and empty. How was it possibleto make any literature about people who knew nothing except how to drive cattle andshear sheep? Lawson was writing stories about them, but I didn't think much of Lawsonthen. He hadn't enough style for my taste. Art was something more refined than that,an elegant, fantastic thing, like a Conder fan, or an Oscar Wilde play about cultivatedpeople who spoke in epigrams ... 8In spite of the bemused tone of this account Esson took Yeats' advice very seriously.Mter his second late night walk he devoted himself to ridding himself of hiscosmopolitan tastes and working towards a nationalist literature of the people. Hereturned from his pilgrimage with his ambitions for himself and for Australian dramaonly partly formed, but he had a clear plan to turn away from the old Bohemianismof his youth and embrace the new Australia, the 'real' Australia which with Irishassistance he was constructing in his imagination out of the Celtic mists of his ownliterary experience of the bush legend of the 1 890s. Immediately on his return herather self-consciously 'went bush', to get back in touch with the land, staying ata writers' camp set up by the eccentric E.J. Brady at the Mallacoota Inlet in East36 WESTERLY, No.2, JUNE, 1989