Life
1867-?; b. 17 Feb., Ballykilbeg, Co. Down; son of William Johnston, MP
[see infra], and Georgina, dg. Sir John Hay, Bart., of Park, Scotland;
ed. Derby, ed. High School, and TCD; initially planned to be a missionary;
fnd. Dublin Hermetic Society with Yeats and others, June 1885; Indian
Civil Service, course work 1886, final Aug. 1888; reaching India, Nov.
1888; asst. and Dep. Magistrate at Murshedabad Lr. Bengal, afterwards
Cuttack district of Irissa; visited Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, and Allahabad;
invalided two years later; travelled four years on continent, Holland,
Belgium, Germany, Russia, Austria, and France; USA, 1896; Mem. Royal Asiatic
Soc., and Pres. Irish Literary Society NY; translated Upanishads
(1896); What is Art?, from Tolstoy; Julian the Apostate, from R
Mereshkovski; The System of the Vedanta from Prof. Paul Deussen
[German]; also The Memory of Past Births (1900); Kela Bai (1900);
Ireland, Historic and Picturesque (1902); articles on Oriental,
historical and literary subjects to leading magazines; m. niece of Madame
Blavatsky. JMC
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Works
Ireland: Historic and Picturesque (Philadelphia: Winston 1902), 293pp.,; Ireland’s Story - new edition with an additional chapter: 1904-1922 (Boston & NY: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1923), ill., C. S. Daniell , xiv, 442pp. 8o.
Bibliographical details
Ireland : Historic And Picturesque (1902): Contents: I. Visible and Invisible; II. The Great Stone Monuments ; iii. The Cromlech Builders; IV. The De Danaans; V. Emain of Maca; VI. Cuculain the Hero; VII. Find and Ossin; VIII. The Messenger of the New Way; IX. The Saints and Scholars; X. The Raids of the Northmen; XI. The Passing of the Norsemen; XII. The Normans; XIII. The Triumph of Feudalism; XIV. The Jacobite Wars; XV. Conclusion. Index.
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John S. Crone, “Willie Yeats and John O'Leary”, in The Irish Book Lover, Vol. XXVII, No.5, Nov. 1940, 245.
A. N. Jeffares, New Commentary on the Poems of W B Yeats (1988), p.5
John Eglinton, ‘Yeats at the High School’, Erasmian, XXX (June 1939) [New Comm., p.379.]
Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948), Ellmann, pp.61-63.
Frank Tuohy, Yeats (1976), pp.31-32-34, 48, 64.
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Notes
J. B. Yeats: Johnston’s opinion of the formative influence
of John B. Yeats on his son W. B. Yeats: ‘Many of the finer qualities
of Willie Yeats’ mind were formed in that study [i.e., J. B. Yeats’
studio] on St. Stephen’s Green, in long talks on art and life, on
man and God, with his sensitive, enthusiastic father. One remembers the
long room, with its skylight, the walls of pale green, frames and canvases
massed along them; a sofa and a big armchair or two; the stout iron stove
with its tube; and, filling the whole with his spirit, the artist stepping
back again, always in movement, always meditating high themes, and now
and then breaking into talk on the second part of "Faust", or
the Hesperian apples, or the relation of villainy to genius.’ (Quoted
in E. H. Mikhail, W. B. Yeats: Interviews and Recollections, 1977,
p.9-10; cited in Terence Brown, W. B. Yeats: A Critical Life, 1999,
p.26 [pb. edn. 2001].)
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.)
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)