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Title: Hail and Farewell
Author: Moore, George Augustus (1852-1933)
Date of first publication: 1925 (this version).
   Earlier separate versions of the three
   parts of the trilogy were first published
   in 1911 ("Ave"), 1912 ("Salve"), and 1914 ("Vale")
Date first posted: 10 June 2009
Date last updated: 10 June 2009
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #329

This ebook was produced by:
Jon Ingram, Don Perry
& the Online Distributed Proofreaders Europe
at http://dp.rastko.net




HAIL AND FAREWELL

Ave, Salve, Vale


George Moore


First published in 1911 Copyright 1911, 1914, 1925




ART WITHOUT THE ARTIST


At the end of the 'forties Ruskin preached: Let us abandon ourselves
unreservedly to Nature, and his teaching gave birth to Pre-Raphaelitism,
unless indeed the truth is that the painters Rossetti, Millais, and
Holman Hunt stood up one evening in a studio in Newman Street, all three
crying together: If we purify ourselves in ignorance and put our trust
in Nature, we shall rediscover the innocency of the painters of the
fifteenth century. So did Robert Ross relate to me the story of the
movement, and perceiving that he was intimately acquainted with it, I
often tried to persuade him to write it: but he could not be persuaded,
for to do so, he said, would deprive him of the pleasure of talking it,
and I was disappointed, for no more perfect beginning of a story was
ever invented than the three--a Robespierre, a Danton, a Marat, standing
up together proclaiming their faith in Nature. A little too dramatic and
self-conscious they were for an aesthetic Revolution, some may think,
but for many no more than a few moments of reflection are needed to
remember that the natural would be for the painters to discover the
truth themselves and find their Apostle afterwards in Ruskin.

But however our feelings go, whether in the direction of Ruskin or the
painters, we must not forget that Ruskin was a craftsman, a master of
the lead pencil, whose drawings bear comparison with the best of their
kind, if we except Turner's. His architectural drawings must have been
admired by Whistler in secret, and there are drawings in which his
pencil followed a range of hills revealing the beauty of every fold
and the swerve of every outline. An exquisite draughtsman! and the
question now comes whether these drawings were done in the 'forties.
If Robert Ross were alive he could tell me; but assuming that some
were accomplished about that time and were accompanied by literary
comment (which is not unlikely, his pen and pencil being as dependent
one upon the other as the musical notes of a song are upon the words
they enhance and illustrate), we find ourselves unable to consider
Ruskin as a mere propagandist, and are obliged to admit that his
handicraft counted for a little in the declaration that was destined
to give to England an art entirely her own.

Hitherto England had derived her inspiration from abroad, but the
Pre-Raphaelite movement was English as a Surrey hedgerow. But before
the hedgerow there were scattered bushes, and before the
Pre-Raphaelite movement there were quakings and stirrings. Mulready is
reported to have said: Yes, but what you tell me is no more than what
I have been trying to do all my life! words that tell plainly how
unable Mulready was by temperament to appreciate the love of beauty
that inspired the brotherhood and directed their choice to beautiful
things with a view to making them seem even more beautiful than they
were by a beautiful handicraft, of which I should speak at length if
the subject of this paper was the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood or
Pre-Raphaelitism. As it is neither one nor the other I shall say no
more than that the desire of Man to discover the source of things led
critics even to the beginning of the century, to William Dyce, and to
hang a pretty, romantic movement round the neck of one of the most
prosaic of all painters, dry and punctilious.

So things are misrepresented in this world even by the best
intentioned! But truth is stronger than good intentions, and of late
years Dyce's name as a possible claimant has been dropped and the
Newman Street episode accepted as the authorised version.

A small thing Pre-Raphaelitism may be, no more than a daisy in the
great flower garden of the world's art; but a daisy that is your own
is perhaps better than a sunflower that is somebody else's, and it is
with reluctance I remark that Rossetti was an Italian--born in
England, nurtured in England, it is true--and that Millais came from
the Channel Islands and was perhaps of French stock. But Holman Hunt's
English blood has never been called into question, happily; so we are
in possession of an artistic movement more or less exclusively our
own, and one that lasted more than twenty years. The dates are
approximately from 1850 to 1870. Millais was painting the three Miss
Armstrongs in Cromwell Place in the 'seventies, and drooping, the
movement lingered on still a few years, till in the 'eighties a great
painter, James M'Neill Whistler, felt himself called upon to pronounce
what may be described as a funeral oration over it. None was
necessary, for the Pre-Raphaelite movement was dead and beyond hope of
resurrection before a goodly assembly of ladies and gentlemen was
called to the Dudley Gallery to hear the artist exalted, placed above
Nature, and his business declared to be to take hints from Nature, to
interpret and to amplify, to use Nature as a musician uses the piano.
All the same, James M'Neill (I drop the Whistler, the name being an
absurd one and a disparagement to his painting) could not do else than
concede a part of every picture to Nature, an admission that will be
regarded as a weakness by many who have followed after him. In his
_Ten o'Clock_ he admits that Nature can on occasions create a picture:

'The sun blares, the wind blows from the east, the sky is bereft of
cloud, and without, all is of iron. The windows of the Crystal Palace
are seen from all points of London. The holiday-maker rejoices in the
glorious day, and the painter turns aside to shut his eyes.

'How little this is understood, and how dutifully the casual in Nature
is accepted as sublime, may be gathered from the unlimited admiration
daily produced by a very foolish sunset.

'The dignity of the snow-capped mountain is lost in distinctness, but
the joy of the tourist is to recognise the traveller on the top. The
desire to see, for the sake of seeing, is, with the mass, alone the
one to be gratified, hence the delight in detail.

'And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with
a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the
tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the
night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is
before us--then the wayfarer hastens home; the working man and the
cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to
understand, as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who, for once, has
sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son
and her master--her son in that he loves her, her master in that he
knows her.'

When the beautifully proportioned brown, square book drops upon my
lap, my mind reverts to the Nocturnes, and I have not long to wait
before a pale grey-green waste of waters rises up in my thoughts, with
shadowy shores, receding lights, and on the horizon dimmer lights, and
half submerged in the swelling tide a trailing seaweed of lovely
design. A mingling of night and day is on the waters, and the artist
hears the song that Nature sings, this time in tune, and returns home
to report it in paint and afterwards in words so beautiful that we do
not forget the warehouses like palaces in the night, nor the artist
who declares himself Nature's son and master--her son in that he loves
her, her master in that he knows her. A beautiful prose this is,
beautiful as the artist's paint. Can I say more? And it is with regret
that I pick a hole in it; but my argument compels. James M'Neill's
point is that Nature is rarely an artist. But may we not say the same
of Man? Indeed, James M'Neill says it on the first page of his book.
Are not then Man and Nature equal, both of them being seldom artists?
James M'Neill would have found no way out of the dilemma, and if he
had sought to do so I should have asked him to come to the Royal
Academy with me. Nature sings in tune many times in the course of a
single year, and sings in vain, there being no artist about who
understands her; and taking Nature's adventures into painting as being
on the whole equal to those of Man, we will turn to Nature's novels.

A novel is the story of a man's life, and I think we shall find that
Nature provides ends for lives more strangely significant than any
invented by story-tellers. The end of Beau Brummel at Nice seems to
me one of Nature's triumphs; in it she has surpassed anything that I
remember for the moment in Tolstoy, or Turgenev, or Tchekov, or
Balzac. We all have a hearsay knowledge of Beau Brummel. We have
heard, or think we have heard, that he came to London with a
fifty-pound note in his pocket, no more, and a talent for dressing
himself so remarkable that he soon began to set the fashion in clothes
and was much sought after by tailors. His wit was ready and he reigned
in London for twenty years, till one evening he said, addressing the
Regent: George, ring the bell! The Regent rang the bell, and the
servant was told to send round for Mr Brummel's carriage. Everybody
wondered, and everybody understood that the knell of his popularity
had been rung. The friends who had endured the Beau's authority,
accepting rebuffs, sarcasms, and insolences of every kind
complacently, foresaw their release from tyranny in the incident, and
soon after, if not immediately after, the Beau found himself without a
friend in London. And for some years, I know not for how many, he
lived in Nice with an ever-fading brain, without friends or money, his
only entertainment being the donning of his gala clothes of other days
and listening to his servant announcing the high-sounding titles of
his former friends, till the cracking of the sconces restored him to
sanity and the sadness thereof.

For another great conqueror, Napoleon, Nature invented an end that
equals in beauty the one she devised for Beau Brummel: she placed him
on the rock of St Helena to watch and listen to the Atlantic, a
wonderful end. And Tolstoy's end is very wonderful if we connect it
with the strange morality that he preached from the Steppes, a
veritable Jeremiah, telling that a wife who left her husband would
meet a violent end; however kind and good her lover may have been, she
would not escape her fate. We are asked to believe in Anna Karenina's
suicide, and we do whilst the book is in our hands; but we do not
follow the great writer in _The Kreutzer Sonata_, for the morality
preached in that book is that unless we marry a woman who is
physically disagreeable to us, we shall plunge of a certainty a
stiletto through the exquisite jersey that tempted us in the
beginning. Mad indeed is the moralist who would reform our natures;
and Nature, having watched the preacher all the while, decreed an end
the significance of which cannot escape even the most casual reader: a
flight from his wife and home in his eighty-second year, and his death
in the waiting-room of a wayside railway station in the early hours of
a March morning.

The correlation of the end of a story to the story itself is that of
the hand to the arm; neither is complete without the other. The end of
_Hlose and Ablard_ is very beautiful. Nature furnished it, together
with a large part of the narrative, for Nature does not stint her
literary activities to ends. Sometimes she undertakes the entire
composition, as in _Hail and Farewell_; every episode and every
character was a gift from Nature, even the subject itself. And I shall
not be misunderstood if due attention be paid to the call that was
vouchsafed to me whilst walking in the Hospital Road, and if the fact
be borne in mind that from that day forward I never seemed to have
doubted that I was needed in Ireland, and that the words: Highly
favoured am I among authors! rose to my lips instinctively, I might
say incontinently, as I opened my garden gate one morning in May, for
the true significance of the words was not perceived by me whilst I
worked at Nature's bidding, taking down her many surprising
inventions, thinking they were my own because they happened to come my
way. For Nature is a sly puss; she sets us working, but we know
nothing of her designs; and for years I believed myself to be the
author of _Hail and Farewell_, whereas I was nothing more than the
secretary, and though the reader may doubt me in the sentence I am now
writing, he will believe that I am telling no more than the truth when
the narrative leads him to Coole Park and he meets the hieratic Yeats
and Lady Gregory out walking, seeking living speech from cottage to
cottage, Yeats remaining seated under the stunted hawthorn usually
found growing at the corner of the field, Lady Gregory braving the
suffocating interior for the sacred cause of Idiom. And the feeling
that there is something providential in the art of _Hail and Farewell_
will be strengthened when the reader comes upon Yeats standing lost in
meditation before a white congregation of swans assembled on the lake,
looking himself in his old cloak like a huge umbrella left behind by
some picnic-party; and raising his eyes from the book, the reader will
say: This is Nature, not Art! and his thoughts reverting to the name
upon the title-page, he will add: A puny author indeed, who merits a
severe reprimand, if not punishment: with such a figure as Yeats he
should have created something overtopping Don Quixote. He has done
well, of course, for with such material he could not have done badly,
but...

Whilst Yeats contemplates the lake and its water-fowl, esurient Edward
devours huge loin chops, followed by stewed chicken and platesful of
curried eggs, for he is suffering terrific qualms of conscience. And
finding that food cannot allay thief, he founds a choir for the
singing of Palestrina Masses, hoping to do something for his Church;
but the only result of Palestrina is the emptying of two churches. How
the emptying of the two churches came about I will suffer the reader
to find out for himself, for I feel that the episode will once more
strengthen the conviction in him that the book he is reading is
Nature's own book, wrought by providential hands; but when he meets AE
in _Salve_ he will discard the belief that Nature is the real author
of the book and will attribute the authorship to Erin. On reflection
it may seem to him that the name Erin has been turned to derision by
much bad poetry in modern times, and being a student of ancient
Ireland the name Banva may occur to him. Banva was Ireland's name when
the Druids flourished, and AE is the last believer in Druid mysteries.
Yeats is hieratic, Edward is esurient (eating procured his death), but
AE is neither hieratic nor esurient; indeed, he is apt to forget his
food, so subject is he to ideas, so willing to deliver everybody of
his ideas, if he have one. He has helped all and sundry through the
labours of parturition, with the single exception of Lady Gregory, who
delivers herself, and very easily, of her own plays and stories. Now
is there a word that would represent him as hieratic represents Yeats,
as esurient represents Edward? I am sure there is a word--yes, it is
coming, it is coming ... I've got it, maieutic! The maieutic AE! A
trilogy, if ever there was one, each character so far above anything
one meets in fiction that the reader's thoughts will return to Banva
as the author, thinly disguised by the puerile name of George Moore,
of this extraordinary work. And if any doubt regarding the authorship
still remains in his mind, it will be dispelled, I think, by the
labours of Plunkett and Gill in Ireland during the ten years which
_Hail and Farewell_ chronicles.

Yeats and dear Edward and AE are outside and beyond anything that has
ever appeared before in print; there is no standard by which we can
judge them; but in the case of Plunkett and Gill there is a standard,
and a literary standard. The reader has read or has heard of
Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet, two clerks whom a fortune beguiles
from their offices and an evil spirit urges to experiment in all
directions, one of which is horticulture, and their efforts produce a
melon that has all the qualities a melon should have except one--the
monstrous fruit is uneatable. France has laughed at the joke for forty
years, appreciating the point of it: the wrecking of a theory by a
simple fact overlooked by the theorists; and Plunkett and Gill
reproduced the originals almost line for line, with this difference,
that they exceeded the originals, which is not surprising if the
theory advanced in this paper be true, that Nature's inventions exceed
the artist's. Whosoever doubts this I would invite to compare
Flaubert's invention of the melon with some of the disasters that
followed Plunkett's and Gill's philanthropic career in Ireland. Some
of these disasters the reader will discover in the book, succinctly
related, but the crowning disaster is the one that I hope will engage
his attention. Inspired by a very noble desire for the advancement of
Banva, it occurred to them that the breed of Irish asses might be
improved; and having sent to the library for all the books on the
subject, the twain spent six days reading, with a view to avoiding the
mistakes that had been made hitherto in the breeding of asses. On the
seventh day several hundred pounds were sent to Alexandria for the
purchase of sires--but no, I will not deflower the joke by reporting
what happened to the unfortunate asses on the voyage. A broad smile
will illumine the face of the reader and the smile will wax broader
till he bursts into laughter, and when he comes to the impotent
jackass that brays at Foxrock, he will cry aloud: Bravo! and clap his
hands. But I would not give a false impression of Banva's book. The
reader will find many touching incidents in it. Tchekov should have
written the story of the snow lion; he would have, had not Banva been
busy dictating it to me.

So far my task of introducing _Hail and Farewell_ to the reader has
been an easy one. All the merits of the book belong to Banva, and the
demerits, alas! to me. In this new edition I have not, needless to
say, meddled with Banva's inventions and with the characters that she
brought into the book. For me to lay hands upon these would be as
unseemly as if I were to undertake to rearrange, to emendate, to
revise the work of some great author--more unseemly, perhaps, for
Banva is a spiritual entity; the Irish themselves are always willing
to strike a blow for Banva. So my editing was limited to re-knitting
and mending the literary texture, which seemed to me in many places
loose and casual. I have done my best with it, and even now, despite
all my stitching and unstitching, as Yeats would say, I have not woven
a garment worthy of Banva.


G.M.




AVE

OVERTURE


In 1894 Edward Martyn and I were living in the Temple, I in a garret
in King's Bench Walk, he in a garret in Pump Court. At the time I was
very poor and had to work for my living; all the hours of the day were
spent writing some chapter of _Esther Waters_ or of _Modern Painting_;
and after dinner I often returned to my work. But towards midnight a
wish to go out to speak to somebody would come upon me: Edward
returned about that time from his club, and I used to go to Pump
Court, sure of finding him seated in his high, canonical chair,
sheltered by a screen, reading his book, his glass of grog beside him,
his long clay pipe in his hand; and we used to talk literature and
drama until two or three in the morning.

I wish I knew enough Irish to write my plays in Irish, he said one
night, speaking out of himself suddenly.

You'd like to write your plays in Irish! I exclaimed. I thought nobody
did anything in Irish except bring turf from the bog and say prayers.

Edward did not answer, and when I pressed him he said:

You've always lived in France and England, and have forgotten Ireland.

You're wrong: I remember the boatmen speaking to each other in Irish
on Lough Carra! And Father James Browne preaching in Irish in
Carnacun! But I've never heard of anybody wanting to write in it ...
and plays, too!

Everything is different now; a new literature is springing up.

In Irish? I said; and my brain fluttered with ideas regarding the
relation of the poem to the language in which it is born.

A new language to enwomb new thoughts, I cried out to Edward.

On the subject of nationality in art one can talk a long while, and it
was past one o'clock when I groped my way down the rough-timbered
staircase, lit by dusty lanterns, and wandered from Pump Court into
the cloister, loitering by the wig-maker's shop in the dim corner, so
like what London must have been once, some hundreds of years after the
Templars.

On my way back to King's Bench Walk I passed their church! And,
standing before the carven porch, I thought what a happy accident it
was that Edward Martyn and myself had drifted into the Temple, the
last vestige of old London--combining, as some one has said, the
silence of the cloister with the licence of the brothel--Edward
attracted by the church of the Templars, I by the fleeting mistress,
so it pleased me to think.

One is making for the southern gate, hoping that the aged porter will
pull the string and let her pass out without molesting her with
observations, and, when the door closed behind her, there seemed to be
nothing in the Temple but silence and moonlight: a round moon sailing
westward let fall a cold ray along the muddy foreshore and along the
river, revealing some barges moored in mid-stream.

The tide is out, I said, and I wondered at the spots and gleams of
light, amid the shrubs in the garden, till I began to wonder at my own
wonderment, for, after all, this was not the first time the moon had
sailed over Lambeth. Even so the spectacle of the moonlit gardens and
the river excited me to the point of making me forget my bed; and,
watching the white torch of Jupiter and the red ember of Mars, I began
to think of the soul which Edward Martyn had told me I had lost in
Paris and in London, and if it were true that whoever casts off
tradition is like a tree transplanted into uncongenial soil. Turgenev
was of that opinion: Russia can do without any one of us, but none of
us can do without Russia--one of his sentimental homilies grown
wearisome from constant repetition, true, perhaps, of Russia, but
utterly untrue of Ireland. Far more true would it be to say that an
Irishman must fly from Ireland if he would be himself. Englishmen,
Scotchmen, Jews, do well in Ireland--Irishmen never; even the patriot
has to leave Ireland to get a hearing. We must leave Ireland; and I
did well to listen in Montmartre. All the same, a remembrance of
Edward Martyn's conversation could not be stifled. Had I not myself
written, only half conscious of the truth, that art must be parochial
in the beginning to become cosmopolitan in the end? And isn't a great
deal of the savour of a poem owing to the language in which it is
written? If Dante had continued his comedy in Latin! He wrote two
cantos in Latin! Or was it two stanzas?

So Ireland is awaking at last out of the great sleep of Catholicism!
And I walked about the King's Bench Walk, thinking what a wonderful
thing it would be to write a book in a new language or in an old
language revived and sharpened to literary usage for the first time.
We men of letters are always sad when we hear of a mode of literary
expression not available to us, or a subject we cannot treat. After
discussing the Humbert case for some time, Dujardin and a friend fell
to talking of what a wonderful subject it would have been for Balzac,
and I listened to them in sad silence. Moore is sad, Dujardin said. He
is always sad when he hears a subject which he may never hope to
write.

The Humbert case being involved in such a mass of French jurisprudence
that--And they laughed at me.

But in the Temple, in Edward's rooms, I had heard that a new
literature was springing up in my own parish, and forthwith began to
doubt if the liberty my father's death had given me was an unmixed
blessing. The talent I brought into the world might have produced
rarer fruit if it had been cultivated less sedulously. Ballinrobe or
the Nouvelle Athnes--which?

The bitterness of my meditation was relieved, somewhat, on remembering
that those who had remained in Ireland had written nothing of any
worth--miserable stuff, no narrative of any seriousness, only broad
farce. Lever and Lover and a rudiment, a peasant whose works I had
once looked into, and whose name it was impossible to remember.
Strange that Ireland should have produced so little literature, for
there is a pathos in Ireland, in its people, in its landscape, and in
its ruins. And that night I roamed in imagination from castle to
castle, following them from hillside to hillside, along the edges of
the lake, going up a staircase built between the thickness of the
walls, and on to the ramparts, remembering that Castle Carra must have
been a great place some four or five hundred years ago. Only the
centre of the castle remains; the headland is covered with ruins,
overgrown with thorn and hazel; but great men must have gone forth
from Castle Carra; and Castle Island and Castle Hag were defended with
battle-axe and sword, and these were wielded as tremendously, from
island to island, and along the shores of my lake, as ever they were
under the walls of Troy. But of what use are such deeds if there be no
chroniclers to relate them? Heroes are dependent upon chroniclers, and
Ireland never produced any, only a few rather foolish bards, no one
who could rank with Froissart; and I thought of my friend up in Pump
Court writing by a window, deep set in a castle wall, a history of his
times. That was just the sort of thing he might do, and do very well,
for he is painstaking. An heroic tale of robbers issuing from the keep
of Castle Carra and returning with cattle and a beautiful woman would
be more than he could accomplish. I had heard of Grania for the first
time that night, and she might be written about; but not by me, for
only what my eye has seen, and my heart has felt, interests me. A book
about the turbulent life of Castle Carra would be merely inventions,
_cela ne serait que du chiqu_; I should be following in the tracks of
other _marchands de camelote_, Scott and Stevenson, and their like.
But modern Ireland! What of it as a subject for artistic treatment?

And noiselessly, like a ghost, modern Ireland glided into my thoughts,
ruinous as ancient Ireland, more so, for she is clothed not only with
the ruins of the thirteenth century, but with the ruins of every
succeeding century. In Ireland we have ruins of several centuries
standing side by side, from the fifth to the eighteenth. By the ruins
of Castle Carra stand the ruins of a modern house, to which the
chieftains of Castle Carra retired when brigandage declined; and the
life that was lived there is evinced by the great stone fox standing
in the middle of the courtyard--was evinced, for within the last few
years the fox and the two hounds of gigantic stature on either side of
the gateway have been overthrown.

When I was a small child I used to go with my mother and governess to
Castle Carra for goat's milk, and we picnicked in the great
banqueting-hall overgrown with ivy. If ever the novel I am dreaming is
written, _Ruin and Weed_ shall be its title--ruined castles in a weedy
country. In Ireland men and women die without realising any of the
qualities they bring into the world, and I remembered those I had
known long ago, dimly, and in fragments, as one remembers
pictures--the colour of a young woman's hair, an old woman's stoop, a
man's bulk; and then a group of peasants trooped past me--Mulhair
recognised by his stubbly chin, Pat Plunket by his voice, Carabine by
his eyes--and these were followed by recollection of an old servant,
Appleby, his unstarched collar and the frock-coat too large for him
which he wore always, and his covert dislike of the other servants in
the house, especially the old housemaids.

All these people have gone to their rest; they are all happily
forgotten, no one ever thinks of them; but to me they are clearer than
they were in life, because the present changes so quickly that we are
not aware of our life at the moment of living it. But the past never
changes; it is like a long picture-gallery. Many of the pictures are
covered with grey cloths, as is usual in picture-galleries; but we can
uncover any picture we wish to see, and not infrequently a cloth will
fall as if by magic, revealing a forgotten one, and it is often as
clear in outline and as fresh in paint as a Van der Meer.

That night in the Temple I met a memory as tender in colour and
outline as the Van der Meer in the National Gallery. It was at the end
of a long summer's day, five-and-twenty years ago, that I first saw
her among some ruins in the Dublin mountains, and in her reappearance
she seemed so startlingly like Ireland that I felt she formed part of
the book I was dreaming, and that nothing of the circumstances in
which I found her could be changed or altered. My thoughts fastened on
to her, carrying me out of the Temple, back to Ireland, to the time
when the ravages of the Land League had recalled me from the Nouvelle
Athnes--a magnificent young Montmartrian, with a blonde beard _ la
Capoul_, trousers hanging wide over the foot, and a hat so small that
my sister had once mistaken it for her riding-hat. And still in my
Montmartrian clothes I had come back from the West with a story in my
head, which could only be written in some poetical spot, probably in
one of the old houses among the Dublin mountains. And I had set out to
look for one on a hot day in July, when the trees in Merrion Square
seemed like painted trees, so still were they in the grey silence; the
sparrows had ceased to twitter; the carmen spat without speaking, too
weary to solicit my fare; and the horses continued to doze on the
bridles. Even the red brick, I said, seems to weary in the heat. Too
hot a day for walking, but I must walk if I'm to sleep tonight.

My way led through Stephen's Green, and the long decay of Dublin that
began with the Union engaged my thoughts, and I fared sighing for the
old-time mansions that had been turned into colleges and presbyteries.
There were lodging-houses in Harcourt Street, and beyond Harcourt
Street the town dwindled, first into small shops, then into
shabby-genteel villas; at Terenure, I was among cottages, and within
sight of purple hills, and when the Dodder was crossed, at the end of
the village street, a great wall began, high as a prison wall; it
might well have been mistaken for one, but the trees told it was a
park wall, and the great ornamental gateway was a pleasant object. It
came into sight suddenly--a great pointed edifice finely designed, and
after admiring it I wandered on, crossing an old grey bridge. The
Dodder again, I said. And the beautiful green country unfolded, a
little melancholy for lack of light and shade, for lack, I added, of a
ray to gild the fields. A beautiful country falling into ruin. The
beauty of neglect--yet there is none in thrift. My eyes followed the
long herds wandering knee-deep in succulent herbage, and I remembered
that every other country I had seen was spoilt more or less by human
beings, but this country was nearly empty, only an occasional herdsman
to remind me of myself in this drift of ruined suburb, with a wistful
line of mountains enclosing it, and one road curving among the hills,
and everywhere high walls--parks, in the centre of which stand stately
eighteenth-century mansions. How the eighteenth century sought
privacy! I said, and walked on dreaming of the lives that were lived
in these sequestered domains.

No road ever wound so beautifully, I cried, and there are no cottages,
only an occasional ruin to make the road attractive. How much more
attractive it is now, redeemed from its humanities--large families
flowing over doorways, probably in and out of cesspools! I had seen
such cottages in the West, and had wished them in ruins, for ruins are
wistful, especially when a foxglove finds root-hold in the crannies,
and tall grasses flourish round the doorway, and withdrawing my eyes
from the pretty cottage, I admired the spotted shade, and the road
itself, now twisting abruptly, now winding leisurely up the hill,
among woods ascending on my left and descending on my right. But what
seemed most wonderful of all was the view that accompanied the
road--glimpses of a great plain showing between comely trees shooting
out of the hillside--a dim green plain, divided by hedges, traversed
by long herds, and enclosed, if I remember rightly, by a line of low
grey hills, far, ever so far, away.

All the same, the road ascends very steeply, I growled, beginning to
doubt the veracity of the agent who had informed me that a house
existed in the neighbourhood. In the neighbourhood, I repeated, for
the word appeared singularly inappropriate. In the solitude, he should
have said. A little higher up in the hills a chance herdsman offered
me some goat's milk; but it was like drinking Camembert cheese, and
the least epicurean amongst us would prefer his milk and cheese
separate. He had no other, and, in answer to my questions regarding a
house to let, said there was one a mile up the road: Mount Venus.

Mount Venus! Who may have given it that name?

The question brought all his stupidity into his face, and after a
short talk with him about his goats, I said I must be getting on to
Mount Venus ... if it be no more than a mile.

Nothing in Ireland lasts long except the miles, and the last mile to
Mount Venus is the longest mile in Ireland; and the road is the
steepest. It wound past another ruined cottage, and then a gateway
appeared--heavy wrought-iron gates hanging between great stone
pillars, the drive ascending through lonely grass-lands with no house
in view, for the house lay on the farther side of the hill, a grove of
beech trees reserving it as a surprise for the visitor. A more
beautiful grove I have never seen, some two hundred years old, and the
house as old as it--a long house built with picturesque
chimney-stacks, well placed at each end, a resolute house, emphatic as
an oath, with great steps before the door, and each made out of a
single stone, a house at which one knocks timidly, lest mastiffs
should rush out, eager for the strangling. But no fierce voices
answered my knocking, only a vague echo. Maybe I'll find somebody in
the back premises, and wandering through a gateway, I came upon many
ruins of barns and byres, and upon a heap of stones probably once used
for the crushing of apples. No cow in the byre, nor pony in the
stable, nor dog in the kennel, nor pig in the sty, nor gaunt Irish
fowl stalking about what seemed to be the kitchen-door. An empty
dovecot hung on the wall above it. Mount Venus without doves, I said.
And as no answer came to my knocking I wandered back to the front of
the house to enjoy the view of the sea and the line of the shore,
drawn as beautifully as if Corot had drawn it. Dublin City appeared in
the distance a mere murky mass, with here and there a building,
faintly indicated. Nearer still the suburbs came trickling into the
fields, the very fields in which I had seen herds of cattle feeding.

Besides the beech woods there was the great yew hedge, hundreds of
years old, and a walled garden at the end of it, a little lower down
the shelving hillside, and, pulling a thorn-bush out of the gateway, I
passed into a little wilderness of vagrant grasses and goats. A scheme
for the restoration of Mount Venus started up in my mind for about two
thousand pounds. I should live in the most beautiful place in the
world. The Temple Church cannot compare with Chartres, nor Mount Venus
with Windsor; a trifle, no doubt, in the world of art; but what a
delicious trifle!... My dream died suddenly in the reflection that one
country-house is generally enough for an Irish landlord, and I walked
seeking for a man who would spend two thousand pounds on Mount Venus,
thereby giving me a house for which I would repay by dedicating all
the books I should write inspired by the lovely lines of Howth afloat
between sea and sky. Men speculate in racehorses and hounds, yachts
and Scottish moors, why is it there is no one who would restore Mount
Venus sufficiently for the summer months, long enough for me to write
my books and to acquire a permanent memory of a beautiful thing which
the earth is claiming rapidly, and which, in a few years, will pass
away.

By standing on some loose stones it was possible to look into the
first-floor rooms, and I could see marble chimney-pieces set in a long
room, up and down which I could walk while arranging my ideas; and
when ideas failed me I could suckle my imagination on the view. This
is the house I'm in search of, and there seems to be enough furniture
for my wants. I'll return tomorrow.... But my pleasure will be lost if
I've to wait till tomorrow. Somebody must be here. I'll try again. The
silence that answered my knocking strengthened my determination to see
Mount Venus that night, and I returned to the empty yard, and peeped
and pried through all the outhouses, discovering at last a pail of
newly peeled potatoes. There must be somebody about, and I waited,
peeling the potatoes that remained unpeeled to pass the time.

I'm afraid I'm wasting your potatoes, I said to the woman who appeared
in the doorway--a peasant woman wearing a rough, dark grey petticoat
and heavy boots, men's boots (they were almost the first thing I
noticed)--just the woman who I expected would come, the caretaker. She
spoke with her head turned aside, showing a thin well-cut face with a
shapely forehead, iron-grey hair, a nose, long and thin, with fine
nostrils, and a mouth a pretty line I think ... but that is all I can
say about her, for when I try to remember more I seem to lose sight of
her...

'You've come to see the house?

She stopped and looked at me.

Is there any reason why I shouldn't see it?'

'No, there's no reason why you shouldn't. If you'll wait a minute I'll
fetch the key.

She doesn't speak like a caretaker, I thought, nor look like one.

Is it a lease of the house you'd like, or do you wish only to hire it
for the season, sir?

Only for the season, I said. It is to be let furnished?

There's not much furniture, but sufficient--

So long as there are beds, and a table to write upon, and a few
chairs.

Yes, there's that, and more than that, she answered, smiling. This is
the kitchen, and she showed me into a vast stone room; and the
passages leading from the kitchen were wide and high, and built in
stone. The walls seemed of great thickness, and when we came to the
staircase, she said: Mind you don't slip. The stairs are very
slippery, but can easily be put right. The stonemason will only have
to run his chisel over them.

I'm more interested in the rooms in which I'm to live myself ... if I
take the house.

These are the drawing-rooms, she said, and drew my attention to the
chimney-piece.

It's very beautiful, I answered, turning from the parti-coloured
marbles to the pictures. All the ordinary subjects of pictorial art
lined the walls, but I passed on without noticing any, so poor and
provincial was the painting, until I came suddenly upon the portrait
of a young girl. The painting was hardly better than any I had already
seen, but her natural gracefulness transpired in classical folds as
she stood leaning on her bow, a Diana of the 'forties, looking across
the greensward waiting to hear if the arrow had reached its mark.

Into what kind of old age has she drifted? I asked myself, and the
recollection of the thin clear-cut eager face brought me back again to
the portrait, and forgetful of the woman I had found in the outhouse
peeling potatoes for her dinner, I studied the face, certain that I
had seen it before. But where?

Several generations seem to be on these walls, and I asked the
caretaker if she knew anything about the people who had lived in the
house? It was built about two hundred years ago, I should say, and we
wandered into another room. I should like to hear something about the
girl whose portrait I've been looking at. There's nothing to conceal?
No story--

There's nothing in her story that any one need be ashamed of. But why
do you ask? And the manner in which she put the question still further
excited my curiosity.

Because it seems to me that I've seen the face before.

Yes, she answered, you have. The portrait in the next room is my
portrait ... as I was forty years ago. But I didn't think that any one
would see the likeness.

Your portrait! I answered abruptly. Yes, I can see the likeness. And I
heard her say under her breath that she had been through a great deal
of trouble, and her face was again turned from me as we walked into
another room.

But do you wish to take the house, sir? If not--

In some ways it would suit me well enough. I'll write and let you
know. And your portrait I shall always remember, I added, thinking to
please her. But seeing that my remark failed to do so, I spoke of the
water supply, and she told me there was another well: an excellent
spring, only the cattle went there to drink; but it would be easy to
put an iron fence round it.

And now, if you'll excuse me. It's my dinner-time.

I let her go and wandered whither she had advised me--to the cromlech,
one of the grandest in Ireland.

I could not miss it, she had said: I'd find it if I followed the path
round the hill in the beech dell: a great rock laid upon three upright
stones; one had fallen lately and, in the words of a shepherd I'd
consulted, the altar was out of repair. Even Druid altars do not
survive the nineteenth century in Ireland, I answered, and still
lingering, detained by the ancient stones, my thoughts returned to her
whom an artist had painted as Diana the Huntress. A man of some
talent, for he had painted her in an attitude that atoned to some
extent for the poverty of the painting. Or was it she who gave him the
attitude leaning on her bow? Was it she who settled the folds about
her limbs, and decided the turn of her head, the eyes looking across
the greensward towards the target? Had she fled with somebody whom she
had loved dearly and been deserted and cast away on that hillside?
Does the house belong to her? Or is she the caretaker? Does she live
there with a servant? Or alone, cooking her own dinner? None of my
questions would be answered, and I invented story after story to
explain her as I returned through the grey evening in which no star
appeared, only a red moon rising up through the woods like a fire in
the branches.

My single meeting with this woman happened twenty-five years ago, and
it is more than likely she is now dead, and the ruins among which she
lived are probably a quarry whence the peasants go to fetch stones to
build their cottages; many of the beech trees have been felled. Mount
Venus has passed away, never to be revived again. But enough of its
story is remembered to fill a corner of the book I am dreaming; no
more than that, for the book I am dreaming is a man's book, and it
should be made of the life that lingered in Mayo till the end of the
'sixties: landlords, their retainers and serfs.

At these words, in the middle of the Temple, a scene rose up before
me of a pack of harriers--or shall I say wild dogs?--running into a
hare on a bleak hillside, and far away, showing faintly on a pale line
of melancholy mountains, a horse rising up in the act of jumping. And
on and on came horse and rider, over stone wall after stone wall, till
stopped by a wall so high that no horse could jump it, so I thought.
The gate of the park was miles away, so the hounds had time, not only
to devour the hare they had killed, but to eat many a rabbit.
Surrounding the furze, they drove the rabbits this way and that, the
whole pack working in concert, as wild dogs might, and the whip, all
the while, talking to a group of countrymen, until the hunt began to
appear. I must be getting to my hounds now, and picking up the
snaffle-rein, he drove the pony at the wall, who, to the admiration of
the group, rose at it, kicking it with her hind hooves, landing in
style among the hounds quarrelling over bits of skin and bone. The
wild huntsman blew his horn and, gathering his hounds round him, said
to me, before putting his pony again at the wall: A great little pony,
isn't she? And what's half a dozen of rabbits between twenty-two
couple of hounds? It'll only give them an appetite, though they've
always that. Bedad if they weren't the most intelligent hounds in the
country it's dead long ago they'd be of hunger. Do you know of an old
jackass? he said, turning to a country-man. If you do you might have a
shilling for bringing him. You can have the skin back if you like to
come for it.

By this time all the field were up, the master, florid and elderly,
and a quarrel began between him and the huntsman, whom he threatened
to sack in the morning for not being up with the hounds.

Wasn't there six foot of a wall between us? And they as hungry as
hawks?

But if the pony was able to lep the wall, why didn't you ride her at
it at once?

And so I did, your honour.

And the countrymen were called and they testified.

Well, Pat, you must be up in time to get the next hare from them, for
if you don't, it's myself and Johnny Malone that will be drinking our
punch on empty bellies, which isn't good for any man. And away went
the master in search of his dinner over the grey plain, under rolling
clouds threatening rain, the hounds trying the patches of furze for
another hare, and the field--a dozen huntsmen with a lady amongst
them--waiting, talking to each other about their horses. I could see
Pat pressing his wonderful pony forward, on the alert for stragglers,
assuring Bell-Ringer with a terrific crack of his whip that he was not
likely to find a hare where he was looking for one, and must get into
the furze instantly; and then I caught a glimpse of the ragged
peasantry following the hunt over the plains of Ballyglass, just as
they used to follow it, a fierce wind thrilling in their shaggy
chests, and they speaking Irish to each other, calling to the master
in English.

A place must be found, I said to myself, in my story for that pack of
hounds, for its master, for its whip, and for the marvellous pony, and
for a race-meeting, whether at Ballinrobe or Breaghwy or Castlebar.
Castlebar for preference. The horde of peasantry would look well amid
the line of hills enclosing the plain: old men in knee-breeches and
tall hats, young men in trousers, cattle-dealers in great overcoats
reaching to their heels, wearing broad-brimmed hats, everybody with a
broad Irish grin on his face, and everybody with his blackthorn. Of a
sudden I could see a crowd gathered to watch a bucking chestnut, a
sixteen-hands horse with a small boy in pink upon his back. Now the
horse hunches himself up till he seems like a hillock; his head is
down between his legs, his hind legs are in the air, but he doesn't
rid himself of his burden. He plunges forward, he rises--up, coming
down again, his head between his legs; and the boy, still unstirred,
recalls the ancient dream of the Centaur.

Bedad! he's the greatest rider in Ireland, a crowd of tinkers and
peasants are saying, the tinkers hurrying up to see the sport,
retiring hurriedly as the horse plunges in their direction, running
great danger of being kicked.

So did I remember the scene as I walked about the Temple that moonlit
night, the very words of the tinkers chiming in my head after many
years: Isn't he a devil? cries one; it's in the circus he ought to be.
Mickey was near off that time, cries another, and while the great
fight was waged between horse and jockey, my father rode up, crying to
the crowd to disperse, threatening that if the course was not cleared
in a few minutes he would ride in amongst them, and he on a great bay
stallion. I'll ride in amongst you; you'll get kicked, you'll get
kicked. Even at this distance of time I can feel the very pang of fear
which I endured, lest the horse my father was riding should kick some
peasant and kill him, for, even in those feudal days, a peasant's life
was considered of some value, and the horse my father rode quivered
with excitement and impatience. Get back! Get back or there'll be no
racing today. And you, Mickey Ford, if you can't get that horse to the
post, I'll start without you. Give him his head, put the spurs into
him, thrash him! And taking my father at his word, Mickey raised his
whip, and down it came sounding along the golden hide. The horse
bounded higher, but without getting any nearer to unseating his rider,
and away they went towards the starting-point, my father crying to the
jockeys that they must get into line, telling Mickey that if he didn't
walk his horse to the post he would disqualify him, and Mickey
swearing that his horse was unmanageable, and my father swearing that
the jockey was touching him on the offside with his spur. It seemed to
me my father was very cruel to the poor boy whose horse wouldn't keep
quiet. A moment after they were galloping over the rough fields,
bounding over the stone walls, the ragged peasantry rebuilding the
walls for the next race, waving their sticks, running from one corner
of the field to another, and no one thinking at all of the melancholy
line of wandering hills enclosing the plain.

A scene to be included in the novel I was dreaming, and, for the
moment, my father appeared to me as the principal character; but only
for a moment. Something much rougher, more Irish, more uncouth, more
Catholic, was required. My father was a Catholic, but only of one
generation, and to produce the pure Catholic several are necessary.
The hero of my novel must be sought and found among the Catholic end
of my family, a combination of sportsman and cattle-dealer. Andy on
his grey mare careering after the Blazers, rolling about like a sack
in the saddle, but always leading the field, tempted me, until my
thoughts were suddenly diverted by a remembrance of a Curragh meeting,
with Dan who had brought up a crack from Galway and was going to break
the ring.

Dan, aren't you going to see your horse run? cried I. He'll run the
same whether I'm looking at him or not. And Dan, in his long yellow
mackintosh, hurrying through the bookies, rose up in my mind, as true
and distinct and characteristic of Ireland as the poor woman I had
discovered among the Dublin mountains. She had fixed herself on my
mind as she was in a single moment. Dan I had seen many times, in all
kinds of different circumstances; all the same, it is in his
mackintosh at the Curragh meeting, on his way to the urinal, that I
remember him--in his tall silk hat (every one wore a tall silk hat at
the Curragh in the 'seventies); but Dan was only half himself in a
hat, for whoever saw him remembers the long white skull over which he
trailed a lock of black hair--the long skull which I have inherited
from my mother's family--and the long pale face; and his hands were
like mine, long, delicate, female hands; one of Dan's sisters had the
most beautiful hands I ever saw. He'll run the same whether I'm
looking at him or not, and Dan laughed craftily, for craft and
innocency were mingled strangely in his face. Dan had a sense of
humour. Or did I mistake a certain naturalness for humour? Be that as
it may, when I was in Galway I was often tempted to ride over to see
him.

It will be difficult to get him on to paper, I reflected. His humour
will not transpire if I'm not very careful, for, though I may
transcribe the very words he uttered, they will mean little on paper
unless I get his atmosphere: the empty house at Dunamon, the stables
about it filled with racehorses, most of them broken down, for no
four legs ever stood more than two years' training over the rough
fields which Dan called his racecourse. A four-year-old, with back
sinews and suspensory ligaments sound, rarely stood in the Dunamon
stables, a chaser or two perchance. All the same Dan did not lose
money on the turf; a stroke of luck kept him going for a long time,
and these strokes of luck happened every five or six years. Every five
or six years he would arrive at the Curragh with a two-year-old,
which, on account of its predecessors' failures, would be quoted on
the list at ten to one. Dan knew how to back him quietly; his backing
was done surreptitiously, without taking any one into his confidence,
not even his cousins. It was no use going to Dunamon to ask him
questions; the only answer one ever got was:

There he is, quite well, but whether he can gallop or not, I can't
tell you. I've nothing to try him with. There he is; go and look at
him.

At the post he might advise us to put a fiver on him, if he wasn't in
too great a hurry. Is your money on him, Dan? one of his cousins
cried. Dan turned only to say: it's all right, and from his words we
guessed, and guessed rightly, that the horse had been backed to win
seven or eight thousand pounds, enough to keep the Dunamon
establishment going for the next four or five years.

As soon as a horse broke down he was let loose on Lagaphouca, a rocky
headland, where the cracks of yesteryear picked up a living as best
they could. He treated his horses as the master of the harriers
treated his hounds: intelligent animals who could be counted upon to
feed themselves. He loved them, too, in his own queer way, for he
never made any attempt to sell them, knowing that the only use they
could be put to, after he had finished training them, would be to draw
cabs; and though food was scarce in Lagaphouca in winter, they were
probably happier there than they would have been in a livery-stable.
Only once did Dan sell his horses. My brother, the Colonel, succeeded
in buying three from him. Any three you like, Dan said, at twenty-five
pounds apiece. At that time Lagaphouca was full of wild horses, and
the Colonel's story is that he only just escaped being eaten, which is
probably an exaggeration. But he chose three, and his choice was
successful. He won may races.... But I must keep to my own story.

I had wandered round the church of the Templars, and, after admiring
the old porch, and the wig-maker's shop, and the cloister, turned into
Pump Court. Up there aloft Edward was sleeping. Then, leaving Pump
Court, I found my way through a brick passage to a seat under the
plane trees in Fountain Court, and I sat there waiting for Symons, who
returned home generally about one. The Temple clock clanged out the
half-hour, and I said: Tonight he must be sleeping out, and continued
my memories to the tune of water dripping, startled now and then by
the carp plunging in the silence, recollecting suddenly that the last
time I went to Dunamon, Dan was discovered by me before an immense
peat fire burning in an open grate. The chimney-piece had fallen some
time ago; one of the marbles had been broken, and it was difficult to
replace the slab. No mason in the country could undertake the job; all
the skilled workmen had gone out of the country, he said. But one did
not discuss the evils of emigration with Dan, knowing what his answer
would be.

As long, he would say, as the people want to go to America they'll go,
and when America is out of fashion they'll stay at home.... There will
always be enough people here for me.

On one occasion when I rode over to Dunamon to get news of what horses
Dan was going to run at the next meeting of the Curragh, Bridget
opened the door to me. The master is not in the house, she said, but
if you'll wait in the drawing-room I'll go and find him for you. I
would have preferred to go round to the stables to seek Dan myself; he
was generally to be found in the stables, but not wishing to distress
Bridget I walked into the room and my eyes went at once to the piano
on which his sisters had played, and to the pictures they had admired.
The room was empty, cheerless, dilapidated, but it was strangely clean
for a room in the charge of an Irish peasant of Bridget's class. I
shall speak of her anon; now I must speak of the two pictures of dogs
going after birds, reddish dogs with long ears, for I used to detest
them when I was a child--why I never knew, they seemed foolish; now
they seemed merely quaint, and I wondered at my former aversion. Under
one of them stood the piano--a grand, made in the beginning of the
nineteenth century. _The Virgin's Prayer_ lay still on top of a heap
of music unlocked into by Dan, for when he touched a piano it was to
play his memories of operas heard long ago in his youth. No doubt he
often turned for refreshment to this piano after an excellent dinner
cooked by Bridget, who, when she had done washing up, would appear in
the drawing-room, for she was not confined to the bedroom and the
kitchen. Dan was a human fellow, who would not keep his mistress
unduly in the kitchen, and I can see Bridget bringing her knitting
with her, and hear Dan playing to her, until, overtaken by love or
weariness, he would cease to strum _Traviata_ or _Trovatore_ and go to
her.

Nobody ever witnessed this scene, but it must have happened just as I
tell it.

A pretty girl Bridget certainly was, and one that any man would have
liked to kiss, and one whom I should like to have kissed had I not
been prevented by a prejudice. We are all victims of prejudice of one
kind or another, and as the prejudice which prevented me from kissing
Bridget inclines towards those which are regarded as virtues, I will
tell the reader that the reason I refrained from kissing Dan's
mistress was because it has always been the tradition in the West that
my family never yielded to such indulgences as peasant mistresses or
the esuriences of hot punch: nobody but Archbishop McHale was allowed
punch in my father's house; the common priests who dined there at
election times had to lap claret. And, proud of my family's
fortitudes, I refrained from Bridget.

But if you respect your family so much, why do you lift the veil on
Dan's frailties? I often asked myself, and the answer my heart gave
back was: if I did not do so, I should not think of Dan at all; and
what we all dread most is to be forgotten. If I don't write about him
I shall not be able to forget the large sums of money I lost by being
put on the wrong horses. I am sure he would like to make amends to me
for those losses; and the only way he can do this now is by giving me
sittings. His brother and sisters will, no doubt, think my portrait in
bad taste, the prejudices of our time being that a man's frailties
should not be written about. It is difficult to understand why a
mistress should be looked upon as a frailty, and writing about the sin
more grievous than the sin itself. These are questions which might be
debated till morning, and as it is very nearly morning now, it will be
well to leave their consideration to some later time, and to decide at
once that Dan shall become a piece of literature in my hands. It is no
part of my morality to urge that nobody's feelings should be regarded
if the object be literature. But I would ask why one set of feelings
should be placed above another? Why the feelings of my relations
should be placed above Dan's? For, if Dan were in a position to
express himself now, who would dare to say that he would like his love
of Bridget to be forgotten? There is nothing more human, as Pater
remarks, than the wish to be remembered for some years after death,
and Dan was essentially a human being, and Bridget was a human being.
So why should I defraud them of an immortality opened up to them by a
chance word spoken by Edward Martyn in his garret in Pump Court? If my
cousins complain, I'll answer them: We see things from different
sides: you from a catholic, I from a literary. What a side of life to
choose! I hear them saying, and myself answering: Dan's love of
Bridget was what was best in him, and what was most like him. It is in
this preference that Dan is above you, for alone among you he sought
beauty. Bridget was a pretty girl, and beauty in a woman is all that a
man like Dan could be expected to seek. Whoever amongst you has bought
an Impressionist picture or a Pre-Raphaelite picture let him first
cast a stone. But not one of you ever bought any object because you
thought it beautiful, so leave me to tell Dan's story in my own way.
His love of Bridget I hold in higher esteem than Mat's desire, during
the last ten years of his life, to buy himself a seat in Heaven in the
front row, a desire which, by the way, cost him many hundreds a year.

At that moment a leaf floated down, and, forgetful of my tale, I
looked up into the tree, admiring the smooth stem, the beautiful
growth, the multitudinous leaves above me and the leaf in my hand.
Enough light came through the branches for me to admire the pattern so
wonderfully designed, and I said: How intense life seems here in this
minute! Yet in a few years my life in the Temple will have passed,
will have become as dim as those years of Dan's life in Dunamon. But
are these years dim or merely distant?

A carp splashed in the fountain basin. How foolish that fish would
think me if he could think at all, wasting my time sitting here,
thinking of Dan instead of going to bed! But being a human being, and
not a carp, and Dan being a side of humanity which appealed to me, I
continued to think of him and Bridget--dead days rising up in my mind
one after the other. I had gone to Mayo to write _A Mummer's Wife_,
and Dan had lent me a riding-horse, a great black beast with no
shoulders, but good enough to ride after a long morning's work, and a
rumour having reached me that something had gone wrong with one of his
cracks, I rode over to Dunamon. The horse was restive and seventeen
hands high, so I did not venture to dismount but halloed outside, and
receiving no answer rode round to the stables, and inquired for the
master of every stableman and jockey, without getting a satisfactory
answer. Every one seemed reticent. The master had gone to Dublin, said
one; another, slinking away, mentioned he was thinking of going,
perhaps he had gone, and seeing they did not wish to answer me, I
called to one, slung myself out of the saddle and walked into the
kitchen.

Well, Bridget, how are you today?

Well, thank you, sir.

What's this I'm hearing in the stables about the master going to
Dublin?

Ah, you've been hearing that? and a smile lit up Bridget's pretty
eyes.

Isn't it true? Bridget hesitated, and I added: Is it that he doesn't
want to see me?

Indeed, sir, he's always glad to see you.

And my curiosity excited, I pressed her.

It's just that he don't want to be showing himself to everybody.

To deceive her my face assumed a grave air.

No trouble with the tenants, I hope? Nothing of that sort?

The people are quiet enough round here.

Well, Bridget, I've always thought you a pretty girl. Tell me, what
has happened? And to lead her further I said: But you and the master
are just as good friends as ever, aren't you? Nothing to do with you,
Bridget? I'd be sorry--

With me, sir? Sure, it isn't from me he'd be hiding in the garden.

Unless, Bridget, he's beginning to grow holy, like Mr Mat, who is a
very holy man up in Dublin now, wearing a white beard, never going out
except to chapel; far too repentant for the priest, who, it is said,
would be glad to get rid of him.

How is that, sir?

He cries out in the middle of Mass that God may spare his soul,
interrupting everybody else's prayers. I never liked that sort of
thing myself, Bridget, and have never understood how God could be
pleased with a man for sending his children and their mother to
America. You know of whom I'm talking?

Bridget did not answer for a while, and when I repeated my question
she said:

Of course I do. Of Ellen Ford.

Yes, that is of whom I'm thinking.

And then, looking round to see if anybody was within hearing, she told
me how two of Mr Mat's sons had come back from America, bothering Mr
Dan for their father's address.

Two fine young fellows, the two of them as tall as Mr Mat himself.

And to escape from his nephews the master locks himself up in the
garden? Excellent security in eighteen feet of a wall.

But didn't they get into the trees--Mr Mat's two big sons--and Mr Dan
never suspecting it walked underneath them, and then it was that they
gave him the length and breadth of their tongues, and the whole stable
listening. The smile died out of her eyes, and fearing that one day
her lot might be Ellen Ford's, Bridget said: Wouldn't it be more
natural for Mr Mat to have married Ellen and made a good wife of her
than sending her to America and her sons coming back to bother Mr Dan?

It was a cruel thing, Bridget.

That's always the way, Bridget answered, and she moved a big saucepan
from one side of the range to the other. You'll find him in the garden
if you knock three times.

I'll go and fetch him presently.

Will you be staying to dinner, sir?

That depends on what you're cooking.

A pair of boiled ducks today.

Boiled ducks!

Don't you like them boiled? You won't be saying anything against my
cooking, if you stay to dinner, will you?

Not a word against your cooking. Excellent cooking, Bridget.

And as she busied herself about the range, thinking of the ducks
boiling in the saucepan, or thinking of what her fate would be if Dan
died before making a good wife of her, I studied the swing of her
hips, still shapely, but at thirty a peasant's figure begins to tell
of the hard work she has done, and as she bent over the range I
noticed that she wore a little more apron-string than she used to
wear.

The return of Mat's two sons from America seemed to have made her a
little anxious about her own future. Any day, I said, another girl may
be brought up from the village, and then Bridget will be seen less
frequently upstairs. She'll receive ten or twelve pounds a year for
cleaning and cooking, and perhaps after a little while drift away like
a piece of broken furniture into the outhouses. That will be her fate,
unless she becomes my cousin, and the possibility of finding myself
suddenly related to Bridget caused a little pensiveness to come into
my walk. It was not necessary that Dan should marry her, but he should
make her a handsome allowance if some years of damned hard luck on the
turf should compel him to marry his neighbour's daughter; enlarged
suspensory ligaments have made many marriages in Mayo and Galway; and
I went about the Temple remembering that when ---- was going to marry
----, the bride's relations had gathered round the fire to decide the
fate of the peasant girl and her children. They were all at sixes and
sevens until a pious old lady muttered: Let him emigrate them;
whereupon they rubbed their shins complacently. But Bridget was not
put away; Dan died in her arms. After that her story becomes
legendary. It has been said that she remained at Dunamon, and washed
and cooked and scrubbed for the next of kin, and wore her life away
there as a humble servant at the smallest wage that could be offered
to her. And it has been said that she made terms with the next of kin
and got a considerable sum from him, and went to America and keeps a
boarding-house in Chicago. And I have heard, too, that she ended her
days in the workhouse, a little crumpled ruin, amid other ruins, every
one with her own story.

Bridget is a type in the West of Ireland, and I have known so many
that perhaps I am confusing one story with another. For the purpose of
my book any one of these endings would do. The best would, perhaps, be
a warm cottage, a pleasant thatch, a garden, hollyhocks, and
bee-hives. In such a cottage I can see Bridget an old woman. But the
end of a life is not a thing that can be settled at once, walking
about in moonlight, for what seems true then may seem fictitious next
day. And already Dan and Bridget had begun to seem a little too trite
and respectable for my purpose. When he came to be written out Dan
would differ little from the characters to be found in Lever and
Lover. They would have served him up with the usual sauce, a sort of
restaurant gravy which makes everything taste alike, whereas painted
by me, Dan would get into something like reality, he would attain a
certain dignity; but a rougher being would suit my purpose better,
and I fell to thinking of one of Dan's hirelings, Carmody, a poacher,
the most notorious in Mayo and Galway, and so wary that he escaped
convictions again and again; and when Dan appointed him as gamekeeper
there was no further use to think about bringing him for trial, for
wasn't Dan on the Bench?

Carmody shot and fished over what land and what rivers he pleased. My
friend's grouse, woodcock, snipe, wild duck, teal, widgeon, hares, and
rabbits, went to Dunamon, and during the composition of _A Mummer's
Wife_, when my palate longed for some change from beef and mutton, I
had to invite Carmody to shoot with me or eat my dinner at Dunamon. He
knew where ducks went by in the evening, and Carmody never fired
without bringing down his bird--a real poaching shot and a genial
companion, full of stories of the country. It is regrettable that I
did not put them into my pocket-book at the time, for if I had I
should be able now to write a book original in every line.

The old woodranger looked at me askance when I brought Carmody from
Dunamon to shoot over my friend's lands. The worst man that ever saw
daylight, he would say. I pressed him to tell me of Carmody's
misdeeds, and he told me many ... but at this distance of time it is
difficult to recall the tales I heard of Carmody's life among the
mountains, trapping rabbits, and setting springes for woodcocks, going
down to the village at night, battering in doors, saying he must have
a sheaf of straw to lie on.

We used to row out to the islands and lie waiting for the ducks until
they came in from the marshes; and those cold hours Carmody would
while away with stories of the wrongs that had been done him, and the
hardships he had endured before he found a protector in Dan. The
account he gave of himself differed a good deal from the one which I
heard from the woodranger, and looking into his pale eyes, I often
wondered if it were true that he used to entice boys into the woods,
and when he had led them far enough, turn upon them savagely, beating
them, leaving them for dead. Why should he commit such devilry? I
often asked myself without discovering any reason, except that finding
the world against him he thought he might as well have a blow at the
world when he got the chance.

Many a poor girl was sorry she ever met with him, the woodranger would
say, and I asked him how, if he were such a wild man, girls would
follow him into the woods? Them tramps always have a following; and he
told me a story he had heard from a boy in the village. A knocking at
the door had waked the boy, and he lay quaking, listening to his young
sister telling Carmody it was too late to let him in, but Carmody
caught a hold of her and dragged her out through the door, so the boy
told me, and he heard them going down the road, Carmody crying: Begob,
I've seen that much of you that you'll be no use to anybody else.

And what became of the girl? Did he marry her?

Sorra marry; he sold her to a tinker, it is said to the one who used
to play the pipes. I thought you said he was a tinker. So he was; but
he used to play the pipes in the dancing-houses on a Sunday night,
till one night Father O'Farrell got out of his bed and walked across
the bog and pushed open the door without a By your leave or With your
leave, and making straight for the old tinker in the corner, snatched
the pipes from him and threw them on the floor, and began dancing upon
them himself, and them squeaking all the time, and he saying every
time he jumped on them: Ah, the divil is in them still. Do you hear
him roarin'?

I closed my eyes a little and licked my lips as I walked, thinking of
the pleasure it would be to tell this story ... and to tell it in its
place. The priest would have to be a friend of the family that lived
in the Big House; he would perhaps come up to teach the children
Latin, or they might go to him. Dan and his lass were typical of
Catholic Ireland, tainted through and through with peasantry. True
that every family begins with the peasant; it rises, when it rises,
through its own genius. The cross is the worst stock of all, the pure
decadent. But he must come into the book. Never was there such a
subject, I said, as the one I am dreaming. Dan, Bridget, Carmody and
his friends the tinkers--with these it should be possible to write
something that would be read as long as--

And while thinking of a simile wherewith to express the durability of
the book, I remembered that Ireland had not been seen by me for many
years, and to put the smack of immortality upon it, it would be
necessary to live in Ireland, in a cabin in the West; only in that way
could I learn the people, become intimate with them again. The present
is an English-speaking generation, or very nearly, so Edward told me;
mine was an Irish-speaking. The workmen that came up from the village
to the Big House spoke it always, and the boatmen on the lake
whispered it over their oars to my annoyance, until at last the
temptation came along to learn it; and the memory of that day floated
up like a wraith from the lake: the two boatmen and myself, they
anxious to teach me the language--a decisive day for Ireland, for if I
had learned the language from the boatmen (it would have been easy to
do so then) a book would have been written about Carmody and the
tinker that would have set all Europe talking; and the novel dreamed
in the Temple by me, written in a new language, or in a language
revived, would have been a great literary event, and the Irish
language would now be a flourishing concern. Now it is too late. That
day on Lough Carra its fate was decided, unless, indeed, genius
awakens in one of the islanders off the coast where Edward tells me
only Irish is spoken. If such a one were to write a book about his
island he would rank above all living writers, and he would be known
for evermore as the Irish Dante. But the possibility of genius,
completely equipped, arising in the Arran Islands seemed a little
remote. To quote that very trite, mutton-chop-whiskered gentleman,
Matthew Arnold, not only the man is required, but the moment.

The novel dreamed that night in the Temple could not be written by an
Arran islander, so it will never be written, for alas! the impulse in
me to redeem Ireland from obscurity was not strong enough to propel me
from London to Holyhead, and then into a steamboat, and across Ireland
to Galway, whence I should take a hooker whose destination was some
fishing harbour in the Atlantic. No, it was not strong enough, and
nothing is more depressing than the conviction that one is not a hero.
And, feeling that I was not the predestined hero whom Cathleen ni
Houlihan had been waiting for through the centuries, I fell to
sighing, not for Cathleen ni Houlihan's sake, but my own, till my
senses stiffening a little with sleep, thoughts began to repeat
themselves.

Other men are sad because their wives and mistresses are ill, or
because they die, or because there has been a fall in Consols, because
their names have not appeared in the list of newly created peers,
baronets, and knights; but the man of letters ... my energy for that
evening was exhausted, and I was too weary to try to remember what
Dujardin had said on the subject.

A chill came into the air, corresponding exactly with the chill that
had fallen upon my spirit; the silence grew more intense and grey, and
all the buildings stood stark and ominous.

Out of such stuff as Ireland dreams are made.... I haven't thought of
Ireland for ten years, and tonight in an hour's space I have dreamed
Ireland from end to end. When shall I think of her again? In another
ten years; that will be time enough to think of her again. And on
these words I climbed the long stone stairs leading to my garret.




I


One of Ireland's many tricks is to fade away to a little speck down on
the horizon of our lives, and then to return suddenly in tremendous
bulk, frightening us. My words were: In another ten years it will be
time enough to think of Ireland again. But Ireland rarely stays away
so long. As well as I can reckon, it was about five years after my
meditation in the Temple that W. B. Yeats, the Irish poet, came to see
me in my flat in Victoria Street, followed by Edward. My surprise was
great at seeing them arrive together, not knowing that they even knew
each other; and while staring at them I remembered they had met in my
rooms in the King's Bench Walk. But how often had Edward met my
friends and liked them, in a way, yet not enough to compel him to hook
himself on to them by a letter or a visit? He is one of those
self-sufficing men who drift easily into the solitude of a pipe or a
book; yet he is cheerful, talkative, and forthcoming when one goes to
see him. Our fellowship began in boyhood, and there is affection on
his side as well as mine, I am sure of that; all the same he has
contributed few visits to the maintenance of our friendship. It is I
that go to him, and it was this knowledge of the indolence of his
character that caused me to wonder at seeing him arrive with Yeats.
Perhaps seeing them together stirred some fugitive jealousy in me,
which passed away when the servant brought in the lamp, for, with the
light behind them, my visitors appeared a twain as fantastic as
anything ever seen in Japanese prints--Edward great in girth as an owl
(he is nearly as neckless), blinking behind his glasses, and Yeats
lank as a rook, a-dream in black silhouette on the flowered wallpaper.

But rooks and owls do not roost together, nor have they a habit or an
instinct in common. A mere doorstep casualty, I said, and began to
prepare a conversation suitable to both, which was, however checked by
the fateful appearance they presented, sitting side by side, anxious
to speak, yet afraid. They had clearly come to me on some great
business! But about what, about what? I waited for the servant to
leave the room, and as soon as the door was closed they broke forth,
telling together that they had decided to found a Literary Theatre in
Dublin; so I sat like one confounded, saying to myself: Of course they
know nothing of Independent Theatres, and, in view of my own
difficulties in gathering sufficient audience for two or three
performances, pity began to stir in me for their forlorn project. A
forlorn thing it was surely to bring literary plays to Dublin!...
Dublin of all cities in the world!

It is Yeats, I said, who has persuaded dear Edward, and looking from
one to the other, I thought how the cunning rook had enticed the
profound owl from his belfry--an owl that has stayed out too late, and
is nervous lest he should not be able to find his way back; perplexed,
too, by other considerations, lest the Dean and Chapter, having heard
of the strange company he is keeping, may have, during his absence,
bricked up the entrance to his roost.

As I was thinking these things, Yeats tilted his chair in such
dangerous fashion that I had to ask him to desist, and I was sorry to
have to do that, so much like a rook did he seem when the chair was on
its hind legs. But if ever there was a moment for seriousness, this
was one, so I treated them to a full account of the Independent
Theatre, begging them not to waste their plays upon Dublin. It would
give me no pleasure whatever to produce my plays in London, Edward
said. I have done with London. Martyn would prefer the applause of our
own people, murmured Yeats, and he began to speak of the by-streets,
and the lanes, and the alleys, and how one feels at home when one is
among one's own people.

Ninety-nine is the beginning of the Celtic Renaissance, said Edward.

I am glad to hear it, I answered; the Celt wants a Renaissance, and
badly; he has been going down in the world for the last two thousand
years. We are thinking, said Yeats, of putting a dialogue in Irish
before our play ... Usheen and Patrick. Irish spoken on the stage in
Dublin! You are not--Interrupting me, Edward began to blurt out that a
change had come, that Dublin was no longer a city of barristers,
judges, and officials pursuing a round of mean interests and trivial
amusements, but the capital of the Celtic Renaissance.

With all the arts for crown--a new Florence, I said, looking at Edward
incredulously, scornfully perhaps, for to give a Literary Theatre to
Dublin seemed to me like giving a mule a holiday, and when he pressed
me to say if I were with them, I answered with reluctance that I was
not; whereupon, and without further entreaty, the twain took up their
hats and staves, and they were by the open door before I could beg
them not to march away like that, but to give me time to digest what
they had been saying to me, and for a moment I walked to and forth,
troubled by the temptation, for I am naturally propense to thrust my
finger into every literary pie-dish. Something was going on in Ireland
for sure, and remembering the literary tone that had crept into a
certain Dublin newspaper--somebody sent me the _Express_ on
Saturdays--I said, I'm with you, but only platonically. You must
promise not to ask me to rehearse your plays. I spoke again about the
Independent Theatre, and of the misery I had escaped from when I cut
the painter.

But you'll come to Ireland to see our plays, said Edward. Come to
Ireland! and I looked at Edward suspiciously; a still more suspicious
glance fell upon Yeats. Come to Ireland! Ireland and I have ever been
strangers, without an idea in common. It never does an Irishman any
good to return to Ireland ... and we know it.

One of the oldest of our stories, Yeats began. Whenever he spoke these
words a thrill came over me; I knew they would lead me through
accounts of strange rites and prophecies, and at that time I believed
that Yeats, by some power of divination, or of ancestral memory,
understood the hidden meaning of the legends, and whenever he began to
tell them I became impatient of interruption. But it was now myself
that interrupted, for, however great the legend he was about to tell,
and however subtle his interpretation, it would be impossible for me
to give him my attention until I had been told how he had met Edward,
and all the circumstances of the meeting, and how they had arrived at
an agreement to found an Irish Literary Theatre. The story was
disappointingly short and simple. When Yeats had said that he had
spent the summer at Coole with Lady Gregory I saw it all; Coole is but
three miles from Tillyra: Edward is often at Coole; Lady Gregory and
Yeats are often at Tillyra; Yeats and Edward had written plays--the
drama brings strange fowls to roost.

So an owl and a rook have agreed to build in Dublin. A strange nest
indeed they will put together, one bringing sticks, and the
other--with what materials does the owl build? My thoughts hurried on,
impatient to speculate on what would happen when the shells began to
chip. Would the young owls cast out the young rooks, or would the
young rooks cast out the young owls, and what view would the beholders
take of this wondrous hatching? And what view would the Church?

So it was in Galway the nest was builded, and Lady Gregory elected to
the secretaryship, I said. The introduction of Lady Gregory's name
gave me pause.... And you have come over to find actors, and rehearse
your plays. Wonderful, Edward, wonderful! I admire you both, and am
with you, but on my conditions. You will remember them? And now tell
me, do you think you'll find an audience in Dublin capable of
appreciating _The Heather Field?_

Ideas are only appreciated in Ireland, Edward answered, somewhat
defiantly.

I begged them to stay to dinner, for I wanted to hear about Ireland,
but they went away, speaking of an appointment with Miss Vernon--that
name or some other name--a lady who was helping them to collect a
cast.

As soon as they had news they could come to me again. And on this I
returned to my room deliciously excited, thrilling all over at the
thought of an Irish Literary Theatre, and my own participation in the
Celtic Renaissance brought about by Yeats. So the drama, I muttered,
was not dead but sleeping, and while the hour before dinner was going
by, I recalled an evening I had spent about two years ago in the
Avenue Theatre, and it amused me to remember the amazement with which
I watched Yeats marching round the dress circle after the performance
of his little one-act play, _The Land of Heart's Desire._ His play
neither pleased nor displeased; it struck me as an inoffensive trifle,
but himself had provoked a violent antipathy as he strode to and forth
at the back of the dress circle, a long black cloak drooping from his
shoulders, a soft black sombrero on his head, a voluminous black silk
tie flowing from his collar, loose black trousers dragging untidily
over his long, heavy feet--a man of such excessive appearance that I
could not do otherwise--could I?--than to mistake him for an Irish
parody of the poetry that I had seen all my life strutting its
rhythmic way in the alleys of the Luxembourg Gardens, preening its
rhymes by the fountains, excessive in habit and gait.

As far back as the days when I was a Frenchman, I had begun to notice
that whosoever adorns himself will soon begin to adorn his verses, so
robbing them of that intimate sense of life which we admire in
Verlaine: his verses proclaim him to have been a man of modest
appearance. Never did Hugo or Banville affect any eccentricity of
dress--and there are others. But let us be content with the theory,
and refrain from collecting facts to support it, for in doing so we
shall come upon exceptions, and these will have to be explained away.
Suffice it to say, therefore, that Yeats's appearance at the Avenue
Theatre confirmed me in the belief that his art could not be anything
more than a pretty externality, if it were as much, and I declined to
allow Nettleship to introduce me to him. No, my good friend, I don't
want to know him; he wouldn't interest me, not any more than the Book
of Kells--not so much; Kells has at all events the merit of being
archaic, whereas--No, no; to speak to him would make me 'eave--if I
may quote a girl whom I heard speaking in the street yesterday.

It was months after, when I had forgotten all about Yeats, that my
fingers distractedly picked up a small volume of verse out of the
litter in Nettleship's room. Yeats! And after turning over a few
pages, I called to Nettleship, who, taking advantage of my liking for
the verses, begged again that he might be allowed to arrange a
meeting, and, seduced by the strain of genuine music that seemed to
whisper through the volume, I consented.

The Cheshire Cheese was chosen as a tryst, and we started for that
tavern one summer afternoon, talking of poetry and painting by turns,
stopping at the corner of the street to finish an argument or an
anecdote. Oxford Street was all aglow in the sunset, and Nettleship
told, as we edged our way through the crowds, how Yeats's great poem
was woven out of the legends of the Fianna, and stopped to recite
verses from it so often that when we arrived at the Cheshire Cheese we
found the poet sitting in front of a large steak, eating abstractedly,
I thought, as if he did not know what he was eating, hearing, if he
heard at all, with only half an ear, the remonstrance that Nettleship
addressed to him for having failed to choose Friday to dine at the
Cheshire Cheese, it being the day when steak-and-kidney pudding was on
at that tavern. He moved up the bench to make room for me as for a
stranger: somebody overheard the unkind things I said at the Avenue
Theatre and repeated them to him, I said to myself. However this may
be, we shall have to get through the dinner as best we can.

Nettleship informed me that Yeats was writing a work on Blake, and
the moment Blake's name was mentioned Yeats seemed altogether to
forget the food before him, and very soon we were deep in a discussion
regarding the Book of Thel, which Nettleship said was Blake's most
effectual essay in metre. The designs that accompanied Blake's texts
were known to me, and when the waiter brought us our steaks, Blake was
lost sight of in the interest of the food, and in our interest in
Yeats's interpretation of Blake's teaching.

But as the dinner at the Cheshire Cheese was given so that I should
make Yeats's acquaintance, Nettleship withdrew from the conversation,
leaving me to continue it, expecting, no doubt, that the combat of our
wits would provide him with an entertainment as exciting as that of
the cock-fights which used to take place a century ago in the
adjoining yard. So there was no choice for me but to engage in
disputation or to sulk, and the reader will agree that I did well to
choose the former course, though the ground was all to my
disadvantage, my knowledge of Blake being but accidental. There was
however, no dread of combat in me, my adversary not inspiring the
belief that he would prove a stout one, and feeling sure that without
difficulty I could lay him dead before Nettleship, I rushed at him,
all my feathers erect. Yeats parried a blow on which I counted, and he
did this so quickly and with so much ease that he threw me at once. A
dialectician, I muttered, of the very first rank; one of a different
kind from any I have met before; and a little later I began to notice
that Yeats was sparring beautifully, avoiding my rushes with great
ease, evidently playing to tire me, with the intention of killing me
presently with a single spur stroke. In the bout that ensued I was
nearly worsted, but at the last an answer shot into my mind. Yeats
would have discovered its weakness in a moment, and I might have fared
ill, so it was a relief to me to notice that he seemed willing to drop
our argument about Blake and to talk about something else. He was
willing to do this, perhaps because he did not care to humiliate me,
or it may have been that he wearied of talking about a literature to
one who was imperfectly acquainted with it, or it may have been that I
made a better show in argument than I thought for.

We might indulge in endless conjectures, and the simplest course will
be to assume that the word dramatic led the conversation away from
Blake. In Blake there is a great deal of drama, but in Yeats, as far
as I knew his poetry, there was none, and his little play _The Land of
Heart's Desire_ did not convince me that there ever would be any; but
Yeats's idea about Yeats was different from mine. About this time he
was thinking of himself as a dramatist and was anxious for me to tell
him what his chances were of obtaining a hearing for a literary play
in London. _The Land of Heart's Desire_ was not the only play he had
written; there was another--a four-act play in verse, which my
politeness said would give me much pleasure to read. I had met with
many beautiful verses in the little volume picked up in Nettleship's
rooms. Yeats bowed his acknowledgment of my compliments, and the smile
of faint gratification that trickled round his shaven lips seemed a
little too dignified; nor did I fail to notice that he refrained from
any mention of my own writings, and wondering how _Esther Waters_
would strike him, I continued the conversation, finding him at every
turn a more enjoying fellow than any I had met for a long time. Very
soon, however, it transpired that he was allowing me to talk of the
subjects that interested me, without relinquishing for a moment his
intention of returning to the subject that interested him, which was
to discover what his chances were of getting a verse play produced in
London. Two or three times I ignored his attempts to change the
conversation, but at last yielded to his quiet persistency, and
treated him to an account of the Independent Theatre and of its first
performance organised by me, and, warming to my subject, I told him of
the play that I had agreed to write if Mr G. R. Sims would give a
hundred pounds for a stall from which he might watch the performance.
The stipulated price brought the desired perplexity into Yeats's face,
and it was amusing to add to his astonishment with--And I got the
hundred pounds. As he was obviously waiting to hear the story of the
hundred-pounds stall I told him that Sims was a popular dramatist, to
whom a reporter had gone with a view to gathering his opinions
regarding independent drama, and that in the course of Sims's remarks
about Ibsen, allusion had been made to the ideas expressed by me
regarding literature in drama; and, as if to give point to his belief
in the limitations of dramatic art, he had said that he would give a
hundred pounds if Mr George Moore would write an unconventional play
for the Independent Theatre. The reporter came to me with his
newspaper, and after reading his interview with Mr Sims, he asked me
for my answer to Mr Sims's challenge. I am afraid Mr Sims is spoofing
you. (In the 'nineties the word spoofing replaced the old word humbug,
and of late years it seems to be heard less frequently; but as it
evokes a time gone by, I may be excused for reviving it here.) If you
write a play, the reporter answered, Mr Sims will not refuse to give
the hundred pounds.

But he asks for an unconventional play, and who is to decide what is
conventional? I notice, I said, picking up the paper, that he says the
scenes which stirred the audience in _Hedda Gabler_ are precisely
those that are to be found in every melodrama. Mr Sims has succeeded
in spoofing you, but he will not get me to write a play for him to
repudiate as conventional. No, no, I can hear him saying, the play is
as conventional as the last one I wrote for the Adelphi. I'll not pay
for that.... But if Mr Sims wishes to help the independent drama, let
him withdraw the word conventional or let him admit that he has been
humbugging.

The reporter left me, and the next week's issue of the paper
announced that Mr Sims had withdrawn the objectionable word, and that
I had laid aside my novel and was writing the play.

So did I recount the literary history of _The Strike at Arlingford_ to
Yeats, who waited, expecting that I would give him some account of the
performance of the play, but remembering him as he had appeared when
on exhibition at the Avenue Theatre, it seemed to me that the moment
had come for me to develop my aestheticism that an author should never
show himself in a theatre while his own play was being performed.
Yeats was of the opinion that it was only by watching the effect of
the play upon the public that an author could learn his trade. He
consented, however, and very graciously, to read _The Strike at
Arlingford_, if I would send it to him, and went away, leaving me
under the impression that he looked upon himself as the considerable
author, and that to meet me at dinner at the Cheshire Cheese was a
condescension on his part. He had somehow managed to dissipate, and,
at the same time, to revive, my first opinion of him, but I am quick
to overlook faults in whoever amuses and interests me, and this young
man interested me more than Edward or Symons, my boon companions at
that time. He was an instinctive mummer, a real dancing dog, and the
dog on his hind legs is, after all, humanity; we are all on our hind
legs striving to astonish somebody, and that is why I honour
respectability; if there were nobody to shock our trade would come to
an end, and for this reason I am secretly in favour of all the
cardinal virtues. But this young man was advertising himself by his
apparel, as the Irish middle classes do when they come to London bent
on literature. They come in knee-breeches, in Jaeger, in velvet
jackets, and this one was clothed like a Bible reader and chanted like
one in his talk. All the same, I could see that among much Irish
humbug there was in him a genuine love of his art, and he was more
intelligent than his verses had led me to expect. All this I admitted
to Nettleship as we walked up Fleet Street together. It even seemed
difficult to deny to Nettleship, when he bade me goodbye at Charing
Cross, that I should like to see the young man again, and all the way
back to the Temple I asked myself if I should redeem my promise and
send him _The Strike at Arlingford_. And I might have sent it if I had
happened to find a copy in my bookcase, but I never keep copies of my
own books. The trouble of writing to my publisher for the play was a
serious one; the postman would bring it in a brown-paper parcel which
I should have to open in order to write Yeats's name on the fly-leaf.
I should have to tie the parcel up again, redirect it, and carry it to
the post--and all this trouble for the sake of an opinion which would
not be the slightest use to me when I had gotten it. It was enough to
know that there was such a play on my publisher's shelves, and that a
dramatic writer had paid a hundred pounds to see it. Why turn into the
Vale of Yarrow, I muttered, and, rising from my table, I went to the
window to watch the pigeons that were coming down from the roofs to
gobble the corn a cabman was scattering for them.

Yeats was forgotten, and almost as completely as before, a stray
memory of his subtle intelligence perhaps crossing my mind from time
to time and a vague regret coming into it that he had dropped out of
my life. But no effort was made to find him, and I did not see him
again until we met at Symons's rooms--unexpectedly, for it was for a
talk with Symons before bedtime that I had walked over from King's
Bench Walk. But it was Yeats who opened the door; Symons was out, and
would be back presently--he generally returned home about one.
Wouldn't I come in? We fell to talking about Symons, who spent his
evenings at the Alhambra and the Empire, watching the ballet. Having
written _Symbolism in Literature_, he was now investigating the
problem of symbolism in gesture. Or was it symbolism in rhythm or
rhythmic symbolism? Even among men of letters conversation would be
difficult were it not for the weakness of our absent friends, and to
pass the time I told Yeats of an evening I had spent with Symons at
the Empire two weeks ago, and how I had gone with him after to the
Rose and Crown; and thinking to amuse him I reported the nonsense I
had heard spoken of over tankards of ale by various contemporary
poets. He hung dreamily over the fire, and fearing that he should
think I had spoken unkindly of Symons--a thing I had no intention of
doing (Symons being at the time one of my greatest friends)--I spoke
of the pleasure I took in his society, and then of my admiration of
his prose, so distinguished, so fine, and so subtle. The Temple clock
clanging out the hour interrupted my eulogy. As Symons does not seem
to return, I said, I must go home to bed. Yeats begged me to stay a
little longer, and tempted by the manuscripts scattered about the
floor, I sat down and asked him to tell me what he had been writing.
He needed no pressing to talk of his work--a trait that I like in an
author, for if I do not want to hear about a man's work I do not want
to hear about himself. He told me that he was revising the stories
that he had contributed to different magazines, and was writing some
new ones, and together these were to form a book called _The Secret
Rose._

I am afraid I interrupted you.

No, I had struck work some time. I came upon a knot in one of the
stories, one which I could not disentangle, at least not tonight.

I begged him to allow me to try to disentangle it, and when I
succeeded, and to his satisfaction, I expected his face to light up;
but it remained impassive, hieratic as ancient Egypt. Wherein now lies
his difficulty? I asked myself. Being a poet, he must be able to find
words, and we began to talk of the search for the right word.

Not so much the right word, Yeats interrupted, but the right language,
if I were only sure of what language to put upon them.

But you don't want to write your stories in Irish, like Edward?

A smile trickled into his dark countenance, and I heard him say that
he had no Irish. It was not for a different language that he yearned,
but for a style. Morris had made one to suit his stories, and I learnt
that one might be sought for and found among the Sligo peasants, only
it would take years to discover it, and then he would be too old to
use it.

You don't mean the brogue, the ugliest dialect in the world?

No dialect is ugly, he said; the bypaths are all beautiful. It is the
broad road of the journalist that is ugly.

Such picturesqueness of speech enchants me, and the sensation was of a
window being thrown suddenly open, and myself looking down some broad
chase along which we would go together talking literature, I saying
that very soon there would not be enough grammar left in England for
literature. English was becoming a lean language. We have lost, Yeats,
and I fear for ever, the second person singular of the verbs; thee and
thou are only used by peasants, and the peasants use them incorrectly.
In poetry, of course--Yeats shook his head--thee and thou were as
impossible in verse as in prose, and the habit of English writers to
allow their characters to thee and to thou each other had made the
modern poetic drama ridiculous. Nor could he sympathise with me when I
spoke of the lost subjunctive, and I understood him to be of the
opinion that a language might lose all its grammar and still remain a
vehicle for literature, the literary artist always finding material
for his art in the country.

Like a landscape painter, I answered him. But we are losing our verbs,
we no longer ascend and descend, we go up and we go down; birds still
continue to alight, whereas human beings get out and get in.

Yeats answered that even in Shakespeare's time people were beginning
to talk of the decline of language. No language, he said, was ever so
grammatical as Latin, yet the language died; perhaps from excess of
grammar. It is with idiom and not with grammar that the literary
artist should concern himself; and, stroking his thin yellow hands
slowly, he looked into the midnight fire, regretting he had no gift to
learn living speech from those who knew it--the peasants. It was only
from them one could learn to write, their speech being living speech,
flowing out of the habits of their lives, struck out of life itself,
he said, and I listened to him telling of a volume of folklore
collected by him in Sligo; a welcome change truly is such after
reading the _Times_, and he continued to drone out his little tales in
his own incomparable fashion, muttering after each one of them, like
an oracle that has spent itself--a beautiful story, a beautiful story!
When he had muttered these words his mind seemed to fade away, and I
could not but think that he was tired and would be happier tucked up
in bed. But when I rose out of my chair he begged me to remain; I
would if he would tell me another story. He began one, but Symons came
in in the middle of it, tired after long symbolistic studies at the
Empire, and so hungry that he began to eat bread and butter, sitting
opposite to us and listening to what we were saying, without, however,
giving us much of his attention. He seemed to like listening to Yeats
talking about style, but I gathered from his detachment that he felt
his own style had been formed years ago; a thing of beauty without
doubt, but accidentally bestowed upon him, so much was it at variance
with his appearance and his conversation; whereas Yeats and his style
were the same thing; and his strange old-world appearance and his
chanting voice enabled me to identify him with the stories he told me,
and so completely that I could not do otherwise than believe that
Angus, taine, Diarmuid, Deirdre, and the rest, were speaking through
him. He is a lyre in their hands; they whisper through him as the wind
through the original forest; but we are plantations, and came from
England in the seventeenth century. There is more race in him than in
any one I have seen for a long while, I muttered, while wending my way
down the long stairs, across Fountain Court, through Pump Court, by
the Temple Church, under the archway into King's Bench Walk.

It is pleasant to stay with a friend till the dusk, especially in
summer; the blue dusk that begins between one and two is always
wonderful; and that morning, after listening to many legends, it
struck me, as I stood under the trees in King's Bench Walk, watching
the receding stars, that I had discovered at last the boon companion I
had been seeking ever since I came to live in London. A boon companion
is as necessary to me as a valet is to Sir William Eden. Books do not
help me to while away the time left over when I am not writing, and I
am fain to take this opportunity to advise everybody to attend to his
taste for reading; once it is lost it is hard to recover; and believe,
if in nothing else, in this, that reading is becoming an increasing
necessity. The plays that entertain us are few, the operas hardly more
numerous; there are not always concerts, and one cannot choose the
music that shall be played if one be not a King. To have music in the
evenings at home we must choose for a wife one who can play Chopin,
and modern education does not seem to have increased the number of
these women. One meets one, misses her, and for ever after is forced
to seek literary conversation; and literary conversation is difficult
to get in London. One cannot talk literature in a club, or at a
literary dinner; only with a boon companion; and my search is even a
more difficult one than that of the light-o'-love who once told me
that her great trouble in life was to find an _amant de coeur_. The
confession amused me, the lady being exceedingly beautiful, but I
understood her as soon as she explained all the necessary
qualifications for the post. He must be in love with me, she said. As
you are very polite, you will admit that there can be no difficulty
about that. And I must be in love with him! Now you are beginning to
understand. He must be able to give me his whole time, he must be
sufficiently well off to take me out to dinner, to the theatre, to
send me flowers.... Money, of course, I would not take from him.

Your trouble as you explain it is a revelation of life, I answered,
but it is not greater than mine--she tossed her head--for what I am
seeking in London at the present time is a boon companion. In many
respects he must resemble your _amant de coeur_. He must like my
company, and as you are very polite, you will admit there can be no
difficulty about that. I shall have to enjoy his company; and so many
other things are necessary that I am beginning to lose heart.

Mary pressed me to recapitulate my paragon, and to console her, for
there is nothing so consoling as to find that one's neighbour's
troubles are at least as great as one's own, I told her that my boon
companion must be between thirty and fifty. Until a man reaches the
age of thirty he is but a boy, without experience of life; I'd prefer
him between thirty-five and forty; and my boon companion must be a
bachelor or separated from his wife. How he spends his days concerns
me not, only in the evenings do I want his company--at dinner about
twice a week, for it is my pleasure to prolong the evenings into the
small hours of the morning, talking literature and the other arts
until the mouth refuses another cigar and the eyelids are heavy with
sleep. You see, he must be a smoker, preferably a cigar rather than a
cigarette smoker, but I lay no stress upon that particular point. I
should prefer his appearance and manner to be that of a gentleman, but
this is another point upon which I lay no particular stress. His first
qualification is intelligence, and amongst women you will understand
me better than any other, your lovers having always been men of
intellect. Any one of them would suit me very well: you have loved, I
think, Adrien Marcs, Coppe, and Becque.

Yes, and many others, she answered. You have required great works from
your lovers, and have gotten them. But I do not require that my boon
companion shall write nearly as well as any of the men you have
honoured. My companion's literature concerns me much less than his
conversation, and if it were not that only a man of letters can
understand literature, I would say that I should not care if he had
never put a pen to paper. I am interested much more in his critical
than in his creative faculty; he must for my purpose be a man keenly
critical, and he must be a witty man too, for to be able to
distinguish between a badly and a well-written book is not enough--a
professor of literature can do that ... occasionally. My man must be
able to entertain me with unexpected sallies. I would not hear him
speak of the verbal felicities of Keats, or of the truly noble diction
of Milton, and I would ring and tell my servant to call a cab were I
to catch him mumbling 'and with new-spangled ore, flames in the
forehead of the morning sky.' If the subject were poetry, my boon
companion would be expected by me to flash out unexpected images,
saying that Keats reminded him of a great tabby-cat purring in the
sun; and I would like to hear him mutter that there was too much
rectory lawn in Tennyson; not that I would for a moment hold up the
lawn and the cat as felicities of criticism. He would, I hope, be able
to flash out something better. It is hard to find a simile when one is
seeking for one. He would have to be interested in the other arts, and
be able to talk about them intelligently, literature not being
sufficient to while an evening away. And in every art he must be able
to distinguish between washtubs and vases; he must know instinctively
that Manet is all vase, and that Mr ----'s portraits are all wash-tub.
When the conversation wanders from painting to sculpture, he must not
be very concerned to talk about Rodin, and if he should speak of this
sculptor, his praise should be measured: There is not the character of
any country upon Rodin's sculpture; it is not French nor Italian; it
would be impossible to say whence it came if one did not know. As a
decorative artist he is without remarkable talent, and he too often
parodies Michael Angelo. _Michel Ange  la coule_ would be a phrase
that would not displease me to hear, especially if it were followed
by--Only the marvellous portraitist commands our admiration: the
bronzes, not the marbles--they are but copies by Italian workmen,
untouched by the master who alone, among masters, has never been able
to put his hand to the chisel. A knowledge of music is commendable in
a boon companion, else he must be unmusical like Yeats. It would be
intolerable to hear him speak of _Tristan_ and ask immediately after
if _Madame Butterfly_ were not a fine work, too.

With her enchanting smile, Mary admitted that my difficulties were not
less than hers, and so I kissed her and returned, with some regret,
next day to London and to dear Edward, who has served me as a boon
companion ever since he came to live in the Temple. He likes late
hours; he is a bachelor, a man of leisure, and has discovered at last
what to admire and what to repudiate. But he is not very sure-footed
on new ground, and being a heavy man, his stumblings are loud.
Moreover, he is obsessed by a certain part of his person which he
speaks of as his soul: it demands Mass in the morning, Vespers in the
afternoon, and compels him to believe in the efficacy of Sacraments
and the Pope's indulgences; and it forbids him to sit at dinner with
me if I do not agree to abstain from flesh meat on Fridays, and from
remarks regarding my feelings towards the ladies we meet in the
railway-trains and hotels when we go abroad.

When Symons came to live in the Temple I looked forward to finding a
boon companion in him. He is intelligent and well versed in
literature, French and English; a man of somewhat yellowish
temperament, whom a wicked fairy had cast for a parson; but there was
a good fairy on the sill at the time, and when the wicked fairy had
disappeared up the chimney she came in through the window, and bending
over the cradle said: I bestow upon thee extraordinary literary gifts.
Her words floated up the chimney and brought the wicked fairy down
again as soon as the good fairy had departed. For some time she was
puzzled to know what new mischief she should be up to; she could not
rob the child of the good fairy's gift of expression in writing: but
in thy talk, she said, thou shalt be as commonplace as Goldsmith, and
flew away in a great passion.

Unlike Symons, Yeats is thinner in his writings than in his talk; very
little of himself goes into his literature--very little can get into
it, owing to the restrictions of his style; and these seemed to me to
have crept closer in _Rosa Alchemica_ inspiring me to prophesy one day
to Symons that Yeats would end by losing himself in Mallarm, whom he
had never read.

Symons did not agree in my estimation of Yeats's talent, and I did not
press the point, being only really concerned with Yeats in as far as
he provided me with literary conversation. A more serious drawback was
Yeats's lack of interest in the other arts. He admired and hung
Blake's engravings about his room, but it was their literary bent
rather than the rhythm of the spacing and the noble line that
attracted him, I think. But I suppose one must not seek perfection
outside of Paris, and in the Temple I was very glad of his company. He
is absorbed by literature even more than Dujardin, that prince of boon
companions, for literature has allowed Dujardin many love-stories, and
every one has been paid for with a book (his literature is mainly
unwritten); all the same, his women, though they have kept him from
writing, have never been able to keep him from his friends; for our
sakes he has had the courage only to be beguiled by such women as
those whom he may treat like little slaves; and when one of these
accompanies him to his beautiful summer residence at Fontainebleau, in
those immemorial evenings, sad with the songs of many nightingales,
she is never allowed to speak except when she is spoken to; and when
she goes with him to Bayreuth, she has to walk with companions of her
own sex, whilst the boon companion explains the mystery of _The Ring_,
musical and literary. If I were to go to his lodgings on the eve of
the performance of _The Valkyrie_ and awaken Dujardin, he would push
his wife aside as soon as he heard the object of my visit was to
inquire from him why Wotan is angry with Brnnhilde because she gives
her shield and buckler to Siegmund, wherewith Siegmund may fight
Hunding on the mountain-side, and would rise up in bed and say to me:
You do not know, then, that the Valkyrie are the wills of Wotan which
fly forth to do his bidding? And if I said that I was not quite sure
that I understood him, he would shake himself free from sleep and
begin a metaphysical explanation for which he would find justification
in the character of the motives. And then, if one were to say to
Dujardin: Dujardin, in a certain scene in the second act of
_Siegfried_, Wagner introduces the Question to Fate motive without any
apparent warrant from the text to do so; I fear he used the motive
because his score required the three grave notes, Dujardin would, for
sure, begin to argue that though the libretto contained no explicit
allusion to Fate in the text, yet Fate was implicit in it from the
beginning of the scene, and, getting out of bed, he would take the
volume from the little shelf at his head and read the entire scene
before consenting to go to sleep.

And if one were to go to Yeats's bedside at three o'clock in the
morning and beg him to explain a certain difficult passage, let us
say, in the _Jerusalem_, he would raise himself up in bed like
Dujardin, and, stroking his pale Buddhistic hands, begin to spin
glittering threads of argument and explanation; instead of
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, we should hear of the Rosicrucians and
Jacob Boehm.

My boon companions are really strangely alike, though presenting
diverse appearances. Were I to devote a volume to each, the casual
reader would probably mutter as he closed the last, A strangely
assorted set, but the more intelligent reader would be entertained by
frequent analogies; many to his practised eye would keep cropping up:
he would discover that Dujardin, though he has written a book in which
he worships the massive materialism of ancient Rome, and derides the
soft effusive Jewish schism known as Christianity, would,
nevertheless, like to preserve a few Catholic monasteries for the use
of his last days. At least a dozen would be necessary, for Dujardin
admits that he would be not unlikely flung out of several before he
reached the one in which he was fated to die in long white robe and
sandal shoon, an impenitent exegetist, but an ardent Catholic, and
perhaps to the last, a doubtful Christian. How often have I heard him
mutter in his beard as he crosses the room: It would be a beautiful
end ... in smock and sandal shoon! He is attracted by rite, and Yeats
is too; but whereas Dujardin would like the magician to boil the pot
for him, Yeats would cry:

  Double, double toil and trouble;
  Fire burn, and cauldron bubble,

following all the best recipes of the Kabala. I have often thought
that he takes a secret pleasure in the word, speaking it with that
unction which comes into the voices of certain relations of mine when
they mention the Bible. And from his constant reference to the Kabala,
I judged it to be his familiar reading, though I never saw it in his
hand nor upon his table when I went to see him. So one day when he
left the room I searched for it among his books, but only copies of
Morris's and Blake's works came under my hand; and on mentioning the
Kabala to him when he returned, he began to speak volubly of the
alchemists and Rosicrucians who had left a great mass of mystical
writings. The interpretation of these was the business of the adepts,
and the fair conclusion appeared to be, that instruction from the
Kabala formed part of the ceremony of initiation into the Order of the
Golden Door--an Order which, so far as I could gather from his
allusions, held weekly meetings somewhere in West Kensington. As soon
as I asked him for a copy of the book, the conversation drifted back
to the alchemists and Rosicrucians, their oaths and conclaves, and
when we returned speciously to modern times I heard for the first time
about McPherson--a learned one in the Order; he may have been the
Prior of it, and that, I think, was the case, for I remember being
told that he had used his authority so unflinchingly that the other
members had rebelled against it, and now he had, after expelling the
entire Order, gone away with the book in which was written much secret
matter. So far the Order had not replied to his repeated libels, but
it would be well for McPherson to refrain from publication of their
secrets; if he did not, it would be hard to prevent certain among them
from.... Up to the present the authority of a certain lady had saved
him, but it was by no means sure that she would be able to protect him
in the future; she had, indeed, incurred a good deal ... I strained my
ears, but Yeats's voice had floated up the chimney, and all I could
hear was the sound of one hand passing over the other.

Rising from the low stool in the chimney-corner, he led me to a long
box, and among the manuscript I discovered several packs of cards. As
it could not be that Yeats was a clandestine bridge-player, I inquired
the use the cards were put to, and learnt that they were specially
designed for the casting of horoscopes. He spoke of his uncle, a
celebrated occultist, whose predictions were always fulfilled, and
related some of his own successes. All the same, he had been born
under Aquarius, and the calculations of the movements of the stars in
that constellation were so elaborate that he had abandoned the task
for the moment, and was now seeking the influences of the Pleiades. He
showed me some triangles drawn on plain sheets of cardboard, into
which I was to look, while thinking of some primary colour--red, or
blue, or green. His instructions were followed by me--why not?--but
nothing came of the experiment; and then he selected a manuscript from
the box, which he told me was the new rules of the Order of the Golden
Door, written by himself. There was no need to tell me that, for I
recognise always his undulating cadences. These rules had become
necessary; an Order could not exist without rule, and heresy must be
kept within bounds, though for his part he was prepared to grant every
one such freedom of will as would not endanger the existence of the
Order. The reading of the manuscript interested me, and I remember
that one of its finest passages related to the use of vestments, Yeats
maintaining with undeniable logic that the ancient priest put on his
priestly robe as a means whereby he might raise himself out of the
ordinary into an intenser life, but the Catholic priest puts on an
embroidered habit because it is customary. A subtle intelligence which
delighted me in times gone by, and I like now to think of the
admiration with which I used to listen to Yeats talking in the
chimney-corner, myself regretting the many eloquent phrases which
floated beyond recall up the chimney, yet unable to banish from my
mind the twenty-five men and women collected in the second pair back
in West Kensington, engaged in the casting of horoscopes and
experimenting in hypnotism.

As has been said before, analogies can be discovered in all my boon
companions. Could it be otherwise, since they were all collected for
my instruction and distraction? Yeats will sit up smoking and talking
of literature just like Dujardin, Edward the same; and Yeats and
Edward are both addicted to magic: it matters little that each
cultivates a different magic, the essential is that they like magic.
And looking towards the armchairs in which they had been sitting, I
said: Yeats likes parlour magic, Edward cathedral magic. A queer pair,
united for a moment in a common cause--the production of two plays:
_The Heather Field_ and _The Countess Cathleen. The Heather Field_ I
know, but _The Countess Cathleen_ I have not read, and wondering what
it might be like, I went to the bookcase and took down the volume.




II


Three weeks after Edward knocked at my door.

Are you busy? I don't want to disturb you, but I thought I'd like to
ask you--

You have come to tell me that the company has been engaged. No! My
dear friend, this is trifling, I cut in sharply, asking if the date
had been fixed for the first rehearsal; it seemed necessary to shake
him into some kind of activity, and it amused me to see him flurried.

From his narrative it appeared that Miss Vernon, a friend of Yeats,
who they had engaged as general manager, had received letters from a
number of actors, and he mentioned the name of one who thought he
might like to play the part of Carden Tyrrell.

Il faut que je m'en mle, I said one morning, jumping out of bed, for
if I don't there'll be no performance. So I wired to Edward, and in
the course of the afternoon he knocked.

Has this woman called a rehearsal?

She has written to a man--I have forgotten his name--he played in one
of Ibsen's plays, and hopes to--

And hopes to get an answer from him next week. If the rehearsals don't
begin at once there'll be no performance. Run away and engage the
company.

He went away red and flurried, and I didn't hear of him again until
the end of the week. Late one afternoon when he called, meeting me on
my doorstep. A moment later and you would have missed me, I said, and
the evening being too fine to turn indoors, he agreed that we should
go for a walk in St James's Park.

As I write I can see ourselves walking side by side, Edward's bluff
and dogmatic shoulders contrasting with my own very agnostic sloping
shoulders; and the houses rising up against the evening sky, delicate
in line and colour. I can see a blue spire striking into the heart of
the sunset, and the casual winds moving among the branches and long
silken grass. The pen pauses ... or I am moved to wonder why I should
remember that evening in St James's Park when so many other evenings
are forgotten? Maybe that I was conscious of Edward's emotion; all the
while, though outwardly calm as any parish priest, he was troubled
inly; and the fact that he expressed his trouble in the simplest
language perhaps helped me to understand how deeply troubled he was.

We have had three or four rehearsals, he confided to me, but my play
is not coming out. An alarming piece of news, for I had sworn to him
that _The Heather Field_ was a good play. But Yeats's play is coming
out beautifully.

A still more alarming piece of news, for I did not want to see Yeats
supreme in these theatricals; and without betraying my concern, I told
him that Yeats's play was poetry, and only to be repeated, whereas
_The Heather Field_ would have to be carefully rehearsed, and by an
experienced stage-manager.

Now, who is your stage-manager? What does he say? And is he competent?

As Edward at that time had never seen a stage-manager at work he could
form no opinion of the man's ability, nor did he seem to have a clear
idea whether the actors and actresses were competent and suited to
their parts. I can't tell from a rehearsal, he said. Yeats and I went
together to the agent's office--

I know, and you chose the company from the description in the agent's
book. Miss X, tall, fair, good presence--I think she'll do for your
leading lady, sir. How much? Four pounds a week. I can't afford so
much. Three? I think I could get her to accept three pounds ten. Very
well. Now for your leading man. Tall, dark, aristocratic bearing.
Five. I can't give so much. You might get him to take four.

That's just what he is getting, said Edward.

There must have been an outburst; rude words were uttered by me, no
doubt; one is unjust, and then one remembers and is sorry. Edward had
never cast a play before; he had never engaged a company, nor had he
ever seen a rehearsal; therefore my expectations that he would succeed
in so delicate an enterprise were ridiculous.

If you would come to see a rehearsal, he ventured timidly. This very
natural request can only have provoked another outburst; one learns
oneself, and in the course of my rage, not quite spontaneous, I must
have reminded him that I had specially stipulated that I was not to be
asked to cast or rehearse plays.

If you would only just come to see one rehearsal.

Anything else, but not that, I answered sullenly, and walked on in
silence, giving no heed to Edward's assurance that the mere fact of my
going to see a rehearsal would not transgress our agreement. There
were my proofs; it would be folly to lay them aside, and striving
against myself, for at the back of my mind I knew I would yield, I
swore again that I would not go. But if I didn't? The thought of these
two wandering over to Dublin with their ridiculous company was a
worry. _The Heather Field_ would be lost; Edward would be
disappointed; his play was his single pleasure; besides, it was
annoying to hear that _The Countess Cathleen_ was coming out better
than _The Heather Field_. So it was perhaps jealousy of Yeats that
caused the sudden declension of my will; and when the question, Where
are you rehearsing? slipped from me, and the question warned me that
for three weeks at least I should be at their beck and call, for
having made an alteration. Once I had altered something I should not
leave _The Heather Field_, nor perhaps _The Countess Cathleen_, if
Yeats allowed me to rehearse it, until it was quite clear to me that
the expedition to Dublin would not turn out so absurd as General
Humbert's.... Where are you rehearsing? At the Bijou Theatre in
Notting Hill. It is impossible to rehearse anywhere except in the
Strand. We'll rehearse where you like; and he continued to press me to
say why I was so averse from seeing the plays. You're coming to
Dublin, George?

I never said I was. If the plays were going to be acted in London it
would be a different thing, but to ally myself to such folly as the
bringing of literature to Ireland! _Les Cloches de Corneville_ is what
they want over there. And next morning in the hansom I continued to
poke Edward up with the sharpest phrases I could find, and to ask
myself why I had yielded to his solicitations. For his sake, or for
the sake of his play--which? He is an amateur; that is to say, a man
of many interests, one of which is literature. Edward is interested in
his soul, deeply interested; he is interested in Palestrina and in his
property in Galway, and the sartorial reformation of the clergy. He
would like to see the clergy in cassocks. Then there are his political
interests. He wants Home Rule, and when he is thinking of none of
these things he writes plays.

But I am always ready to stretch out a hand to save a work of art,
however little merit it may have, if it only have a little. Yeats is
like me in this. Other men write for money, or for fame, or to kill
time, but we are completely disinterested. We are moved by the love of
the work itself, and therefore can make sacrifices for other men's
work. Yeats is certainly like that, and for disinterestedness in art
I'm sure he would give me a good character. My reverie was interrupted
by Edward crying: There's Yeats, and I saw the long black cloak with
the manuscript sticking out of the pocket, and the rooklike gait, and
a lady in a green cloak. My stick went up, the cab stopped, and as we
entered the theatre Edward told me that Yeats and the lady had been in
and out of the bun-shop ever since rehearsals began.

I knew it, I knew it; I can see it all--talking continually of the
speaking of verse.

Two or three people on a stage, repeating as much as they can remember
of something they have been trying to learn by heart, and a man with a
script in his hand watching and interrupting them with some phrase
like: I think, old man, the line you've just spoken should get you
across; whoever is in the habit of conducting rehearsals can tell at
the first glance if things are going well or badly, and, above all, if
the stage-manager knows his business. A play is like music; it has to
go to a beat; and it did not take me long to see that _The Heather
Field_ was not going to a bad or a good beat; it was just going to no
beat at all, and I said to Edward: Which is your stage-manager? The
one reading from the script? But he isn't rehearsing the play; he's
prompting, that's all.

Edward begged me to be patient, but in a very few minutes it was clear
to me that patience meant wasting time.

We shall have to make some alteration in the cast. Mr ----, I don't
think the part of Carden Tyrrell altogether suits you; the second
part, Barry Ussher--The gentleman who was playing Barry Ussher
objected. You'll play, I said, perhaps, one of the doctors in the
second act. Now, Edward, who is your leading lady? Edward whispered:
The fair-haired lady--But she looks as if she had come from the halls.
So she has. She's been doing a turn. And you expect a music-hall
artist to play Mrs Tyrrell! Edward besought me to try her.

Will you, Miss ----, if you please, read your part from your first
entrance. With some reluctance the lady rose out of her seat, and went
upon the stage. She did not think the part suited her, and it was with
evident relief that she agreed to give it up and accept two pounds for
her trouble. Then I entered into discussion with the gentleman who had
been told that he was not to play Barry Ussher. Now, sir, if you'll
read me the part of one of the doctors from the first entrance. A few
words from him on the stage convinced me that, like the fair-haired
lady, he would be of no use; but when he was told so he caught up a
chair, threw it at me, and swore and damned the whole company and all
the plays. An irate little actor interposed, saying that Mr ----should
try to remember that he was in the presence of ladies. Edward was
appealed to, but he said the matter was entirely out of his hands, and
in the course of the next half-hour three or four more members of the
company received small doles from Edward, and went their several ways.

We've got through a very nice rehearsal, I whispered, taking Edward's
arm--very satisfactory indeed, dear Edward. For it was just as well to
show a bold front, although, indeed, I was a little frightened. The
responsibility of collecting an efficient company was now my share of
the Irish Literary Theatre, and if I failed and the plays did not go
to Dublin.... Even so, it were better that the project should fall
through than that the plays should be distributed among such odds and
oddments. One can go out hunting, I said to Edward, on bad horses, but
one can't go out hunting on goats. And I impressed this point of view
upon Yeats too, begging of him to try to find a small part among the
peasants in his play for the gentleman who had thrown the chair at me;
he had since apologised, and seemed so distressed at his own bad
conduct that I thought I must do something for him. A few words to
speak, that is all I ask, Yeats. Edward and I are going to the Strand
to find a Carden Tyrrell and a Mrs Tyrrell. And we're going to the
bun-shop, where we have an appointment with Miss Vernon's niece. Her
speaking of verse--Don't trouble; I'll bring you back a Countess
Cathleen, my good friend. Edward sat back in the hansom, too terrified
for speech, and as we went along I explained to him the disaster that
had been averted. At last we came to the Green Room Club, and opposite
two friends of mine were living. The wife is just the woman to play
Mrs Tyrrell. She wouldn't do the Countess Cathleen badly, either. Be
that as it may, she'll have to play it. And we went up the stairs
praying that we might find her at home; she was, and after a little
solicitation agreed to come with us.

Now, Edward, do you follow in another cab. I'll jump into this one
with Miss ----, and will tell her about the Irish Literary Theatre,
and that we want her to play leading parts in Dublin, in two of the
most beautiful plays of modern times. Mrs Tyrrell and the Countess
Cathleen whiled the miles away. There's Yeats--and putting up my stick
I stopped the cab--the man in the long black cloak like a Bible
reader, coming out of the bun-shop. With the woman in the long green
cloak followed by a pretty girl? the new Countess Cathleen asked.
Deeply engaged, I said, in conversation.

It was difficult to attract his attention, and his emotions were so
violent that he could hardly collect himself sufficiently to bow to
the new Countess Cathleen, and for the first time this master of words
could not find words to tell us of the joy he had experienced at
hearing his verses properly spoken. Miss Vernon's niece had recited
the monologue in the second act--

I'm glad, Yeats, very glad; and now you'll have the pleasure of
hearing somebody else recite the monologue. But won't you hear--

The monologue isn't the part. My dear young lady, I said, turning to a
girl about sixteen, we've reserved one of the fairies for you, and
you'll look enchanting in a blue veil. The Countess Cathleen requires
an experienced actress. Now, Miss ----, you who can speak verse better
than any living actress, will you read us the monologue, for your
pleasure and for ours? I have told Mr Yeats about you, and ... now,
will you be so kind?

The experienced actress went on the stage, and while she recited my
mind turned over all the possible Carden Tyrrells in the Green Room
Club, but Yeats had been listening, and as soon as I had congratulated
her he began to talk to her about his method. My anger was checked by
the thought that the quickest way, and perhaps the only way, to rid
ourselves of Yeats would be to ask him to go on the stage and read his
verses to us. There was no choice for him but to comply, and when he
left the stage I took him by the arm, saying: One can hear that kind
of thing, my dear fellow, on Sunday, in any Methodist chapel. Yeats's
face betrayed his disappointment, but there is a fund of good sense in
him which can be relied upon, and he had already begun to understand
that, however good his ideas might be in themselves, he had not had
enough experience to carry them out, and that there was no time to
experiment. What I would do with his play would not be what he wanted,
but I should realise something.

Now, Edward, I'll say goodbye; I must get back to the Green Room Club.
I may find your husband there, Miss ----, playing cards; if I do I
shall try to persuade him to undertake the stage-management. I'll
write and let you know about the next rehearsal; Notting Hill is too
far away. We must find some place in the Strand, don't you think so,
Miss ----?

Miss ---- agreed with me that Notting Hill was too far for her to go
to rehearsals, and as I handed her out of the cab, she pointed with
her parasol across the street, and looking along it, I spied a man in
a velvet coat going into the Green Room Club. She said he might play
Carden Tyrrell. A friend introduced us; I gave him the part to read,
and he came to rehearsal next day enthusiastic. A boy presented
himself--and an excellent boy-actor he showed himself to be, giving a
good reading of his part, and a few days after Miss ----'s husband
relieved me of the stage-management, and seeing that things were going
well, I bade everybody goodbye.

I'm going back to my writing, but will give you a look in some time
next week, towards the end of the week, for my publishers are pressing
me to finish some proofs.

The proofs were those of _Esther Waters_, not the proofs of the
original edition (they had been corrected in the Temple), but the
proofs of a cheap edition. I had been tempted by the opportunity a new
type-setting gave me of revising my text, and had begun, amid many
misgivings, to read a book which I had written, but never read. One
reads when the passion of composition is over, and on the proofs of
the original edition one correction alone amounted to the striking out
of some twenty or thirty pages, and the writing in of as many more new
pages, and there were many others nearly as important, for proofs
always inspire me, and the enchanted period lasts until the bound copy
arrives. _Esther Waters_ was no exception; and turning the pages,
seeing all my dreams frozen into the little space of print, I had
thrown the book aside and had sat like one overcome until the solitude
of King's Bench Walk became unendurable, and forced me to seek
distraction in St James's Theatre, for I did not think that any one
had yet read the book, and was genuinely surprised when an
acquaintance stopped me in the lobby and began to thank me for the
pleasure my story had given him. But I could not believe that he was
not mocking me, and escaped from him, feeling more miserable than
before. A little farther on another acquaintance stopped me to ask if
I had written the book with the intention of showing up the evils of
betting, and his question was understood as an ironical insinuation
that the existence of my book might be excused on account of the moral
purpose on the part of the author. Or was my intention merely to
exhibit? His second question struck me as intelligent, but strange as
coming from him. His writings have since gained some notoriety, but
not because he has ever confined himself to the mere exhibition of a
subject.

The old saw that everything is paid for came into my mind. I was
paying for the exaltation I had experienced when rewriting my proofs,
and when I returned to the Temple I had fallen into an armchair,
without sufficient energy to take off my clothes and turn into bed,
wondering at my folly in having supposed that there could have been
anything worth reading in _Esther Waters_. How could there be, since
it was I who wrote it? I repeated to myself over and over again.

For it is difficult for me to believe any good of myself. Within the
oftentimes bombastic and truculent appearance that I present to the
world, trembles a heart shy as a wren in the hedgerow or a mouse along
the wainscoting. And the question has always interested me, whether I
brought this lack of belief in myself into the world with me, or
whether is was a gift from Nature, or whether I was trained into it by
my parents at so early an age that it became part of myself. I lean to
the theory of acquisition rather than to that of inheritance, for it
seems to me that I can trace my inveterate distrust of myself back to
the years when my father and mother used to tell me that I would
certainly marry an old woman, Honor King, who used to come to the door
begging. This joke did not wear out; it lasted through my childhood;
and I remember still how I used to dread her appearance, or her name,
for either was sufficient to incite somebody to remind me of the
nuptials that awaited me in a few years. I understood very well that
the joke rested on the assumption that I was such an ugly little boy
that nobody else would marry me.

I do not doubt that my parents loved their little boy, but their love
did not prevent them laughing at him and persuading him that he was
inherently absurd; and it is not wise to do this, for as soon as the
child ceases to take himself seriously he begins to suspect that he is
inferior, and I had begun to doubt if I would ever come to much, even
before I failed to read at the age of seven, without hesitating, a
page of English written with the long _ff_'s, whereas my father could
remember reading the _Times_ aloud at breakfast when he was three. I
could see that he thought me a stupid little boy, and was ashamed of
me, and as the years went by many things occurred to confirm him in
his opinion. The reports that were sent home from school incited him
to undertake to teach me when I came back for the holidays, but the
more I was taught the stupider I became, and, perhaps, the more
unwilling to learn. My father was trying to influence me directly, and
it is certain that direct influence counts for nothing. We are
moulded, but the influences that mould us are indirect, and are known
to nobody but ourselves. We never speak of them, and are almost
ashamed even to think of them, so trivial do they seem. It requires
some little courage to tell that my early distaste for literature was
occasioned by my father coming into the billiard-room where I was
playing and insisting on my reading Burke's _French_ _Revolution_; nor
does it sound very serious to say that a meeting with a cousin of mine
who used to paint sign-board lions and tigers awakened a love of
painting in me that has lasted all my life. He sent me to Paris to
learn painting; I have told in _My Confessions_ how I found myself
obliged to give up painting, having no natural aptitude for it; but I
do not know if I tell in that book, or lay sufficient stress on the
fact that the agony of mind caused by my failure was enhanced by
remembrances of the opinion that my father formed of me and my
inability to learn at school. I think I am right in saying that I tell
in _My Confessions_ of terrible insomnias and of a demon who whispered
in my ear that it would be no use my turning to literature; my failure
would be as great there as it had been in painting.

The slight success that has attended my writings did not surprise my
relations as much as it surprised me, and what seems curious is that,
if the success had been twice what it was, it would not have restored
the confidence in myself that I lost in childhood. I am always a
novice, publishing his first book, wondering if it is the worst thing
ever written; and I am as timid in life as in literature. It is always
difficult for me to believe that my friends are glad to see me. I am
never quite sure that I am not a bore--an unpleasant belief, no doubt,
but a beneficial one, for it saves me from many blunders, and I owe to
it many pleasant surprises: that day at Steer's, when Tonks
interrupted me in one of my usual disquisitions on art with--Isn't it
nice to have him among us again criticising our paintings? I had come
back from Ireland after an absence of two years, and I shall never
forget the delicious emotion that his words caused me. I never
suspected my friends would miss me, or that it would mean much to them
to have me back again. I was overwhelmed and were I Rousseau, my pages
would be filled with instances of my inherent modesty of character,
but my way is not Rousseau's. Out of this one instance the reader
should be able, if he be intelligent, to imagine for himself the
hundred other exquisite moments that I owe to my inveterate belief in
my own inferiority. True that it has caused me to lose many pleasant
hours, as when I imagined that some very dear friends of mine were
bored by my society, and did not wish to see me in their house again.
Mary Robinson did not say a word to suggest any such thing, only there
are times when the belief intensifies in me that nobody does, or
could, care for me; and I did not go to see her for a long while, and
would never have gone if I had not met her at her railway-station, and
if she had not asked me if I were on my way to her, and on my
answering that I wasn't, had not cheerfully replied that I ought to
be, it being nearly two years since she had seen me. But you don't
want to see me? The last time, just as I was leaving--She looked at me
and I tried to explain, but there was nothing to explain, and I
walked by her side thinking of the many delightful visits that my
imagination had caused me to lose.

No doubt something of the same kind has happened to everybody, but not
so often as it happens to me--I am sure of that, and I am quite sure
nobody believes he is in the wrong so easily as I do, or is tempted so
irresistibly to believe the fault is his if anything goes wrong with
his work. If an editor were to return an article to me tomorrow, it
would never occur to me to suppose he returned it for any other reason
that its worthlessness, and those who think badly of my writings are
always looked upon as very fine judges, while admirers are regarded
with suspicion. Symons used to say that he could not understand such a
lack of belief side by side with unflagging perseverance, and he often
told me that when a manuscript was returned to him, he never doubted
the editor to be a fool.... _The Confessions_ are coming back to me.
Rousseau realised in age that in youth Rousseau was a shy, silly lad,
with no indication, apparently, of the genius that awaited him in
middle life, always blundering, and never with the right word on his
lips. But I do not think Rousseau was obsessed by a haunting sense of
his own inferiority--not, at any rate, as much as I am--and I am not
sure that he realised sufficiently that the braggart wins but foolish
women and the vain man has few sincere friends. If it had not been for
my unchanging belief in my own unworthiness, I might have easily
believed in myself to the extent that my contemporaries believe in
themselves, and there is little doubt that many of them believe
themselves to be men and women of genius; and I am sure it were
better, on the whole, to leave St James's Theatre heart-broken than to
leave it puffed up, thinking oneself a great man of letters,
representing English literature. Even from the point of view of
personal pleasure, it were better that I should learn gradually that
_Esther Waters_ was not such a bad book as I had imagined it to be
when the first copy came to me. It were enough that my friends and the
Press should succeed at length in hammering this truth into me; it
were too absurd that I should continue to think it worthless; an
artist should know his work to have been well done, and it is
necessary that it should meet with sufficient appreciation, though,
indeed, it is open to doubt if the vain fumes that arise from the
newspapers when a new masterpiece is published be of any good to
anybody.

Only once can I accuse myself of any sudden vanity called out of the
depths by the sight of a newspaper placard--once certain words excited
in me a shameful sense of triumph at, shall I say, having got the
better of somebody?--only once, and it did not endure longer than
while walking past St Clement Danes. And I am less ashamed to speak of
the joy I experienced five years after the first publication of
_Esther Waters_. The task has to be got through, I said, throwing
myself into an armchair, having left my friends at rehearsal. The
hospital scenes were not liked, but the story soon picked up again,
and when the end came I sat wondering how it could have happened to me
to write the book that among all books I should have cared most to
write, and to have written it so much better than I ever dreamed it
could be written.

The joy of art is a harmless joy, and no man should begrudge me the
pleasure that I got from my first reading of _Esther Waters_. He would
not, though he were the most selfish in the world, if he knew the
unhappiness and anxieties that my writings always cause me. A harmless
joy, the reading of _Esther Waters_, truly, and it is something to
think of that the book itself, though pure of all intention to do
good--that is to say, to alleviate material suffering--has perhaps
done more good than any novel written in my generation. It is no part
of my business nor my desire to speak of the Esther Waters Home--I am
more concerned with the evil I know the book to have done than with
the good. It did good to others--to me it did evil, and that evil I
could see all around me when I raised my eyes from my proofs. At the
end of a large, handsome, low-ceilinged flat on the first floor, very
different from the garret in King's Bench Walk, hung a grey portrait
by Manet; on another wall a mauve morning by Monet, willows emerging
from a submerged meadow; on another an April girl sitting in an
arbour, her golden hair glittering against green leaves, by Berthe
Morisot. The flowered carpet and all the pretty furniture scattered
over it represented evil, and the comfortable cook who came to ask me
what I would like for dinner. We read in the newspapers of the evil a
book may produce--the vain speculation of erotic men and women; but
here is a case of a thoroughly healthy book having demoralised its
author. How is such evil to be restrained? All virtuous men and women
may well ask, and I hope that they may put their heads together and
find out a way.

In Paris I had lived very much as I lived in Victoria Street, but it
had never occurred to me that I showed any merit by accepting, without
murmuring, the laborious life in the Temple that a sudden reverse of
fortune had forced upon me;[1] it was no suffering for me to live in a
garret, wearing old clothes, and spending from two shillings to half a
crown on my dinner, because I felt, and instinctively, that that is
the natural life of a man of letters; and I can remember my surprise
when my brother told me one day that my agent had said he never knew
anybody so economical as George. Some time after Tom Ruttledge himself
came panting up my stairs, and during the course of conversation
regarding certain large sums of money which I heard of for the first
time, he said: Well, you have spent very little money during the last
few years. And when I spoke of the folly of other landlords, he
added: There are very few who would be content to live in a cock-loft
like this. And looking round my room I realised that what he said was
true; I was living in a cock-loft, bitterly cold in winter and
stifling in summer; the sun beating on the windows fiercely in the
afternoon, obliging me to write in my shirt-sleeves. And it so
happened that a few days after Tom Ruttledge's visit a lady called by
appointment--a lady whom I was so anxious to see that I did not wait
to put on my coat before opening the door. My plight and the fatigue
of three long flights of stairs caused her to speak her mind somewhat
plainly.

         [Footnote 1: See _Confessions of a Young Man_.]

A gentleman, she said, wouldn't ask a lady to come to such a place;
and he wouldn't forget to put his coat on before opening the door to
her. But you have received me dressed still more lightly.

With me it is all or nothing, she said laughing, her ill humour
passing away suddenly. All the same, I realised that she was right;
the Temple is too rough and too public a place for a lady, and it is
an inconvenient place, too, for in the Temple it is only possible to
ask a lady to dinner during forty days in the year. Only for forty
days are there dinners in the hall; the sutler then will send over an
excellent dinner of homely British fare to any one living in the
Temple. She used to enjoy these dinners, but they did not happen often
enough; and it was the necessity of providing myself with a suitable
trysting place that drew me out of the poverty to which I owe so much
of my literature, and despite many premonitions compelled me to sign
the lease of a handsome flat. The flat sent me forth collecting pretty
furniture which she never saw, for she never came to Victoria Street.
I should have written better if I had remained in the Temple, within
hearing and seeing of the poor folk that run in and out of Temple Lane
like mice, picking up a living in the garrets, for, however poor one
may be there is always somebody by one who is still poorer. _Esther
Waters_ was a bane--the book snatched me, not only out of that
personal poverty which is necessary to the artist, but out of the way
of all poverty.

My poor laundress[2] used to tell me every day of her troubles, and
through her I became acquainted with many other poor people, and they
awakened spontaneous sympathy in me, and by doing them kindnesses I
was making honey for myself without knowing it. _Esther Waters_ and
Tom Ruttledge robbed me of all my literary capital; and I had so
little, only a few years of poverty. I've forgotten how long I lived
in the Strand lodging described in _My Confessions_--two years, I
think; I was five or six in Dane's Inn, and seven in the Temple--about
twelve lean years in all; and twelve lean years are not enough, nor
was my poverty hard enough. The last I saw of literature was when my
poor laundress came to see me in Victoria Street. Standing in the
first position of dancing (she used to dance when she was young), she
looked round the drawing-room. Five pounds was my farewell present to
her! How mean we seem when we look back into our lives! When her son
wrote to ask me to help her in her old age I forgot to do so, and this
confession costs me as much as some of Rousseau's cost him.... In
bidding her goodbye I bade goodbye to literature. No, she didn't
inspire the subject of _Esther Waters_, but she was the atmosphere I
required for the book, and to talk to her at breakfast before
beginning to write was an excellent preparation. In Victoria Street
there was nobody to help me; my cook was nearly useless (in the
library), and the parlourmaid quite useless. She had no stories to
tell of the poor who wouldn't be able to live at all if it weren't for
the poor. She thought, instead, that I ought to go into society, and
at the end of the week opened the door so gleefully to Edward that she
seemed to say: At last somebody has called.

         [Footnote 2: The Charwomen who work in the Temple are called
         laundresses.]

I turned round in my chair; Well, how are the rehearsals going on? I
noticed that he was unusually red and flurried. He had come to tell me
that Yeats had that morning turned up at rehearsal, and was now
explaining his method of speaking verse to the actors, while the lady
in the green cloak gave illustration of it on a psaltery. At such news
as this a man cries Great God! and pales. For sure I paled, and
besought Edward not to rack my nerves with a description of the
instrument or of the lady's execution upon it. In a fine rage I
started out of my seat in the bow-window, crying: Edward, run, and be
in time to catch that cab going by. He did this, and on the way to the
Strand indignation boiled too fiercely to hear anything until the
words quarter-tones struck my ear.

Lord save us! Quarter-tones! Why, he can't tell a high note from a low
one! And leaving to Edward the business of paying the cab, I hurried
through the passage and into the theatre, seeking till I found Yeats
behind some scenery in the act of explanation to the mummers, whilst
the lady in the green cloak, seated on the ground, plucked the wires,
muttering the line, Cover it up with a lonely tune. And all this going
on while mummers were wanted on the stage, and while an experienced
actress walked to and fro like a pantheress. It was to her I went
cautiously as the male feline approaches the female (in a different
intent, however) and persuaded her to come back to her part.

As soon as she had consented I returned to Yeats with much energetic
talk on the end of my tongue, but finding him so gentle, there was no
need for it; he betook himself to a seat, after promising in rehearsal
language to let things rip, and we sat down together to listen to _The
Countess Cathleen_, rehearsed by the lady, who had put her psaltery
aside and was going about with a reticule on her arm, rummaging in it
from time to time for certain memoranda, which when found seemed only
to deepen her difficulty. Her stage-management is all right in her
notes, Yeats informed me. But she can't transfer it from paper on to
the stage, he added, without appearing in the least to wish that the
stage-management of his play should be taken from her. Would you like
to see her notes? At that moment the voice of the experienced actress
asking the poor lady how she was to get up the stage drew attention
from Yeats to the reticule, which was being searched for the notes.
And the actress walked up the stage and stood there looking
contemptuously at Miss Vernon, who laid herself down on the floor and
began speaking through the chinks. Her dramatic intention was so
obscure that perforce I had to ask her what it was, and learnt from
her that she was evoking hell.

But the audience will think you are trying to catch cockroaches.

Yeats whirled forward in his cloak with the suggestion that she should
stand on a chair and wave her hands.

That will never do, Yeats; and the lady interrupted, asking me how
hell should be evoked, and later begged to be allowed to hand over the
rehearsal of _The Countess Cathleen_ to the experienced actress's
husband, who said he would undertake to get the play on the stage if
Mr Yeats would promise not to interfere with him.

Yeats promised, but as he had promised me before not to interfere, I
felt myself obliged to beg him to take himself off for a fortnight.

The temptation to deliver orations on the speaking of verse is too
great to be resisted, Yeats.

One can always manage to do business with a clever man, and with a
melancholy caw Yeats went away in his long cloak leaving Mr--to settle
how the verses should be spoken; and, feeling that my presence was no
longer required, I returned to my novel, certain that Erin would not
be robbed of the wassail-bowl we were preparing for her. But there is
always a hand to snatch the bowl from Erin's lips, and at the end of
the week Yeats came to tell me that Edward had gone to consult a
theologian, and was no longer sure that he would be able to allow the
performances of _The Countess Cathleen_.

You see, he's paying for it, and believes himself to be responsible
for the heresy which the friar detects in it.

Every other scene described in this book has been traced faithfully
from memory; even the dialogues may be considered as practically
authentic, but all memory of Yeats bringing news to me of Edward's
vacillations seemed to have floated from my mind until Yeats pitted
his memory against mine. My belief was that it was in Ireland that
Edward had consulted the theologian, but Yeats is certain that it was
in London. He gave me a full account of it in Victoria Street, and was
careful to put geasa upon me, as himself would word it, which in
English means that he was careful to demand a promise from me not to
reproach Edward with his backsliding until the company had left
Euston. The only interest in the point is that I who remember
everything should have forgotten it. There can be no doubt that
Yeats's version is the true one; it appears that I was very angry with
Edward, and did write him a letter which flurried him and brought him
to Yeats with large sweat upon his forehead. Of this I am sure, that
if I were angry with Edward, it was not because he feared to bring an
heretical play to Dublin--a man has a right to his conscience--if I
were angry, it was because he should have neglected to find out what
he really thought of _The Countess Cathleen_ before it went into
rehearsal. It seemed that, after giving up many of my days to the
casting of his play, and to the casting of _The Countess Cathleen_, it
was not fair for him to cry off, and at the last moment. He had seen
_The Countess Cathleen_ rehearsed day after day, and to consult a
friar about a play was not worthy of a man of letters. But he was not
a man of letters, only an amateur, and he would remain one,
notwithstanding _The Heather Field_--Symons had said it. What annoyed
me perhaps even more than the sudden interjection of the friar into
our business, were Edward's still further vacillations, for after
consultation with the friar he was not yet certain as to what he was
going to do. Such a state of mind, I must have declared to Yeats, is
horrifying and incomprehensible to me. Edward's hesitation must have
enraged me against him. It is difficult for me to understand how I
could have forgotten the incident.... It seems to me that I do
remember it now. But how faint my memory of it is compared with my
memory of the departure of the mummers from Euston! Yeats and the lady
in green had started some days before--Yeats to work up the Press, and
the lady to discover the necessary properties that would be required
in Dublin for both plays. Noggins were wanted for _The Countess
Cathleen_, and noggins could not be procured in London. Yeats and the
lady in green were our agents in advance, Edward with universal
approbation casting himself for the part of baggage-man. He was
splendid in it, with a lady's bag on his arm, running up and down the
station at Euston, shepherding his flock, shouting that all the
luggage was now in the van, and crying: The boy, who is to look after
him? I will be back with the tickets in a moment. Away he fled and at
the ticket-office he was impassive, monumental muttering fiercely to
impatient bystanders that he must count his money, that he had no
intention of leaving till he was sure he had been given the right
change.

Now, are you not coming with us? he cried to me, and would have pulled
me into the train if I had not disengaged myself, saying:

No, no; I will not travel without clothes. Loose me. The very words
do I remember, and the telegram two days after: The sceptre of
intelligence has passed from London to Dublin. Again and again I read
Edward's telegram. If it be true, if art be winging her way westward?
And a vision rose up before me of argosies floating up the Liffey,
laden with merchandise from all the ports of Phoenicia, and poets
singing in all the bowers of Merrion Square; and all in a new language
that the poets had learned, the English language having been
discovered by them, as it had been discovered by me, to be a declining
language, a language that was losing its verbs.

The inflaming telegram arrived in the afternoon, and it was possible
to start that evening; but it seemed to me that the returning native
should see Ireland arising from the sea, and thinking how beautiful
the crests would show against the sunset, I remembered a legend
telling how the earliest inhabitants of Ireland had the power of
making the island seem small as a pig's back to her enemies, and a
country of endless delight to her friends.

And while I sat wondering whether Ireland would accept me as a friend
or as an enemy, the train steamed through the Midlands; and my anger
against Edward, who preferred his soul to his art, was forgotten; it
evaporated gently like the sun haze at the edges of the wood yonder. A
quiet, muffled day continued its dreams of spring and summer time; but
my thoughts were too deeply set in memories of glens where fairy bells
are heard, to heed the simple facts of Nature--the hedgerows breaking
into flower, the corn now a foot high in the fields, birds rising out
of it, birds flying from wood to wood in the dim sunny air, flying as
if they, that had been flying all their lives, still found pleasure in
taking the air. I was too deeply set in my adventure to notice the red
towns that flashed past, nor did I sentimentalise over the lot of
those who lived in those ugly parallel streets--human warrens I should
call them. I could think of nothing else but the sweetness of taine's
legs as she washed them in the woodlands; of Angus coming perhaps to
meet her, his doves flying round him; of Grania and Diarmuid sleeping
under cromlechs, or meeting the hermit in the forest who had just
taken three fish out of the stream, of the horns of Finn heard in the
distance, and the baying of his hounds.

The sudden sight of shaw, spinney, and sagging stead would at other
times have carried my thoughts back into medieval England, perhaps
into some play of Shakespeare's interwoven with kings and barons; now
the legends of my own country--the renascent Ireland--absorbed me, and
so completely, that I did not notice the passing of Stafford and
Crewe. It was not until the train flashed through Chester that I awoke
from my reveries sufficiently to admire the line of faint yellow
hills, caught sight of suddenly, soon passing out of view. Before my
wonderment ceased we were by a wide expanse of water, some vast river
or estuary of the sea, with my line of yellow hills far away--cape,
promontory, or embaying land, I knew not which, until a
fellow-passenger told me that we were travelling along the Dee, and at
low tide the boats, now proudly floating, would be lying on the empty
sand. A beautiful view it was at high tide, the languid water lapping
the rocks within a few feet of the railway; and a beautiful view it
doubtless was at low tide--miles and miles of sand, a streak of water
flashing half-way between me and the distant shore.

We went by a manufacturing town, and there must have been mines
underneath the fields, for the ground sagged, and there were
cinder-heaps among the rough grass. Conway Castle was passed; it
reminded me of the castles of my own country, and Anglesey reminded me
of the Druids. Yeats had told me that the Welsh Druids used to visit
their brethren in Ireland to learn the deeper mysteries of their
craft. Pictures rose up in my mind of these folk going forth in their
galleys, whether plied with oar or borne by sail I knew not; and I
would have crossed the sea in a ship rather than in a steamer. It was
part of my design to sit under a sail and be the first to catch sight
of the Irish hills. But the eye of the landsman wearies of the
horizon, and it is possible that I went below and ordered the steward
to call me in time; and it is also possible that I rolled myself up in
a rug and sat on the deck, though this be not my ordinary way of
travelling; but having no idea at the time of writing this book, no
notes were taken, and after the lapse of years details cannot be
discovered.

But I do remember myself on deck watching the hills now well above the
horizon, asking myself again if Ireland were going to appear to me
small as a pig's back or a land of extraordinary enchantment? It was
the hills themselves that reminded me of the legend--on the left,
rough and uncomely as a drove of pigs running down a lane, with one
tall hill very like the peasant whom I used to see in childhood, an
old man that wore a tall hat, knee-breeches, worsted stockings, and
brogues. Like a pig's back Ireland has appeared to me, I said; but
soon after on my right a lovely hill came into view, shapen like a
piece of sculpture and I said: Perhaps I am going to see Ireland as an
enchanted isle after all.

While I was debating which oracle I should accept, the steamer churned
along the side of the quay, where I expected, if not a deputation, at
least some friends to meet me; but no one was there, though a telegram
had been sent to Yeats and Edward informing them of my journey. And as
there was nobody on the platform at Westland Row to receive me, I
concluded that they were waiting at the Shelbourne Hotel. But I
entered that hotel as any stranger from America might, unknown,
unwelcomed, and it was with a sinking heart that I asked vainly if
Edward had left a note for me, an invitation to dine with him at his
club. He had forgotten. He never thinks of the gracious thing to do,
not because he is unkind, but because he is a little uncouth. He will
be glad to see me, I said, when we meet. All the same, it seemed to me
uncouth to leave me to eat a solitary table-d'hte dinner when I had
come over in his honour. And chewing the casual food that the German
waiters handed me, I meditated the taunts that I would address to him
about the friar whose advice he had sought in London, and whose advice
he had not followed. He runs after his soul like a dog after his tail,
and lets it go when he catches it, I muttered as I went down the
street, to angry to admire Merrion Square, beautiful under the
illumination of the sunset, making my way with quick, irritable steps
towards the Antient Concert Rooms, whither the hall-porter had
directed me, and finding them by a stone-cutter's yard. Angels and
crosses! A truly suitable place for a play by Edward Martyn, I said.
The long passage leading to the rooms seemed to be bringing me into a
tomb. Nothing very renascent about this, I said, pushing my way
through the spring doors into a lofty hall with a balcony and benches
down the middle, and there were seats along the walls placed so that
those who sat on them would have to turn their heads to see the stage,
a stage that had been constructed hurriedly by advancing some rudely
painted wings and improvising a drop-curtain.

There is something melancholy in the spectacle of human beings
enjoying themselves, but the melancholy of this dim hall I had never
seen before, except in some of Sickert's pictures: the loneliness of
an audience, and its remoteness as it sits watching a small
illuminated space where mummers are moving to and fro reciting their
parts.

And it is here that Edward thinks that heresy will flourish and put
mischief into men's hearts, I thought, and searched for him among the
groups, finding him not; but Yeats was there, listening reverentially
to the sound of his verses. He went away as soon as the curtain fell,
returning just before the beginning of the next act, his cloak and his
locks adding, I thought, to the melancholy of the entertainment. His
intentness interested me so much that I did not venture to interrupt
it. His play seemed to be going quite well, but in the middle of the
last act some people came on the stage whom I did not recognise as
part of the cast, and immediately the hall was filled with a strange
wailing, intermingled with screams; and now, being really frightened,
I scrambled over the benches, and laying my hand upon Yeats's shoulder
begged him to tell me what was happening. He answered, The
_caoine_--the _caoine._ A true _caoine_ and its singers had been
brought from Galway. From Galway! I exclaimed. You miserable man! and
you promised me that the play should be performed as it was rehearsed.
Instead of attending to your business you have been wandering about
from cabin to cabin, seeking these women.

Immediately afterwards the gallery began to howl, and that night the
Antient Concert Rooms reminded me of a cats' and a dogs' home suddenly
merged into one. You see what you have brought upon yourself,
miserable man! I cried in Yeats's ear. It is not, he said, the
_caoine_ they are howling at, but the play itself. But the play seemed
to be going very well, I interjected, failing to understand him. I
want to hear the Countess's last speech--I'll tell you after.

A man must love his play very much, I thought, to be able to listen to
it in such distressing circumstances. He did not seem to hear the
cat-calls, and when the last lines had been spoken he asked if I had
seen _The Cross or the Guillotine._ Wasn't it put into your hand as
you came into the theatre? And while walking to the hotel with me he
told me that the author of this pamphlet was an old enemy of his. All
the heresies in _The Countess Cathleen_ were quoted in the pamphlet,
and the writer appealed to Catholic feeling to put a stop to the
blasphemy. Last night, Yeats said, we had to have the police in, and
Edward, I am afraid, will lose heart; he will fear the scandal and may
stop the play. He spoke not angrily of Edward as I should have done,
but kindly and sympathetically, telling me that I must not forget that
Edward is a Catholic, and to bring a play over that shocks people's
feelings is a serious matter for him. The play, of course, shocks
nobody's feelings, but it gives people an opportunity to think their
feelings have been shocked, and it gives other people an opportunity
of making a noise; and Yeats told me how popular noise was in Ireland,
and controversy, too, when accompanied with the breaking of chairs.
But I was too sad for laughter, and begged him to tell me more about
the friar whom Edward had consulted in London, and whose theology had
not been accepted, perhaps because Gill had advised Edward that the
friar's opinion was only a single opinion, no better and no worse than
any other man's. It appeared that Gill had held out a hope to Edward
that opinions regarding _The Countess Cathleen_, quite different from
the friar's, might be discovered, and I more or less understood that
Gill's voice is low and musical, that he had sung Hush-a-by baby on
the tree top; but a public scandal might awaken the baby again. And
send it crying to one of the dignitaries of the Church, and so it may
well be that we have seen the last of _The Countess Cathleen_.

Yeats seemed to take the matter very lightly for one whom I had seen
deeply interested in the play, and I begged him to explain
everything--himself, Edward, the friar, and above all, Ireland.

In Ireland we don't mean all we say, that is your difficulty, and he
began to tell of the many enemies his politics had made for him, and
in a sort of dream I listened, hearing for the hundredth time stories
about money that had been collected, purloined, information given to
the police, and the swearing of certain men to punish the traitors
with death. I was told how these rumoured assassinations had reached
the ears of Miss Gonne, and how she and Yeats had determined to save
the miscreants; and many fabulous stories of meetings in West
Kensington, which in his imagination had become as picturesque as the
meetings of Roman and Venetian conspirators in the sixteenth century.
A few years before Miss Gonne had proclaimed '98 to a shattering
accompaniment of glass in Dame Street, Yeats walking by her, beholding
divinity. We have all enjoyed that dream. If our lady be small we see
her with a hand-mirror in her boudoir, and if she be tall as an
Amazon, well, then we see her riding across the sky hurling a javelin.
And the stars! We have all believed that they could tell us everything
if they only would; and we have all gone to some one to cast our
horoscopes. So why jeer at Yeats for his humanities? We have all been
interested in the Rosicrucians--Shelley our van-bird. Yeats knew all
their strange oaths, and looked upon himself as an adept. Even the
disastrous pamphlet could not make him utterly forget Jacob Boehm, and
we spoke of this wise man, going up Merrion Street--a dry subject, but
no subject is dry when Yeats is the talker. Go on, Yeats, I said--go
on, I like to listen to you; you believe these things because Miss
Gonne believes herself to be Joan of Arc, and it is right that a man
should identify himself with the woman he admires. Go on, Yeats--go on
talking; I like to hear you.

After some further appreciation of Jacob Boehm we returned to the
pamphlet.

It is all very sad, Yeats, I said, but I cannot talk any more tonight.
Tomorrow--tomorrow you can come to see me, and we will talk about
Edward and _The Cross or the Guillotine_.




III


When the boots asked me in the morning if I would like to have my
water 'otted, it seemed to me that I was back in London; but the
bareness of the hotel bedroom soon stimulated my consciousness, and
with a pang yesterday returned to me--its telegram, its journey, and
the hissing of _The Countess Cathleen_ in the Antient Concert Rooms.

I haven't been shown Ireland as a land of endless enchantment, I said,
turning over, and perhaps the wisest thing for me to do would be to go
away by the morning boat. But the morning boat was already in the
offing; word should have been left overnight that I was to be called
at seven. An impulsive departure would be in strict keeping with
myself ... a note for Yeats, enclosing a paragraph to be sent to the
papers: Mr George Moore arrived in Dublin for the performance of _The
Countess Cathleen_, but the hissing of the play so shocked his
artistic sensibilities that he could not bide another day in Dublin,
and went away by the eight o'clock boat. The right thing to do,
without a doubt, only I had not done it, and to go away by the eleven
o'clock boat from the North Wall would not be quite the same thing.
There was an evening boat at eight to consider; it would give me time
to see Yeats, with whom I had an appointment, and to find out if there
was stuffing enough in Edward to hold out against the scandal that
this pamphlet had provoked.

The Cross or the Guillotine. Into what land have I drifted? and
slipping out of bed, I stood in pyjamas for some moments asking myself
if a paragraph in the paper announcing my sudden departure would cause
Ireland to blush for her disgraceful Catholicism....

But it is difficult to be angry with Ireland on a May morning when the
sun is shining, and through clouds slightly more broken than
yesterday's, but full of the same gentle, encouraging light--dim,
ashen clouds out of which a white edging rose slowly, calling
attention to the bright blue, the robe that perhaps noon would wear.
All about the square the old brick houses stood sunning themselves,
and I could see a chimney-stack steeped in rich shadow, touched with
light, and beyond it, and under it, upon an illuminated wall, the
direct outline of a gable; and at the end of the streets the mountains
appeared, veiled in haze, delicate and refined as _The Countess
Cathleen_.

A town wandering between mountain and sea, I said as I stood before my
glass shaving, forgetful of Edward, for below me was Stephen's Green,
and it took me back to the beginning of my childhood, to one day when
I stole away, and inspired by an uncontrollable desire to break the
monotony of infancy, stripped myself of my clothes, and ran naked in
front of my nurse or governess, screaming with delight at the
embarrassment I was causing her. She could not take me home along the
streets naked, and I had thrown my clothes out of reach into a
hawthorn--cap and jacket, shirt and trousers. Since those days the
Green had been turned into an ornamental park by a neighbour of mine
in Mayo, and given to the public; and telling the hall-porter that if
Mr Yeats called he would find me in the Green, I went out thinking how
little the soul of man changes. It declares itself in the beginning,
and remains with us to the end. Was this visit to Ireland any thing
more than a desire to break the monotony of my life by stripping
myself of my clothes and running ahead a naked Gael, screaming Brian
Boru?

There is no one in the world that amuses one as much as oneself.
Whoever is conscious of his acts cannot fail to see life as a comedy
and himself as an actor in it; but the faculty of seeing oneself as
from afar does not save a man from his destiny. In spite of his
foreseeing he is dragged on to the dreaded bourne like an animal,
supposing always that animals do not foresee. But a spring morning
will not tolerate thought of destiny, and of dreaded bournes. A glow
of sunlight catches our cheeks, and we begin to think that life is a
perfect gift, and that all things are glad to be alive. Our eyes go to
the horse between the shafts; he seems to munch in his nosebag,
conscious of the goodness of the day, and the dogs bark gaily and run,
delighted with the world, interested in everything. The first thing I
saw on entering the Green was a girl loosening her hair to the wind,
and following her down a sunny alley, I found myself suddenly by a
brimming lake curving like some wonderful caligraphy round a thickly
planted headland, the shadows of some great elms reflected in the
water, and the long, young leaves of the willow sweeping the surface.
The span of a stone bridge hastened my steps, and leaning over the
parapet I stood enchanted by the view of rough shores thickly wooded,
and high rocks down which the water came foaming to linger in a quiet
pool. I enjoyed standing on the bridge, feeling the breeze that came
rustling by, flowing through me as if I were plant or cloud. The
water-fowl beguiled me; many varieties of ducks, green-headed
sheldrakes, beautiful, vivacious teal hurried for the bread that the
children were throwing, and over them a tumult of gulls passed to and
fro; the shapely little black-headed gull, the larger gull whose wings
are mauve and whose breast is white, and a herring gull, I think, its
dun-coloured porpoise-like body hanging out of great wings. Whither
had they come? From their nests among the cliffs of Howth? Anyhow,
they are here, being fed by children and admired by me.... A
nurse-maid rushes forward, a boy is led away screaming; and wondering
what the cause of his grief might be, I went in quest of new
interests, finding one in an equestrian statue that ornamented the
centre of the Green. There were parterres of flowers about it, and in
the shadow people of all ages sat half asleep, half awake, enjoying
the spring morning like myself; perhaps more than I did, they being
less conscious of their enjoyment.

My mood being sylvan, I sought the forest, and after wandering for
some time among the hawthorns, came upon a nook seemingly unknown to
anybody but a bee that a sweet scent had tempted out of the hive. The
insect was bustling about in the lilac bloom, reminding me that
yesterday the crocuses were coming; and though they are ugly flowers,
like cheap crockery, it was a sad surprise to find them over, and
daffodils nodding in woods already beginning to smell rooky. And the
rooks. How soon they had finished building! Before their eggs were
hatched the hyacinths were wasting and the tulips opening--the pale
yellow tulip which I admire so much, and the purple tulip which I
detest, for it reminds me of an Arab drapery that I once used to see
hanging out of a shop in the Rue de Rivoli. But the red tulip with
yellow stripes is as beautiful as a Chinese vase, and it is never so
beautiful as when it is growing among a bed of forget-me-nots--the
tall feudal flower swaying over the lowly forget-me-nots, well named,
indeed, for one can easily forget them. And thinking of Gautier's
sonnet, Moi, je suis la tulipe, une fleur de Hollande, I remembered
that lilies would succeed the tulips, and after the lilies would come
roses, and then carnations. A woman once told me that all that goes
before is a preliminary, a leading up to the carnation. After them are
dahlias, to be sure, and I love them, but the garden is over in
September, and the year declines into mist and shortening days and
those papery flowers, ugly as the mops with which the coachmen wash
carriage-wheels. All the same, this much can be said in praise of the
winter months, that they are long, and sorrow with us, but the spring
passes by, mocking us, telling us that the flowers return as youthful
as last year's, but we....

I wandered on, now enchanted by the going and coming of the sun, one
moment implanting a delicious warmth between my shoulder-blades, and
at the next leaving me cold, forgetful of Yeats until I saw him in his
black cloak striding in a green alley, his gait more than ever like a
rook's. But the simile that had once amused me began to weary me from
repetition, and resolving to banish it from my mind for evermore, I
listened to him telling that he had been to the Kildare Street Club
without finding Edward. Mr Martyn had gone out earlier than usual that
morning, the hall-porter had said, and I growled out to Yeats: Why
couldn't he came to see the tulips in the Green instead of bustling
off in search of a theologian ... listening to nonsense in some frowsy
presbytery? The sparrows, Yeats! How full of quarrel they are! And now
they have all gone away into that thorn-bush!

By the water's edge we met a willing duck pursued by two drakes--a
lover and a moralist. In my good nature I intervened, for the lover
was being hustled off again and again, but mistaking the moralist for
the lover, I drove the lover away, and left the moralist, who feeling
that he could not give the duck the explanation expected from him,
looked extremely vexed and embarrassed. And this little incident
seemed to me full of human nature, but Yeats's thoughts were far above
nature that morning, and he refused to listen, even when a boy pinched
a nurse-maid and she answered his rude question very prettily
with--she would be badly off without one.

The spring-time! The spring-time! Wake up and see it, Yeats, I cried,
poking him up with this objection--that before he met the Indian who
had taught him metaphysics his wont was to take pleasure in the otter
in the stream, the magpie in the hawthorn and the heron in the marsh,
the brown mice in and out of the corn-bin, and the ousel that had her
nest in the willow under the bank. Your best poems came to you through
your eyes. You were never olfactory. I don't remember any poems about
flowers or flowering trees. But is there anything, Yeats, in the world
more beautiful than a pink hawthorn in flower? For all the world like
one of those purfled waistcoats that men wore in the sixteenth
century. And then, changing the conversation, I told him about an
article which I should write, entitled, The Soul of Edward Martyn, if
dear Edward should yield to popular outcry and withdraw _The Countess
Cathleen_. But I wouldn't be walking about all the morning, Yeats; let
us sit on a bench where the breeze comes filled with the scent of the
gillyflowers. What do you say to coming with me to see one of the old
Dublin theatres--a wreck down by the quays? Some say it was a great
place once ... before the Union.

The ghost of a theatre down by the quays? I answered.

One does not like to speak of a double self, having so often heard
young women say they fear they never can be really in love, because of
a second self which spies upon the first, forcing them to see the
comic side even when a lover pleads. Yet if I am to give a full
account of my visit to Dublin, it seems necessary that I should speak
of my self-consciousness, a quality which I share with every human
being; but as no two human beings are alike in anything, perhaps my
self-consciousness may be different from another's. The reader will be
able to judge if this be so when he reads how mine has been a good
friend to me all my life, helping me to while away the tediousness of
walks taken for health's sake, covering my face with smiles as I go
along the streets; many have wondered, and never before have I told
the secret of my smiling face. In my walks comedy after comedy rises
up in my mind, or I should say scene after scene, for there are empty
interspaces between the scenes, in which I play parts that would have
suited Charles Mathews excellently well. The dialogue flows along,
sparkling like a May morning, quite different from any dialogue that I
should be likely to find pen in hand, for in my novels I can write
only tragedy, and in life play nothing but light comedy, and the one
explanation that occurs to me of this dual personality is that I write
according to my soul, and act according to my appearance.

The reader will kindly look into his mind, and when the point has been
considered he will be in a mood to take up my book again and to read
my story with profit to himself.

These unwritten dialogues are often so brilliant that I stop in my
walk to repeat a phrase, making as much of it as Mathews or Wyndham
would make, regretting the while that none of my friends is by to
hear me. All my friends are actors in these unwritten plays, and
almost any event is sufficient for a theme on which I can improvise.
But never did Nature furnish me with so rich a theme as she did when
Yeats and Edward came to see me in Victoria Street. The subject was
apparent to me from the beginning, and the reason given for my having
agreed to act with them in the matter of the Irish Literary Theatre
(the temptation to have a finger in every literary pie) has to be
supplemented. There was another, and a greater temptation--the desire
to secure a good part in the comedy which I foresaw, and which had for
the last three weeks unrolled itself, scene after scene, exceeding any
imagination of mine. Who could have invented the extraordinary
rehearsals, Miss Vernon and her psaltery? Or the incident of Yeats's
annunciation that Edward had consulted a theologian in London? My
anger was not assumed; Yeats told me he never saw a man so angry; how
could it be otherwise, ready as I am always to shed the last drop of
my blood to defend art? Yet the spectacle of Edward and the theologian
heresy-hunting through the pages of Yeats's plays was behind my anger
always, an irresistible comicality that I should be able to enjoy some
day. And then the telegram saying that the sceptre of intelligence had
passed from London to Dublin. Who could have invented it? Neither
Shakespeare nor Cervantes. Nor could either have invented Yeats's
letter speaking of the Elizabethan audiences at the Antient Concert
Rooms. The hissing of _The Countess Cathleen_ had enraged me as every
insult upon art must enrage me--my rage was not factitious; all the
same, when Yeats spoke to me of his arch-enemy the author of the
pamphlet _The Cross or the Guillotine_, the West Kensington
conspirators and the President of the Order of the Golden Door who had
expelled the entire society and gone away to Paris, I felt that the
comedy was not begotten by any poor human Aristophanes below, but was
the invention of the greater Aristophanes above.

We had only just finished the first act of the comedy in which I found
myself playing a principal part, and the second act promised to exceed
the first, as all second acts should, for I learned from Yeats that
_The Cross or the Guillotine_ had been sent to Cardinal Logue, and
that a pronouncement was expected from him in the evening papers. If
Logue's opinion was adverse to the play, Yeats was afraid that Edward
would not dare to challenge his authority, he being Primate of all
Ireland. Further rumours were current in Dublin that morning--the
names of the priests to whom Gill had sent the play; it had gone, so
it was said, to a Jesuit of high repute as an educationalist, and to a
priest of some literary reputation in England. Yeats wouldn't vouch
for the truth of these rumours, but if there were any truth in them he
felt sure that Edward would be advised that to stop the play would
raise the question whether Catholicism was incompatible with modern
literature; and this was a question that no Jesuit would care to
raise. The line Yeats said that the pamphlet laid special stress on
was: And smiling, the Almighty condemns the lost. I begged for an
explanation, for, as we can only conceive the Almighty in the likeness
of a man, we must conceive him as smiling or frowning from his
Judgment-seat. Frowning, I suppose, would mean that he was angry with
those who had disobeyed the commands of his priests, and smiling would
mean that he wasn't thinking of priests at all, which, of course,
would be very offensive to a majority of the population. Yeats
laughed, but could not be pressed into a theological argument. You
look upon theology, Yeats, as a dead science. At that he cawed a
little--the kindly caw of the jackdaw it was, and I wondered why he
was not more angry with Edward and with the priests.

Ecclesiastical interference is intolerable, I said, trying to rouse
him. But if he were indifferent to the fate of his play, if he did not
care for literature as much as I thought he did, why was it that he
did not notice the spring-time? Have tulips and nursemaids no part in
the Celtic Renaissance? It isn't kind not to look at them; they have
come out to be looked at. Do notice the fragrance of the lilacs. Are
all of you Irish indifferent to the spring-time? Upon my word, it
wouldn't surprise me if the spring forgot one of these days to turn up
in Ireland. Yeats, I looked forward to finding Ireland a land of
endless enchantment, but so far as I can see at present Ireland isn't
bigger than a priest's back.

We passed out of the gates and walked up the sunny pavement; girls
were going by in pretty frocks. That one, Yeats. How delightful she is
in her lavender dress.

To exaggerate one's ignorance of Dublin seemed to me to be parcel of
the character of the returned native, and though I knew well enough
that we were walking down Grafton Street, Yeats was asked what street
we were in. When he mentioned the name, I told him the name was
familiar, but the street was changed, or my memory of it imperfect.
For such parade--for parade it was--I have no fault to find with
myself, nor for stopping Yeats several times and begging of him to
admire the rich shadows that slumbered in the brick entanglements,
making an ugly street seem beautiful. But I cannot recall, without
frowning disapproval, the fact that I compared the sky at the end of
Grafton Street to a beautiful sky by Corot. The sky I mean rises above
yellow sand and walls, blue slates, and iron railings; and these
enhance its beauty very much in the same way as the terra-cotta shop
fronts in Grafton Street enhanced the loveliness of the pale blue sky
that I saw the day I walked down Grafton Street with Yeats. To exalt
art above nature has become a platitude; and resolving never to be
guilty of this platitude again, I asked Yeats if the grey walls at
the end of the street were Trinity College, and standing on my toes
insisted on looking through the railings and admiring the greenswards,
and the trees, and the cricket-match in progress. Yeats was willing to
talk of Trinity, but not to look at it; and though I have no taste or
knowledge in architecture, it was pleasant, even with Yeats, to admire
the Provost's House and the ironwork over the gateway, and the
beautiful proportions of the courtyard. It was pleasant to allow one's
enthusiasm to flow over like a mug of ale at the sight of the front of
Trinity, to contrast the curious differences in style that the Bank
presented to the College--the College severe and in straight lines,
the Bank all in curves.

The Venus de Milo facing the Antinous, I cried.

Yeats laughed a somewhat chilling approval as is his wont; all the
same, he joined me in admiration of the curve of the parapet cutting
the sky, the up-springing statues breaking the line and the beautiful
pillared porticoes up and down the street, the one in Westmorland
Street reminding me of a walk with my father when I was a child of
ten. In those times a trade in umbrellas was permitted under the great
portico, and though it could interest Yeats nowise, I insisted on
telling him that I remembered my father buying an umbrella there, and
that my affection for Dublin was wilting for lack of an umbrella-stand
under the portico. Impossible to interest Yeats in that umbrella my
father bought in the 'sixties, he seemed absorbed in some project on
the other side of the street, and when the opposite pavement was
reached he began to tell me of a friend of his, a clerk in a lawyer's
office who I gathered was a revolutionary of some kind (after business
hours), a follower of Miss Gonne. I refused, however, to listen to his
account in Miss Gonne's prophecies or in the mild-eyed clerk on the
third landing, who said he would join us on the quays when he had
finished drafting a lease.

The quays were delightful that day, and I wished Yeats to agree with
me that there is nothing in the world more delightful than to dawdle
among seagulls floating to and fro through a pleasant dawdling light.
But how is it, Yeats, you can only talk in the evening by the fire,
that yellow hand drooping over the chair as if seeking a harp of
apple-wood? Yeats cawed; he could only caw that morning, but he cawed
softly, and my thoughts sang so deliciously in my head that I soon
began to feel his ideas to be unnecessary to my happiness, and that it
did not matter how long the clerk kept us waiting. When he appeared he
and Yeats walked on together, and I followed them up an alley
discreetly remaining in the rear, fearing that they might be muttering
some great revolutionary scheme. I followed them up a staircase full
of dust, and found myself to my great surprise in an old library. Very
like a drawing by Phiz, I said to myself, bowing, for Yeats and the
clerk were bowing apologies for our intrusion to twenty or more
shabby-genteel scholars who sat reading ancient books under immemorial
spider webs. At the end of the library there was another staircase,
and we ascended, leaving footprints in the dust. We went along a
passage, which opened upon a gallery overlooking a theatre, one that I
had no difficulty in recognising as part of the work done in Dublin by
the architects that were brought over in the eighteenth century from
Italy. The garlands on the ceiling were of Italian workmanship, and
the reliefs that remained on the walls. Once the pit was furnished
with Chippendale chairs, carved mahogany chairs, perhaps gilded chairs
in which ladies in high-bosomed dresses and slippered feet had sat
listening to some comedy or tragedy when their lovers were not talking
to them; and in those times the two boxes on either side of the stage
let out at a guinea or two guineas for the evening.

Once supper-parties were served in them, for Abbey Street is only a
few yards from the old Houses of Parliament, and even Grattan may have
come to this theatre to meet a lady, whom he kissed after giving her
an account of his speech. It amused me to imagine the love-scene, the
lady's beauty and Grattan's passion for her, and I wondered what her
end might have been, if she had died poor, without money to buy paint
for her cheeks or dye for her hair, old, decrepit, and alone like that
fair helm-maker who had lived five hundred years ago in France, or the
helm-maker who had lived a thousand years ago in Ireland. She, too,
had been sought by kings for her sweet breasts, her soft hair, her
live mouth and sweet kissing tongue; and she, too, tells how she fell
from love's high estate into shameful loves at nightfall in the wind
and rain. I looked on the plank benches that were all the furniture of
this theatre, I thought of the stevedores, the carters, the bullies
and their trulls, eating their suppers, listening the while to some
farce or tragedy written nobody knows by whom. Grattan's mistress may
have sat among such, eating her bread and onions about eighty years
ago. A little later she may have fallen below even the lust of the
quays, and in her great want may have written to Grattan some simple
letter, and her words were put into my mind. Dear Henry,--You will be
surprised to hear from me after all these years. I am sorry to say
that I am in very poor health, and distress. I had to leave a good
place last Christmas, and have not been able to do much since. I
thought you might send me a few shillings. If you do I shall be very
grateful and will not trouble you again. Send them for old time's
sake. Do you know that next year it will be forty years since we met
for the first time? Looking over an old newspaper, I saw your speech,
and am sending this to the House of Commons. My address is 24 Liffey
Street; Mrs Mulhall, my proper name.

Grattan would read this letter, hurriedly thrusting it into the brown
frock-coat with brass buttons which he wore, and that night, and the
next day, and for many a week, the phrase of the old light-o'-love: Do
you know that next year it will be forty years since we met for the
first time? would startle him, and would recall a beautiful young girl
whom he had met in some promenade, listening to music, walking under
trees--the Vauxhall Gardens of Dublin--and he would say, Now she is
old with grey hair and broken teeth, and he would wonder what was the
good place she had lost last Christmas. He would send her something,
or tell somebody to give her a few pounds, and then would think no
more of her.

Yeats and the clerk were talking about the rebuilding of the theatre,
saying that the outer walls seemed sound enough, but all the rest
would have to be rebuilt, and I wandered round the gallery wondering
what were Yeats's dreams while looking into the broken decorations and
the faded paint. Plays were still acted in this bygone theatre. But
what plays? And who were the mummers that came to play them?

As if in answer, a man and two women came on the stage. I heard their
voices, happily not the words they were speaking, for at the bottom of
my heart a suspicion lingered that it might be _The Colleen Bawn_ they
were rehearsing, and not to hear that this was so I moved up the
gallery and joined Yeats, saying that we had been among dust and gloom
long enough, that I detected drains, and would like to get back into
the open air.

We moved out of the theatre, Yeats still talking to the clerk about
the price of the building, telling him that the proprietor must never
know from whom the offer came; for if he were to hear that there was a
project on foot for the establishment of an Irish Literary Theatre his
price would go up fifty per cent. The clerk muttered something about a
hundred per cent. And if he were to hear that Mr Edward Martyn was as
the back of it--Yeats muttered. The clerk interjected that if he were
to hear that it would be hard to say what price he would not be
putting upon his old walls.

A dried-up, dusty fellow was the clerk, a man about fifty, and I
wondered what manner of revolution it might be that he was supposed to
be stirring, and how deep was his belief that Maud Gonne would prove
herself to be an Irish Joan of Arc; not very much deeper than Yeats's
belief that he would one day become possessed of a theatre in Dublin
and produce literary plays in it for a people unendowed with any
literary sense whatever. Yet they continued shepherding their dreams
up the quays, just as if _The Countess Cathleen_ had not been hissed
the night before, as if Cardinal Logue were not about to publish an
interdiction, as if Edward were the one that could be recovered from
ecclesiasticism.

It is an old philosophy to say that the external world has no
existence except in our own minds, and that day on the quays my
experience seemed to bear witness to its truthfulness. The houses on
the other side, the quays themselves, the gulls floating between the
bridges, everything seemed to have put off its habitual reality, to
have sloughed it, and to have acquired another--a reality that we meet
in dreams; and connecting the external world with the fanciful
projects that I heard discussed with so much animation at my elbow, I
began to ask myself if I were the victim of an hallucination. Had I
come over to Ireland? Else surely Ireland had lost her reality? The
problem was an interesting one, and getting it well before me, I began
to consider if it might be that through excessive indulgence in dreams
for over a hundred years the people had at last dreamed themselves and
Ireland away. And this was a possibility that engaged my thoughts as
we crossed Carlisle Bridge. I put it to myself in this way: reality
can destroy the dream, why shouldn't the dream be able to destroy
reality? And I continued to ponder the theory that had been
accidentally vouchsafed to me until the clerk left us, and Yeats said:
Even if it should happen that Edward should stop the performances (I
don't think he will), the Irish literary movement will go on.

It's extraordinary what conviction they can put into their dreams, I
thought, and we walked on in silence, for in spite of myself Yeats's
words had revealed to me a courage and a steadfastness in his
character that I had not suspected. There is more stuffing in him than
I thought for, and I shouldn't be surprised if he carried something
through. What that will be, and how he will carry it, it is impossible
to form any idea.

Stopping suddenly, he told me that T. P. Gill, the editor of the
_Daily Express_, expected me to lunch, and he was anxious I should
meet him, for he was one of the leaders of the movement; an excellent
journalist, he said, who had been editing the paper with great
brilliancy ever since he and Horace Plunkett had changed it from an
organ of mouldering Unionism into one interested in the new Ireland.

Somebody--Gill, perhaps--had been kind enough to send me the _Express_
during the winter, and I used to read it, thinking it even more
unworldly than any of the little reviews of my youth edited by
Parnassians and Realists. All the winter I had read in it stories of
the Celtic Gods--Angus, Dana, and Lir, intermingled with controversies
between Yeats and John Eglinton regarding the literary value of
national legend in modern literature; and when the Irish Literary
Theatre was spoken of, the _Express_ seemed to have discovered its
mission--the advancement of Celtic drama. Angus and Lir were lifted
out of, and Yeats and Edward lifted into their thrones; and on the
Saturday before the arrival of the company in Dublin the _Express_
had printed short but succinct biographies of the actors and actresses
whom I had picked up in the casual Strand. If the entire Comdie
Franaise had come over with plays by Racine and Victor Hugo, not the
old plays, but new ones lately discovered, which had not yet been
acted, the _Express_ could not have displayed more literary
enthusiasm. A newspaper so confused and disparate that I had never
been able to imagine what manner of man its editor might be. A tall,
dark, and thin man with feverish, restless hands and exalted diction
whenever he spoke, was dismissed for a short, square, and thick-set
man like a bull-dog, with great melancholy eyes, and he in turn was
dismissed for a stout, elderly man with spectacles, very commonplace
and polite, speaking little, and not interested at all in literature
or in theosophy, but in something quite different, and I had often sat
thinking what this might be, without being able to satisfy myself,
getting up from my chair at last, saying that only Balzac could solve
the problem; only he could imagine the inevitable personality of the
editor of the _Daily Express_.

He would have foreseen that the editor of this extraordinary sheet
wore a Henri Quatre beard; whereas the beard, the smile, the courtesy,
the flow of affable conversation, were a surprise to me. Balzac would
have foreseen the wife and children, and their different appearances
and personalities; whereas I had always imagined the editor of the
_Express_ a bachelor. Balzac would have divined the family man in his
every instinct, despite the round white brows shaded by light hair,
curling prettily; despite the eyes--the word that comes to the pen is
furtive, but for some reason, perhaps from repetition, the expression
furtive eyes has come to mean very little. Gill's eyes seem to follow
a dream and then they suddenly return, and he watches his listener,
evidently curious to know what effect he is producing upon him, and
then the eyes wander away again in pursuit of the dream. The coming
and going of his eyes interested me until the nose caught my
attention--a large one with a high bridge, and with those clean-cut
nostrils without which every nose is ugly. But the nose is said to be
an index of character, telling of resolution; and the hand, too, is
said to be a tell-tale feature: I noticed that Gill's hands were small
and white, with somewhat crooked and ill-shapen nails. A hand of
languid movement--one that went to the beard, caressing it constantly,
reminding one of a cat licking its fur, with this difference, however,
that a cat is silent while it licks itself, whereas Gill could talk
while he dallied with his beard. It has been said, too, that a man's
character transpires in his dress, and Gill was carefully dressed. His
shirt-collar looked more like London than Dublin washing, and I asked
myself if his washing went to London while I admired the carefully
chosen necktie and the pin. The grey suit fitted his shoulders so
well that I decided he must have gone back and forwards a good many
times to try on, and then that he did not give his tailor much
trouble, for his figure was well knit, square shoulders, clean-cut
flanks. A delicate man withal, said the hollow chest, and I remembered
that Yeats had told me that last winter Gill had been obliged to go
abroad in search of health.

We were not altogether strangers, as he reminded me--he had had the
pleasure of meeting me in London. We had been fellow-workers on the
_Speaker_, and so it gave him much pleasure to see me in Ireland. I'm
afraid that Ireland doesn't want either Yeats or me, I growled out;
and this remark carried us right into the middle of the controversy
regarding _The Countess Cathleen_. When he was in London Martyn had
spoken to him on the subject, and had told him that a learned
theologian had been consulted and that the incident of the crucifix
kicked about the stage by the starving peasantry had been cut out.

I don't remember the incident you speak of. Martyn insisted on its
omission, you say? Without answering me, Gill continued, speaking very
slowly, hesitating between his words. He seemed to take pleasure in
hearing himself talk, and this was strange to me, for he was saying
nothing of importance, merely that the subject of the play was
calculated to wound the religious susceptibilities of the Irish
people; and while stroking his beard he continued to speak of the
famine times and of the proselytising by the Protestants: memories
like these were too deep to be washed away by mere poetry, though,
indeed, he would yield to nobody in his admiration of Yeats's poetry;
and if Yeats had consulted him regarding the choice of a subject for a
play, he certainly would not have advised him to choose _The Countess
Cathleen_. All the same, he had done all that he possibly could do for
the Irish Literary Theatre, as I must have seen by his paper. He had
even done more than what had appeared in the paper, for he had,
himself, sent _The Countess Cathleen_ to two priests, and placing
himself in the light of a wise mediator, he told me that both these
priests had given their verdict in favour of the play. One of them, a
Jesuit of considerable attainments, had pointed out that the language
objected to was put into the mouths of demons.

Who could not be expected to say altogether kind things of their
Creator, I interjected. Gill laughed, and his laughter seemed to
reveal a temperament that ripples, pleasantly murmuring, over
shallows, never sinking into a deep pool or falling from any great
height. A pleasant stream, I said to myself, only I wish it would flow
a little faster. The opposition to _The Countess Cathleen_ in the
Antient Concert Rooms was no doubt regrettable, but I must not judge
Ireland too harshly. The famine times were remembered in Ireland; and
I had lived too long out of Ireland to sympathise with the people on
this point. Yeats had lived more in Ireland; but he, too, was liable
to misjudge Ireland, being a Protestant. Gill felt that there was an
Ireland in Ireland that Protestants could not understand, and he
repeated that if Yeats had come to him in the first instance he
certainly would have advised him to choose another subject. When
Parnell consulted him at the time of the split--I begin to be
interested, I said to myself, and wondering what advice Gill had given
to Parnell, all my attention was strained to hear. The fault was mine,
no doubt, but at the supreme moment Gill's words and voice began to
ripple vaguely, like the stream, and I heard that if a great Liberal
newspaper had existed then (he used the word Liberal in its broadest
sense), it would have been possible to arrive at some compromise
between Parnell and the party, and himself would have gone to the
prelates, and knowing Ireland as well as he did, he thought that the
situation might have been saved. The present situation might be saved
if somebody came forward and gave Ireland a newspaper, a newspaper
_bien entendu_, that would give expression to all the different minds
now working in Ireland. He was doing this in the _Express_, in a small
way, for his enterprise was checked by lack of capital. All the same,
he had managed to bring more culture into the _Express_ than had ever
entered into it before--John Eglinton, AE, Yeats. Under his direction
the _Express_ was the first paper that had attempted to realise that
Ireland had an aesthetic spirit of her own.

This is true, I said to myself, and I lent to Gill an attentive ear,
thinking he was interested in art; but he glided away from my
questions, passing into an account of the co-operative movement,
apparently as much concerned in dairies as in statues; and for an hour
I listened to his slumbrous talk until at last it seemed to me that a
firkin rolled out of the door of one of the dairies, and that I could
see a dainty little man fixed upon it for ever, a sort of petrifaction
having taken place, a statue upon butter or--

My reverie was broken by Gill, who questioned me regarding my first
impressions of Dublin, if I would be kind enough to write them out for
him, and if not, he was interested to hear them for his own pleasure.
On the subject of Dublin the leader of the Renaissance seemed to hold
far-reaching views. He knew Paris well, and feeling that the
conversation would be agreeable to me, he spoke of the immense benefit
of the work that Baron Haussmann had done there; and then, as if
spurred by a sense of rivalry, he described the great boulevards he
would cut through Dublin if he were entrusted with the dictatorship of
Ireland for fifteen years. Nor was this all. The University question
could be dealt with, and the Home Rule question to the satisfaction of
all parties. It seemed to me that I had come upon the original fount
of all wisdom; it flowed from him in a slow but continual stream,
bearing along in its current different schemes; one, I remember, was
for the construction of a new bank, for the bankers would have to be
housed when they were turned out of the old House of Parliament.
Whereas I was thinking whether his father was Balzac or Turgenev, and
perhaps this point might never have been decided if he had not
suddenly begun to talk about Trinity College, saying there was a wider
and more Bohemian culture, one to which he would like to give effect.
By means of the newspaper you were speaking of just now? I asked.

The newspaper would be necessary, but a caf was necessary too. A caf
was Continental, and the new Dublin should model itself more upon
Continental than British ideas; and we talked on, discussing the
effect of the caf on the intellectual life in Dublin. The caf would
be useless unless it remained open until two in the morning. A short
Act of Parliament might easily be introduced, and the best site would
be the corner of Grafton Street and the Green. The site, however, had
this disadvantage--it would go to make Stephen's Green the centre of
Dublin, and this was not desirable. The old centre of Dublin, which
was in the north, should be restored to its former prosperity. Another
caf might be established on the quays, an excellent site were it not
for the Liffey. I mentioned that I had only seen the river when the
tide was up, and Gill told me that when it was out the smell was not
pleasant. The new drainage, however, would soon be completed, and a
caf could be opened at the corner of O'Connell Street, but for the
moment the corner of Grafton Street seemed the more practicable site.

A question regarding the probable cost of the caf brought a slight
cloud into his face, but it vanished quickly as soon as he had stroked
his beard, and he spoke to me at great length about a man whom he had
met in America, and with whom he had become great friends. This man
was a millionaire, and his ambition was to build hotels in Ireland,
whether for the sake of adding to his millions, or diminishing them
for the sake of Ireland, Gill did not know. Probably his friend was
influenced by both reasons, for, of course, to found hotels that did
not pay some dividend would be of no benefit to anybody. Gill
continued to talk of possible dividends, and I listened to him with
difficulty, for my curiosity was now keen to hear from him the
reciprocation of the millionaire in the building of hotels and the
founding of a real Parisian caf at the corner of Stephen's Green and
Grafton Street, and I waited almost breathless for the answer to this
conundrum. It was simple enough when it came. After the building of
the hotels a great deal of money would remain over, and with this
money the millionaire would build the caf.

There isn't a drop of Balzac blood in him, I said to myself; he is
pure Turgenev, and perhaps Ireland is a little Russia in which the
longest way round is always the shortest way home, and the means more
important than the end.

Two or three young men who wrote in the _Express_ every night had been
invited to come to take coffee with us after lunch, and their arrival
was a relief to both Gill and myself. We had been talking of Ireland
for several hours, and Gill had begun to speak of the time when he
would have to go down to the office. The young men, too, wished to
speak to him about what they were to write that evening, for Gill
explained that he did not write very much himself in his newspaper;
his notion of editing was to pump ideas into people; and after
listening for some time I got up to go. It was then that Gill told me
that the newspaper of which he was the editor was offering a great
dinner at the Shelbourne Hotel to the Irish Literary Theatre, and he
hoped that I would be present.

On this we parted, and a few moments afterwards I found myself lost in
Nassau Street, for Nature has denied me all sense of topography, and
while looking up and down the street wondering how I should get to
Merrion Square, I caught sight of Yeats coming out of a bun-shop. By
calling wildly I succeeded in awakening him from his reverie. He
stopped, and in answer to my question told me that he had been to
Edward's club; but Edward was not there. With one of his theologians,
no doubt, both deep in your heresies, I said, and we walked on in
silence until a newsboy posted his placard against some railings, and
we read: Letter from Cardinal Logue condemning _The Countess
Cathleen._

Yeats pointed, saying, There's Edward, and I saw him in his short
black jacket and voluminous grey trousers reading the newspaper at the
kerb. There will be no plays tonight! we cried. His glasses dropped
from his high nose, but he caught them as they fell. You haven't seen
Logue's letter, then? He admits that he hasn't read the play; he has
only judged it by extracts. And you can't judge a work by extracts.
Besides, I said, the two priests to whom the play was sent have
decided in its favour. Gill told me that he showed you some letters
from them. As well as I remember he showed me--But, my dear friend,
you must know whether he showed you a letter or not. Yes, I'm
practically sure that I saw a letter, but I'm not affected by stray
opinions, whether they are in favour of the play or against it. You
may not have sent the play to two priests, but you brought it to a
theologian. That was in England. Of course you were then in a
Protestant country. And did he decide in favour of the play? No, he
didn't. Very much the other way.

Edward's sense of humour does not desert him even when he fears that
his soul may be grilled; and he entertained us with an account of the
evening he had spent with the theologian.

I had to bite my lips to prevent myself from laughing when he climbed
up the steps of a ladder, taking down tomes, and he descended step by
step very carefully, for he is an old man, and putting the tome under
the lamp--

He read aloud the best opinions on the subject. It was like going to a
lawyer. Blackstone writes according to So-and-so Vic. Who was this
theologian? Edward refused to give up his name, and I could not guess
it, although he allowed me many guesses. Somebody you never heard of.
Then I am to understand the plays will go on as usual? I see no reason
why not. The Cardinal hasn't read the play; he has put himself out of
court. But if he had read the play, Edward, and had interdicted it?

An interdiction would be quite another matter. I'm not obliged to
accept stray opinions, but an interdiction would be very serious. It
would be a very serious matter for me to persist in supporting a play
that the head of the Church in Ireland deemed harmful!

I suggested that Dr Walshe was a sufficient authority in his own
diocese.

There's that, too, and I wouldn't be surprised if Walshe said some of
those sharp things that ecclesiastics can, on occasion, say about each
other.

What enrages me, I said, turning to Yeats, is the insult offered to
mankind by this Cardinal. But you don't seem interested, Yeats. I
can't understand why you are so little interested in the general
question, apart from the particular.

I am interested; but the matter isn't so serious as you think. I know
Ireland better than you, and am more patient.

Yeats's words appeased me, and without knowing it my thoughts were
drawn away from the peasant Cardinal to the spring weather, and I
relinquished myself to the delight of the warm air, to the beauty of
the sunlight among the flowering trees, to the sky, so blue, so
ecstatic, lifting the heart to rapture; and knowing Edward's love of
architecture, and feeling he needed a little compensation for the
courage he had shown, I called his attention to a piece of monumented
wall, designed to conceal the rear of a gardener's cottage, but a
beautiful thing in itself, and adding to the beauty of the square.

Two curving wings, an arched recess, vases and terra-cotta
plaques--very eighteenth century, a century to which Edward has never
been able to extend his sympathy, calling it with some truth a century
of boudoirs, and its genius the decoration of an alcove. His
sympathies flow out more naturally to the cathedral, to the
monastery, and to the palace, never very generously to the
dwelling-house.

You've always said, my dear friend, that you understand public life
much better than private.

Edward is always willing to discuss his ideas, but for the moment he
was taken with the beauty of the monumented wall.

As a screen, he said, it is beautiful, but the sixteenth century would
have built--

Built a cottage that would have been beautiful all the way round? No,
it wouldn't. As I have said, you've never understood the eighteenth
century, Edward, and your misunderstanding is quite natural; a century
of feminine intrigue, subtle women devoted to the arts and to the
delightful abbes, who visited artists in their studios, drawing
attention to the points of their female models. In the sixteenth
century Roman priests no longer spoke of their sons as their nephews,
and went into the church laughing at the Mass they were going to
celebrate. A sixteenth-century Cardinal would have been highly amused
at the thought of condemning a beautiful play because the writer spoke
of the Almighty smiling as He condemned the lost. He would have said,
But if the line is beautiful? and taking Logue by the arm, he would
have told him that religion is interesting until we are twenty. After
that it becomes a means to an end, and the mission of every Cardinal
should be to find a mistress who would respect his nerves, and to
collect some passable pictures. My dear friends, how you have duped
me! Do you remember what you told me about the Celtic Renaissance?
Poets and painters burgeoning on every bush.

I laid a hand on Edward's shoulder and another on Yeats's, and looked
into their faces. Now, Edward--Well, all I can say is, the Irish
people liked my play, and it wouldn't have been listened to in London
... any more than Ibsen is.

And what about Yeats?

His would have been listened to if he had not put things into it which
shocked people's feelings. I know there are many calling themselves
Christians who are only Christians in name, but it is very hurtful for
those who really believe to have to listen to lines.... And Edward
stopped, fearing to wound Yeats's feelings.

He bade us goodbye soon after. Perhaps he is going to Vespers, I said.
A good fellow--an excellent one, and a man who would have written well
if his mother hadn't put it into his head that he had a soul. The soul
is a veritable pitfall. I'm afraid, Yeats, you'll find it difficult to
persuade him to buy the theatre for you. He would live in terror lest
you should let him in for some heresy.




IV


I read an historic entertainment in the appearance of the waiters;
they were more clean and spruce and watchful than usual; the best
shirts had been ordered from the laundry, every button-hole held its
stud, shoes had been blacked scrupulously; and the head waiter, a
tall, thin man, confident in his responsibilities, pointed out the way
to the cloak-room, and in subdued voice told us that we should find Mr
Gill in the ante-room.

And we found him receiving his guests, blithe and alert as a bird in
the spring-time. All his seriousness had vanished from him, he stroked
his beard and he laughed, and his eye brightened as he told of his
successes ... the extreme ends of Dublin had yielded to his
persuasiveness, and under the same roof-tree that night Trinity
College and the Gaelic League would dine together. Hyde was coming,
and John O'Leary, the Fenian leader, was over yonder. And looking
through the evening coats and shirt-fronts, I caught sight of the
patriarchal beard that had bored me years ago in Paris, for John would
talk about Ireland when I wanted to talk about Ingres and Cabanel. All
the same I went to him, and he angered me for the last time by asking
for news of Marshall, my friend in the _Confessions_, instead of
speaking to me about the Gaelic literary movement. As tedious as ever,
I said, escaping from him; and seeing nobody who might amuse me, I
returned to Gill to reproach him for not having asked his guests to
bring their females with them.

At these public repasts there is nothing to distract our eyes from the
food but the eternal feminine, and when that is absent, the eternal
masculine confronts us shamelessly in his office clothes; and looking
round I said to myself not an opera-hat among them; and lowering my
eyes, I noticed that some of the men had not even taken the trouble to
change their shoes. Perhaps they haven't even changed their socks, and
to pass the time away I began to wonder how it was that women could
take any faint interest in men. Every kind seemed present: men with
bellies and without, men with hair on their heads, bald men,
short-legged men and long-legged men; but looking up and down the long
tables, I could not find one that might inspire passion in a woman; no
one even looked as if he would like to do such a thing. And with this
sad thought in my head I sought for my chair, and found it next to a
bald, obese professor, with Yeats on the other side, next to Gill, at
the head of the table. It is always nice to see dear Edward, and he
was not far away, on Gill's left hand, as happy as a priest at a
wedding. He sat, chewing his cud of happiness, a twig from _The
Heather Field_; slightly triumphant, I thought, over Yeats, whose
_Countess Cathleen_ had not been received quite so favourably.

Beside me, on my right, was a young man, clean-shaven and demure; the
upper lip was long, but the nose and eyes and forehead were delicately
cut, like a cameo, and his bright auburn hair was brushed over his
white forehead, making a line that a girl might have envied if she
were inclined to that style of _coiffure_. He answered my questions,
but he answered them somewhat dryly. Yeats would not speak, but sat
all profile, like a drawing on an Egyptian monument, thinking his
speech; and it was not until we had eaten the soup and the fish, and a
glass of champagne had been drunk, that I discovered the young man at
my right elbow to be full of information about the people present.

The very person, I said, I stand in need of. And that is why Gill put
him next to me. So I began to speak of our host, of his kind and
genial nature. My young friend knew him (he was one of the writers on
the _Express_), and seemed to be much amused at my story of Gill's
plan to introduce Continental culture into Dublin. As we talked of
Gill our eyes went towards him, and we admired in silence, thinking
how like he was to some portraits we had seen in the Louvre, or in the
National Gallery--we were not sure which.

Bellini, I think.

My young friend had some knowledge of the art of painting, for he
corrected me, saying that Giorgione was the first designer of that
round brow, shaded by pretty curling hair. I believe you're right, I
said. It was he who started the fashion for a certain wisdom which
Gill seems to have caught admirably, and which, though enhanced by, is
not dependent upon the beauty of a blond and highly trimmed beard.

Did you see a portrait of Gill done before he grew his beard?

I answered that I had not seen it, surprised a little by the question.
My young friend smiled.

He rarely shows that photograph now. Perhaps he has destroyed it.

But at what are you smiling?

Well, you see, he answered, Gill was nothing before he grew his beard.
His face is so thin, and falls away at the chin so quickly, that no
one credited him with any deep and commanding intelligence.

The round, prettily drawn eyes have nothing to recommend them. One
couldn't call them crafty eyes.

My young friend smiled, but as I was about to ask him why he was
smiling. Gill addressed some remarks to me over Yeats's head,
disturbing, I feared, some wondrous array of imagery collecting in the
poet's mind. The professor I had perforce to fall back upon, and I
succeeded in engaging his attention with a remark regarding
Tennyson's proneness to write the sentiment of his time rather than
the ideas of all time.

But his language is always so exquisite. You must know the
line--something you know: Doves murmuring in immemorial elms, not
since Milton, and I am not sure that I don't prefer Tennyson's
imagery, excepting that immortal line: Blazed in the forehead of the
morning sky. Give me, said the professor, the sublime diction. You can
have all the rest--the sentiments, the ideas, the thoughts ... all.
You remember that wonderful line when he addresses Virgil, that ...
that ... (I waited for the rare adjective), that excellent line. The
waiter interposed a bottle between us. This excellent wine goes very
well with the entre. He was then called into the conversation which
Gill was holding with Edward, regarding the necessity of founding a
school of acting, and I found myself free to return to the young
gentleman on my right.

You mentioned just now that Gill's beard was the origin of Gill.

Lowering his voice, my young neighbour said:

I'm afraid the story is difficult to tell here.

Nobody is listening; everybody is engaged in different conversations.

Gill is not very strong, and has often to go away in quest of health.
It was in Paris that it happened.

We were interrupted many times by the waiters, and our neighbours,
seeing that we were amused, sought to share our amusement. All the
same, the young man succeeded in telling me how, at the end of a long
convalescence, Gill had entered a barber's shop, his beard neglected,
growing in patches, thicker on one side of the face than on the other.
He fell wearily into a chair, murmuring, La barbe, and exhausted by
illness and the heat of the saloon, he did not notice for some time
that no one had come to attend upon him. The silence at last awoke him
out of the lethargy or light doze into which he had slipped, and
looking round it seemed to him that his dream had come true; that the
barber had gone: that he was alone, for some reason unaccountable, in
the shop. A little alarmed he turned in his chair, and for a moment
could find nobody. The barber had retreated to the steps leading to
the ladies' saloon, whence he could study his customer intently, as a
painter might a picture. As Gill was about to speak the barber struck
his brow, saying, Style Henri Quatre, and drew his scissors from the
pocket of his apron.

Gill does not remember experiencing any particular emotion while his
beard was being trimmed. It was not until the barber gave him the
glass that he felt the sudden transformation--felt rather than saw,
for the transformation effected in his face was little compared with
that which had happened in his soul. In the beginning was the beard,
and the beard was with God, who in this case happened to be a barber;
and glory be to the Lord and to his shears that a statesman of the
Renaissance walked that day up the Champs lyses, his thoughts
turning--and we think not unnaturally--towards Machiavelli. A Catholic
Machiavelli is not possible, nor an Alexander the Sixth, a Caesar
Borgia, nor a Julius the Second; but if one is possessed of the sense
of compromise, difficulties can be removed, and Gill's alembicated
mind soon discovered that it was possible to conceive Machiavelli with
all that great statesman's bad qualities removed and the good
retained. As he walked it seemed to him all the learning of his time
had sprung up in him. He found himself like the great men of the
sixteenth century, well versed in the arts of war and peace, a patron
of the arts and sciences.

But at that moment reality thrust itself forward, shattering his
dream. Gill had been an active Nationalist--that is to say, he had
driven about the country on outside cars, occasionally stopping at
crossroads to tell little boys to throw stones at the police; in other
words, he had been a campaigner, and had felt that he was serving his
country by being one. But since he had set eyes on his new beard the
conviction quickened in him that he would be able to serve his country
much better by dispensing his prodigal wisdom than by engaging in the
rough-and-tumble fights of party politics. The inside of gaols were
well enough for such simple minds as Davitt and O'Brien, but not for a
mind grown from a Henri Quatre beard; and remembering the celebrated
saying of him who had worn the beard four hundred years ago--_Paris
vaut bien une messe_-Gill muttered in his beard, _Ma barbe vaut mieux
que le plan_.

About the time of Gill's beard Horace Plunkett was engaged in laying
the foundations of what he believed to be a great social reformation
in Ireland. But Plunkett, Gill reflected as he walked gaily, with an
alert step and brightening eye, did not know Ireland. A Protestant can
never know Ireland intimately. Such was Gill's conviction, and there
was the still deeper conviction that he was the only man who could
advise Plunkett, and save him from the many pitfalls into which he was
sure to tumble. All that Plunkett required was something of the genial
spirit of the Renaissance. Again beguiled by the delicious temptation,
Gill paused in his walk. Plunkett could not associate himself with one
who had been engaged in the Plan of Campaign. The Plan had faded with
the trimming of his beard; and he could hardly believe that he had
been connected with it, except, indeed, as a romantic incident in his
career. The only difficulty--if it were a difficulty--was to find a
means of explaining his repudiation of the Plan satisfactorily. The
Irish atmosphere is dense, and to tell the people that it had all gone
away with the shaggy ends of his beard would hardly satisfy them. But
in Ireland there is always Our Holy Mother the Church, and the Church
had quite lately condemned the Plan. Gill is a faithful son of the
Church. Of course, of course. The error into which he had fallen had
gone with the shaggy beard, and with his trimmed beard, and his
trimmed soul, Gill appeared in Dublin, henceforth known to his friends
as Tom the Trimmer.

An excellent story that probably started from some remark of Gill's,
and was developed as it passed from mouth to mouth. A piece of folk.
If a story be told three or four times by different people it becomes
folk. You have, no doubt, stories of the same kind about everybody?

This last remark was injudicious, for I seemed to frighten my
neighbour, and I had some difficulty in tempting him into gossip
again.

Are there any other contributors to the _Express_ present?

Yes, he said, yielding again to his temptation to talk. T. W.
Rolleston. Do you see that handsome man a head above everybody else,
sitting a little way down the table?

Yes, I said. And what a splendid head and shoulders! Byron said he
would give many a poem for Southey's, and Southey's were not finer
than that man's.

As if guessing that somebody was admiring him, Rolleston looked down
the table, and I saw how little back there was to his head.

He lacks something, my neighbour said; and I was told how Rolleston
came down every evening to write his leader in a great cloak and in
leggings if it were raining, bringing with him his own pens and ink
and blotting-pad, all the paraphernalia of his literature.

A man like that writing leaders! I said. Nothing short of an Odyssey,
one would have thought--

So many people did think. He was a great scholar at Trinity, and in
Germany he translated, or helped to translate, Walt Whitman into
German. When he came back, the prophet, the old man, John O'Leary,
whom you told me you knew in France, the ancient beard at the end of
the room, accepted him as Parnell's successor.

And now he is writing leaders for the _Express_! How did the
transformation happen?

O'Grady tells a story--

Who is O'Grady? I asked, enjoying the gossip hugely; and my neighbour
drew my attention to a grey, round-headed man, and after looking at
him for some time I said: How lonely he seems among all these people!
Does he know nobody? Or is he very unpopular?

He is very little read, but we all admire him. He is our past; and my
neighbour told me that O'Grady had written passages that for fiery
eloquence and energy were equal to any that I would find in
Anglo-Irish literature. Only--

Only what? I asked.

And he told me that O'Grady's talent reminded him of the shaft of a
beautiful column rising from amid rubble-heaps. After a pause, during
which we mused on the melancholy spectacle, I said:

Rolleston--you were going to tell me about Rolleston.

O'Grady tells that he found Rolleston a West Briton, but after a few
lessons in Irish history Rolleston donned a long black cloak and a
slouch hat, and attended meetings, speaking in favour of secret
societies, persuading John O'Leary to look upon him as one that might
rouse the country, going much further than I had ever dreamed of
going, O'Grady said. His extreme views frightened me a little, but
when I met him next time and began to speak to him about the Holy
Protestant Empire, he read me a paper on Imperialism.

And when did that happen?

About ten years ago, a Messiah that punctured while the others were
going by on inflated tyres ... poor Rolleston punctured ten years ago.

And we talked of Messiahs, going back and back until we arrived at
last at Krishna, the second person of the Hindoo Trinity, whose
crucifixion, it is related, happened between heaven and earth.

Two beautiful poems and a great deal of scholarship which he doesn't
know what to do with. How very sad! And looking at him, I said: A
noble head and shoulders. What a good tutor he would make if I had
children!

So from one remark to another I was led into saying spiteful things
about men whom I did not know, and who were destined afterwards to
become my friends.

Tell me about some of your other contributors--about the professor who
writes Latin and Greek verses as well as he writes English. He reviews
books for you, doesn't he?

Yes; but I beg of you to speak a little lower, or he'll hear you.

No, no; he's talking with Gill and Yeats.

Gill is terrified, my young friend said, lest Yeats should speak
disrespectfully of Trinity College. He has taken a great deal of
trouble about this dinner, and believes that it will unite the country
in a common policy if Yeats doesn't split it up on him again.

At that moment the professor turned to me, and asked me to lunch the
following day at Trinity, impressing upon me the necessity of coming
down a little early, in time to have just a glass of wine before
lunch. His doctor had forbidden him all stimulants in the morning, and
by stimulants he understood whisky. But a bottle of wine, he said, was
a tenuous thing, and he would like to avail himself of my visit to
Dublin to drink one with me. I could see that we had now struck upon
his interest in life, and with a show of interest which he had not
manifested in Virgil's poetry, he said:

Just a glass of Marsala, the ancient Lilybaeum. You know, the grape
is so abundant there that they never think of mixing it with bad
brandy.

At that moment somebody spoke to me, and when I had answered a few
questions I heard the professor saying that he had gone down for lunch
to some restaurant. Nothing much today, John. Just a dozen of oysters
and a few cutlets, and a quart of that excellent ale.

Again my attention was distracted by a waiter pressing some
ice-pudding upon me, and I lost a good deal of information regarding
the professor's arduous day. As soon, however, as I had helped myself
I heard a story, whether it related to yesterday or some previous time
I cannot say.

After that I had nothing at all, until something brought me to the
cupboard, and there, behold! I found a bottle of lager. I said: Smith
has been remiss. He has mixed the Bass and the lager. But no. They
were all full, twelve bottles of Bass and only one of lager; so I took
it, as it seemed a stray and lonely thing.

It appears that the professor then continued his annotations of
Aristophanes until the light began to fade.

I thought of calling again on Lilybaeum. Really, the more I drink of
it the more honest and excellent I find it. When the bottle was
finished it was time to return home to dinner, and I learned that the
professor's abstinence was rewarded by the delight he took in the
first whisky and soda after dinner.

An excellent old pagan he seems to be, Quintus Horatius Flaccus of
Dublin, untroubled by any Messianic idea. Now Hyde--I've heard a good
deal about him. Can you point him out to me?

As my neighbour was about to do so Gill rose up at the head of the
table.

Speech time has come, I said.

Gill read a letter from W. E. H. Lecky, who regretted that he was
prevented from being present at the dinner, and then went on to say
that the other letter was from a gentleman whose absence he was sure
was greatly regretted. He alluded to his friend, Mr Horace Plunkett,
who was, if he might be allowed to say so, one of the truest and
noblest sons that Ireland had ever begotten.

I've noticed, I said to my young friend, even within a few days I have
been in Ireland, that Ireland is spoken of, not as a geographical, but
a sort of human entity. You are all working for Ireland, and I hear
now that Ireland begets you; a sort of Wotan who goes about--

Somebody looked in our direction, somebody said Hush! And Gill
continued, saying they had had an exciting week in Ireland, one that
would be memorable in the history of the country. For the first time
Ireland had been profoundly stirred upon the intellectual question. He
said he regarded the controversy which Yeats's play had aroused as
one of the best signs of the times. It showed that they had reached at
last the end of the intellectual stagnation of Ireland, and that, so
to speak, the grey matter of Ireland's brain was at last becoming
active.

Ireland's brain! Just now it was the loins of Ireland.

Gill's soul set free flowed on rejoicing in journalistic vapidities
that had a depressing effect upon Yeats, who seemed to sink farther
and farther into himself. But continuing unabashed his gentle
rigmarole, Gill talked on. He for one had always regarded Yeats,
broadly, as one who held the sword of the spirit in his hand, and
waged war upon the gross host of materialism, and as an Irishman of
genius who had devoted a noble enthusiasm to honouring his country by
the production of beautiful work.... What should he say of Mr Martyn?
There was no controversy about him. Their minds were not occupied by
controversy, but with that which must be gratifying to Mr Martyn and
to all of them--the knowledge that he had produced a great and
original play, and that Ireland had discovered in him a dramatist
fitted to take rank among the first in Europe.

I think everybody present thought this eulogy a little exaggerated,
for I noticed that everybody hung down his head and looked into his
plate, everybody except Edward, who stared down the room unabashed,
which, indeed, was the only thing for him to do, for it is better when
a writer is praised that he should accept the praise loftily than that
he should attempt to excuse himself, a mistake that I fell into at the
St James's Theatre.

Gill continued in the same high key. This gathering of Irishmen, which
he thought he might say was representative of the intellect of Dublin,
and included men of the utmost differences of opinion on every
question which now divided Irishmen, was, to his mind, a symbol of
what they were moving towards in this country. He thought they had now
reached the stage at which they had begun to recognise the profundity
of the saying:

  The mills of God grind slowly,
  Yet they grind exceeding small.

They all felt, instinctively now, that the time for the reconstruction
of Ireland had begun. They stood among the wreckage of old society and
felt that out of the ruins they were called upon to build a new
Ireland. No matter what their different opinions on various questions
might be, they all felt within them a throb of enthusiasm for their
new life, their own country, and a determination that, irrespective of
different views, they would give their country an intellectual and a
political future worthy of all the sufferings that every class and
creed of the country had gone through in the past.

You're disappointed, my young friend said, but if you stay here much
longer you'll get used to hearing people talk about working for
Ireland, helping Ireland, selling boots for Ireland, and bullocks too.
You'll find if you read the papers that Gill's speech will be very
much liked--much more than Yeats's. The comment will be: We want more
of that kind of thing in Ireland.

My young friend's cynicism now began to get upon my nerves, and
turning upon him rudely, I said:

Then you don't believe in the language movement?

His reply not being satisfactory, and his accent not convincing of his
Celtic origin, I grew suddenly hostile, and resolved not to speak to
him again during dinner; and to show how entirely I disapproved of his
attitude towards Ireland, I affected a deep interest in the rest of
Gill's speech, which, needless to say, was all about working for
Ireland. Amid the applause which followed I heard a voice at the end
of the table saying, We want more of that in Ireland.

My neighbour laughed, but his laughter only irritated me still more
against him, and my eyes went to Yeats, who sat, his head drooping on
his shirt-front, like a crane, uncertain whether he should fold
himself up for the night, and I wondered what was the beautiful
eloquence that was germinating in his mind. He would speak to us about
the Gods, of course, and about Time and Fate and the Gods being at
war; and the moment seemed so long that I grew irritated with Gill for
not calling upon him at once for a speech. At length this happened,
and Yeats rose, and a beautiful commanding figure he seemed at the end
of the table, pale and in profile, with long nervous hands and a voice
resonant and clear as a silver trumpet. He drew himself up and spoke
against Trinity College, saying that it had always taught the ideas of
the stranger, and the songs of the stranger, and the literature of the
stranger, and that was why Ireland had never listened and Trinity
College had been a sterile influence. The influences that had moved
Ireland deeply were the old influences that had come down from
generation to generation, handed on by the story-tellers that
collected in the evenings round the fire, creating for learned and
unlearned a communion of heroes. But my memory fails me; I am
disfiguring and blotting the beautiful thoughts that I heard that
night clothed in lovely language. He spoke of Cherubim and Seraphim,
and the hierarchies and the clouds of angels that the Church had set
against the ancient culture, and then he told us that Gods had been
brought vainly from Rome and Greece and Judaea. In the imaginations of
the people only the heroes had survived, and from the places where
they had walked their shadows fell often across the doorways; and then
there was something wonderfully beautiful about the blue ragged
mountains and the mystery that lay behind them, ragged mountains
flowing southward. But that speech has gone for ever. I have searched
the newspapers, but the journalist's report is feebler even than my
partial memory. It seemed to me that while Yeats spoke I was lifted up
and floated in mid-air.... But I will no longer attempt the
impossible; suffice it to say that I remember Yeats sinking back like
an ancient oracle exhausted by prophesying.

A shabby, old, and woolly-headed man seated at the head of the second
table rose up and said he could not accept Yeats's defence of the
ancient beliefs--Ireland had not begun to be Ireland until Patrick
arrived; and he went on till everybody was wearied. Then it was my
turn to read the lines I had dictated to the typist.

After some words hastily improvised, some stuttering apology for
daring to speak in the land of oratory (perhaps I said something about
the misfortune of having to speak after Demosthenes, alluding, of
course, to Yeats), I explained the reason for my return to Ireland:
how in my youth I had gone to France because art was there, and how,
when art died in France, I had returned to England; and now that art
was dead in England I was looking out like one in a watch-tower to
find which way art was winging. Westward, probably, for all the
countries of Europe had been visited by art, and art never visits a
country twice. It was not improbable that art might rest awhile in
this lonely Northern island; so my native country had again attracted
me. And when I had said that I had come, like Bran, to see how they
were getting on at home, I spoke of Yeats's poetry, saying that there
had been since the ancient bards poets of merit, competent poets,
poets whom I did not propose they should either forget or think less
of; but Ireland, so it seemed to me, had no poet who compared for a
moment with the great poet of whom it was my honour to speak that
night. It was because I believed that in the author of _The Countess
Cathleen_ Ireland had recovered her ancient voice that I had
undertaken the journey from London, and consented to what I had
hitherto considered the most disagreeable task that could befall me--a
public speech. I told them I would not have put myself to the
inconvenience of a public speech for anything in the world except a
great poet--that is to say, a man of exceptional genius, who was born
at a moment of great national energy. This was the advantage of
Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, as well as of Yeats. The works of Yeats
were not yet, and probably never would be, as voluminous as those of
either the French or the English poet, but I could not admit that they
are less perfect. I pointed out that the art of writing a blank-verse
play was so difficult that none except Shakespeare and Yeats had
succeeded in this form.

The assertion, I said, seems extravagant; but think a moment, and you
will see that it is nearer the truth than you suppose. We must not be
afraid of praising Mr Yeats's poetry too much; we must not hesitate to
say that there are lyrics in the collected poems as beautiful as any
in the world. We must, I said, be courageous in front of the
Philistine, and insist that the lyric entitled Innisfree is
unsurpassable.

And I concluded by saying that twenty years hence this week in Ireland
would be looked back upon with reverence. Then things would have
falled into their true perspective. The Saxon would have recovered
from his bout of blackguardism and would recognise with sorrow that
while he was celebrating Mr Kipling, Marie Corelli, Mrs Humphry Ward,
and Mr Pinero, the Celt was celebrating in a poor wayside house the
idealism of Mr Yeats.

My paper irritated a red-bearded man sitting some way down the table.
He wore no moustache, but his beard was like a horse's collar under
his chin, and his face was like glass, and his voice was like the
breaking of glass, and everybody wondered why he should speak so
sourly about everybody, myself included. Now that Mr Moore thinks that
Ireland has raised herself to his level, Mr Moore has been kind enough
to return to Ireland, like Bran.

Who is he? I asked Yeats.

Bran is one of the greatest of our legends.

Yes, I know that. But the man who is speaking?

A great lawyer, Yeats answered, who has never quite come into his
inheritance.

And the gritty voice went on proclaiming the genius of the Irish race.

But, Yeats, I said, he is talking nonsense. All races are the same;
none much better or worse than another: merely blowing dust; the dust
higher up the road is no better than the dust lower down.

Yeats said this would be an excellent point to make in my answer, and
Gill said that I must get up; but I shook my head, and sat listening
to my speech, seeing it quite clearly, and the annihilation of my
enemy in every stinging sentence, but without the power to rise up and
speak it.

Who would care for France, I whispered to Yeats, if it only consisted
of peasants, industrious or idle? The race is anonymous, and passes
away if it does not produce great men who do great deeds, and if there
be no great contemporary writers to chronicle their valour. What
nonsense that man is talking, Yeats! Do get up and speak for me. Tell
him that the fields are speechless, and the rocks are dumb. In the
last analysis everything depends upon the poet. Tell him that, and
that it is for Ireland to admire us, not for us to admire Ireland.
Dear me, what nonsense, Yeats! Do speak for me.

Yeats tried to push me on to my feet.

No, no! I said; I will not. My one claim to originality among Irishmen
is that I have never made a speech.

Gill waited for me, and looking at him steadily, I said, No; and he
answered:

Then I will call upon Hyde.

Hyde, I said; that is the man I want to see.

He had been sitting on my side of the table, and I could catch
glimpses only of his profile between the courses when he looked up at
the waiter and asked him for more champagne, and the sparkling wine
and the great yellow skull sloping backwards had seemed a little
incongruous. A shape strangely opposite, I said, to Rolleston, who has
very little back to his head. All Hyde's head seemed at the back, like
a walrus, and the drooping black moustache seemed to bear out the
likeness. As nothing libels a man a much as his own profile, I
resolved to reserve my opinion of his appearance until I had seen his
full face. His volubility was as extreme as a peasant's come to ask
for a reduction of rent. It was interrupted, however, by Edward
calling on him to speak in Irish, and then a torrent of dark, muddied
stuff flowed from him, much like the porter which used to come up from
Carnacun to be drunk by the peasants on midsummer nights when a
bonfire was lighted. It seemed to me a language suitable for the
celebration of an antique Celtic rite, but too remote for modern use.
It had never been spoken by ladies in silken gowns with fans in their
hands or by gentlemen going out to kill each other with engraved
rapiers or pistols. Men had merely cudgelled each other, yelling
strange oaths the while in Irish, and I remembered it in the mouths of
the old fellows dressed in breeches and worsted stockings,
swallow-tail coats and tall hats full of dirty bank-notes which they
used to give to my father. Since those days I had not heard Irish, and
when Hyde began to speak it an instinctive repulsion rose up in me,
quelled with difficulty, for I was already a Gaelic Leaguer. Hyde,
too, perhaps on account of the language, perhaps it was his
appearance, inspired a certain repulsion in me, which, however, I did
not attempt to quell. He looked so like a native Irish speaker; or was
it?--and perhaps it was this--he looked like an imitation native Irish
speaker; in other words, like a stage Irishman.

Passing without comment over the speeches of the various professors of
Trinity, I will tell exactly how I saw Hyde in the ante-room from a
quiet corner whence I could observe him accurately. He was talking to
a group of friends. Is he always so hilarious, so voluble? I'm so
delighted, I could hear him saying to some new-comer, so delighted to
see you again. Well, this is really a pleasure.

His three-quarter face did not satisfy me, but, determined to be
just, I refused to allow any opinion of him to creep into my mind
until I had seen him in full face; and when he turned, and I saw the
full face, I was forced to admit that something of the real man
appeared in it: I sat admiring the great sloping, sallow skull, the
eyebrows like blackthorn bushes growing over the edge of a cliff, the
black hair hanging in lank locks, a black moustache streaking the
yellow-complexioned face, dropping away about the mouth and chin.

Without doubt an aboriginal, I said.

He spoke with his head thrust over his thin chest, as they do in
Connemara. Yet what name more English than Hyde? It must have some to
him from some English ancestor--far back, indeed, for it would require
many generations of intermarriage with Celtic women to produce so
Celtic an appearance.

At this moment my reflections were interrupted by Hyde himself. A
common friend brought him over and introduced him to me, and when I
told him of my interest in the language movement, he was vociferously
enthusiastic, and I said to myself: He has the one manner for
everybody.

Some of his writings were known to me--some translations he had made
of the peasant songs of Connaught--and I admired them, though they
seemed untidily written, the verse and the prose. I had read some of
his propagandist literature, and this, too, was of a very untidy kind.
So the conclusion was forced upon me that in no circumstance could
Hyde have been a man of letters in English or in Irish.

The leader has absorbed the scholar. So perhaps the language movement
is his one chance of doing something.

Our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of AE. I had read his
articles in the _Express_, and looking at him I remembered the delight
and the wonder which his verse and prose had awakened in me. It had
been just as if somebody had suddenly put his hand into mine, and had
led me away into a young world which I recognised at once as the
fabled Arcady that had flourished before man discovered gold, and
forged the gold into a ring which gave him power to enslave. White
mist curled along the edge of the woods, and the trees were all in
blossom. There were tall flowers in the grass, and gossamer threads
glittered in the rays of the rising sun. Under the trees every youth
and maiden was engaged in some effusive moment of personal love, or in
groups they wove garlands for the pleasure of the children, or for the
honour of some God or Goddess. Suddenly the songs of the birds were
silenced by the sound of a lyre; Apollo and his Muses appeared on the
hillside; for in these stories the Gods and mortals mixed in
delightful comradeship, the mortals not having lost all trace of their
divine origin, and the Gods themselves being the kind, beneficent Gods
that live in Arcady.

The paper had dropped from my hands, and I said: Here is the mind of
Corot in verse and prose; the happiness of immemorial moments under
blossoming boughs, when the soul rises to the lips and the feet are
moved to dance. Here is the inspired hour of sunset and it seemed to
me that this man must live always in this hour, and that he not only
believed in Arcady, but that Arcady was always in him. While we strive
after happiness he holds it in his hand, I said, and it was to meet
this man that I had come to Ireland as much as to see the plays.

He had refused to dine with us because he did not wish to put on
evening clothes, but he had come in afterwards, more attractive than
anybody else in the room in his grey tweeds, his wild beard, and
shaggy mane of hair. Some friends we seem to have known always, and
try as we will we cannot remember the first time we saw them; whereas
our first meetings with others are fixed in our mind, and as clearly
as if it had happened no later than yesterday, I remember AE coming
forward to meet me, and the sweetness of his long grey eyes. He was
more winning than I had imagined, for, building out of what Yeats had
told me in London, I had imagined a sterner, rougher, ruder man. Yeats
had told me how a child, while walking along a country road near
Armagh, had suddenly begun to think, and in a few minutes the child
had thought out the whole problem of the injustice of a creed which
tells that God will punish him for doing things which he never
promised not to do.

The day was a beautiful summer's day, the larks were singing in the
sky, and in a moment of extraordinary joy AE realised that he had a
mind capable of thinking out everything that was necessary for him to
think out for himself, realising in a moment that he had been flung
into the world without his consent, and had never promised not to do
one thing or to do another. It was hardly five minutes since he had
left his aunt's house, yet in this short space his imagination had
shot up into heaven and defied the Deity who had condemned him to the
plight of the damned because--he repeated the phrase to himself--he
had done something which he had never promised not to do. It mattered
nothing what that thing was--the point was that he had made no
promise; and his mind embracing the whole universe in one moment, he
understood that there is but one life: the dog at his heels and the
stars he would soon see (for the dusk was gathering) were not
different things, but one thing.

There is but one life, he had said to himself, divided endlessly,
differing in degree, but not in kind; and at once he had begun to
preach the new gospel.

I had heard how, when earning forty pounds a year in an accountant's
office, he used to look at his boots, wondering whether they would
carry him to the sacred places where the Druids ascended and descended
in many-coloured spirals of flame; and fearing that they would not
hold together for forty long miles, he had gone to Bray Head and had
addressed the holiday folk. I could hear the tumult, the ecstasy of it
all! I could see him standing on a bit of wall, his long, thin,
picturesque figure with grey clothes drooping about it, his arms
extended in feverish gesture, throwing back his thick hair from his
face, telling the crowd of the sacred places of Ireland, of the Druids
of long ago, and their mysteries, and how much more potent these were
than the dead beliefs which they still clung to; I could hear him
telling them that the genius of the Gael, awakening in Ireland after a
night of troubled dreams, returns instinctively to the belief of its
former days, and finds again the old inspiration.

The Gael seeks again the Gods of the mountains, where they live
enfolded in a mantle of multitudinous tradition. Once more out of the
heart of mystery he had heard the call Come away; and after that no
other voice had power to lure--there remained only the long heroic
labours which end in the companionship of the Gods.

The reason I have not included any personal description of AE is
because he exists rather in one's imagination, dreams, sentiments,
feelings, than in one's ordinary sight and hearing, and try as I will
to catch the fleeting outlines, they escape me; and all I remember are
the long, grey, pantheistic eyes that have looked so often into my
soul and with such a kindly gaze.

Those are the eyes, I said, that have seen the old Celtic Gods; for
certainly AE saw them when he wandered out of the accountant's office
in his old shoes, into Meath, and lay under the trees that wave about
the Druid hills; or, sitting on some mountain-side, Angus and Diarmuid
and Grania and Deirdre have appeared to him, and Mannanan MacLir has
risen out of the surge before him, and Dana the great Earth Spirit has
chanted in his ears. If she had not, he could not have written those
articles which enchanted me. Never did a doubt cross my mind that
these great folk had appeared to AE until he put a doubt into my mind
himself, for he not only admitted that he did not know Irish (that
might not be his fault, and the Gods might have overlooked it, knowing
that he was not responsible for his ignorance), but that he did not
believe in the usefulness of the Irish language.

But how, then, am I to believe that the Gods have appeared to you? I
answered. That Angus and Diarmuid, Son of Angus, have conversed with
you? That Dana the Earth Spirit has chanted in your ears?

The Gods, he answered, speak not in any mortal language; one becomes
aware of their immortal Presences.

Granted. But the Gods of the Gael have never spoken in the English
language; it has never been spoken by any Gods.

Whatever language the Gods speaks becomes sacred by their use.

That is begging the question. I can't accept you as the redeemer of
the Gael; and I turned from him petulantly, let it be confessed, and
asked somebody to introduce me to John Eglinton. I'm vexed, AE, I
said, and will go and talk with John Eglinton. For not having ever
communed with the Gods he is at liberty to deny their speech.

And John Eglinton told me that it was not from the Gods that he had
learned what he knew of the Irish language; that his was only a very
slight knowledge acquired from O'Growney and some of Hyde's
folk-tales.

So you've learned Irish enough to read it? And I grew at once
interested in John Eglinton, and pressed him to continue his studies,
averring that I had not time to learn the language myself. And now
what is your opinion about it as a medium of literary expression?

Before he could answer me I had asked him if he did not think that
English was becoming a lean language, and all I remember is that in
the middle of the discussion John Eglinton dropped the phrase: The
Irish language strikes me as one that has never been to school.

Of course it hasn't. How could it? But is a language the worse for
that?

We began to argue how much a language must be written in before it
becomes fitted for literary usage, and during the discussion I studied
John Eglinton, wondering why he had said that the Irish language had
never been to school. There was something of the schoolmaster in his
appearance and in his talk. The articles he had published in the
_Express_ were written in a style of his own; but he had no valiant
ideas like AE, and AE had cast a spell, and only his eloquence could
appeal to me. John Eglinton had seemed to me dryly a writer, and I
could only regard as intolerable that an editor should be found so
tolerant as to allow John Eglinton to contravene AE, and remembering
all this, I noticed a thin, small man with dark red hair growing
stiffly over a small skull; and I studied the round head and the high
forehead, and the face somewhat shrivelled and thickly freckled.

A gnarled, solitary life, I said, lived out in all the discomforts
inherent in a bachelor's lodging, a sort of lonely thorn tree. One
sees one sometimes on a hillside and not another tree near it. The
comparison amused me, for John Eglinton argued with me in a thorny,
tenacious way, and remembering his beautiful prose, I said: The thorn
breaks to flower, and continued to discover analogies. A sturdy life
has the thorn, bent on one side by the wind, looking as if sometimes
it had been almost strangled by the blast. John Eglinton, too, looked
as if he had battled; and I am always attracted by those who have
battled, and who know how to live alone. Looking at him more
attentively, I said: If he isn't a schoolmaster he is engaged in some
business: an accountant's office, perhaps; and the tram takes him
there every morning at the same hour. A bachelor he certainly is, and
an inveterate one; but not because all women appeal to him, or nearly
all; rather because no woman appeals to him much, not sufficiently to
induce him to change his habits. He sits in the tram, his hands
clasped over his stick, and no flowered skirt rouses him from his
literary reverie.

So did I see him in my thoughts going into Dublin in the morning,
without a feminine trouble in his life. If there had ever been such a
trouble, it must have been a faint one, a little surprise to himself
as soon as it was over. A woman must feel as if there was a stone wall
between them. Many will think that this seems to imply a lack of
humanity, for the many appreciate humanity in the sexual instinct
only, an instinct which we share with all animals and insects; only
the very lowest forms of life are epicene. Yet, somehow, we are all
inclined to think that man is never so much man as when he is in
pursuit of the female. Perhaps he is never less man than at the
moment. We are apt to think we are living intensely when we congregate
in numbers in drawing-rooms and gossip about the latest publications,
social and literary, and there is a tendency in us all to look askance
at the man who likes to spend the evening alone with his book and his
cat, who looks forward to lonely holidays, seeing in them long
solitary walks in the country, much the same walks as he enjoyed the
summer before, when he wandered through pleasantly wooded prospects,
seeing hills unfolding as he walked mile after mile, pleasantly
conscious of himself, and of the great harmony of which he is a part.

The man of whom I am dreaming, shy, unobtrusive and lonely, whose
interests are literary, and whose life is not troubled by women, feels
intensely and hoards in his heart secret enthusiasms and sentiments
which in other men flow in solution here and there down any feminine
gutter. I thought of Emerson and then of Thoreau--a Thoreau of the
suburbs. And remembering how beautiful John Eglinton's writings are,
how gnarled and personal, like the man himself, my heart went out to
him a little, and I wondered if we should ever become friends. I hoped
we should, for I felt myself inclining to the belief that the hard
North is better than the soft, peaty, Catholic stuff which comes from
Connaught.




V


While strolling with him, or sitting beside him smoking cigars,
listening to him talking about the success of _The Heather Field_,
the thought often crossed my mind that his life had flowered in the
present year, and that after it all would be decline. He was to me a
pathetic figure as he sat sunning himself in the light of Ibsen and
Parnell, his exterior placid as a parish priest's; for knowing him
from the very beginning of his life, and having seen the play written,
I was not duped like the others. He is thinking that his dreams are
coming to pass, and believes himself to be the Messiah--he who will
give Ireland literature and her political freedom; and I wondered how
far he would go before puncturing like the others.

He was talking about his new comedy, _The Tale of a Town._ Politicians
were satirised and things were said in it that might create a riot,
and the riot in the theatre might spread to the streets, and a flame
run all over Ireland. We cannot afford, Edward, to have the Gaiety
Theatre wrecked. A shadow used to come into his face when he thought
of the moral responsibility he was incurring by writing _The Tale of a
Town_; but heresies frighten him more than the destruction of
property; he was prepared to risk the play, and took refuge in
generalities, saying he was no good at telling a plot. A doubt rises
up in my mind always when I hear an author say he cannot tell his
plot, for if there be one, a baby can tell it, and it is the plot that
counts; the rest is working out, and can be accomplished if one is a
writer. All I could learn from him was that the play was nearly
finished. He was going down to Galway to work over the dialogue for
the last time, and then the manuscript would be sent to Yeats, and
when it was read it would be sent to London to me, for the rules of
the Irish Literary Theatre were that no play could be performed
without the approval of the three directors.

You may expect it in about three weeks.

And a memorable morning it was in Victoria Street when I received the
parcel and cut the string, saying:

We shall be able to talk about this comedy, and to discuss its
production, on our way to Bayreuth, when we have said all we have to
say about Wagner and his _Ring_.

The first half-dozen pages pleased me, and then Edward's mind, which
can never think clearly, revealed itself in an entanglement; which
will be easily removed, I said, picking up the second act. But the
second act did not please me as much as the first, and I laid it down,
saying: Muddle, muddle, muddle. In the third act Edward seemed to fall
into gross farcical situations, and I took up the fourth act sadly. It
and the fifth dissipated every hope, and I lay back in my chair in a
state of coma, unable to drag myself to the writing-table. But getting
there at last, I wrote--after complimenting him about a certain
improvement in the dialogue--that the play seemed to me very inferior
to _The Heather Field_ and to _Maeve_.

But plainer speaking is necessary. It may well be inferior to _The
Heather Field_ and to _Maeve_, and yet be worthy of the Irish Literary
Theatre.

So I wrote: There is not one act in the five you have sent me which,
in my opinion, could interest any possible audience--Irish, English,
or Esquimaux. There you have it, my dear friend; that is my opinion.
But perhaps we shall be able to straighten it out on our way to
Bayreuth, and on our way home.

After posting such a letter one is seized with scruples, and I walked
about the room asking myself if a pinch of human kindness but not
worth more than a cartload of disagreeable truths. Edward was my
friend, the friend of my boyhood, and I had written to say that the
play he had been working upon for the last two years was worthless.
Why not have saddled Yeats and Lady Gregory with the duty? One looks
at the question from different points of view, worrying a great deal,
coming back to the point--that lies would not have saved our trip
abroad. Be that as it may, my letter had probably wrecked it.

We were to meet at Victoria Station, and if Edward were to turn rusty
what would happen? The theatre tickets would be lost. No Bayreuth for
me that year; impossible to travel in Germany when one doesn't know a
word of German. I regretted again the letter I had written, and
watched the post. Letters came, but none from Edward. This was a good
sign, for if he were not coming he would let me know. All the same,
the quarter of an hour before the train started was full of anxiety.

Ah, there he is! We're going to Bayreuth after all!

There he was--huge and puffy, his back to the engine, his belly
curling splendidly between his short fat thighs, his straw hat perched
on the top of his head, broader at the base than at the crown, a
string dangling from it. We sat embarrassed; Edward did not seem
embarrassed, but I suppose he must have been; I was embarrassed enough
for two. The play would have to be talked about. But who would open
the conversation? Edward did not seem inclined to speak about it, and
for me to do so before Clapham Junction would be lacking in courtesy.
Ask him for a cigar! But one cannot talk of the quality of a cigar
beyond Croydon, and when we had passed through the station the strain
became unbearable. Besides, I was anxious to aestheticise.

I am sorry I didn't like your play, but you see you asked my opinion,
and there was no use my giving you a false one.

I dare say you are right. I'm no critic; all the same, it was a great
disappointment to me to hear that you didn't like it.

I had expected a note of agony in his voice, and was shocked to find
that he could enjoy a cigar while I gave him some of my reasons for
thinking his play unpresentable. If he were a real man of letters it
would be otherwise--so why should I pity him? And the pity for him
which had been gathering in my heart melted away, and suddenly I found
myself angry with him, and would have said some unpleasant things
about his religion if he had not dropped the remark that my letter had
entirely spoilt the pleasure of his trip round the coast of Ireland in
a steamer with a party of archaeologists. I begged for an account of
this trip, and he told me that they had visited pagan remains in
Donegal and Arran, and many Christian ruins, monasteries and round
towers, and my naturally kind heart was touched by the thought of
Edward lagging in the rear, thinking of his unfortunate play and the
letter I had written him, his step quickening when Coffey began his
discourses, but proving only an indifferent listener.

One would have to lack the common sympathies not to feel for Edward,
and to myself I seemed a sort of executioner while telling him that
the play would have to be altered, and extensively altered. It was not
a matter of a few cuts; my letter must have made that clear; but he
had not been told the whole truth. He probably suspected it would be
forthcoming, if not on board the train, on board the boat. A
courageous fellow is Edward before criticism, perhaps because art is
not the great concern of his life; and he would have listened to the
bitter end; but it seemed to me that it would be well to allow my
criticism to work down into his mind. The subject was dropped; we
talked about _The Ring_ all the way to Dover, and on board the boat he
whistled the motives, looking over the taffrail until it was time to
go to bed. His manner was propitious, and it seemed to me that in the
morning he would listen to the half-dozen alterations that were of an
elemental necessity, and turning these over in my mind, I fell asleep,
and awoke thinking of them, and nothing could have prevented me from
telling Edward how the third act might be reconstructed the moment we
got on deck but the appearance of the foreland as we steamed into
Holland.

A dim light had just begun to filter through some grey clouds, like
the clouds in Van Goyen's pictures; and the foreland--sand and
tussocked grass, with a grey sea slopping about it--was drawn exactly
as he would have drawn it.

The country has never quite recovered from his genius and the genius
of his contemporaries though two hundred years have passed away, I
said, mentioning, as we climbed into the train, that painting was no
longer possible in Holland.

Edward wished to know why this was, and I kept him waiting till
breakfast for an answer, saying then: The country is itself a picture.
See! A breeze has just awakened a splendid Ruysdael in the bay. A
little farther on we shall pass a wood which Hobbema certainly
painted. We did, and we had not got many miles before we came upon
some fields with cattle in them. Dujardin and Berghem. And afterwards
the train sped through flat meadows intersected by drains, for the
country, once marish, had been redeemed by the labour of the
Dutchmen--indefatigable labour, I said. When they drove the Catholics
out of Holland, art and Protestantism began together. Look! See those
winding herds. Cuyp! Look into the mist and you'll see him in his
leathern jerkin, and his great beaver hat with a plume in it, stalking
the cattle, drawing bits at a time--heads and hind quarters. I don't
like Holland; it looks too much like pictures--and pictures I have
weared of.

It seemed to me that we were wasting time. What was important was _The
Tale of a Town_, for another alteration had come into my mind; and
anxious to know how it would strike Edward, I asked him to give me his
attention.

Don't look at those fields any more; forget Dujardin and Berghem,
forget Cuyp; let us think of _The Tale of a Town_.

His lack of eagerness was discouraging; all the same I began my
serious criticism, to which was given an excellent but somewhat stolid
attention.

There is no growth in the first act, and very little in the second,
and the scene of the meeting in which Jasper Dean makes his great
speech must come in the middle of the play, and not at the beginning
of it.

I waited for some acknowledgment from Edward, but was unable to get
from him either assent or dissent.

You're a very good critic, he repeated again and again, and that
irritated me, for, of course, one thinks one is something more than a
critic.

Is it possible that he thinks his play perfect? Or is it that he would
not like to bring any outside influence into it, because to do so
might impair its originality. It must be one of these things. Which?

Edward opened his valise, and took a book out of it, and began to
read, and I was left to continue my meditations. Was it that Edward
was what I had often believed him to be: merely an amateur? An amateur
of talent, but an amateur. That was Symons's opinion. He said: Martyn
will always remain an amateur, whereas you, notwithstanding your
deficiences, can be considered a writer.

His words were remembered, for Edward's aversion from my suggestions
discovered the amateur in him. It was not that he disapproved of the
alterations, but he did not like to accept them because they were not
his. The amateur always puts himself before his work, and it is only
natural that he should do so, for the amateur writes or paints when he
has time. When weary of the glory that a title or a motor-car brings
him, he writes a book about Shakespeare's Sonnets, or David Cox's
slushy water-colours, or maybe an appreciation of Napoleon; whereas
the artist is interested in the thing itself, and will accept readily
a suggestion from any one, if he thinks that it will be to the
advantage of the work to do so. _Je prends mon bien o je le trouve_
is his device, the motto upon his shield. Anybody who can improve a
sentence of mine by the omission of a comma or by the placing of a
comma is looked upon as my dearest friend. But Edward....

The interruption in my thoughts concerning him was caused by a sudden
motion to ask him which was our first halting-place. I expected him to
answer Cologne, where we had stopped before to hear a contrapuntal
Mass; two choirs, as well as I remember, answering each other from
different sides of the cathedral, the voices dividing and uniting,
seeking each other along and across the aisles. It was my first
experience of this kind of music, and I had preserved a vague,
perhaps, but intense memory of it, and feeling somewhat disappointed
that we were not going to hear another Mass by Palestrina, I asked
Edward for his reasons for this change of route, and my astonishment
was great when he began to speak disparagingly of the Cologne music,
and my astonishment passed into amazement when he told me that the
music we had heard was not by Palestrina at all, but only a modern
imitation of his manner. It had seemed to me so beautiful that I did
not like to hear its authenticity called into question, but Edward was
very firm, and it soon became plain that he knew he had been deceived,
and that all mention of Cologne was disagreeable to him. We shall
never stop there again, I said to myself, and to fall in with his
humour, spoke of the cathedral, which we looked upon as an ugly
building. How could it be otherwise? It was begun in the Middle Ages
and finished somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century. But
the cathedral at Aix, where we stopped, he declared to be pure
thirteenth century, with a good deal of old glass still in the
windows; and he looked forward to hearing Mass, his eyes raised to
some wonderful purples which a friend of his in London, in whom he
placed great faith, had told him to be sure not to miss seeing.

Ugly glass, ugly vestments, ugly architecture, distract one's
attention from one's prayers. The music is simple at Aix, but I hear
it is excellent; and he pressed me to go with him in the morning,
saying that I would be able to appreciate the glass better during the
service than afterwards. The purples you speak of must be wonderful
when there is a prayer in the heart, but I cannot pray in a church,
Edward, and the rather in a Roman Catholic church. There are times
when Edward is afraid to understand, others when he cannot; and asking
myself which is the real Edward I directed my steps towards the
church.

The folk were coming out, but Edward was not among them, and I feared
that my opportunity was lost of learning something definite about
architecture. He might, however, be in the church, and was discovered
after a long search at the end of a pew, in a distant corner, still
praying heavily. Reluctant to interrupt him, I stood watching, touched
by his piety. He crossed himself, came out of the pew, genuflected
before the altar, and hastened towards me, now ready to explain the
difference between the Romanesque and the Gothic, and that day I
learned that the Romanesque windows are round and the Gothic pointed.

It is always interesting to add to one's store of information; all the
simple facts of the world are not known to everybody; and when Edward
had told me that the cathedral at Aix bore traces of both styles, we
went to study the stained glass, stopping before a large window, the
beauty of which, he said, filled him with enthusiasm for the genius of
the thirteenth century.

But, my dear Edward, I'm sure that is a modern window.

Whereupon he blazed out. He respected my judgment, but not about
stained glass, nor about architecture, and he reminded me that five
minutes before I did not know the difference between the Gothic and
the Romanesque.

That is quite true; all the same, I know the window to be modern; and
after a heated argument we went in search of a beadle, who produced a
guide-book and a little English; Edward produced a little German, and
between the three--guide-book, German-English, and English-German--it
was established beyond doubt that the window was exactly six years
old. But let no one conclude that this story is told in order to show
that dear Edward is one of the nine hundred and ninety and nine who
cannot distinguish between the thirteenth century and a modern
imitation of it. Were the story told for this purpose I should be a
false friend, and, what is worse, a superficial writer. The story is
told in order to show Edward when the fog descends upon him. His
comprehension is never the same. There is always a little mist about;
sometimes it is no more than a white, evanescent mist sufficient to
dim the outlines of things, making them seem more beautiful; sometimes
the mist thickens into yellow fog through which nothing is seen. It
trails along the streets of his mind, filling every alley, and then
the fog lifts and pinnacles are seen again. He is like Ireland, the
country he came from; sometimes a muddling fog, sometimes a delicious
mist with a ray of light striking through; and that is why he is the
most delightful of travelling companions. One comes very soon to the
end of a mind that thinks clearly, but one never comes to the end of
Edward.

After the cathedral we went to the picture-gallery, and I remember a
number of small rooms--hung with pictures, of course, since it was a
picture-gallery--and going down these with Edward, and being stopped
suddenly by the sight of one picture so beautiful that all the others
are forgotten. Who can have painted it? Let us stand here--don't go
near it; let us try to work it out. Some Dutch or Flemish master. A
Flemish master rather than a Dutch master--I cannot get nearer to it
than that; but one of the most beautiful pieces of paintings in the
world,--a picture, let us say, twenty-four by thirty-six (remember, it
is ten or a dozen years since I have seen it!) painted on canvas or on
a panel; for aught I know it may be painted on copper; but if I have
forgotten the details that interest the bric--brac hunter, I have not
forgotten the painting. But no more than this will I say about
it--that it is not by Hondecoeter nor by Cuyp, who painted barn-door
fowls occasionally, nor by Snyders. Its brilliant beauty is beyond the
scope of their palettes. Shall I satisfy the curiosity of the reader,
or shall I excite it by concealing the name? Excite it by telling him
to be sure to stop at Aix-la-Chapelle on his way to Bayreuth to see
the most beautiful cock that ever trod a hen on a dunghill--a glowing,
golden bird.




VI


A long train journey awaited us (and Edward insists on travelling
second-class, however hot the weather may be), and all the way to
Mainz the day grew hotter and hotter, the carriage narrower and
narrower, and Edward's knees longer and longer. Our carriage was
filled with large-bellied Germans, and whenever the train stopped, and
any of our travelling-companions got out, other Germans, as
large-bellied as those who left us, climbed in, followed by their
_Frauen_--swaying, perspiring German females, hugely breasted,
sweating in their muslin dresses, and tediously good-humoured. It was
necessary to find places for the new arrivals and their luggage, and
all the way to Mainz it seemed to me that Edward was being asked to
remove his luggage, and that I was helping him to lift his valise into
the rack or out of it.

The cathedral is in red brick--rose-coloured domes upon a blue
sky--and it is said to be of very ancient date; whether Gothic or
Romanesque I cannot remember. Edward seemed loath to express an
opinion, and he questioned me regarding the probable age of certain
walls, but not with a view to tempting me into a trap, and so repair
his own mistakes with mine; he is far too good-natured for that. I
should like to have shown off; _faire la roue_ is natural to every
human being; but fearing to lose my newly acquired prestige by a
mistake, I assured Edward that Mainz cathedral was all right, and
hurried him off to catch the boat, anxious to get away, for Mainz is a
pompous town--imitation French, white streets with tall blue roofs,
and some formal gardens along the river. We felt as if we were being
roasted. The Rhine itself did not look cooler than molten lead, and
we waited, limping over the burning cobble-stones and asphalt, till
our boat turned in, our intention being to ascend the Rhine as far as
the boats go.

A couple of hours of Rhenish scenery, however, tamed our enthusiasm,
and I sought Edward out among the passengers, feeling that I must tell
him at once that I had discovered Rhenish scenery to be entirely
opposed to my temperament. As he wished me to see Lorelei, there was
nothing for it but to remain on deck until the boat had passed the
Rhine Maiden's Rock. The harpist and the fiddler whom we had on board
might have attempted to play some of the Rhine music; they might at
least have played the motives, but they continued to scrape out their
waltzes as we steamed over the very spot where Alberich had robbed the
Maidens of the Fairy Gold.

We are in the country of Gnther and Hagen. It must have looked better
in those days than it does now; otherwise Siegfried would not have
left Brnnhilde.

Do you really think the Rhine so ugly?

Edward! mile after mile of ugly shapeless hills, disfigured by ruins
of castles in which one would fain believe that robber-barons once
lived, but one knows in one's heart that they were only built to
attract tourists. And to make the hills seem still more ugly, vines
have been planted everywhere, and I know of nothing more unpicturesque
than a vineyard. The beauty of a swelling wheat-field is obvious to
everybody, and the lesser beauty of fields of oats, barley, and rye. I
can admire a field of mustard, though I doubt if it would find its way
more easily into a picture than a zebra or a Swiss chalet. I love
sainfoin and clover, and do not turn up my nose at cabbages; a
potato-field in flower is a beautiful sight; much can be said in
favour of mangolds, mangold-wurzels; parsnips and turnip-tops are
leathery, but under certain skies they present a pleasant variation in
the landscape. A hop-country is one of the most beautiful things in
the world, but vines are abhorrent--not for any moral reasons; I
appreciate good wine with difficulty, but I'm not a teetotaller.

Look; the other bank isn't so ugly.

It is higher and steeper, and there are trees. But trees in Germany
seem to lose their beauty; they clothe the hillside like gigantic
asparagus.

At that moment a castle rose up through the trees, seemingly built
upon the top of a crag, and we learned from one of the officers on
board that it belonged to a certain German baron who spent some months
of every year in it; and we wondered how he reached it, without
experiencing, however, the slightest desire to visit him and his
German family.

There's Boppart, Edward said. We'll stop there.

My heart answered yes, for my heart is full of memories of Boppart, a
charming, little village on the banks of the river, where we dine on a
balcony, and where, with a bottle of Rhine wine on the table and the
thought of the bottle that will follow in our minds, the hours dream
themselves away. We awake at midnight as from fairyland. We have been
in fairyland, for on Boppart's balcony we leave the casual and
inferior interests of our daily lives to mingle with Gods and
Goddesses. The story of _The Ring_ is told there best, by him that
knows it, amid pensive attitudes and minds uplifted to Valhalla; and
in the telling the August dusk dies on the river, and the song of the
river is heard at last coming up through the darkness.

All trains stop at Boppart, and Edward discovered a good one soon
after midday; so we should have plenty of time to climb the hillside
and visit the church, which we did, and found it to be a straight,
stiff building with flying buttresses, fine in a way, built in the
fourteenth or fifteenth century, when every building was beautiful ...
even in Germany. And when Edward had completed his inspection of the
church we wandered about the hillside, finding ourselves at last in
some shady gardens, where we had no right to stray. We shall never see
those gardens again, but the dim green shade of the trees and the long
grass are pleasant to remember. And it was pleasant to lie there for
an hour, out of the way of the light. We who live under grey skies in
the North always cry out for the light, but in the South we follow the
shade; and I should have been glad to have lingered all the afternoon
in that garden, but Edward was anxious to get on to Nuremberg.

The journey is a long and tedious one, and we did not arrive there
before something had arisen as much like a quarrel as anything that
could happen between me and Edward. A quarrel with Edward is so
unthinkable that the reader will pardon me for telling what happened.
We were both tired of talking, tired of holding our tongues, tired of
thinking, and for some forgotten reason the conversation had turned on
newspapers, on their circulation, and how they may profit the owner
through the advertisements if the circulation does not pass beyond a
certain figure.

But as the circulation increases the loss disappears.

Not, Edward, if a single number costs more to produce than the price
it is sold at. The illustrated paper we are speaking of is sold at
sixpence. The editor makes a large profit if he sells twenty thousand,
because if he can guarantee that circulation he can, let us say, get
two thousand pounds of advertisements--the maximum that he can get;
and as the paper costs sixpence-halfpenny to produce, you see, it will
not do for him to sell twenty-five thousand or thirty thousand.

But that is just what I don't see. I've always heard that if you sell
enough--

That is when the cost of producing a single copy does not exceed the
price at which it is sold.

Edward remained recalcitrant, and after many efforts on my part to
explain, he begged me not to lose my temper.

I can't see it.

The fog, the fog, I said to myself, is descending upon him. And never
was it so thick as it is at this moment between Boppart and Nuremberg.

And it lasted all the evening, thickening during dinner, no sign of a
pinnacle anywhere. It was not until next morning after breakfast that
one began to appear.

That illustrated paper, Edward began.

You aren't going to open that discussion again, I replied,
interrupting him.

It was to tell you that I have been thinking over your argument, and
that I see it all quite plainly now. There are times when my mind is
denser than at others.

It is charming to hear a man admit that he is wrong--nothing is more
winning; and we went away together, talking of Achilles and the
tortoise, an admirable fallacy, resting, it appears, upon a false
analogy which no one is able to detect. Edward, however, had been able
to unravel the other problem, and we were going to see the old town.
But on our way there we were stopped by the most beautiful fountain in
the world, to which all the folk come to draw water. The drawing of
the water is accomplished by some strange medieval device which I
cannot remember, and which if I did would be difficult to describe: a
grooved iron (one cannot call it a pipe) is tipped over, it fills with
water and then it is tipped back again, and the water runs out very
prettily.

It surprises me that I am not able to produce a better description of
an object that delighted and interested me for quite a long while,
compelling me not only to drink when I was not thirsty, but forcing me
to beg Edward to do likewise. He besought me to leave that fountain,
but its beauty fascinated me. I returned to it again and again, and I
remember yielding at last, not to exhortations that we should be late
for dinner, nor to the strength of his arm, but to the eighteen stone
to which that arm is attached. It dragged me away, I vowing all the
while that I should never go to Nuremberg without finding time to run
down to see that fountain. But the last time I was in Nuremberg, two
years ago, the fountain was not to be discovered, at least by me, and
after walking till we were both foot-sore, the friend who set out with
me to seek it declared it to be a dream-fountain. We took a carriage
and questioned the driver. He pretended to understand and drove us to
see a number of sights, and among them were some fountains, but not my
fountain--mere parish pumps. My friend jeered the more. A
dream-fountain! A dream-fountain! So I insisted on returning to the
hotel to ask the way to the fountain from the hotel-porter. A
Continental porter or concierge can understand trains and luggage in
all languages, and when he has learned to do this his intellect is
exhausted, like one who has won a fellowship at Trinity. And our man,
to save himself from the suspicion that was beginning to fall upon him
that he did not understand us, said the fountain had been abolished
two years ago, an open fountain being considered injurious to the
health of the town. It may be so. But I have much difficulty in
believing that the Nuremberg folk would permit such a vandalism, and
shall be glad if some reader who knows German will inquire the matter
out when he is next in Nuremberg, and publish, if he discovers it, the
shameful order for the destruction of the fountain.

The old citadel crowns the hill, and around many devious streets a
panting horse dragged us, through the burning afternoon, up to the
castle gateway. We were shown the famous virgin of Nuremberg, and all
the strange instruments that the ecclesiastics of the Middle Ages
devised for the torment of their religions enemies, together with the
stuffed representation of a robber-baron, said to have harried the
town-folk for years, he and twenty-five companions. The tale runs that
one day he failed to make good his retreat to the cave amid the woods,
and was taken prisoner. The custom of the town was that a man
condemned to death should be allowed whatever enjoyment he might
choose on the eve of his execution; a last bite of the cake of earthly
satisfactions should be his. The baron loved his horse, and declared
that he chose to ride him through the town. No one divined a ruse in
this choice. The baron was free for the time being, and putting spurs
to his horse he jumped over the parapet into the moat, and swam the
animal across it, and so escaped. But at the end of three years he was
again taken prisoner; this time the usual gratification allowed to
prisoners was refused him; he was put forthwith on the wheel, and his
limbs broken one by one with an iron bar. And looking at the wheel, I
said to Edward:

You wouldn't have been broken, but I should, had I lived in those
times; and Luther would not have escaped had it not been for the
Elector of Saxony.

We discovered the great monk's portrait in the museum, and a splendid
piece of portraiture it is, Cranach fixing upon our minds for ever a
bluff face with a fearless eye in it. We looked into the panel
tenderly, thinking of the stormy story of his life--quite a little
panel, eight or ten by six or seven inches, containing but the head
and shoulders, and so like Luther! Those fifteenth-century painters
convince us, giving in a picture a likeness more real than any
photograph, and doing this because they were able to look at nature
innocently. We wondered at his Adam and Eve, two little panels,
hanging close by, single figures, covering with their hands certain
ridiculous but necessary organs, in modern pictures generally hidden
by somebody else's elbow, or a flying gull, or a flying towel, or what
not. Modern painting is uninteresting because there is no innocency
left in it. Blessed are the innocent, for theirs is the kingdom of
Art!

Edward admired these nudes as much as I did, and when he said it was
not a painter's but a photographer's studio that shocked him, I
muttered to myself: Pinnacles! pinnacles! On this we went down the
galleries, discovering suddenly a beautiful portrait by Boucher, and
the question whether his vision was an innocent one arose, and it was
discussed before a portrait of a beautiful woman, looking like some
rare flower or a bird--only a head and shoulders, with all Boucher's
extraordinary handicraft apparent in the dress she wears--a cynical
thing, for the painter has told her story lightly, gracefully, almost
casually.

And I had to admit that however much we may admire him, we cannot
describe his vision as being as innocent as Cranach's.

All the same, these are the two painters who make Nuremberg
rememberable, and we left it full of curiosity to see a town about
sixty miles south of Bayreuth, having heard that it is today exactly
as it was in the fifteenth century, less changed than any other town
in Germany. The journey there was a wearisome one, for our train shed
some of its German peasantry at every station and gathered up more,
and it carried many creels of geese, and these cackled monotonously,
while a very small engine drew us with so much difficulty that we
feared it would break down at the next ascent. But it reached
Rothenburg at the end of a long afternoon, blond as the corn-fields
through which we had come, and I said:

We might have walked, driving the geese before us. We should have
arrived in time for supper instead of arriving in time for dinner.

The station is about a mile distant from the town, whither the hotel
omnibus took us, and having ordered dinner to be ready in an hour's
time, we went out to see the streets, Edward, as usual, seeking the
church, which was found at last. But I did not follow him into it, the
evening being so fine that it seemed to me shameful to miss any moment
of it. Never were the streets of Rothenburg more beautiful than that
evening, not even when the costumes of old time moved through them. A
more beautiful sky never unfolded, and girls, passing with alert steps
and roguish glances, answering their admirers with sallies of
impertinent humour, are always delightful. They and the sky absorbed
my attention, for it is natural for me to admire what is permanent,
whereas Edward is attached to the transitory. He had just come out of
the church, where he had discovered a few bits of old glass, and he
was talking of these eagerly, and congratulating himself that we had
seen everything there was to be seen in Rothenburg, and would be able
to go away next morning. His hurry to leave shocked me not a little.
It semed indeed like an insult to go into a town, look about one, and
rush away again without bestowing a thought upon the people who lived
in it. So did I speak to him, telling him that while he had been
poking about in the church I had been thinking of a sojourn of six
months in Rothenburg in some pretty lodging which one could easily
find tomorrow, and the attendance of a sweet German girl. From her it
would be possible to learn a little German, rejoicing in her presence
in the room while she repeated a phrase, so that we might catch the
sound of the words. At the end of the day it would be pleasant to
wander with my few mouthfuls of German into the fields, and make new
acquaintances. The whole of my life would not be spent in Rothenburg,
but enough of it to acquire a memory of Rothenburg. But Edward did not
understand me. All he cared to study were the monuments and the public
buildings, and from them he could learn all there was worth knowing
about the people that had made them, all people being more or less
disagreeable to him, I said to myself; especially women, I added,
noticing that he averted his eyes from the girls that passed in twos
and threes; and as if desirous to distract my attention from them, he
called upon me to admire a very wide, red-tiled roof, and some old
lanterns hung on a chain across the street. These things and the
hillside over against our window interested Edward more than any man
or woman could; quaint little houses went up the hillside like the
houses in Drer's pictures. There are quite a number of them in his
picture of Fortune. Everybody knows the woman who stands on the world
holding a chalice in one hand; she does not hold it straight, as she
would have done if the painter had been an inferior artist: Drer
leaned it a little towards the spectator. Over one arm hangs some
curious bridle, at least in the engraving it seems to be a bridle with
many bits and chains; and every one of these and the reins are drawn
with a precision which gives them beauty. Drer's eyes saw very
clearly, and they had to see clearly, and steadily, to interest us in
that great rump and thigh. One wonders who the model was, and why
Drer chose her. Degas more than once drew a creature as short-legged
and as bulky, and the model he chose was the wife of a butcher in the
Rue La Rochefoucauld. The poor creature arrived in all her finery, the
clothes which she wore when she went to Mass on Sunday, and her
amazement and her disappointment are easily imagined when Degas told
her he wanted her to pose for the naked. She was accompanied by her
husband, and knowing her to be not exactly a Venus de Milo, he tried
to dissuade Degas, and Edward who has had little experience of life,
expressed surprise that a husband should not guard his wife's honour
more vigilantly; but he laughed when I told that Degas had assured the
butcher that the erotic sentiment was not strong in him, and he liked
my description of the poor, deformed creature standing in front of a
tin bath, gripping her flanks with both hands--his bias towards
ecclesiasticism enables him to sympathise with the Middle Ages, and
its inherent tendency to regard women as inferior, and to keep them
out of sight.

It's strange, I said to myself, to feel so different from one's
fellows, to be exempt from all interest and solicitude for the female,
to be uninfluenced by that beauty which sex dowers her with, and which
achieves such marvels in the heart. We go to our mistresses as to
Goddesses, and the peasant, though he does not think of Goddesses,
thinks of the wife waiting for him at his fireside, with a tender,
kindly emotion of which the labour of the fields has not been able to
rob him. It's wonderful to come into the world unconcerned with the
other sex, Edward.

You think I hate women. You're quite wrong. I don't hate women, only
they seem absurd. When I see them going along the streets together
they make me laugh; their hats and feathers, everything about them.

We come into the world, Edward, with different minds; that is a thing
we can't remember too often. What makes you laugh enchants me. Nature
has given us companions as different from us as the birds of the air,
and for that I shall always feel grateful to Nature.

And then, just for the sake of expressing myself, though I knew that
Edward would never understand, I told him that the coming of a woman
into the room was like a delicious change of light.

Without women we should be all reasonable, Edward; there would be no
instinct, and a reasonable world--what would it be like? A garden
without flowers, music without melody.

But these comparisons did not satisfy me, and seeking for another one
I hit upon this, and it seemed to express my meaning better: without
women the world would be like a palette set in the raw umber and
white. Women are the colouring matter, the glaze the old painters
used. Edward wanted information as to the method employed by the old
painters, but I preferred to develop my theme, telling him that a
mother's affection for her daughter was quite different from her
affection for her son, and that when a father looks upon his daughter
he hears the love that he bore her mother echoed down the years, and
muttering the old saw God is Love, I said that it would be much truer
to invert the words, considering religion as a development of the
romance which begins on earth.

To one who realises hell more clearly than heaven, and to one so
temperamentally narrow as my friend, it must have been disagreeable
to hear me say that religion has helped many to raise sex from earth
to heaven; to instance Teresa as an example, saying how she has, in
hundreds of pages of verse and prose, told her happy fate, that, by
resigning an earthly, she has acquired an eternal Bridegroom.

It was in the second or third century that the Church became aware
that heaven without a virgin could not commend itself to man's
imagination, but the adoration of the Virgin, said to be encouraged by
the Catholic Church, has never been realised by any saint that I know
of--not even by St Bernard. Nor is this altogether to be wondered at;
the Virgin is always represented with a baby in her arms: motherhood
is her constant occupation, and I can imagine Edward, to whom all
exhibition of sex is disagreeable, being not a little shocked at the
insistence of certain painters on the breast, the nipple, and the
gluttonous lips of the child. The exhibition which women make of their
bosoms at dinner-parties has always struck him as somewhat ludicrous.
Full-blown roses, he used to call them, reminding him of the
flower-maidens in Klinsor's garden.

Who could not tempt Parsifal, and would not tempt you, Edward. But
would you have yelled as he did when Kundry tried to kiss him?

By one of those intricate and elaborate analogies of thought which
surprise us, Parsifal took me back to my chambers in King's Bench
Walk, and I told Edward how, when I was writing _Esther Waters_, it
was a help to me to gossip with my laundress after breakfast, a pious
woman of the Nonconformist type, like Esther herself. Almost any
topical event provided a basis for ethical discussion; a divorce case
best of all, and the O'Shea divorce and Parnell's complicity seemed to
me to be the very thing. But it was impossible to engage her
attention, and soon it was evident that she was much more interested
in a certain murder case--a Mrs Percy who had murdered another woman's
baby, and hidden it in a perambulator. It was the perambulator that
gave the story the touch of realism that appealed to my laundress's
imagination. But the murder of a baby offering little scope for
ethical discussion, I took advantage of the first break in the flow of
her conversation to remind her that the crimes were not parallel.

Don't you think so, sir? And I can still see her rolling her apron
about her arms. It comes to the same thing in the end, sir, for when
one party goes away with the other party, the party that's left behind
dies.

Her view of life interested me; the importance of desertion is greater
among the lower classes than it is among the upper; but it could not
be doubted that she was telling me what she had heard from the parson
rather than any view of her own, drawn from her experience.
Therefore, to get at herself, to force her into direct personal
expression, I said:

You can't seriously maintain, Mrs Millar, that adultery is as great a
crime as murder?

Still winding her coarse apron round her arms, she stood looking at
me, her eyes perplexed and ambiguous, and I thought of how I might
move her out of her position.

You know your Bible, Mrs Millar? You know the story of the woman of
Samaria? And you remember that Christ forbade the people to stone her,
and told her to sin no more?... Mrs Millar, you can't deny that Christ
said that ... and you are a Christian woman.

Yes, sir, he did say that; but you must remember he was only a
bachelor.

I think I fell back in my chair and looked at my laundress in
amazement, until she began to wonder what was the matter, and she must
have wondered the more when I told her she had said something which I
should never forget.

But what I said is true, isn't it? she answered shyly.

Yes, it's quite true, only nobody ever thought of it before, Mrs
Millar! It's true that the married man who brings home his wages at
the end of the week is the one that understands life, and you are
quite right to condone Christ's laxity in not pronouncing a fuller
condemnation. You are quite right. The bachelor may not attain to any
full comprehension of the 'ome.

She left the room, confused and wondering at my praise, thinking that
she had answered as everybody would have answered, and conscious of
having expressed national sentiments.

Dear Irish Edward was shocked by Mrs Millar's theology at first, but
hearing that she was a pious woman, he roused a little, and, lest he
might reproach Protestantism for its married clergy, I reminded him
that Rome still retained married clergy in Greece. His answer was that
he was sure the Greek priests abstained from their wives before their
ministrations, an answer that rejoiced my heart exceedingly, and set
me thinking that the Western mind has never been able to assimilate,
or even understand, the ideas that Christianity brought from the East.
Our notions of the value of chastity are crude enough, and the Brahmin
would life his eyes in silent contempt on hearing from a priest that a
man, if he lives chastely, though he be a glutton and a drunkard, will
never descend to so low a stage of materialism as he that lives with a
woman ... even if his life be strict. The oddest of all animals is
man; in him, as in all other animals, the sexual interest is the
strongest; yet the desire is inveterate in him to reject it; and I am
sure that Christ's words that in heaven there is neither marriage nor
giving in marriage have taken a great weight off Edward's mind, and
must have inspired in him many prayers for a small stool in heaven.
If by any chance he should not get one (which is, of course,
unthinkable) and finds himself among the damned, his plight will be
worse than ever, for I suppose he will have no opportunity for
correcting his natural disinclination, and I believe no theologian has
yet decided that the damned do not continue to commit the sins in hell
which they were damned for committing on earth.

Edward always leads me to think of the Middle Ages, but he also leads
me to think sometimes of the ages that preceded these. There are
survivals of pagan rites in Christianity, and in every man there is a
survival of the pagan that preceded him; paganism is primordial fire,
and it is always breaking through the Christian crust. We know of the
eruption that took place in Italy in the sixteenth century, and,
though the pagan Edward lies in durance vile, Edward is, in common
with every other human being, no more than a pagan overlaid with
Christianity. If three men meet in _The Heather Field_ to speak of the
misfortune that comes to a man when he allows himself to be inveigled
by woman's beauty, they express, every one of them, a craving for some
higher beauty, and this craving finds beautiful expression in the
scene between Carden Tyrrell and his brother; and the same craving for
some beauty, half imagined, something which the world has lost, is the
theme of _Maeve_. She renounces earthly love, and dreams of a hero of
Celtic romance, and in her last sleep he visits her at the head of a
wonderful assemblage. Edward's paganism finds fuller expression in
_The Enchanted Sea_ than in any other play. In the depths of green
sea-water, we catch sight of the face of the beautiful boy, Guy, whose
drowning causes Lord Mark such blinding despair that he walks like one
enchanted into the sea, and is carried away by the waves. More in this
play than in the others do we catch a glimpse of the author's earlier
soul, for every soul proceeds out of paganism; only in Edward the
twain are more distinct; neither has absorbed the other, both exist
contemporaneously and side by side--a Greek marble may be found
enfolded in a friar's frock.




VII


Though we could find nothing of interest to say about Rothenburg, we
did not wish to leave the town in a slighting silence, so I asked
Edward if he thought that living among medieval aspects influenced the
children playing, and if it were possible to feel sure that the
Rothenburg mind could be as effective in modern life as the Berlin, or
the Carlsbad, or the Dresden? Edward replied that he did not know or
care whether it would be as effective, but was quite sure that life
in a medieval town could not fail to produce a beautiful mind, and a
long discussion sprang up between us, I maintaining that it were
better to live in a modern town like Dsseldorf, in which there is
only one picture--Holbein's Holy Family--then to live in a medieval
town like Rothenburg, where there are only roofs and lanterns; Edward
declaring that art is traditional, and where there is no tradition
there can be no art, and, though it was not likely that Rothenburg
would produce an impressionist painter--

There is no saying that Rothenburg might not produce another Cranach,
or, better still, another Luther. And you would not mind sacrificing
some red roofs to save Europe from another heresy.

Edward did not like my remark. It proved my soul, he said, a shallow
one, for whenever I was being cornered in an argument I tried to
banter my way out.

Continue, my dear friend; but I don't see your point.

Nor do I see yours, he answered--I thought somewhat testily.
Rothenburg is a Gothic town, and you don't approve of the Gothic. Is
your proposal to turn the people out of Rothenburg and keep the place
as a museum? You wouldn't destroy it, I suppose?

Destroy it! No, I answered. But if it can be shown that medieval
surroundings are not altogether a healthy influence upon children, do
you not think that some opportunity should be given to them for
contrasting the old with the new, and that some part of the town, for
instance, should be modernised?

It is possible that the reader will think that I was rather tiresome
that day, but so was the train, and to while away the time there was
no resource but to raise the question whether Rothenburg would have
produced the same Edward as Galway. But the question did not succeed
in provoking any of those psychological admissions that make him so
agreeable a travelling companion. He was not in a communicative mood
that afternoon, and to draw him out I was obliged to remind him that
Bavaria is Protestant and Catholic, and strangely intermixed, for the
two sects use the same church--service at eleven and Mass at twelve.

And you might have been brought up a Protestant, Edward, or half and
half.

A grave look came into his face, and he answered that if he hadn't
been brought up a Catholic, and severely, he might have gone to pieces
altogether; and I sat pondering the very interesting question whether
Edward would have done better as a Protestant than as a Catholic.
Every man knows himself better than any one else can know him, and
Edward seemed to think that he needed a stay. Perhaps so, but there
is a vein of thought--perhaps I should say of feeling--in him which
Catholicism seems to me to have restrained, and which Protestantism, I
like to think, would have encouraged. The effect of religion upon
character was worth considering, and as there was nothing else to do
in the train I set myself to think the matter out.

But it is hard to set bounds on one's thoughts, and mine suddenly
turned from Edward, and I found myself wondering if the great genius
towards whom we were faring could have written _The Ring_ in
Rothenburg. Now this was a question which had to be put to Edward, and
at once, and he applied himself to it, pointing out that Bayreuth was
nearly as quaint and slumberous as Rothenburg, yet Wagner had written
part of _The Ring_ in Bayreuth. True that he had written parts of it
all over Europe; some of it was written in Switzerland, some in Italy,
some even in Dorset Square.

But if he had been born in Rothenburg and had never left it--

The noise of the train prevented me from catching his answer, and
leaning back in my seat, I fell to thinking of the extraordinary joy
and interest that Bayreuth had been in my life ever since Edward and I
went there for the first time at the beginning of the 'nineties, after
hearing a performance of _The Ring_ in London.

It had been the horns announcing the Rhine that re-awakened my musical
conscience. The melodies of my own country I had never heard.
Offenbach and Herv stirred me to music when we went to live in
London, and I carried to Paris all their little tunes in my head.
Painters are often more or less musicians: one such drifted into our
studio, and he introduced me to the Circle des Merlitons, where I
heard Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart. Classical music ousted operette
without difficulty; and as long as there were musical friends about,
music was followed with as much interest as could be spared from the
art of painting. But when the maladministration of my affairs called
me from Paris to Ireland musical interests disappeared with my French
friends; they were driven underground when agrarian outrages compelled
me to consider the possibility of earning my living. The only way open
to me was literature, so I went to London to learn to write, as has
been told in a chapter in an earlier book.

In London literature and poverty absorbed me for several years, and I
had forgotten music altogether when Edward asked me if I would go to
hear _The Rhinegold_. I had consented, regretting my promise almost as
soon as it was given, for Wagner was reputed unmelodious and difficult
to all except the most erudite, and fearing that I should be bored for
several hours by sounds which would mean nothing to me, I began to
seek for excuses, and to ask Edward if he could not dispose of the
ticket he had taken for me. He could not do this, and as my plaints
did not cease, he said to me, as we walked up King's Bench Walk:

Well, there's no use your coming. All my pleasure will be spoilt.

The dark theatre reminded me of the rooms at exhibitions in which bad
pictures are exhibited, no light showing anywhere except on the
picture itself; but the moment the horns gave out the theme of the
Rhine my attention was arrested, and a few minutes after it was clear
that new birth awaited me. A day or two later I heard _Tristan_, and
it so happened that there were performances at Bayreuth that year, so
Edward and I went there together, and we have gone there many times
since, each visit awakening every little musical faculty in me, and
developing it; and though nothing can be created, a seed can be
developed prodigiously, and a taste likewise, if the soil be fertile
and circumstances fortunate. They were certainly favourable to my
picking up this lost interest. Edward is a true melamonaic, loving all
good music, and ready to travel anywhere to hear music; then there is
Dujardin, who is always talking to me about music; his friends are
musicians and whenever I go to Paris I am with musicians, talking
about music when not listening to it, and once again my life began to
unfold in a musical atmosphere. To feel one's life unfolding is joy.
Life should never cease to unfold, and it will be time enough for
Death to lower the banner when the last stitch of canvas is reached.

Now I was going to Bayreuth again, determined to understand _The Ring_
a little better than heretofore. But was this possible? I can learn
until somebody tries to teach me; all the same every man is at tether,
and lying back in my seat in the train from Rothenburg, a little weary
of conversation with Edward, I relinquished myself to regrets that my
ear only allows me to hear the surface of the music, the motives which
float up to the top, the transforming effect of a chord upon a melodic
phrase. I can hear that Wagner's melodies arise naturally one out of
the other. If I could not hear that every melody in _Tristan_ rises
out of the one that preceded it, Wagner would have written in vain, so
far as I was concerned. My ear is but rudimentary, an ear that will
seem like no ear to those who can hear the whole orchestra together
and in detail, seeing in their mind's eye the notes that every
instrument is playing. It is well to have their ears, but mere ear
will not carry anybody very far; to appreciate music an intelligence
is necessary; and those who are not gifted with too much ear can hear
the music oftener than those who can read it. Last year in Paris Dukas
told me he would not go to hear some music with me because he had read
it, and having once read a piece of music there was nothing left in it
for him.

So essentially human is Wagner that there is something in his art for
everybody, something in his music for me, and a great deal for
musicians; and besides the music, some part of which everybody except
the tone-deaf can hear, there are the dramas, wonderful in conception
and literary art; for him gifted with imagination there are scenes in
_The Ring_ as beautiful as any in Shakespeare; and were Dujardin
pressed to state his real feeling on the subject he would affirm that
nothing has been written in words as moving as the scene in which
Brnnhilde tells Siegmund that Wotan is calling him to Valhalla. Not
the music, Dujardin cries--it is not the music that counts, but the
words. The music is beautiful, of course it is--it couldn't be else;
but so intensely aware was Wagner of the poetry that he allowed it to
transpire.

One can think about Dujardin and Wagner without the time appearing
long; and I had forgotten a very important matter about which there
had been a great deal of correspondence, till I was suddenly reminded
of it by a slackening in the speed of the train.

At the time I am writing of, Bayreuth was an uncomfortable town to
live in; it has changed a good deal within the last ten years, and in
the twentieth century we get better food in the restaurants than we
did in the nineteenth; bathrooms have begun to appear, the fly-haunted
privy is nearly extinct, and this was the important matter that the
slackening of the train's speed had reminded me of. We had written
many letters, and had many interviews with the agent who apportions
out the lodgings, and my last words had been to him, A clean privy! He
had promised that he would see to it, but from the direction in which
the coachman was driving us, it would seem that the desirable
accommodation was not procurable in the town. It was Edward who
noticed that our coachman was heading straight for the country, and
standing up in the carriage, he began to expostulate--ineffectually,
however, for Edward's German is limited and the driver only laughed,
pointing with a whip towards a hillside facing the theatre, and there
we saw a villa embowered and overlooking a corn-field, a lodging so
delightful that I could not but feel interested in Edward's objection
to it.

We shall be out of the way of everything, was all he shrieked.

But not out of the way of the theatre! I interjected. We shall walk
through the corn-fields to it.

The theatre isn't everything.

Everything in Bayreuth ... surely.

He spoke of his breakfast. He wouldn't be able to get it. He must be
near a restaurant, and the corn-field did not appeal to his sense of
the picturesque as Rothenburg did. Despite my entreaty, he stood up
again in the carriage, and began to expostulate with the driver again,
who, however, only laughed and pointed with his whip, pouring forth
all the while a torrent of Bavarian German which Edward could not
understand.

How shall I stop him? he cried, turning to me, who can speak no
single word of German. After mentioning this fact, I reminded him that
the people in the villa were waiting for us, and for us to go away to
the town without advising them might prevent them from letting their
lodgings. I said this, knowing Edward's weak spot--his moral
conscience. He fell to my arrow, answering quietly that he would
willingly pay for the lodging on the hillside if I would only go with
him to the town in search of another. To this I consented, unwillingly
I admit, but I consented. My unwillingness, however, to live in the
town, where all the decent lodgings had long ago been taken, became
more marked when we were shown into a large drawing-room and two
bedrooms, the cleanest we had ever seen in Bayreuth.

We shall want a room in which to write _The Tale of a Town_.

The mention of his play did not seem to soften Edward, and the
landlord, an elderly man, who had relinquished me because I knew no
German at all, attached himself to Edward--literally attached himself,
taking him by the lappet of his coat; and I remember how the old man
drew him along with him to the end of a passage, I following them,
compelled by curiosity. We came to a door, which the old man threw
open with a flourish, exhibiting to our enchanted gaze a brand-new
water-closet, all varnish and cleanliness, and the pride of the old
man, who entered into a long explanation, the general drift only of
which pierced Edward's understanding. He says he has redecorated the
privy for us at the special request of Mr Schulz Curtis. But if we pay
him for his lodging!

No mere payment will recompense him. Remember he asked you if you
liked the wallpaper. He may have spent hours choosing it.

But, blind to all the allurements of the checkered paper, Edward
insisted on telling the landlord that he wished to live near a
restaurant where he could get his breakfast. The German again caught
him by the lappet of his coat, and there was a pretty German girl who
knew a little English, the old man's daughter, smiling in the doorway,
about whom I had already begun to think. But it was impossible to
dissuade Edward, and we drove with our luggage here and there and
everywhere, seeking a couple of rooms. It would be inopportune to
describe every filthy suite of apartments that we visited; but it is
not well, in a book of this kind, to omit any vivid memory, and among
my memories none is more vivid than that of an iron railing dividing a
sort of shallow area from the street in which some workmen were
drinking beer, and of the kitchen beyond it. Uncouth women, round in
the back as washtubs, walked about with frying-pans in their hands,
great udders floating under blue blouses; and we followed a trail of
inferior German cookery up a black slimy staircase to the first
landing, where a bald-headed waiter, with large drops of sweat upon
his brow, opened a door, exhibiting for our inspection two
low-ceilinged rooms with high beds in the corners.

Ask him if we can have clean sheets. We have no others, the waiter
answered.

As I moved towards the doorway, I heard Edward saying that the rooms
would do us very well, and when I explained to him their
disadvantages, he answered that he would be able to get his breakfast.
To get his breakfast! The phrase seemed so Irish, so Catholic, that
for a moment it was impossible to suppress my anger at Edward's
unseemly indifference to my sense of cleanliness and comfort, and the
women in the kitchen, the waiter, and the sheets horrified me, even to
the extent of compelling me to tell him that I would sooner go back to
England, giving up _The Ring, Parsifal_--

I would sooner sleep anywhere, Edward; in the streets! Let us get
away. Perhaps we shall find--

No, you'll object to all.

But why, Edward, should you stay here? You can have breakfast at our
lodging.

I shan't be able to get an omelette. Can't you understand that people
have habits?

Habits! I said.

And then he admitted--it seemed to me somewhat unwillingly, no doubt
because he was talking to a heretic--that the villa under the lindens
was two miles from the chapel, and that he liked to go to Mass in the
morning.

I see; it is the magician and his house that tempts you.

If you talk like that you'll make me regret I came abroad with you.

But, unable to restrain myself, I added:

The desire to have a magician always at one's elbow is extraordinary.

I know the value of such talk as that, he growled, as we drove back to
the villa, and he seemed so much put about that he gained my sympathy,
almost to the extent of persuading me that I, and not he, was the
inconsiderate one; and I began to defend myself.

It would have been impossible to eat anything that came out of that
kitchen. The magician must have a very strong hold upon you to--

Edward is so good-humoured that one cannot resist the temptation to
tease and to twit him, though one knows that one will regret doing so
afterwards; and, sorry already, seeing how seriously he felt this
unexpected dislocation in his habits, I began to think how I might be
kind, and, rightly or wrongly, mentioned his play, asking him when he
would like to consider it with me. Without answering my question, he
went into his room and began to rummage in his trunk, coming back,
however, with the manuscript, which he handed to me.

Now, Edward, there is the second act--

You don't want to alter that, do you? I thought it the best act--

He did not seem to appreciate my criticism or to pick up my
suggestions. He was not very forthcoming, and we went to bed early
that evening. He'll be in a more literary humour tomorrow morning, I
said, before going to sleep, and looked forward to a long _sance de
collaboration_ after breakfast. But Edward would accept no breakfast
in the house, only a cup of tea and a thin slice of bread and butter.
He refused to ask the landlord's daughter, who attended upon us, if
she could make an omelette, for some reason which it is impossible for
me even to guess at. It would not be like him to go without breakfast,
so that he might make me feel I had seriously inconvenienced him, and
it seemed difficult to understand why he should refuse to breakfast in
the house. The people were willing to cook him anything he wanted. Was
he such a slave to habits that he had to breakfast in a restaurant?
No, for when he was at home he had to breakfast in his own house. He
would say that was different. So I was forced to fall back on the
theory that he was annoyed because he would have to walk two miles to
chapel to hear Mass. But when he was in Galway he did not go to Mass
every morning. So why did he wish to go to Mass every day in Bayreuth?
Why would he refuse to discuss the question any further, saying that
it didn't matter, that it was all right, and, after sipping his tea,
steal away for the greater part of the day, leaving me alone with _The
Tale of a Town?_ A _sance de collaboration_ would have passed the
morning nicely for me, and I muttered: He has taken his soul out, or
his soul has taken him out. Would that his soul would betake itself to
literature! He has gone away without saying a word about _The Tale of
a Town_.

It did not strike me until late in the afternoon that he had gone away
to avoid criticism of his play; but on reflection it hardly seemed
necessary that I should accept literary sensitiveness as a reason for
absence. Yeats had told him, and I had told him, and Lady Gregory had
told him, that the play could not be acted by the Irish Literary
Theatre in its present form. It would have to be altered, and at
Aix-la-Chapelle, at Boppart, and at Mainz, and in the long train
journey from Mainz to Nuremberg, he had seemed willing to accept some
of my criticism as just. _Et alors_? Had he begun to examine my
criticism, picking it to pieces, arriving gradually at the conclusion
that it was all wrong, and that his play was all right? Or was it that
he had persuaded himself that it were better to retain his own
mistakes than to accept my suggestions, even if they were
improvements? A view of art for which a great deal may be said when
the artist has arrived at maturity of thought and expression, but a
very dangerous one when the artist is but a beginner.

And Edward is a beginner, and he isn't progressing, I said, and may
remain a beginner. For he came into the world a sketch, _une bauche_
by a great master, and was left unfinished, whether by design or
accident it is impossible to say. A delightful study he is! And in the
embowered villa I sat, looking into his mind, interested in its
unmapped spaces (Australia used to interest me in much the same manner
when I was a child) until the young girl came upstairs to tell me it
was time to go to the theatre. One knows a single word--_Spielhaus_.
My eyes went to the clock, the hands pointed to four, and from four to
five is the hottest hour of a summer's day. By four the sun, blazing
forth from a cloudless sky, has sucked all the cool of the night away,
and heated unendurably every brick and tile and stone it can strike
with a ray. Even in the shady villa under the lindens one could not
think of the tall gables in the town, the fierce sun beating on them,
or of the cobble-stones in the streets, without congratulating oneself
that Edward's inclinations had been resisted. Those low-ceilinged
rooms above the kitchen would stifle on such a day, and I was able to
look back on my courage with admiration. It had given me a splendid
view of a corn-field with reapers working in it, the sun shining on
their backs--that one straightening himself to wipe the sweat from his
brow with a ragged sleeve.

And while walking through the corn-field I remembered a letter to
Blow in which the Master says: One thing is certain--I am not a
musician, meaning thereby that music was only part of his message. He
tells in these words that his art enjoined separation from the drone
of daily life, and that is why he chose Bayreuth, a small Bavarian
town difficult to get at, but not impossible to reach. It had a train
service even in Wagner's time, and there was a sufficient number of
dirty inns and lodgings in the town to house the pilgrims. Humanity
was an open book to the Master, and the hardships he was inflicting on
his pilgrims he knew to be for their good, for it would induce in them
the disposition of mind suitable for the reception of the sacramental
_Ring_. And while building his theatre on the brow of the hill in the
shade of the pines, there can be no doubt that he foresaw the added
charm it would be to the pilgrim to leave the town and plod through
the glare up the long street past the railway-station into the avenue
of chestnut trees. He foresaw them, pausing in their ascent, leaning
upon their staves; and the restaurant which he allowed to be built
next his theatre is a tribute to his perfect understanding of men, for
however beautiful his music might be he knew that none could listen to
it for five hours upon an empty belly. He liked, I am sure, the little
green-painted restaurant higher up the hill in the orchard close, and
must have gone there himself and sat under the trees, drinking Rhenish
wine mixed with cool water from stone jars. The Master, who thought
of everything, must have foreseen the great charm it would be to walk
through the pine-wood, seeing beyond the red bark of the trees the
purple ranges of hills that enclose the great plain, slope after slope
rising at evening, and no one too far distant for the eye to follow
the noble shapes and all the delicate sinuosities travelling down the
skyline. Every shape and every outline is visible between the acts of
_The Valkyrie, Siegfried_, and the _Gtterdmmerung_. The village
standing in the middle of the plain is often lighted by a last ray.
Between the acts an extraordinary harmony gathers; art and Nature
abandon their accustomed strife, and with ears filled with calm,
exalted melodies, our eyes follow the beautiful landscape in which
Bayreuth stands.

There are off-days at Bayreuth when there are no performances, and
these are pleasant days of rest, that give us time to think of what we
have heard, and what we are going to hear, and time to stroll about
the town admiring its German life. The town is more interesting than
Rothenburg--to me at least--for it is less archaic. One cannot imagine
oneself living in the fifteenth century, whereas one can imagine
oneself living at the end of the eighteenth or the beginning of the
nineteenth. Bayreuth is very yesteryear, _surann_ as the French say.
A foreign word is a veiled face. The veil is often slight, but there
is a veil always, wherefore we like foreign words--a weakness. The
great gables which show themselves against the blue skies at Bayreuth
mean more to me than the red-tiled roofs with the dormer windows in
Rothenburg, for I can imagine myself born in Bayreuth, or growing up
in it, and living there, seeing the Margrave and his court. It would
be pleasant to live under the protection of a Margrave. One asks the
name of the last, and wonders what he was like in his Schloss, a
melancholy building full of tall official portraits and heavy German
furniture, surrounded by gardens full of trees in which there is
artificial water and swans. The year I am writing of the swans were
followed by a brood of cygnets, and we used to watch these, not Edward
and I, but myself and the daughter of a great painter, one who has
inherited some of the intensity of her father's early pictures--a
woman loving music dearly, and travelling with her husband in search
of it.

It was pleasant to leave _The Tale of a Town_ and visit her, and to
walk about under the sunlit trees, or through the town, or to visit
with her the old Court Theatre, perhaps picking up Edward on the way
there and taking him along with us.

He will always go to see a building, and though we had both visited
the Court Theatre many times before, it was pleasant to see it again,
and she and he and I together admired its pillared front and its
quaint interior, German rococo, clumsy, quaint, heavy, but
representative of the German mind. And together we admired the gilded
cupids, the garlands of flowers and the little boxes on either side of
the stage, in which the Margrave's trumpeters used to appear to
announce his arrival--a theatre not intended for the populace, but for
the Court, containing only fifty or sixty stalls, beautifully designed
and comfortable withal. The gilded balconies reminded us of
drawing-rooms; we spoke of the courtly air of the theatre, now
forbidden to the mime for many a day. A beautiful little theatre, we
said--a theatre designed for the performance of Mozart or Gluck's
operas, and I think Edward would have given up some performances of
_Parsifal_ to hear Gluck or Mozart in this out-of-date theatre.

In the afternoon my friends suggested to us that we should accompany
them to a village some six or seven miles distant, and we went there
in a carriage drawn by two long-tailed Bavarian horses, that drew us
slowly but surely out of Bayreuth along smooth white roads, every one
lined with apple trees and loaded with fruit. It was a wonder to us
how these trees were not despoiled by thieves, so easy would it be to
carry away the fruit by night. In England, in Ireland, or in Scotland
a great deal of fruit would certainly have been robbed, and we asked
ourselves if the Bavarian peasants are more naturally honest than the
English, or if it were mere custom that prevented the waggonner from
gathering as many apples as he pleased. The lady's husband, who is a
politician, suggested that these wayside trees belonged to the
community, and he is no doubt right; and we accepted his explanation
that the honesty of the Bavarian is to be found in the fact that
everybody shared in the fruit and, this being so, it was nobody's
interest to strip the trees.

Behold the trees, and the long undivided plain stretching away to the
foot of the hills, without wall or hedge, and we asking ourselves how
do the peasants distinguish between the different farms, somebody
telling how one of his farmers had called another to admire a fence he
had put up between their lands. I'd like the fence, aye, twice as
well, if thee 'ad not taken in some six or seven inches of my land. In
our appreciation of the German landscape there is to be reckoned our
disappointment at seeing nowhere beautiful English trees--ash, elm,
beech, and oak--only the pine, and we, being tree-lovers, think the
pine a tedious tree, if it can be called a tree; it isn't in our
apprehension of one, only being intended by Nature for what the French
call _bois charpentier_. No man would care to sit under a pine (and a
woman still less), needles underfoot and needles overhead. To us
English folk the beauty of a wood is as much in the underwoods as in
the tall trees, and the pine allows no underwood. In a pine wood one
meets few birds. A goshawk, startled from the branches, flees quickly
down the long aisles. The pine is cultivated in Germany; the
unfortunate pine, ugly by nature, is made still more ugly by
cultivation. Pines cover the lower hills, forming black stains in the
landscape and disfiguring their purple.

The long-tailed Bavarian horses walked up some steep ascent, trotted
down a hill, at the bottom of which a pretty brook purls through an
orchard, and the village was reached at last, built under the foot of
a steep black hill, on which stand the ruins of a castle. There are
paths through the woods, and one becomes conscious of the ceaseless
change in human life as one follows the paths to the gateway of the
robber-baron who lived there three centuries ago, defying Gustavus
Adolphus, the Lion of the North, until his castle was battered with
cannon. It was fortunate for Adolphus that he had cannon to batter it
with, for without cannon he would not have captured it.

We came upon a ravine, and on each hillside a wooden platform had been
built; the orchestra playing in the pit between, no doubt, as in the
theatre at Bayreuth. We strolled up and down the steep paths,
wondering if players were heard from hillside to hillside, inclining
to the belief that human voices would not carry so far, and to put the
natural acoustics of the wood to the test, some went to the other
hillside and spoke to us. But what play had been acted in this wood?
Somebody suggested a miracle play, and leaping at the suggestion, I
spoke of the miracle plays in Oberammergau.

Some pious people of your sect, Edward, I said, taking his arm, who
would set Asiatic Gods against native divinities.

My aphorism was not at first understood, and I explained it--how
Bavaria comprises two spectacles: the Asiatic Gods in the South on the
Tyrolean frontier, while the original Rhine Gods display themselves in
the North at Bayreuth--Wotan, Loki, Donner, Froh, and the Goddesses
Frika, Erda, and Freia. My remark had some success, and we walked on,
wondering how it was that this division of the deities had not been
remarked before. All were interested except Edward, who said he did
not care to listen to blasphemy.

But, my dear Edward, it cannot be blasphemy to tell the truth, and
surely the Gods that Oberammergau exhibits are Asiatic. And there can
be no doubt that the Gods that Bayreuth exhibits are German and
Scandinavian; and I pressed Edward to explain to me how a mere
statement of fact, the truth of which could not be contested, could be
called blasphemous, falsehood being implicit in every blasphemy. To
escape from this quandary Edward began to argue that the Rhenish Gods
had come from Asia, too, by way of Scandinavia, finding solace,
apparently, in the belief in the Asiatic origin of all Gods. We
laughed at this novel defence of divinity.

It is like China tea, I answered, only grown in Asia. Somebody else
spoke of Havana cigars, and very soon all the life died out of the
argument. We were but vaguely interested in it, for none amongst us,
perhaps not even the youngest, was entirely free from the thought
inspired by the empty platforms. We were all thinking how every
generation is but a pageant, that all is but pageant here below. Part
of our excursion was already behind us, and in later years how little
of it would be remembered! Such philosophies are soon exhausted, and
we sympathised with a lady who was anxious about her daughter and
husband. They were walking in the woods, and she feared they might be
overtaken by the coming darkness. But we assured her there would be
light for many hours still, and whistled the motives of _The Ring_....

We returned through the hilly country, with the wide, sloping evening
above us, and apple-trees lining the roads, all the apples now
reddened and ready for gathering. We admired the purple crests
illuminated by the sunset, as millions of men and women had done
before us, and as millions of men and women shall do after us. Voices
dropped and faces grew pensive. We asked if we should ever meet at
Bayreuth again, and our thoughts turned towards the great Master lying
in his grave, whose dreams had given us such sweet realities.

Too soon over, somebody said. In a few days Bayreuth would be deserted
like the platforms we found in the wood. The long distance we had come
was mentioned, and somebody asked if the pleasure we had received were
worth the journey. The answer made to this--and it was a woman who
made it--was that the journey would be more real in six months' time
than it was today, and picking up the thought, I answered quickly:

So you think that we must live not so much for the moment as for the
sake of the memory of it?

Somebody answered that memory was, perhaps, half of life and this was
denied.

He who cannot enjoy things as they go by is but a poor companion.

A poor lover, I interjected. And soon after found myself arguing that
the great gift Nature has bestowed upon woman is the power of enjoying
things as they go by--a great gift truly it is, and sufficient
compensation for lack of interest in religion and morals. It may be
that that is why women have not written a great book, or painted a
great picture. Or invented a religion, some one added.

Women are not idealists, Edward said, speaking out of his remembrance
of his play _The Heather Field_.

In the evening we were all going to the house that Wagner had lived
in, and in which he had written the last act of _Siegfried_, the
_Gtterdmmerung_, and _Parsifal_. Every one who goes to Bayreuth is
asked there if he leaves a card upon Madame Wagner. Such, at least,
used to be the custom. One presented an invitation card at the door
and walked about the music-room and into Wagner's library. Edward was
much moved to see the Master's books and his writing-table. Things
interest him more than human beings, whereas Wagner's books and
writing-table merely depressed me, and refusing to follow Edward to
the grave, I sought for a friend who might introduce me to Madame
Wagner.

A tall, thin woman, nearer sixty than seventy, very vital, with a high
nose like her father's, came forward to meet me, full of cordiality,
full of conversation and pleasant greeting. Liszt lives again in her,
I said, the same inveigling manner; she casts her spells like her
father, and--Well, there is no way of telling my impression except to
tell the thought that passed through my mind: it was, But how is all
this to end? Am I going to run away with her? And when we arrive
somewhere, what am I to do with her? A woman nearly seventy years! And
I thought what an extraordinary fascination she must have been when
she heard _Tristan_ for the first time, and felt she could no longer
live with Blow.

It is always pleasant, she said, to welcome to Bayreuth strangers who
come to hear our art.

The arrogance of the expression amused me; but after all, music is the
art of Germany just as poetry is the art of England; and feeling in
the next five minutes that I must either take her hand or interrupt
the conversation, I chose the latter course, and asked her to
introduce me to her son. She hastened to comply with my wish, and put
herself to some trouble to find him. He was found at last, and I was
introduced to him.

My impression of Madame Wagner is compressed in the Am I going to run
away with her? And the same words, with a change of preposition and
pronoun, will describe the impression that Siegfried Wagner produced
upon me. The son is the father in everything except his genius--the
same large head, the same brow, the same chin and jaw. A sort of
deserted shrine! I cried to myself and gasped for words.

Van Roy was singing at the time, and I succeeded at last in asking
Siegfried Wagner who had composed the song.

I do not know, but it should be by Grandpapa Liszt.

I bowed, thanked him, and moved away, glad to escape from his
repelling blankness. Shyness it may have been, or perhaps boredom. If
we had met at Venice or in London--anywhere except in that crowd, we
might have become friends. So I was glad to meet him on the bench in
front of the theatre, and to find him slightly more forthcoming than
he had shown himself to me in his mother's house. We spoke about his
opera, and about Ellis, who had translated his libretto, and for a
moment it looked as if we were going to know each other, to become
acquainted, for in answer to my question whether he thought it was of
advantage that the musician should write his own libretto, he answered
that he thought it was, for while writing the libretto the musician
sang his first ideas of the music.

Meeting me again on the same seat at the same hour, he asked me why I
was not in the theatre, and it only occurred to me to tell the mere
truth, that I came to Bayreuth to hear _The Ring_ and not _Parsifal_.
Perhaps if you knew the score of _Parsifal_.

I can never know a score, for I'm not a musician, but I've heard it
many times, and it makes no personal appeal as do the other works.

The explanation was received in silence, and I thought how I might
have better explained my position if I had said that, though I
recognised Milton to be a great poet, he wrote in vain so far as I was
concerned. But Siegfried's manner checks the words upon one's lips,
and the people began to come out of the theatre soon after.

We parted, and all the way to the caf where Edward and I went to have
supper I turned Siegfried over in my mind and understood him to be a
man of talent, for he is the son of a man of genius. One must be a man
of talent to conduct _The Ring_ as I had heard him conduct it, bearing
the last scene of _The Valkyrie_ along with him like a banner. A man
of talent, the son of a man of genius, without sufficient vitality to
be very much interested in anything; his life a sort of diffused
sadness like a blank summer day when the clouds are low; and he must
be conscious, too, that there is no place on earth where he can lay
his head and call it his own.

If the physical resemblance were not so marked, I said to myself as we
entered the caf.

That little caf! What enchanting hours Edward and I have spent in it
between half past ten and in the morning, amid beer and cigars and
endless discussions as to the values of certain scenes and acts, of
singers and conductors! The year that I am now referring to,
_Parsifal_ was conducted in turn by Fischer, Mottl, and Seidl,
Wagner's favourite pupil and disciple. He sat in the far end of the
caf by himself, and I often wondered why his society was not more
sought after. Although he was an old man, and in declining health, it
was a pleasure for me to sit with him and engage him in conversation,
telling him that under his direction the first act of _Parsifal_
played ten minutes quicker than it did under Mottl, and that Mottl was
five minutes quicker than Fischer.

So much as that?

Yes, I took the time. And how much better I like your conducting of
_The Flower Maidens_! Mottl gets a crescendo in the middle.

Whereas there is no necessity. It goes as well without, doesn't it?

A thin, spare man, quiet, speaking but little--a kindly man, as the
reader has already guessed from the few phrases exchanged between him
and me, and an unassuming man, apparently taking a pleasure even in
such appreciations as Edward's and mine; a man between sixty and
seventy, at the time I am speaking of, and as I write this line I can
see his small, refined features and his iron-grey hair, which once
must have been black. My thoughts pause, and I like to indulge myself
in the regret that I did not walk home with him in the evenings to his
lodgings. He might have asked me to come to see him in the morning,
and over the piano, perhaps, would have told me many things regarding
his relations with Wagner and his understanding of the music, and
things about himself, for Seidl lived among great men, and was easily
inveigled in the confessional.

He died a year or two later, and the caf is no longer as attractive
as it was when all the actors came down from the theatre to eat their
supper there. Klafsky was my first Brnnhilde; when she died
Gulbranson took her place, and the moment she came into the cafe all
eyes went towards her, and I may say all hearts, for very soon a
beautiful smile would light up a round, rosy, very ordinary face,
suffusing it, transforming a plain woman into one to whom one's heart
goes instinctively, convinced that all that is necessary to be happy
is to be with her.




VIII


We take tickets for a cycle, a _Ring_, and as many _Parsifals_ as we
have appetite for, and when the last performance is over the
railway-station is crowded; no longer with the Bohemianism of London
and Paris, but with the snobbery (I use the word in its French sense)
of both capitals. The trolleys are piled with aristocratic luggage,
and the porters are followed by anxious valets; ladies in long,
fashionable dust-cloaks are beset by maids with jewel-cases in their
hands. Among this titled crowd one can still pick out the student (the
professional musician still goes to Bayreuth) and those who really
love music, and who go to Bayreuth for the art of the Master--like our
friends, the politician and his wife and daughter.

Between the acts of the _Gtterdmmerung_ we had heard arrangements
being made to be present at other music festivals. It seemed that a
considerable part of the audience was going to Munich to hear Mozart.
For the last day or two everybody seemed to be muttering _Cosi fan
Tutti_, an opera never given in England. On a former occasion Edward
and I had gone to Munich, but we had not heard it; and I would have
preferred to follow Mozart, but we were going in a different
direction, in quest of other music--northward, a long and tedious
journey. For Edward had decided that the revival of drama which the
success of _The Heather Field_ had started in Ireland must be
accompanied by a revival of all the arts--painting, sculpture, and
music. For landscape and portrait-painting he thought he could rely on
Dermod O'Brien, who had decided to come to Ireland. A number of
chapels had been spoilt by German stained glass, but Miss Purser had
promised to engage a man whose father had been intimately connected
with the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England, and under her direction
ecclesiastical art would flourish again in Ireland. John Hughes would
revive Donatello and Edward Palestrina. He told me that Archbishop
Walsh had been approached, and that he thought he would be able to
persuade him to accept a donation of ten thousand pounds to establish
a choir in the cathedral upon the strict understanding, of course,
that the choir was only to sing Vittoria, Palestrina, Orlando di
Lasso, Francesca de Prs, and the other writers, bearing equally
picturesque names, who had, if I may borrow a phrase from _Evelyn
Innes_, gravitated round the great Roman composer.

It seemed to me that the analogy he drew between the Italian
Renaissance and the Irish was a false one. The Italians had imported
nothing, but had re-created all the arts simultaneously. This view
was, however, not acceptable, and in the return journey between
Nuremberg and Mainz, Edward pointed out that the Italian Renaissance
was not as original as it seemed at first sight. It was indebted
largely to antiquity, and its flavour was due to the spirit of the
Middle Ages which still lingered in the sixteenth century, and in
support of this theory he affirmed that Palestrina had used
plain-chant melodies in all his Masses.

Turning them into pattern music, I interjected. If you want religion
in music, let your choir sing only plain chant.

Edward feared that the congregation would deem that monotonous, and I
said, If concessions are going to be made--, and the conversation
dropped, for we were going to a festival of pattern music far away in
the North of Germany, to a town called Mnster, whither, I venture to
say, very few have ever wandered, though it is well known by name, on
account of Meyerbeer's opera _Le Prophte_. We all know the prayer
that the prophet sings at the end of the third act before he enters
the town, and the great beauty of the fourth act--the cathedral scene
in which John of Leyden refuses to recognise his mother. A great act!
It was not the fashion of those times to write fifth acts, and
Meyerbeer finished his opera with a couple of songs of no great merit,
and the blowing up of the town by John of Leyden, who perishes amid
the ruins.

But in history he perished quite differently. After a few weeks of
revelry Mnster was taken by assault, and John of Leyden and his
companions were put into iron cages, in which they could neither
stand, nor sit, nor lie, and in them they remained on exhibition, hung
up some thirty feet above the pavement on the principal street, for
three days, before they were torn to pieces with red-hot hooks, by
order of the good Bishop. These cages still hang in the principal
street, regarded, no doubt, as objects of great historical interest.
That they are, no one will contest, yet one cannot help feeling that
they would be better out of sight in a museum, for they certainly
inspire hatred of the Roman Church in the heart of every passer-by,
and it is hardly going too far to say that to these cages, and to the
memories which they evoke, is owing the preservation of all the
original aspects of the town, so grey and austere, without a sign
anywhere of life, of modern thought or aspiration, without a
picture-gallery, without a painter, without a writer, a fitting town,
indeed, for a festival of archaic music.

Edward had written to his conductor, the man to whom the revival of
Palestrina was to be entrusted, to come over and when we were not in
the cathedral--which was not often--we used to spend the time
wandering about the grey, calico-coloured streets, Edward admiring the
fifteenth-century roofs, of which there are a great many, and the
arcades; the conductor and myself thinking how the minutes were
bringing us nearer another concert. He was a man of quiet and neutral
intelligence, and it would have been pleasant to go away for a walk in
the country with him. He would have liked to escape from the patter of
this archaic music which he already foresaw it was his fate to teach
and conduct till the end of his days. But to slip away between a
_Gloria_ and a _Credo_ (my suggestion to him) would have offended his
burly task-master and perhaps have lost him his job. He dared not even
show for one instant that the music bored him, and I hardly dared
either, and resisted Edward with difficulty at the door of the
cathedral. The choice lay between a motet by Josquin des Prs and _The
Tale of a Town_. The third act needed revision, and I not infrequently
took the manuscript away with me and forgot it in the pleasant shade
of the avenue that encircles the town; and sometimes I took the
manuscript with me to the Zoological Gardens, beguiled there by the
finest lion ever known, that is to say, the finest ever seen or
imagined by me--an extraordinary, silent and monumental beast that
used to lie, his paw tucked in front of him, a gazing-stock for me and
a group of children. We moved on subdued by his wonderful presence,
majestic, magnificent, forlorn, ashamed before his great, brown,
melancholy eyes, full of dreams of the desert of long ago, perhaps of
the very day when an Arab held him, a whelp, well above the high,
red-pommelled saddle, and the dam was speared and shot by other Arabs
in the mle that happened amid some loose rocks and brushwood.

The blue sky of Mnster, and the dust of Mnster, and the silence and
the loneliness of Munster, often made me think I should like to enter
his cage. It was such a splendid one!--built out into the garden, a
little park with two tree-trunks and some rocks, a dome-shaped cage in
which the great beast could trot or climb, if he were so disposed, but
I never saw him except sunning himself in front of his bars. He seemed
as lonely as myself, and I often imagined us twain, side by side, _The
Tale of a Town_ in my left hand, while with the right I combed his
great, brown mane for him. Which would he resent--the reading or the
combing? Speculation on this point amused me, and urged me towards the
risk, and perhaps might have induced me to undertake it, if I had not
met a fox in the circular avenue. The red, bushy animal came there on
a chain, and when his master sat on the other end of the bench on
which I was sitting, the fox often hopped up between us, treating me
with the politeness due to a visitor, a politeness which was requited
next by a cutlet. On cutlets our friendship throve until the end of
the week, and had I known German it might have become permanent. The
fox seemed quite willing, for though well behaved with his master, his
affection for me was so spontaneous that I think it would have lasted.
The peasant, too, might have been persuaded to sell his fox, and if he
refused a sovereign it would be because he did not know its value, or
because he would not include the chain. As this point could not be
settled without some knowledge of German, I strove to explain to him
by signs that he was to remain where he was, until I brought back
somebody who could _sprechen Deutsch_. There was no hope of a
passer-by who could speak English--there were no passers-by; the whole
population of Munster was in the cathedral. It had been going there
all the morning, headed by Edward and his conductor, to hear several
Masses by Palestrina, and they had started off again in the afternoon
to listen to Orlando di Lasso. Edward had pressed me to accompany
them, saying that the opportunity might not occur again to hear a work
by that great Fleming; but one concert a day of contrapuntal music was
enough for me, and I had pleaded my duty regarding a possible
reconstruction of the third act, which I was anxious to submit to him
in the evening.

He is in the cathedral, listening, I said, and tired by now of Orlando
di Lasso; he will be glad of an excuse to get away.

Orlando was being sung when I arrived, and I listened, forgetful of
the fox, and very soon it began to seem to me strange that so
beautiful a name should be allied to such ugly music. So I fell to
thinking how a theory often goes down before a simple fact. It had
been mine this long while that a man's work proceeds from his name;
and still forgetful of the fox, I pondered the question whether
Orlando di Lasso was, or was not, a beautiful name, deciding at last
that it was an affected name, and therefore not beautiful; whereas
Palestrina is naturally beautiful, like his music. Palestrina! There
is a sound of strings in the name, and he could not have failed to
write beautifully for the strings if he had written for instruments.
Palestrina! Strings! Strings! I murmured, seeking Edward, and finding
him without much difficulty, so striking is his appearance when he
sits listening, his hand to his ear, an old melomaniac, drinking in
the music. As soon as my errand was whispered he shook his head,
saying that he could not leave just now, for the choir were going to
sing another motet by Orlando di Lasso, and when that motet was
finished there was one by Nannini, which he would not like to miss.

The peasant will never wait so long, I said many a time as I lingered
about the church; and when all the motets were finished, and we
returned to the avenue, the peasant and his fox were far away, and
there was no means of discovering them. The lion? Well, he is dead
now--dead and buried; and that is all I remember of a town which I
praise God I shall never see again!

As a recompense for having accompanied him to hear the
contrapuntalists, Edward was coming with me to see Rubens. We should
not arrive in Antwerp until late that night. Edward lay sleeping
opposite; it seemed strange that any one should be able to sleep while
on his way to Rubens; and I thought of the picture we were going to
see. It seemed extraordinary, inconceivable, impossible that tomorrow
I should walk down a street into a cathedral, and find myself face to
face with _The Descent from the Cross_. Edward sleeps, but art keeps
me awake.

My thoughts turned to Florence and Stella, whom I had arranged to meet
in the cathedral; and to pass the time I very soon began to ask myself
which I would retain, if the choice were forced upon me--the immense
joy of the picture, or the pleasure of meeting two amiable and
charming women? In the ordinary course of my days there could be no
hesitation, but Edward had been my sole companion for the last six
weeks, and in our journeys abroad he imposed acceptance of this rule
upon me--that no acquaintances should be made among the flocks of
English and American women that congregate in the Continental hotels.
I had always abided by this rule of the road, leaving him when the
strain became too great--at Dresden some years before, and some years
later again at Munich. Those separations had been effected without
difficulty. Edward never complains; only once did he mention that I
had broken up our tours, as he would put it, for the pleasure of some
abandoned woman; and so in this tour it had been a point of honour
with me to allow it, at all costs to my feelings, to run its natural
course. As it was to end at Antwerp I was well within my rights in
arranging to meet Florence and Stella in the cathedral. I say well
within, for my friends did not belong to the class of women to which
Edward took special objection--women whose sole morality seemed to him
to be to yield to every impulse of the heart. My friends were
painters, and of considerable talent, and in Edward's eyes art redeems
sex of much of its unpleasantness. He knew nothing of the meeting, and
it did not seem to me worth while to mention it as we walked down the
street. It would be stupid to interrupt our emotion by introducing any
contentious question. We were going to see Rubens, in what is perhaps
his lordliest achievement; and when the cathedral came in sight, I
laid my hand suddenly on Edward's shoulder, stopping him to say:

Edward, isn't it wonderful that we should this moment be walking down
a street to see Rubens? Let us never forget it. Let us try to fix it
in our memories now before we enter.

Rubens for the moment blotted out all remembrance of Florence and
Stella, but as we wandered round the cathedral, memory of them
returned to me, and my heart misgave me, for I was beginning to think
of Stella perhaps more than was altogether fair to Florence. To
confide such scruples as these to Edward would at once prejudice him
against both women, and I wanted him to like them. So, with the
intention to deceive, I continued to aestheticise, speaking of the
beauty of the drooping body as it slips down the white sheet into the
arms of devoted women. The art of Greece, we said, re-arisen in
Florence, and carried to Antwerp on the calm, overflowing genius of a
Fleming. We contrasted this picture, so restrained and concentrated,
with the somewhat gross violence of _The Ascent of the Cross_, painted
immediately on his return from Italy, his first abandonment to his
native genius, before he had discovered himself. _The Crowning of the
Virgin_ is said to have been repainted in some places. Edward was
anxious to know if it were so, but art-criticism is difficult when one
is expecting two ladies. Though one knows they will not wilfully
disappoint, there is always a danger that something may happen to
prevent them from coming. The picture is one of the most enchanting
that Rubens ever painted. He seems to have forgotten the theological
aspects of the subject, and to have remembered only that much of it
which is nearest to his heart--a beautiful woman surrounded by
beautiful children--and to have painted with no other intention than
to make beautiful fair faces, clouds and pale draperies, seem more
beautiful. The ease and grace of his incomparable handicraft held my
attention while looking round for Stella, tall and shapely, and
Florence, whom Nature has not made less well, but on a smaller scale.
At last two backs were perceived in a distant chapel. The moment had
therefore come to tell Edward that I had just caught sight of two
ladies, acquaintances, artists both of them.

I must go and speak to them. Shall I bring them back and introduce
them? They are artists.

Somewhat to my surprise, Edward did not raise any objection to meeting
them; on the contrary, he said that it would be interesting to hear
them talk about the pictures. He showed himself very affable to both,
speaking to Florence about the supposed repainting of _The Crowning of
the Virgin_, and to Stella about the quality of the black behind the
Magdalen's head in _The Descent from the Cross_. At the door of the
cathedral I mentioned that I was lunching with the ladies, and he
consented to join us, and when the ladies left us, he made
complimentary observations regarding their demeanour and
intelligences, asking several questions about their work, and not one
about their private lives.

After lunch we went to the exhibition of Van Dyck's works which was
being held at Antwerp that year, and after viewing his monotonous
portraits one after the other, the residual impression left on the
mind was of a painting lackey, an impersonal mind transcribing an
impersonal world. Something less vulgar, more individual, I declared,
we should find at Ghent, a small town in Flanders, renowned because of
its possession of one of the world's masterpieces, Van Eyck's
_Adoration of the Lamb_. And we went thither accompanied by Edward,
who had not seen the picture. It astonishes the painter as nothing
else in the world can, except, perhaps, the miracle that decrees that
to flowers their shapes and hues. We visited other towns and saw some
fine Memlings; but better than those do I remember the afternoon that
I walked with Stella up a long grey platform (Edward, walked with
Florence), telling her that I should deem my life worthless if she did
not allow me to accompany her to Holland. As I have said, my tour with
Edward had been arranged to end at Antwerp, so the change from
Edward's society to that of these ladies would prove beneficial to me,
as much for intellectual as for sensuous reasons. I am penetrated
through and through by an intelligent, passionate, dreamy interest in
sex, going much deeper than the mere rutting instinct; and turn to
women as a plant does to the light, as unconsciously, breathing them
through every pore, and my writings are but the exhalation that
follows the inspiration. I am, in contrast to Edward, an essentially
social being, taking pleasure in, and deriving profit from, my
fellows. But he is independent of society, and we both suffer from the
defects of our qualities. The moments of loneliness that fall upon me
at the close of a long day's work are unknown to him. He has never
experienced that spiritual terror which drives me out after dinner in
search of somebody to talk to. A book and a cigar (I have never been
able to smoke a pipe) are not enough for me, and the hours between
nine and midnight are always redoubtable hours. How they are to be
whiled away is my problem. I admire and envy Edward's taste for
reading. That bulky man can return to his rooms, even in the height of
summer, light half a dozen candles (he does not like a lamp) and sit
down behind a lofty screen (draughts give him colds) with a long clay
between his teeth and a book on aesthetics in his hand, and read till
midnight. And that, night after night, his life going by all the
while. It is true that he pays for his contentment. His mind began to
harden before he was forty, and I had to warn him of the precipice
towards which he was going: One cannot change oneself, he answered. He
is glad to see me if I call, but he feels no special need of my
society. One day I said: Edward, which would you prefer to spend the
evening with--a very clever woman, or a stupid man? After three or
four puffs at his pipe he answered: With the stupid man.

But man, no more than woman, is necessary to him. Is not his
self-sufficientness (if I may coin a word) admirable? Never have I
known it fail him. At Dresden, it is true that he expressed regret
that I was leaving him in the middle of our tour; but how shallow that
regret was can be gathered from the indifference with which he
accepted the news of my decision to accompany the ladies to Holland.
We asked him if he would come with us, but he said that important
business awaited him in Ireland; and he told me privately that he was
not frightened away by the ladies, but he did not care to go to a
Protestant country, for he never felt at home in one, and he did not
even seem to understand when I asked him if he minded the long journey
to Ireland alone.

I shall be with you in Tillyra a month later, and we shall then be
able to make the necessary alterations in _The Tale of a Town_.

At the mention of the alterations in his play his face clouded, but he
did not betray that anxiety which would have approved him a true
artist. Only an amateur, I said, and went away with the ladies, our
intention being to study the art of the Low Countries in Amsterdam, in
Haarlem, and the Hague; to stop at every town in which there was a
picture-gallery. An account of our aesthetic and sentimental tour
would make a charming book; our appreciations of Ruysdael, Hals,
Rembrandt and Van der Meer, and Florence's incautious confession that
no more perfect mould of body than Stella's existed in the
flesh--perhaps in some antique statues of the prime, though even that
was not certain.




IX


The scene you want me to write isn't at all in character with the
Irish people.

So you've said, Edward. We talked the matter out at Rothenburg, but
men's instincts are the same all over the world. If you don't feel the
scene, perhaps it would be as well if you allowed me to sketch it out
for you. It is all quite clear.... Just as you like.

Edward said he didn't mind, and I went up to my bedroom, and came down
about tea-time to look for him, anxious to read the pages I had
written. He consented to hear the scene, but it seemed to me that he
listened to it resentfully; and when I had finished, it did not
surprise me to hear that he didn't like it at all; and then he begged
of me, almost hysterically, not to press my alteration upon him,
crying aloud, Leave me my play! Then, turning suddenly, he thanked me
effusively for the trouble I had taken, and besought me to try to
understand that he couldn't act otherwise, assigning as a reason that
I was giving the play a different colour from what he intended.

I'm sorry. But what is to be done? You admit the play requires
alteration?

Yes, but I can make the alterations myself. And away he went up the
slippery staircase of the old castle to his study.

For it is in the old castle that he prefers to live; the modern house,
which he built some five-and-twenty years ago, remaining always
outside his natural sympathies, especially its drawing-room. But one
cannot have a modern house without a drawing-room, or a drawing-room
without upholstered furniture, and the comfort of a stuffed armchair
does not compensate Edward for its lack of design; and he prefers that
his hinder parts should suffer rather than his spirit. Every
drawing-room is, in the first glance, a woman's room--the original
harem thrown open to visitors--and his instinct is to get away from
women, and all things which evoke intimacy with women. He was always
the same, even in his hunting days, avoiding a display of horsemanship
in front of a big wall, if women were about. It was in these early
days, when the stables were filled with hunters, that I first went to
Tillyra; and walking on the lawn, I remember trying to persuade him
that the eighteenth-century house, which one of his ancestors had
built alongside of the old castle, on the decline of brigandage, would
be sufficient for his wants.

For you don't intend to become a country gentleman, do you?

That he might escape from Tillyra had clearly never occurred to him,
and he was startled by the idea suggested by me that he should follow
his instinct. But the sea sucks back the wave, and he murmured that
the old house had decayed and a new one was required.

If you spend a few hundred pounds upon the old house it will last your
lifetime, my dear friend; and it is in much better taste than any
house you will build. You think that modern domestic Gothic will be in
keeping with the old fortress!

He must have suspected I was right, for his next argument was that
the contract had been signed, and to break it would cost several
hundred pounds. Better pay several hundred than several thousand, and
your Gothic house will cost you twenty, and never will it please you.

For a moment it seemed as if he were going to reconsider the matter,
and then he adduced a last argument in favour of the building: his
mother wished it.

But, my dear friend, unless you're going to marry, so large a house
will be a burden.

Going to marry!

Well, everybody will look upon you as an engaged man.

A shadow crossed his face, and I said: I've touched the vital spot,
and rebellion against all authority being my instinct, I incited him
to rebel.

After all, your mother has no right to ask you to spend so much money,
and she wouldn't do so unless she thought you were going to marry.

I suppose she wouldn't.

But not on that occasion, nor any other, could I induce him to throw
the architect's plans into the fire, and why blame him for his lack of
courage? For it is natural to man to yield something of himself in
order that there may be peace in his home. (Edward yields completely
to authority once he has accepted it.) His mother's clear and resolute
mind was perhaps more sympathetic to me than to him, and turning to
her, in my officiousness, I said, thinking to frighten her: Will that
house be finished for fifteen thousand?

The painting and the papering aren't included in the estimate; but a
few thousands more will finish it, and I have promised to finish it
for him.

That the spending of so much money should cost her no scruple whatever
surprised me, and to explain her to myself I remembered that she
belonged to a time when property was secured to its owner by laws. The
Land Acts, which were then coming into operation, could not change her
point of view. Edward must build a large and substantial house of
family importance, and when this house was finished he could not do
otherwise than marry. She would ask all the young ladies of her
acquaintance to come to see them, and among the many Edward might find
one to his liking. This hope often transpired in her talks about
Edward, and she continued to cherish it during the building of the
house, in spite of her suspicions that Edward's celibacy was something
more than the whim of a young man who thinks that a woman might rob
him of his ideals. She could not admit to herself any more than you
can, reader, or myself, that we come into the world made as it were to
order, contrived so that we shall run down certain lines of conduct.
We are not determinists, except in casual moments of no importance,
and we like to attribute at least our misfortunes to circumstance,
never looking beyond the years of childhood, just as if the greater
part of man's making was not done before he came into the world.
Edward was a bachelor before he left his mother's womb. But how was
his mother to know such a thing--or to sympathise with such an idea?
All the instruction we get from the beginning of our lives is to the
effect that man is free, and our every action seems so voluntary that
we cannot understand that our lives are determined for us. Another
illusion is that nothing is permanent in us, that all is subject to
change. Edward's mother shared this illusion, but for a much shorter
time than many another woman would have done, partly because her
intelligence allowed her to perceive much, and to understand much that
would have escaped an inferior woman, and partly because Edward never
tried to hide his real self, wearing always his aversion on his
sleeve. So it could not have been later than two years after the
building of the house that the first thought crossed her mind, that,
though she had ruled Edward in every detail of his daily life since he
was a little boy, she might still fail to reach the end which she
regarded as the legitimate end of life--a wife for her son, and
grandchildren for herself.

He has built a modern house, but before it is quite finished he has
decided to live in the old tower, she said to me, and the furniture
which had been made for his sitting-room filled her, I could see, with
dread. A less intelligent woman would have drawn no conclusions from
the fact that a table taken from a design by Albert Drer, and six
oaken stools with terrifying edges, were to be the furniture of the
turret chamber, reached by cold, moist, winding stairs, and that his
bedroom, too, was to be among the ancient walls. Look at his bed, she
said, as narrow as a monk's; and the walls whitewashed like a cell,
and nothing upon them but a crucifix. He speaks of his aversion from
upholstery, and he can't abide a cushion.

She has begun to understand that there are certain natures which
cannot be changed, I said to myself. She understands in her
subconscious nature already, soon she will understand with her
intellect, that he, who lies in that bed by choice, will never leave
it for a bridal chamber.

Life affords no more arresting drama than the fatality of temperament
which irrevocably separates two people bound together by the closest
natural ties, and the poignancy is heightened when each is sensitive
to the duty which each bears the other, when each is anxious to
perform his or her part of the contract; and the drama is still
further heightened when both become aware that they must go through
life together without any hope that they will ever understand each
other better. This drama is curious and interesting to the looker-on,
who is able to appreciate the qualities of the mother and the son; the
son's imaginative temperament always in excess of, and overruling, his
reason, and his mother's clear, practical intelligence, always unable
to understand that her son must live the life that his nature ordained
him to live. Again and again, in the course of our long friendship, he
has said: If you had been brought up as severely as I was.... A sudden
scruple of conscience, or shyness of soul, stays the end of the phrase
on his large loose mouth. But by brooding on his words I understand
them to mean that his mother imposed obedience upon him by appealing
to his fear of God, and aggravating this fear by a severe training in
religious dogma. It is easy to do this; a little child's mind is so
sensitive and so unprotected by reason that a stern mother is one of
the great perils of birth. If the boy is a natural boy with healthy
love of sex in his body, the wife or mistress will redeem him from his
mother, but if there be no such love in him he stands in great danger;
for from woman's influence the son of man may not escape; and it would
seem that whoever avoids the wife falls into the arms of the mistress,
and he who avoids the wife and the mistress becomes his mother's
bond-slave.

Edward was in his tower, and, wandering about the park, I thought how
he had gone back to his original self since his mother death. The
schoolboy was a Republican, but the Church is not friendly to
free-thought, and the prestige of his mother's authority had prevented
him from taking any active part in Nationalist politics during her
lifetime. The wild heather, I said, is breaking out again; and I
stopped in my walk, so that I might think how wonderful all this
was--the craving for independence, of a somewhat timid nature always
held back, never being able to cast out of the mouth the bit that had
been placed in it. These weak, ambiguous natures lend themselves so
much more to literature, and, indeed, to friendship, than the
stronger, who follow their own instincts, thinking always with their
own brains. They get what they want, the others get nothing; but the
weak men are the more interesting: they excite our sentiments, our
pity, and without pity man may not live.

Then, a little weary of thinking of Edward, my thoughts turned to
Yeats. He had come over to Tillyra from Coole a few days before, and
had read us _The Shadowy Waters_, a poem that he had been working on
for more than seven years, using it as a receptacle or storehouse for
all the fancies that had crossed his mind during that time, and these
were so numerous that the pirate-ship ranging the Shadowy Waters came
to us laden to the gunnel with Fomorians, beaked and unbeaked, spirits
of Good and Evil of various repute, and, so far as we could understand
the poem, these accompanied a metaphysical pirate of ancient Ireland
cruising in the unknown waters of the North Sea in search of some
ultimate kingdom. We admitted to Yeats, Edward and I, that no audience
would be able to discover the story of the play, and we confessed
ourselves among the baffled that would sit bewildered and go out
raging against the poet. Our criticism did not appear to surprise
Yeats; he seemed to realise that he had knotted and entangled his
skein till no remedy short of breaking some of the threads would
avail, and he eagerly accepted my proposal to go over to Coole to talk
out the poem with him, and to redeem it, if possible from the
Fomorians. He would regret their picturesque appearance; but could I
get rid of them, without losing the poetical passages? He would not
like the words poetical passages--I should have written beautiful
verses.

Looking up at the ivied embrasure of the tower where Edward was
undergoing the degradation of fancying himself a lover so that he
might write the big scene between Jasper and Millicent at the end of
the third act, I said: He will not come out of that tower until
dinner-time, so I may as well ride over to Coole and try what can be
done. But the job Yeats has set me is a difficult one.

Away I went on my bicycle, up and down along the switch-back road,
trying to arrive at some definite idea regarding Fomorians, and
thinking, as I rode up the long drive, that perhaps Yeats might not be
at home, and that to return to Tillyra without meeting the Fomorians
would be like riding home from hunting after a blank day.

The servant told me that he had gone for one of his constitutionals,
and would be found about the lake. The fabled woods of Coole are thick
hazel coverts, with tall trees here and there, but the paths are easy
to follow, and turning out of one of these into the open, I came upon
a tall black figure standing at the edge of the lake, wearing a cloak
which fell in straight folds to his knees, looking like a great
umbrella forgotten by some picnic-party.

I've come to relieve you of Fomorians, and when they've been flung
into the waters we must find some simple and suggestive anecdote. Now,
Yeats, I'm listening.

As he proceeded to unfold his dreams to me I perceived that we were
inside a prison-house with all the doors locked and windows barred.

The chimney is stopped, I said, but a brick seems loose in that
corner. Perhaps by scraping--

And we scraped a little while; but very soon a poetical passage turned
the edge of my chisel like a lump of granite, and Yeats said:

I can't sacrifice that.

Well, let us try the left-hand corner.

And after scraping for some time we met another poetical passage.

Well, let us try one of the tiles under the bed; we might scrape our
way into some drain which will lead us out.

But after searching for a loose tile for an hour, and finding none,
all proving more firmly cemented than any reader would think for, the
task of getting Yeats out of the prison-house which he had so
ingeniously built about himself, began to grow wearisome, and my
thoughts wandered from the Fomorians to the autumn landscape, full of
wonderful silence and colour, and I begged Yeats to admire with me the
still lake filled with broad shadow of the hill, and the ghostly moon
high up in the pale evening, looking down upon a drift of
rose-coloured clouds. A reed growing some yards from the shore threw
its slender shadow to our feet, and it seemed to me that we could do
nothing better than watch the landscape fixed in the lake as in a
mirror.

But Yeat's mind was whirling with Fomorians, and he strove to engage
my attention with a new scheme of reconstruction. He had already
proposed, and I had rejected so many that this last one was
undistinguishable in my brain from those which had preceded it, and
his febrile and somewhat hysterical imagination, excited as if by a
drug, set him talking, and so volubly, that I could not help thinking
of the old gentleman that Yeats had frightened when he was staying
last at Tillyra. The old gentleman had come down in the morning, pale
and tired, after a sleepless night, complaining that he had been
dreaming of Neptune and surging waves.

Last night, said Yeats, looking up gloomily from his breakfast, I felt
a great deal of aridness in my nature, and need of moisture, and was
making most tremendous invocations with water, and am not surprised
that they should have affected the adjoining room.

The old gentleman leaned back in his chair, terror-stricken, and
taking Edward aside after breakfast he said to him: A Finnish
sorcerer; he has Finnish blood in him; some Finnish ancestor about a
thousand years ago. And with the old gentleman's words in my head, I
scrutinised my friend's hands and face, thinking them strangely dark
for Ireland. But there are Celts with hair of Oriental blackness, and
skins dyed with Oriental yellow. All the same, the old gentleman's
reading of Yeats's prehistoric ancestry seemed to me like an
intuition. His black hair and yellow skin were perhaps accidents, or
they might be atavisms. It was not the recurrence of any Finnish
strain of a thousand years ago that tempted me to believe in a strain
of Oriental blood; it was his subtle, metaphysical mind, so unlike
anything I had ever met in a European, but which I had once met in an
Oriental years ago in West Kensington, in a back drawing-room,
lecturing to groups of women--an Indian of slender body and refined
face, a being whose ancestry were weaving metaphysical arguments when
painted savages prowled in the forests of Britain and Ireland. He
seemed to be speaking out of a long metaphysical ancestry;
unpremeditated speech flowed like silk from a spool, leading me
through the labyrinth of the subconscious, higher and higher,
seemingly towards some daylight finer than had ever appeared in the
valleys out of which I was clambering hurriedly, lest I should lose
the thread that led me. On and on we went, until at last it seemed to
me that I stood among the clouds; clouds filled the valleys beneath
me, and about me were wide spaces, and no horizon anywhere, only
space, and in the midst of this space light breaking through the
clouds above me, waxing every moment to an intenser day; and every
moment the Indian's voice seemed to lead me higher, and every moment
it seemed that I could follow it no longer. The homely earth that I
knew had faded, and I waited expectant among the peaks, until at last,
taken with a sudden fear that if I lingered any longer I might never
see again a cottage at the end of an embowered lane, I started to my
feet and fled.

But the five minutes I had spent in that drawing-room in West
Kensington were not forgotten; and now by the side of the lake,
hearing Yeats explain the meaning of his metaphysical pirate afloat on
Northern waters, it seemed to me that I was listening again to my
Indian. Again I found myself raised above the earth into the clouds;
once more the light was playing round me, lambent light like rays,
crossing and recrossing, waxing and waning, until I cried out, I'm
breathing too fine air for my lungs. Let me go back. And, sitting down
on a rock, I began to talk of the fish in the lake, asking Yeats if
the autumn weather were not beautiful, saying anything that came into
my head, for his thoughts were whirling too rapidly and a moment was
required for me to recover from a mental dizziness.

In this moment of respite, without warning, I discovered myself
thinking of a coachman washing his carriage in the mews, for when the
coachman washes his carriage a wheel is lifted from the ground, and it
spins at the least touch of the mop, turning as fast as Yeats's mind,
and for the same reason, that neither is turning anything. I am
alluding now to the last half-hour spent with Yeats, talking about his
poem; and thinking of Yeats's mind like a wheel lifted from the
ground, it was impossible for my thoughts not to veer round to
Edward's slow mind, and to compare it to the creaking wheel of an
ox-waggon.

If one could only combine these two--one is an intellect without a
temperament to sustain it, the other is a temperament without an
intellect to guide it; and I reflected how provokingly Nature
separates qualities which are essential, one to the other; and there
being food for reflection in this thought, I began to regret Yeats's
presence. Very soon his mind would begin to whirl again. The slightest
touch, I said, of the coachman's mop will set it going, so I had
better remain silent.

It was then that I forgot Yeats and Edward and everything else in the
delight caused by a great clamour of wings, and the snowy plumage of
thirty-six great birds rushing down the lake, striving to rise from
its surface. At last their wings caught the air, and after floating
about the lake they settled in a distant corner where they thought
they could rest undisturbed. Thirty-six swans rising out of a lake,
and floating round it, and settling down in it, is an unusual sight;
it conveys a suggestion of fairyland, perhaps because thirty-six wild
swans are so different from the silly china swan which sometimes
floats and hisses in melancholy whiteness up and down a stone basin.
That is all we know of swans--all I knew until the thirty-six rose out
of the hushed lake at our feet, and prompted me to turn to Yeats,
saying, You're writing your poem in its natural atmosphere. To avoid
talking about the poem again, and because I am always interested in
natural things, I begged him to tell me whence this flock had come,
and if they were really wild swans; and he told me that they were
descended originally from a pair of tame swans who had re-acquired
their power of flight, and that the thirty-six flew backwards and
forwards from Coole to Lough Couter, venturing farther, visiting many
of the lakes of Galway and Mayo, but always returning in the autumn to
Coole.

We struck across the meadows to avoid the corner of the lake where the
swans had settled, and Yeats proposed another scheme for the
reconstruction of his poem, and it absorbed him so utterly that he
could feel no interest in the smell of burning weeds, redolent of
autumn, coming from an adjoining field. Yet it trailed along the damp
meadows, rising into the dry air till it seemed a pity to trouble
about a poem when Nature provided one so beautiful for our
entertainment--incense of woods and faint colours, and every colour
and every odour in accordance with my mood.

How pathetic the long willow leaves seemed to me as they floated on
the lake! and I wondered, for there was not a wind in the branches. So
why had they fallen?... Yeats said he would row me across, thereby
saving a long walk, enabling us to get to Tillyra an hour sooner than
if we followed the lake's edge. Remember, it was still day, though the
moon shed a light down the vague water, but when we reached the other
side the sky had darkened, and it was neither day-time nor night-time.
The fields stretched out, dim and solitary and grey, and seeing cattle
moving mysteriously in the shadows, I thought of the extraordinary
oneness of things--the cattle being a little nearer to the earth than
we, a little farther than the rocks--and I begged of Yeats to admire
the mystery. But he could not meditate; he was still among his
Fomorians; and we scrambled through some hawthorns over a ruined wall,
I thinking of the time when masons were building that wall, and how
quaint the little leaves of the hawthorns were, yellow as gold,
fluttering from their stems.

A ruined country, I said, wilderness and weed.

Yeats knew the paths through the hazel woods, and talking of the
pirate, we struck through the open spaces, decorated with here and
there a thorn tree and much drooping bracken, penetrating into the
silence of the blood-red beeches, startled a little when a squirrel
cracked a nut in the branch above us, and the broken shells fell at
our feet.

I thought there were no squirrels in Ireland?

Twenty years ago there was none, but somebody introduced a pair into
Wexford, and gradually they have spread all over Ireland.

This and no more would he tell me, and as we fell into another broad
path, where hazels grew on either side, it seemed to me that I should
have walked through those woods that evening with some quiet woman,
talking of a time long ago, some love-time which had grown distinct in
the mirror of the years, like the landscape in the quiet waters of the
lake. But in life nothing is perfect; there are no perfect moments, or
very few, and it seemed to me that I could no longer speak about
Fomorians or pirates. Every combination had been tried, and my tired
brain was fit for nothing but to muse on the beauty that was about me,
the drift of clouds seen through the branches when I raised my head.
But Yeats would not raise his eyes; he walked, his eyes fixed on the
ground, still intent upon discovering some scheme of recomposition
which would allow him to write his poem without much loss of the
original text, and before we reached the end of the alley he delivered
himself of many new arrangements, none of which it was possible for me
to advise him to adopt, it differing nowise from the half a dozen
which had preceded it, and in despair I ran over the story again, just
as one might run one's fingers down the keys of a piano, with this
result--that in a hollow of the sloppy road which we were following he
agreed to abandon the Fomorians; and discussing the harp of
apple-wood, which could not be abandoned, we trudged on, myself held
at gaze by the stern line of the Burran Mountains showing on our left,
and the moon high above the woods of Tillyra. How much more
interesting all this is than his pirate! I thought. A shadowy form
passed us now and then; a peasant returning from his work, his coat
slung over his shoulder; a cow wandering in front of a girl, who
curtsied and drew her shawl over her head as she passed us.

Yes, that will do, Yeats answered. I shall lose a good many beautiful
verses, but I suppose it can't be helped. Only, I don't like your
ending.

The poem has since those days been reconstructed many times by Yeats,
but he has always retained the original ending, which is, that after
the massacre of the crew of the merchant galley, the Queen, who lies
under the canopy when the vessel is boarded, is forced by spells, shed
from the strings of a harp made of apple-wood, into a love so
overwhelming for the pirate, that she consents to follow him in his
quest of the ultimate kingdom in the realms of the Pole. My ending was
that her fancy for the pirate should cool before his determination to
go northward, and that he should bid her step over the bulwarks into
the merchant galley, where the pirates were drinking yellow ale; and
then, cutting the ropes which lashed the vessels together, he should
hoist a sail and go away northward. But Yeats said it would be a
disgraceful act to send a beautiful woman to drink yellow ale with a
drunken crew in the hold of a vessel.

So did we argue as we went towards Tillyra, the huge castle now
showing aloft among the trees, a light still burning in the ivied
embrasure where Edward sat struggling with the love-story of Jasper
and Millicent.

He, too, is an inferior artist; he will not yield himself to the
love-story. Both of these men in different ways put their personal
feelings in front of their work. They are both subaltern souls. And my
thoughts turned from them to contemplate the huge pile which Edward's
Norman ancestor had built in a hollow. Why in a hollow? I asked
myself, for these Norman castles are generally built from hillside to
hillside, and were evidently intended to overawe the country, the
castles lending each other aid when wild hordes of Celts descended
from the Burran Mountains; and when these raids ceased, probably in
the seventeenth century, the castle's keep was turned into stables,
and a modern house run up alongside of the central tower. Ireland is
covered with ruins from the fifth to the eighteenth century.

A land of ruin and weed, I said, and began to dream again a novel that
I had relinquished years ago in the Temple, till rooks rising in
thousands from the beech-trees interrupted my thoughts.

We'd better go into this wood, I said. Our shadows will seem to Edward
from his casement window--

Somewhat critical, Yeats answered; and we turned aside to talk of _The
Tale of a Town_, Yeats anxious to know from me if there was any chance
of Edward's being able to complete it by himself, and if he would
accept any of the modifications I had suggested.




X


The castle hall was empty and grey, only the autumn dusk in the Gothic
window; and the shuffle of the octogenarian butler sounding very
dismal as he pottered across the tessellated pavement. On learning
from him that Mr Martyn was still writing, I wandered from the organ
into the morning-room, and sat by the fire, waiting for Edward's
footstep. It came towards me about half an hour afterwards, slow and
ponderous, not at all like the step of the successful dramatist; and
my suspicions that his third act was failing him were aggravated by
his unwillingness to tell me about the alterations he was making in
it. All he could tell me was that he had been in Maynooth last summer,
and had heard the priests declaring that they refused to stultify
themselves; and as the word seemed to him typical of the country he
would put it frequently into the mouths of his politicians.

How drama was to arise out of the verb, to stultify, did not seem
clear, and in the middle of my embarrassment he asked me where I had
been all the afternoon, brightening up somewhat when I told him that I
had been to Coole. In a curious detached way he is always eager for a
gossip, and we talked of Yeats and Lady Gregory for a long time, and
of our walk round the lake, Edward rousing from my description of the
swans to ask me where I had left the poet.

At the gate.

Why didn't you ask him to stay for dinner? And while I sought for an
answer, he added: Maybe it's just as well you didn't, for today is
Friday and the salmon I was expecting from Galway hasn't arrived.

But Yeats and I aren't Catholics.

My house is a Catholic house, and those who don't care to conform to
the rule--

Your dogmatism exceeds that of an Archbishop; and I told him that I
had heard my father say that the Archbishop of Tuam, Dr McHale, had
meat always on his table on Friday, and when asked how this was,
answered that he didn't know who had gotten dispensations and who
hadn't. Edward muttered that he was not to be taken in by such remarks
about dispensations; he knew very well I had never troubled to ask for
one.

Why should I, since I'm not a Catholic?

If you aren't a Catholic, why don't you become a Protestant?

In the first place, one doesn't become a Protestant, one discovers
oneself a Protestant; and it seems to me that an Agnostic has as much
right to eat meat on Friday as a Protestant.

Agnosticism isn't a religion. It contains no dogma.

It comes to this, then: that you're going to make me dine off a couple
of boiled eggs. And I walked about the room, indignant, but not
because I care much about my food--two eggs and a potato are more
agreeable to me in intelligent society than grouse would be in stupid.
But two eggs and a potato forced down my throat on a theological fork
in a Gothic house that had cost twenty thousand pounds to build--two
eggs and a potato, without hope of cheese! The Irish do not eat
cheese, and I am addicted to it, especially to Double Gloucester. In
my school-days that cheese was a wonderful solace in my life, but
after leaving school I asked for it in vain, and gave up hope of ever
eating it again. It was not till the 'nineties that a waiter mentioned
it. Stilton, sir; Chester, Double Gloucester--Double Gloucester! You
have Double Gloucester! I thought it extinct. You have it? Then bring
it, I cried, and so joyfully that he couldn't drag himself from my
sight. An excellent cheese, I told him, but somewhat fallen from the
high standard it had assumed in my imagination. Even so, if there had
been a slice of Double Gloucester in the larder at Tillyra, I should
not have minded the absence of the salmon, and if Edward had pleaded
that his servants would be scandalised to see any one who was supposed
to be a Catholic eat meat on Fridays, I should have answered: But
everybody knows I'm not a Catholic. I've written it in half a dozen
books. And if Edward had said: But my servants don't read your books;
I shall be obliged if you'll put up with fasting fare for once, I
would have eaten an egg and a potato without murmur or remark. But to
be told I must dine off two eggs and a potato, so that his conscience
should not be troubled during the night, worried me, and I am afraid I
cast many an angry look across the table. An apple pie came up and
some custards, and these soothed me; he discovered some marmalade in a
cupboard, and Edward is such a sociable being when his pipe is alight,
that I forgave his theological prejudices for the sake of his
aesthetic. We peered into reproductions of Fra Angelico's frescoes,
and studied Leonardo's sketches for draperies. Edward liked Ibsen from
the beginning, and will like him to the end, and Swift. But he cannot
abide Schumann's melodies. We had often talked of these great men and
their works, but never did he talk as delightfully as on that Friday
evening right on into Saturday morning. Nor was it till Sunday morning
that his soul began to trouble him again. As I was finishing
breakfast, he had the face to ask me to get ready to go to Mass.

But, Edward, I don't believe in the Mass. My presence will be
only--Will you hold your tongue, George?... and not give scandal, he
answered, his voice trembling with emotion. Everybody knows that I
don't believe in the Mass.

If you aren't a Catholic, why don't you become a Protestant? And he
began pushing me from behind. I have told you before that one may
become a Catholic, but one discovers oneself a Protestant. But why am
I going to Gort? Because you had the bad taste to describe our church
in _A Drama in Muslin_, and to make such remarks about our parish
priest that he said, if you showed yourself in Ardrahan again, he'd
throw dirty water over you. If you send me to Gort, I shall be able to
describe Father ----'s church. Will you not be delaying? One word
more, It isn't on account of my description of Father ----'s church
that you won't take me to Ardrahan: the real reason is because, at
your request, mind you, I asked Father ---- not to spit upon your
carpet when he came to dinner at Tillyra. You were afraid to ask a
priest to refrain from any of his habits, and left the room. I only
asked you to draw his attention to the spittoon. Which I did; but he
said such things were only a botheration, and my admonitions on the
virtue of cleanliness angered him so that he never--

You'll be late for Mass. And you, Whelan; now, are you listening to
me? Do you hear me? You aren't to spare the whip. Away you go; you'll
only be just in time. And you, Whelan, you're not to delay putting up
the horse. Do you hear me?

Whelan drove away rapidly, and when I looked back I saw my friend
hurrying across the park, tumbling into the sunk fence in his anxiety
not to miss the _Confiteor_, and Whelan, who saw the accident, too,
feared that the masther is after hurting himself. Happily this was not
so. Edward was soon on his feet again, running across the field like a
hare, the driver said--out of politeness, I suppose.

Hardly like a hare, I said, hoping to draw a more original simile from
Whelan's rustic mind; but he only coughed a little, and shook up the
reins which he held in a shapeless, freckled hand.

Do you like the parish priest at Gort better than Father ---- at
Ardrahan?

They're well matched, Whelan answered--a thick-necked, long-bodied
fellow with a rim of faded hair showing under a bowler hat that must
have been about the stables for years, collecting dust along the
corn-bin and getting greasy in the harness-room. One reasoned that it
must have been black once upon a time, and that Whelan must have been
a young man long ago; and one reasoned that he must have shaved last
week, or three weeks ago, for there was a stubble on his chin. But in
spite of reason, Whelan seemed like something that had always been,
some old rock that had lain among the bramble since the days of Finn
MacCoole, and his sullenness seemed as permanent as that of the rocks,
and his face, too, seemed like a worn rock, for it was without
profile, and I could only catch sight of a great flabby ear and a red,
freckled neck, about which was tied a woollen comforter that had once
been white.

He answered my questions roughly, without troubling to turn his head,
like a man who wishes to be left to himself; and acquiescing in his
humour, I fell to thinking of Father James Browne, the parish priest
of Carnacun in the 'sixties, and of the day that he came over to Moore
Hall in his ragged cassock and battered biretta, with McHale's Irish
translation of Homer under his arm, saying that the Archbishop had
caught the Homeric ring in many a hexameter. My father smiled at the
priest's enthusiasm, but I followed this tall, gaunt man, of
picturesque appearance, whose large nose with tufted nostrils I
remember to this day, into the Blue Room to ask him if the Irish were
better than the Greek. He was a little loth to say it was not, but
this rustic scholar did not carry patriotism into literature, and he
admitted, on being pressed, that he liked the Greek better, and I
listened to his great rotund voice pouring through his wide Irish
mouth while he read me some eight or ten lines of Homer, calling my
attention to the famous line that echoes the clash of the wave on the
beach and the rustle of the shingle as the wave sinks back. My
curiosity about McHale's translation interested him in me, and it was
arranged soon after between him and my father that he should teach me
Latin, and I rode a pony over every morning to a thatched cottage
under ilex-trees, where the pleasantest hours of my childhood were
spent in a parlour lined with books from floor to ceiling, reading
there a little Virgil, and persuading an old priest into talk about
Quintilian and Seneca. One day he spoke of Propertius, and the beauty
of the name led me to ask Father James if I might read him, and not
receiving a satisfactory answer, my curiosity was stimulated and
Caesar studied diligently for a month.

Shall I know enough Latin in six months to read Propertius? It will be
many years before you will be able to read him. He is a very difficult
writer. Could Martin Blake read Propertius?

Martin Blake was Father James's other pupil, and these Blakes are
neighbours of ours, and live on the far side of Carnacun. Father James
was always telling me of the progress Martin was making in the Latin
language, and I was always asking Father James when I should overtake
him, but he held out very little hope that it would be possible for me
ever to outdo Martin in scholarship. He may have said this because he
could not look upon me as a promising pupil, or he may have been moved
by a hope to start a spirit of emulation in me. He was a wise man, and
the reader will wonder how it was that, with such a natural interest
in languages and such excellent opportunities, I did not become a
classical scholar; the reader's legitimate curiosity shall be
satisfied.

One day Father James said the time would come when I would give up
hunting--everything, for the classics, and I rode home, elated, to
tell my mother the prophecy. But she burst out laughing, leaving me in
no doubt whatever that she looked upon Father James's idea of me as an
excellent joke; and the tragedy of it all is that I accepted her
casual point of view without consideration, carrying it almost at once
into reality, playing truant instead of going to my Latin lesson.
Father James, divested of his scholarship, became a mere priest in my
eyes. I think that I avoided him, and am sure that I hardly ever saw
him again, except at Mass.

A strange old church is Carnacun, built in the form of a cross, with
whitewashed walls and some hardened earth for floor; and I should be
hard set to discover in my childhood an earlier memory than the
panelled roof, designed and paid for by my father, who had won the
Chester Cup some years before. The last few hundred pounds of his good
fortune were spent in pitch-pine rafters and boards, and he provided a
large picture of the _Crucifixion_, painted by my cousin, Jim Browne,
who happened to be staying at Moore Hall at the time, from Tom Kelly
the lodge-keeper, the first nude model that ever stood up in Mayo
(Mayo has always led the way--Ireland's van-bird for sure). It was
taken in great pomp from Moore Hall to Carnacun; and the hanging of it
was a great and punctilious affair. A board had to be nailed at the
back whereby a rope could be attached to hoist it into the roof, and
lo! Mickey Murphy drove a nail through one of the gilt leaves which
served as a sort of frame for the picture. My father shouted his
orders to the men in the roof that they were to draw up the picture
very slowly, and, lest it should sway and get damaged in the swaying,
strings were attached to it. My father and mother each held a string,
and the third may have been held by Jim Browne, or perhaps I was
allowed to hold it.

Some time afterwards a _Blessed Virgin_ and a _St Joseph_ came down
from Dublin, and they were painted and gilded by my father, and so
beautifully, that they were the admiration of every one for a very
long while, and it was Jim Browne's _Crucifixion_ and these anonymous
statues that awakened my first aesthetic emotions. I used to look
forward to seeing them all the way from Moore Hall to Carnacun--a
bleak road as soon as our gate-lodge was passed: on one side a hill
that looked as if it had been peeled; on the other some moist fields,
divided by small stone walls, liked by me in those days, for they were
excellent practice for my pony. Along this road our tenantry used to
come from the villages, the women walking on one side (the married
women in dark blue cloaks, the girls hiding their faces behind their
shawls, carrying their boots in their hands, which they would put on
in the chapel yard), the men walking on the other side, the elderly
men in traditional swallow-tail coats, knee-breeches, and worsted
stockings; the young men in corduroy trousers and frieze coats. As we
passed, the women curtsied in their red petticoats; the young men
lifted their round bowler-hats; but the old men stood by, their tall
hats in their hands. At the bottom of every one was a red
handkerchief, and I remember wisps of grey hair floating in the wind.
Our tenantry met the tenantry of Clogher and Tower Hill, and they all
collected round the gateway of the chapel to admire the carriages of
their landlords. We were received like royalty as we turned in through
the gates and went up the wooden staircase leading to the gallery,
frequented by the privileged people of the parish--by us, and by our
servants, the postmaster and postmistress from Ballyglass, and a few
graziers. In the last pew were the police, and after the landlords
these were the most respected.

As soon as we were settled in our pew the acolytes ventured from the
sacristy tinkling their bells, the priest following, carrying the
chalice covered with the veil. As the ceremony of the Mass had never
caught my fancy, I used to spend my time looking over the pew into the
body of the church, wondering at the herd of peasantry, trying to
distinguish our own serfs among those from the Tower Hill and Clogher
estates. Pat Plunket, a highly respectable tenant (he owned a small
orchard), I could always discover; he knelt just under us, and in
front of a bench, the only one in the body of the church, and about
him collected those few that had begun to rise out of brutal
indigence. Their dress and their food were slightly different from the
commoner kind. Pat Plunket and Mickey Murphy, the carpenter, not the
sawyer, were supposed to drink tea and eat hot cakes. The others
breakfasted off Indian-meal porridge. And to Pat Plunket's bench used
to come a tall woman, whose grace of body the long blue-black cloak of
married life could not hide. I liked to wonder which among the men
about her might be her husband. And a partial memory still lingers of
a cripple that was allowed to avail himself of Pat Plunket's bench.
His crutches were placed against the wall, and used to catch my eye,
suggesting thoughts of what his embarrassment would be if they were
taken away whilst he prayed. A great unknown horde of peasantry from
Ballyglass and beyond it knelt in the left-hand corner, and after the
Communion they came up the church with a great clatter of brogues to
hear the sermon, leaving behind a hideous dwarf whom I could not take
my eyes off, so strange was his waddle as he moved about the edge of
the crowd, his huge mouth grinning all the time.

Our pew was the first on the right-hand side, and the pew behind us
was the Clogher pew, and it was filled with girls--Helena, Livy,
Lizzy, and May--the first girls I ever knew; and these are now under
the sod--all except poor Livy, an old woman whom I sometimes meet out
with her dog by the canal. In the first few on the left was a red
landlord with a frizzled beard and a perfectly handsome wife, and
behind him was Joe McDonnel from Carnacun House, a great farmer, and
the wonder of the church, so great was his belly. I can see these
people dimly, like figures in the background of a picture; but the
blind girl is as clear in my memory as if she were present. She used
to kneel behind the Virgin's altar and the Communion rails, almost
entirely hidden under an old shawl, grown green with age; and the
event of every Sunday, at least for me, was to see her draw herself
forward when the Communion bell rang, and lift herself to receive the
wafer that the priest placed upon her tongue and having received it,
she would sink back, overcome, overawed, and I used to wonder at her
piety, and think of the long hours she spent sitting by the cabin fire
waiting for Sunday to come round again. On what roadside was that
cabin? And did she come, led by some relative or friend, or finding
her way down the road by herself? Questions that interested me more
than anybody else, and it was only at the end of a long inquiry that I
learnt that she came from one of the cabins opposite Carnacun House.
Every time we passed that cabin I used to look out for her, thinking
how I might catch sight of her in the doorway; but I never saw her
except in the chapel. Only once did we meet her as we drove to
Ballyglass, groping her way, doubtless, to Carnacun. Where else would
she be going? And hearing our horses' hoofs she sank closer to the
wall, overawed, into the wet among the falling leaves.

As soon as the Communion was over Father James would come forward, and
thrusting his hands under the alb (his favourite gesture) he would
begin his sermon in Irish (in those days Irish was the language of the
country among the peasantry), and we would sit for half an hour,
wondering what were the terrible things he was saying, asking
ourselves if it were pitchforks or ovens, or both, that he was
talking; for the peasantry were groaning aloud, the women not
infrequently falling on their knees, beating their breasts; and I
remember being perplexed by the possibility that some few tenantry
might be saved, for if that happened how should we meet them in
heaven? Would they look another way and pass us by without lifting
their hats and crying: Long life to yer honour?

My memories of Carnacun Chapel and Father James Browne were
interrupted by a sudden lurching forward of the car, which nearly
flung me into the road. Whelan apologised for himself and his horse,
but I damned him, for I was annoyed at being awakened from my dream.
There was no hope of being able to pick it up again, for the chapel
bell was pealing down the empty landscape, calling the peasants from
their desolute villages. It seemed to me that the Carnacun bell used
to cry across the moist fields more cheerfully; there was a menace in
the Gort bell as there is in the voice of a man who fears that he may
not be obeyed, and this gave me an interest in the Mass I was going to
hear. It would teach me something of the changes that had happened
during my absence. The first thing I noticed as I approached the
chapel was the smallness of the crowd of men about the gateposts; only
a few figures, and they surly and suspicious fellows, resolved not to
salute the landlord, yet breaking away with difficulty from
traditional servility. Our popularity had disappeared with the laws
that favoured us, but Whelan's appearance counted for something in
the decaying sense of rank among the peasantry, and I mentally
reproached Edward for not putting his servant into livery. It
interested me to see that the superstitions of Carnacun were still
followed: the peasants dipped their fingers in a font and sprinkled
themselves, and the only difference that I noticed between the two
chapels was one for the worse; the windows at Gort were not broken,
and the happy, circling swallows did not build under the rafters. It
was easier to discover differences in the two congregations. My eyes
sought vainly the long dark cloak of married life, nor did I succeed
in finding an old man in knee-breeches and worsted stockings, nor a
girl drawing her shawl over her head.

The Irish language is inseparable from these things, I said, and it
has gone. The sermon will be in English, or in a language as near
English as those hats and feathers are near the fashions that prevail
in Paris.

The Gort peasants seemed able to read, for they held prayer-books, and
as if to help them in their devotion a harmonium began to utter sounds
as discordant as the red and blue glass in the windows, and all the
time the Mass continued very much as I remembered it, until the priest
lifted his alb over his head and placed it upon the altar (Father
James used to preach in the vestment, I said to myself); and very
slowly and methodically the Gort priest tried to explain the mystery
of Transubstantiation to the peasants, who lent such an indifferent
ear to him that it was difficult not to think that Father James's
sermons, based on the fear of the devil, were more suitable to
Ireland.

A Mass only rememberable for a squealing harmonium, some panes in
terrifying blues and reds, and my own great shame. However noble my
motive may have been, I had knelt and stood with the congregation; I
had even bowed my head, making believe by this parade that I accepted
the Mass as a truth. It could not be right to do this, even for the
sake of the Irish Literary Theatre, and I left the chapel asking
myself by what strange alienation of the brain had Edward come to
imagine that a piece of enforced hypocrisy on my part could be to any
one's advantage.

It seemed to me that mortal sin had been committed that morning; a
sense of guilt clung about me. Edward was consulted. Could it be right
for one who did not believe in the Mass to attend Mass? He seemed to
acquiesce that it might not be right, but when Sunday came round again
my refusal to get on the car so frightened him that I relinquished
myself to his scruples, to his terror, to his cries. The reader will
judge me weak, but it should be remembered that he is my oldest
friend, and it seemed to me that we should never be the same friends
again if I refused; added to which he had been telling me all the week
that he was getting on finely with his third act, and for the sake of
a hypothetical act I climbed up on the car.

Now, Whelan, don't delay putting up the horse. Mind you're in time for
Mass, and don't leave the chapel until the last Gospel has been read.

Must we wait for Benediction? I cried ironically.

Edward did not answer, possibly because he does not regard Benediction
as part of the liturgy, and is, therefore, more or less indifferent to
it. The horse trotted and Whelan clacked his tongue, a horrible noise
from which I tried to escape by asking him questions.

Are the people quiet in this part of the country? Quite enough, he
answered, and I thought I detected a slightly contemptuous accent in
the syllables.

Not much life in the country? I hear the hunting is going to be
stopped?

Parnell never told them to stop the hunting.

You're a Parnellite?

He was a great man.

The priests went against him, I said, because he loved another man's
wife.

And O'Shea not living with her at the time.

Even if he had been, I answered, Ireland first of all, say I. He was a
great man.

He was that.

And the priest at Gort--was he against him?

Wasn't he every bit as bad as the others?

Then you don't care to go to his church?

I'd just as lief stop away.

It's strange, Whelan; it's strange that Mr Martyn should insist on my
going to Gort to Mass. Of what use can Mass be to any one if he
doesn't wish to hear it?

Whelan chuckled, or seemed to chuckle.

He will express no opinion, I said to myself, and abstractions don't
interest him. So, turning to the concrete, I spoke of the priest who
was to say Mass, and Whelan agreed that he had gone agin Parnell.

Well, Whelan, it's a great waste of time going to Gort to hear a Mass
one doesn't want to hear, and I have business with Mr Yeats.

Maybe you'd like me to turn into Coole, sur?

I was thinking we might do that ... only you won't speak to Mr Martin
about it, will you? Because, you see Whelan, every one has his
prejudices, and I am a great friend of Mr Martyn, and wouldn't like to
disappoint him.

Wouldn't like to contrairy him, sur?

That's it, Whelan. Now, what about your dinner? You don't mind having
your dinner in a Protestant house?

It's all one to me, sur.

The dinner is the main point, isn't it, Whelan?

Begad it is sur, and he turned the horse in through the gates.

Just go round, I said, and put the horse up and say nothing to
anybody.

Yes, sur.

After long ringing the maid-servant opened the door and told me that
Lady Gregory had gone to church with her niece; Mr Yeats was
composing. Would I take a seat in the drawing-room and wait till he
was finished? He must have heard the wheels of the car coming round
the gravel sweep, for he was in the room before the servant left
it--enthusiastic, though a little weary. He had written five lines and
a half, and a pause between one's rhymes is an excellent thing, he
said. One could not but admire him, for even in early morning he was
convinced of the importance of literature in our national life. He is
nearly as tall as a Dublin policeman, and preaching literature he
stood on the hearthrug, his feet set close together. Lifting his arms
above his head (the very movement that Raphael gives to Paul when
preaching at Athens), he said what he wanted to do was to gather up a
great mass of speech. It did not seem to me clear why he should be at
pains to gather up a great mass of speech to write so exiguous a thing
as _The Shadowy Waters_; but we live in our desires rather than in our
achievements, and Yeats talked on, telling me that he was
experimenting, and did not know whether his play would come out in
rhyme or in blank verse; he was experimenting. He could write blank
verse almost as easily as prose, and therefore feared it; some
obstacle, some darn was necessary. It seemed a pity to interrupt him,
but I was interested to hear if he were going to accept my end, and
allow the lady to drift southward, drinking yellow ale with the
sailors, while the hero sought salvation alone in the North. He flowed
out into a torrent of argument and explanation, very ingenious, but
impossible to follow. Phrase after phrase rose and turned and went out
like a wreath of smoke, and when the last was spoken and the idea it
had borne had vanished, I asked him if he knew the legend of Diarmuid
and Grania. He began to tell it to me in its many variants, surprising
me with unexpected dramatic situations, at first sight contradictory
and incoherent, but on closer scrutiny revealing a psychology in germ
which it would interest me to unfold. A wonderful hour of literature
that was, flowering into a resolution to write an heroic play
together. As we sat looking at each other in silence, Lady Gregory
returned from church.

She came into the room quickly, with a welcoming smile on her face,
and I set her down here as I see her: a middle-aged woman, agreeable
to look upon, perhaps for her broad, handsome, intellectual brow
enframed in iron-grey hair. The brown, wide-open eyes are often lifted
in looks of appeal and inquiry, and a natural wish to sympathise
softens her voice till it whines. It modulated, however, very
pleasantly as she yielded her attention to Yeats, who insisted on
telling her how two beings so different as myself and Whelan had
suddenly become united in a conspiracy to deceive Edward, Whelan
because he could not believe in the efficacy of a Mass performed by an
anti-Parnellite, and I because--Yeats hesitated for a sufficient
reason, deciding suddenly that I had objected to hear Mass in Gort
because there was no one in the church who had read Villiers de l'Isle
Adam except myself; and he seemed so much amused that the thought
suddenly crossed my mind that perhaps the _cocasseries_ of Connaught
were more natural to him than the heroic moods which he believed
himself called upon to interpret. His literature is one thing and his
conversation is another, divided irreparably. Is this right? Lady
Gregory chattered on, telling stories faintly farcical, amusing to
those who knew the neighbourhood, but rather wearisome for one who
didn't, and I was waiting for an opportunity to tell her that an
heroic drama was going to be written on the subject of Diarmuid and
Grania.

When my lips broke the news, a cloud gathered in her eyes, and she
admitted that she thought it would be hardly wise for Yeats to
undertake any further work at present; and later in the afternoon she
took me into her confidence, telling me that Yeats came to Coole every
summer because it was necessary to get him away from the distractions
of London, not so much from social as from the intellectual
distractions that Arthur Symons had inaugurated. The Savoy rose up in
my mind with its translations from Villiers le l'Isle Adam, Verlaine
and Maeterlinck; and I agreed with her that alien influences were a
great danger to the artist. All Yeats's early poems, she broke in,
were written in Sligo, and among them were twenty beautiful lyrics and
Ireland's one great poem, _The Wanderings of Usheen_--all these had
come straight out of the landscape and the people he had known from
boyhood.

For seven years we have been waiting for a new book from him; ever
since _The Countess Cathleen_ we have been reading the publisher's
autumn announcement of _The Wind among the Reeds._ The volume was
finished here last year; it would never have been finished if I had
not asked him to Coole; and though we live in an ungrateful world, I
think somebody will throw a kind word after me some day, if for
nothing else, for _The Wind among the Reeds_.

I looked round, thinking that perhaps life at Coole was arranged
primarily to give him an opportunity of writing poems. As if she had
read my thoughts, Lady Gregory led me into the back drawing-room, and
showed me the table at which he wrote, and I admired the clean pens,
the fresh ink, and the spotless blotter; these were her special care
every morning. I foresaw the strait sofa lying across the window,
valued in some future time because the poet had reclined upon it
between his rhymes. Ah me! the creeper that rustles an accompaniment
to his melodies in the pane will awaken again, year after year, but
one year it will awaken in vain.... My eyes thanked Lady Gregory for
her devotion to literature. Instead of writing novels she had released
the poet from the quern of daily journalism, and anxious that she
should understand my appreciation of her, I spoke of the thirty-six
wild swans that had risen out of the lake while Yeats and I wandered
all through the long evening seeking a new composition for _The
Shadowy Waters_.

She did not answer me, and I followed her in silence back to the front
room and sat listening to her while she told me that it was because
she wanted poems from him that she looked askance at our project to
write a play together on the subject of Diarmuid and Grania. It was
not that the subject was unsuited to his genius, but she thought it
should be written by him alone; the best of neither would transpire in
collaboration, and she lamented that it were useless to save him from
the intellectual temptations of Symons if he were to be tossed into
more subtle ones. She laughed, as is her way when she cozens, and
reminded me that we were of different temperaments and had arisen out
of different literary traditions.

Mayo went to Montmartre, and Sligo turned into Fleet Street.

Suspicious in her cleverness, my remark did not altogether please her,
and she said something about a man of genius and a man of talent
coming together, speaking quickly under her breath, so that her
scratch would escape notice at the time; and we were talking of our
responsibilities towards genius when the door opened and Yeats came
into the room.

He entered somewhat diffidently, I thought, with an invitation to me
to go for a walk. Lady Gregory was appeased with the news that he had
written five and a half lines that morning, and a promise that he
would be back at six, and would do a little more writing before
dinner. As he went away he told me that he might attain his maximum of
nine lines that evening, if he succeeded in finishing the broken line.
But S must never meet S; for his sake was inadmissible, and while
seeking how he might avoid such a terrifying cacophony we tramped down
wet roads and climbed over low walls into scant fields, finding the
ruined castle we were in search of at the end of a long boreen among
tall, wet grasses. The walls were intact and the stair, and from the
top we stood watching the mist drifting across the grey country. Yeats
telling how the wine had been drugged at Tara, myself thinking how
natural it was that Lady Gregory should look upon me as a danger to
Yeats's genius. As we descended the slippery stair an argument began
in my head whereby our project of collaboration might be defended.
Next time I went to Coole I would say to Lady Gregory: You see, Yeats
came to me with _The Shadowy Waters_ because he had entangled the plot
and introduced all his ideas into it, and you will admit that the plot
had to be disentangled? To conciliate her completely I would say that
while Yeats was rewriting _The Shadowy Waters_ I would spend my time
writing an act about the many adventures that befell Diarmuid and
Grania as they fled before Finn. Yeats had told me these adventures in
the ruined castle; I had given to them all the attention that I could
spare from Lady Gregory, who, I was thinking, might admit my help in
the arrangement of some incidents in _The Shadowy Waters_, but would
always regard our collaboration in _Diarmuid and Grania_ with
hostility. But for this partiality it seemed to me I could not blame
her, so well had she put her case when she said that her fear was that
my influence might break up the mould of his mind.

The car waited for me at the end of the boreen, and before starting I
tried to persuade Yeats to come to Tillyra with me, but he said he
could not leave Lady Gregory alone, and before we parted I learnt that
she read to him every evening. Last summer it was _War and Peace_, and
this summer she was reading Spenser's _Faerie Queene_, for he was
going to publish a selection and must get back to Coole for the
seventh canto.

Goodbye, and springing up on the car, I was driven by Whelan into the
mist, thinking Yeats the most fortunate amongst us, he having
discovered among all others that one who, by instinctive sympathy,
understood the capacity of his mind, and could evoke it, and who never
wearied of it, whether it came to her in elaborately wrought stanzas
or in the form of some simple confession, the mood of last night
related as they crossed the sward after breakfast. As the moon is more
interested in the earth than in any other thing, there is always some
woman more interested in a man's mind than in anything else, and
willing to follow it sentence by sentence. A great deal of Yeats's
work must come to her in fragments--a line and a half, two lines--and
these she faithfully copies on her typewriter, and even those that his
ultimate taste has rejected are treasured up, and perhaps will one day
appear in a stately variorum edition.

Well she may say that the future will owe her something, and my
thoughts moved back to the first time I saw her some twenty-five years
ago. She was then a young woman, very earnest, who divided her hair in
the middle and wore it smooth on either side of a broad and handsome
brow. Her eyes were always full of questions, and her Protestant
high-school air became her greatly and estranged me from her.

In her drawing-room were to be met men of assured reputation in
literature and politics, and there was always the best reading of the
time upon her tables. There was nothing, however, in her conversation
to suggest literary faculty, and it was a surprise to me to hear one
day that she had written a pamphlet in defence of Arabi Pasha, an
Egyptian rebel. Some years after she edited her husband's memoirs,
circumstances had not proved favourable to the development of her
gift, and it languished till she met Yeats. He could not have been
long at Coole before he began to draw her attention to the beauty of
the literature that rises among the hills and bubbles irresponsibly,
and set her going from cabin to cabin taking down stories, and
encouraged her to learn the original language of the country, so that
they might add to the Irish idiom which the peasant had already
translated in English, making in this way a language for themselves.

Yeats could only acquire the idiom by the help of Lady Gregory, for
although he loves the dialect and detests the defaced idiom which we
speak in our streets and parlours, he has little aptitude to learn
that of the boreen and the market-place. She put her aptitude at his
service, and translated portions of _Cathleen ni Houlihan_ into
Kiltartan (Kiltartan is the village in which she collects the
dialect); and she worked it into the revised version of the stories
from _The Secret Rose_, published by the Dun Emer Press, and thinking
how happy their lives must be at Coole, implicated in literary
partnership, my heart went out towards her in a sudden sympathy. She
has been wise all her life through, I said; she knew him to be her
need at once, and she never hesitated ... yet she knew me before she
knew him.




XI


While Edward revised his play Yeats and I talked of _The Shadowy
Waters_, and the Boers crossed one of our frontiers into Cape Colony
or Natal--I have forgotten which; but I remember very well my attitude
of mind towards the war, and how I used to walk every day from Tillyra
to Ardrahan, a distance of at least two Irish miles, to fetch the
newspaper, so anxious was I to read of a victory for our soldiers.

Before starting I would pay Edward a visit in his tower, and after a
few words about the play, I would tell him that the way out of our
South African difficulties was simple--the Government should arm the
blacks; and this would make Edward growl out that the English
Government was beastly enough to do it; and I remember how I used to
go away, pleased that I had always the courage of my morality. Other
men do what they know to be wrong, and repent, or think they repent;
but as it would be impossible for me to do what I believe to be wrong,
repentance is for me an idle word; and, thinking that to raise an army
of seventy thousand blacks would be a fine trick to play upon the
Boers, I often returned through the park full of contempt for my
countrymen, my meditations interrupted occasionally by some natural
sight--the beauty of the golden bracken through which the path
twisted, a crimson beech at the end of it, or the purple beauty of a
line of hills over against the rocky plain freckled with the thatched
cabins of the peasantry. Nor do I remember more beautiful evenings
than these were; and, as the days drew in, the humble hawthorns shaped
themselves into lovely silhouettes, and a meaning seemed to gather
round the low, mossy wall out of which they grew, until one day the
pictorial idea which had hitherto stayed my steps melted away, and I
became possessed by a sentimental craving for the country itself.
After all, it was my country, and, strangely perturbed, I returned to
the castle to ask Edward's opinion regarding the mysterious feeling
that had glided suddenly into my heart as I stood looking at the
Burran Mountains.

It is difficult for anybody to say why he loves his country, for what
is a country but a geographical entity? And I am not sure that Edward
was listening very attentively when I told him of a certain pity, at
variance with my character, that had seemed to rise out of my heart.

It would be strange if Cathleen ni Houlihan were to get me after all.
That is impossible ... only a passing feeling; and I sat looking at
him, remembering that the feeling I dreaded had seemed to come out of
the landscape and to have descended into my heart. But he was so
little interested in what seemed to me transcendental that I refrained
from further explanation, concluding that he was thinking of his play,
which had gone to Coole yesterday. I was led to think this, for he was
sitting at the window as if watching for Yeats. We were expecting our
poet.

Here he is. I wonder what he thinks of your revisions?

And to save Edward from humiliation I asked Yeats as soon as he came
into the room if he liked the new third act.

No, no; it's entirely impossible. We couldn't have such a play
performed. And dropping his cloak from his shoulders, he threw his
hair from his brow with a pale hand, and sank into a chair, and seemed
to lose himself in a sudden meditation. It was like a scene from a
play, with Yeats in the principal part; and, admiring him, I sat
thinking of the gloom of Kean, of the fate of the Princes in the
Tower, headsmen, and suchlike things, and thinking, too, that Yeats,
notwithstanding his hierarchic airs, was not an actual literary
infallibility. The revised third act might not be as bad as he seemed
to think it. He might be mistaken ... or prejudiced. Yeats's literary
integrity is without stain, that I knew. But he might be prejudiced
against Edward without knowing it. The success of _The Heather Field_
had stirred up in Edward, till then the most unassuming of men, a
certain aggressiveness which, for some time past, I could see had been
getting on Yeats's nerves. Nor am I quite sure that myself at that
moment would not have liked to humble Edward a little ... only a
little. But let us not be drawn from the main current of our
resolution, which is entirely literary, by a desire to note every
sub-current. Yeats looked very determined, and when I tried to induce
him to give way he answered:

We are artists, and cannot be expected to accept a play because other
plays as bad, and nearly as bad, have been performed.

Saints, I said, do not accept sins because sins are of common
occurrence.

He did not answer, but sat looking into the fire gloomily.

He takes a very determined view of your play, Edward. It may not
strike me in the same light. If you will give me the manuscript I'll
just run upstairs with it. I can't read it in front of you both.

There was no reason why I should read the first two acts; Edward had
not touched them. What he had engaged to rewrite was the last half of
the third act, and a few minutes would enable me to see if he had made
sufficient alterations for the play to be put forward--not as a work
of art--that is as something that would be acted fifty years hence for
the delight of numerous audiences, as proof of the talent that existed
in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century--but as a play to
which literary people could give their attention without feeling
ashamed of themselves afterwards. There was no reason why we should
ask for more than that; for the subject of the play was merely one of
topical interest, and it is a mistake--I pointed this out to Yeats--to
be very particular about the literary quality of such a play. All the
same it would have to be put right, and this Edward could not do. It
was more a matter for a cunning literary hand than for a fellow like
Edward with a streak of original genius in him, and very little
literary tact.

On these reflections I sat down to read, but the play was so crude,
even in its revised form, that I fell to thinking that Yeats's
thoughts must have wandered very often from the page. He should have
remembered, however, whilst we discussed the play with Edward, that
Edward was a human being after all, and not made it apparent that he
looked upon the play as something the local schoolmaster might have
written, and of all, should have kept looks out of his face which said
as plainly as words could: Your soul is inferior, beneath my notice;
take it away. He did not even seem to apprehend that Edward was torn
between love of self and love of Ireland. Abstract thinking, I said,
kills human sympathies, and Yeats is no longer able to appreciate
anything but literary values. The man behind the play is ignored ...
Yeats can no longer think with his body; it is only his mind that
thinks. He is all intellect, if that isn't too cardinal a word. And
seeing before me quite a new country of conjecture, one which I had
never rambled in, I sat thinking of the cruelty of the monks of the
Middle Ages, and the cruelty of the nuns and the monks of the present
day. Their thoughts are abstracted from this world, from human
life--that is why; and Yeats was a sort of monk of literature, an
Inquisitor of Journalism who would burn a man for writing that
education was progressing by leaps and bounds. Opinions make people
cruel--literary as well as theological. Whereas the surgeon, whose
thought is always of the flesh, is the kindliest of creatures. It is
true that one sometimes hears of surgeons who, in the pursuit of
science, willingly undertake operations which they know to be
dangerous, and we know that the scientists in the laboratory are
indifferent to the sufferings of the animals they vivisect. Even so,
Nature thinks like the surgeon who risks an operation in order that he
may discover the cause of the disease. The knowledge he gathers from
the death of the patient is passed on, and it saves the life of
another. But the artist cannot pass on any portion of his art to his
pupil; his gift lives in himself and dies with him, and his art comes
as much from his heart as from his intellect. The intellect outlives
the heart, and the heart of Yeats seemed to me to have died ten years
ago; the last of it probably went into the composition of _The
Countess Cathleen_.

Yesterevening, when we wandered about the lake, talking of _The
Shadowy Waters_, trying to free it from the occult sciences that had
grown about it, Fomorians beaked and unbeaked, and magic harps and
Druid spells, I did not perceive that the difficulties into which the
story had wandered could be attributed to a lack of human sympathy.
But Yeats's treatment of Edward proved it to me. The life of the
artist is always at difficult equipoise; he may fail from lack of
human sympathies, or he may yield altogether to them and become a mere
philanthropist; and we may well wonder what the choice of the artist
would have been if he had to choose between the destruction of Messina
and Reggio or of Herculaneum and Pompeii. Were he to choose the
ancient ruins in preference to the modern towns, he might give very
good reasons for doing so, saying that to prolong the lives of a
hundred thousand people for a few years would not be, in his opinion,
worth a bronze like the Narcissus. A very specious argument might be
maintained in favour of the preservation of the bronze, even at the
price of a hundred thousand lives. Perhaps he might let the bronze go,
but if all Greek art were added he would hesitate, and when he had let
one hundred thousand men and women go to their doom he would probably
retire into the mountains to escape from sight of every graven thing.
To write a play our human and artistic sympathies must be very evenly
balanced, and I remembered that among my suggestions for the
reconstruction of _The Shadowy Waters_, the one that Yeats refused
most resolutely was that the woman should refuse to accompany the
metaphysical pirate to the ultimate North, but return somewhat
diffidently, ashamed of herself, to the sailors who were drinking
yellow ale.

Yeats has reflected himself in the pirate, I said. All he cares for is
a piece of literature. The man behind it matters nothing to him. But
am I not just as wicked as he? Worse, indeed, for Edward is my oldest
friend and I do not defend him. Whereupon the manuscript fell from my
hand, and I sat for a long time thinking; and then, getting up, I
wandered out of my room and hung over the banisters, looking down into
the central hall, asking myself what Yeats and Edward were saying to
each other, and thinking that their talk must be strained and
difficult, thinking too that my duty was to go down to them and bring
their bitter interview to an end.

And I resolved to say that I could see no reason why the play should
not be acted. But half-way down the stairs my conscience forbade so
flagrant a lie. Yeats would not believe me. And what good would it do
to allow Edward to bring over actors and actresses for the performance
of such a play? It's kinder to tell him the truth. In the middle of
the hall I stopped again. But if I tell him the truth the Irish
Literary Theatre will come to an end.

Well, Edward, I've read your play ... but the alterations you've made
aren't very considerable, and I can't help thinking that the play
requires something more done to it.

You've read my play very quickly. Are you sure you've read it?

I've read all the passages that you've altered.

I had only glanced through them, but I could not tell him that a
glance was sufficient.

If there were time, you might alter it yourself. You see, the time is
short--only two months; and I watched Edward. For a long time he said
nothing, but sat like a man striving with himself, and I pitied him,
knowing how much of his life was in his play.

I give you the play, he said, starting to his feet. Do with it as you
like; turn it inside out, upside down. I'll make you a present of it!

But, Edward, if you don't wish me to alter your play--

Ireland has always been divided, and I've preached unity. Now I'm
going to practise it. I give you the play.

But what do you mean by giving us the play? Yeats said.

Do with it what you like. I'm not going to break up the Irish Literary
Theatre. Do with my play what you like, and he rushed away.

I'm afraid, Yeats, his feelings are very much hurt.

And my heart went out to the poor man sitting alone in his tower,
brooding over his failure. I expected Yeats to say something
sympathetic, but all he said was: We couldn't produce such a play as
that. It was perhaps the wisest thing he could say under the
circumstances. For what use is there in sentimentalising over the lamb
whose throat is going to be cut in the slaughter-house?

The sooner the alterations are made the better.

And I asked Yeats to come over tomorrow.

You see, you'll have to help me with this adaptation, for I know
nothing of Ireland.

It is a pleasure to be with him, especially when one meets him for the
purpose of literary discussion; he is a real man of letters, with an
intelligence as keen as a knife, and a knife was required to cut the
knots into which Edward had tied his play, for very few could be
loosened. The only fault I found with Yeats in this collaboration was
the weariness into which he sank suddenly, saying that after a couple
of hours he felt a little faint, and would require half an hour's
rest.

We returned to the play after lunch, and continued until nearly seven
o'clock, too long a day for Yeats, who was not so strong then as he is
now, and Lady Gregory wrote to me, saying that I must be careful not
to overwork him, and that it would be well not to let him go more than
two hours without food--a glass of milk, or, better still, a cup of
beef-tea in the afternoon, and half an hour after lunch he was to have
a glass of sherry and a biscuit. These refreshments were brought up by
Gantley, Edward's octogenarian butler, and every time I heard his foot
upon the stairs I offered up a little prayer that Edward was away in
his tower, for, of course, I realised that the tray would bring home
to him in a very real and cruel way the fact that his play was being
changed and rewritten under his very roof, and that he was providing
sherry and biscuits in order to enable Yeats to strike out, or, worse
still, to rewrite his favourite passages. It was very pathetic; and
while pitying and admiring Edward for his altruism, I could not help
thinking of two children threading a bluebottle. True that the
bluebottle's plight is worse than Edward's, for the insect does not
know why it is being experimented upon, but Edward knew he was
sacrificing himself for his country, and the idea of sacrifice begets
a great exaltation of mind, is in fact, a sort of anaesthetic; and
sustained by this belief we, Yeats and I, worked on through the day,
Yeats tarrying as late as seven o'clock in order to finish a scene,
Edward asking him to stay to dinner, a kindness that proved our
undoing, for we lacked tact, discussing before Edward the alterations
we were going to make. He sat immersed in deep gloom, saying he did
not like our adaptation of the first act, and when we told him the
alterations we were going to make in the second, he said:

But you surely aren't going to alter that? Why do you do this? Good
heavens! I wouldn't advise you--

Yeats looked at him sternly, as a schoolmaster looks at a small boy,
and next morning Edward told me that he was going to Dublin, adding
that I had better come with him. On my mentioning that I expected
Yeats that afternoon, he said that he would write, telling him of his
decision, and a note came from Lady Gregory in the course of the
afternoon, saying that she was leaving Coole. Would it be convenient
to Edward to allow Yeats to stay at Tillyra for a few days by himself?
He would like to continue the composition of _The Shadowy Waters_ in
Galway.

Lady Gregory's request seemed to me an extraordinary one to make in
the present circumstances, and it seemed still more extraordinary that
Edward should have granted it, and without a moment's hesitation, as
if Yeats's literary arrogance had already dropped out of his memory.
Such self-effacement as this was clearly a matter for psychological
inquiry, and I turned Edward over in my mind many times before I
discovered that his self-effacement should be attributed to patriotism
rather than to natural amiability. He believed Yeats to be Ireland's
poet, and to refuse to shelter him might rob Ireland of a masterpiece,
a responsibility which he did not care to face.

Extraordinary! I said to myself, and as in a vision I saw Ireland as a
god demanding human sacrifices, and everybody, or nearly everybody,
crying: Take me, Ireland, take me; I am unworthy, but accept me as a
burnt-offering. Ever since I have been in the country I have heard
people speaking of working for Ireland. But how can one work for
Ireland without working for oneself? What do they mean? They do not
know themselves, but go on vainly sacrificing all personal
achievement, humiliating themselves before Ireland as if the country
were a god. A race inveterately religious I suppose it must be! And
these sacrifices continue generation after generation. Something in
the land itself inspires them. And I began to tremble lest the
terrible Cathleen ni Houlihan might overtake me. She had come out of
that arid plain, out of the mist, to tempt me, to soothe me into
forgetfulness that it is the plain duty of every Irishman to
disassociate himself from all memories of Ireland--Ireland being a
fatal disease, fatal to Englishmen and doubly fatal to Irishmen.
Ireland is in my family. My grand-uncle lay in prison condemned to
death for treason; my father wasted his life in the desert of national
politics. It is said that the custom of every fell disease is to skip
a generation, and up to the present it had seemed that I conformed to
the rule. But did I? If I did not, some great calamity awaited me, and
I remembered that the middle-aged may not change their point of view.
To do so is decadence.




XII


A room had been hired at the Shelbourne Hotel, and the mornings were
spent writing _The Bending of the Bough_ It could be finished in the
next three weeks if I fortuned upon somebody who could explain the
various sections and parties in Irish politics, all striving for
mastery at that time; somebody acquainted enough with the country to
unravel the Lord Castletown incident, and expound the Healy problem,
the O'Brien problem, the Redmond problem, and the great many other
political problems with which the play is beset.

There is little use in writing when there is no clear vision in the
mind; the pen stops of its own accord, and I often rose from my chair
and walked about the room, my feet at last finding their way through
the hotel, and down the street as far as the Kildare Street Club, to
ask Edward if he would tell me. He would tell me nothing. His present
to the Irish Literary Theatre was his play, and I was free to alter it
as I pleased, putting the last act first and the first act last, but
he would not help me to alter it; and it was impossible not to feel
that it was reasonable for him to refuse.

What do you think of the title--_The Bending of the Bough_?

_The Tale of a Town_ is a better title. And after some heated words we
left the Club one evening together. You must sign the play, he said,
turning suddenly.

I sign the play! I answered, all my literary vanity ablaze. No; but
I'll put adapted from.

I'll have no adaptations; I'll have nothing to do with your version;
and he wrenched himself free from me, leaving me to go my way,
thinking that here was nothing for it but to sign a work that was not
mine. I, too, am sacrificing to Cathleen ni Houlihan; one sacrifice
brings many. And to escape from the hag whom I could see wrapped in a
faded shawl, her legs in grey worsted stockings, her feet in brogues,
I packed my trunk and went away by the mail-boat laughing at myself,
and at the same time not quite sure that she was not still at my
heels. Cathleen follows her sons across the seas; and she did not seem
to be very far away in the morning in Victoria Street, while Edward's
play was before me. After writing some lines of vituperation quite in
the Irish style, I would lay down the pen and cry: Cathleen, art thou
satisfied with me? And it seemed an exquisite joke to voice Ireland's
woes, until one day I stopped in Ebury Street, abashed; for it was not
a victory for our soldiers that I desired to read in the paper just
bought from the boy who had rushed past me, yelling News from the
Front, but one for the Boers. The war was forgotten, and I walked on
slowly, frightened lest this sudden and inexplicable movement of soul
should be something more than a merely accidental mental vacillation.

It may be no more, and it may be that I am changing, I whispered under
my breath; and then, charging myself with faint-heartedness and
superstition, I walked on, trying to believe that I should be myself
again next morning.

It was a bad sign to lie awake all night, thinking of what happened in
Ebury Street the evening before, and asking if I really did desire
that the Boers should win the fight and keep their country; and it was
a worse sign to read without interest headlines announcing a forward
movement of our troops. On turning over the pages, a rumour (it was
given as a rumour) that the Boers were retreating northward caught my
eye; the paper was thrown aside, and an hour was spent wondering why
the paper had been tossed aside so negligently. Was it because I had
become, without knowing it, Pro-Boer? That was it, for next morning,
on reading that five hundred of our troops had been taken prisoners, I
was swept away by a great joy, and it was a long time before I could
recover sufficient calm of mind to ask myself the reason of all this
sympathy for illiterate farmers speaking a Dutch dialect in which no
book had yet been written; a people without any sentiment of art,
without a past, without folklore, and therefore, in some respect, a
less reputable people than the Irish. I had seen some finely designed
swords in the Dublin Museum, forged, without doubt, in the late Bronze
Age, and Coffey had shown me the splendid bits that the ancient Irish
put into their horses' jaws. There was the monkish Book of Kells, a
beautiful thing in a way; the Cross of Cong was made in Roscommon, and
by an Irish artist; it bears the name of its maker, an Irish name, so
there can be no doubt as to its nationality. There are some fine
legends, the rudiments of a literature that had not been carried into
culture, the Irish not being a thinking race ... perhaps.

After that I must have fallen into a deep lethargy. On awakening, I
remembered the autumn evening in Edward's park, when Cathleen ni
Houlihan rose out of the plain that lies at the foot of the Burran
Mountains, and came, foot-sore and weary, up through the beech-grove
to me. I had not the heart to repulse her, so hapless did she seem;
nor did I remember the danger of listening to her till I had stood
before Edward telling him the story of the meeting in the park.

It is dangerous, I had said to him, to listen to Cathleen even for a
moment; she has brought no good luck or good health to any one.

The morning paper was picked up from the hearthrug, and the news of
the capture of our troops read again and again, the same thrill of
joy coming into my heart. The Englishman that was in me (he that wrote
_Esther Waters_) had been overtaken and captured by the Irishman.
Strange, for all my life had been lived in England. When I went to
Ireland I always experienced a sense of being a stranger in my own
country, and, like many another Irishman, had come to think that I was
immune from the disease that overtakes all Irishmen sooner or
later--that moment in Edward's park was enough for me, and ever since
the disease had been multiplying in secret: the incident in Ebury
Street was only a symptom.... A moment after I was asking myself if
the microbe were sown that evening in Edward's park, or if the
introduction of it could be traced back to the afternoon in Victoria
Street, when Edward and Yeats had called to ask me to join in their
attempt to give a National Literary Theatre to Ireland. It might be
traced further back still, to the evening in the Temple when Edward
had told me that he would like to write his plays in Irish; and there
arose up in me the memory of that midnight when I wandered among the
courts and halls, dreaming of Ireland, of the story of wild country
life that I might write.

It was then that I caught the disease, I said; a sort of spiritual
consumption; it was then that the microbe first got into my soul and
ate away most of it without my being aware of its presence, or of the
ravages caused by it, until the greater part of me collapsed in Ebury
Street.

And what was still more serious was that out of the wreck and rubble
of my former self a new self had arisen. It could not be that the old
self that had worshipped pride, strength, courage, and egoism should
now crave for justice and righteousness, and should pause to consider
humility and obedience as virtues, and might be moved to advocate
chastity tomorrow. Such a thing could not be. A new self had grown up
within me, or had taken possession of me. It is hard to analyse a
spiritual transformation; one knows little about oneself; life is
mysterious. Only this can I say for certain, that I learnt then that
ideas are as necessary to us as our skins; and, like one that has been
flayed, I sat wondering whether new ideas would clothe me again, until
a piece of burning coal falling from the grate into the fender awoke
me from my reverie. When I had put it back among the live embers, I
said: My past life crumbles away like that piece of coal; in a few
moments it will be all gone from me, and my new self will then be
alone in me, and powerful enough to lead me into a new life. Into what
life will it lead me? Into what Christianity?

I wandered across the room to consult the looking-glass, curious to
know if the great spiritual changes that were happening in me were
recognisable upon my face; but the mirror does not give back
characteristic expression, and to find out whether the expression of
my face had changed I should have to consult my portrait-painters:
Steer, Tonks, and Sickert would be able to tell me. And that night at
Steer's, after a passionate protest against the wickedness and the
stupidity of the Boer War delivered across his dining-table, I got up
and walked round the room, feeling myself to be unlike the portraits
they had painted of me, every one of which had been done before the
war. The external appearance no doubt remained, but the acquisition of
a moral conscience must have modified it. As I was about to launch my
question on the company, I caught sight of the little black eyes that
Steer screws up when he looks at anything; all the other features are
insignificant; the eyes are all that one notices, and the full, sleek
outlines of the face. His shoulders slope a little, like mine, and the
body is long, and the large feet shuffle down the street in goloshes
if the weather be wet, and in the studio in carpet slippers. Long
white hands droop from his cuffs--hands that I remember carrying
canvases from one easel to another. Tonks is lank and long in every
limb, and one remembers him as a herring-gutted fellow, with a high
bridge on his nose; and one remembers him much more for the true,
honest heart that always goes with his appearance. I could see that he
sympathised with the Boer women and children dying in concentration
camps, and that Steer was thinking of the pictures he had brought home
from the country. It was shameful that any one should be able to think
of pictures at such a time, but Steer takes no interest in morals; his
world is an external world; and I abandoned myself somewhat cowardly
to his pictures till the end of the evening, thinking all the while
that Tonks would understand my perplexities better, and that the time
to speak to him would be when we walked home together.

Steer's pictures are the best he has done, Tonks said, as soon as we
had left our friend's doorstep, and he asked me if I liked the wooded
hillside better than the ruins.

I can't talk of pictures just now, Tonks. The war has put pictures
clean out of my head, and I don't mind telling you that Steer's
indifference to everything except his values has disgusted me. I don't
know if you noticed it, I hardly looked at anything. Were you
interested?

Well, Moore, I can always admire Steer's pictures, but it is difficult
to detach oneself from the war to admire them sufficiently. I'm sure
we shall admire his work more at some other time; so far I am with
you.

Only as far as that? Can't you see that the war has changed me
utterly?

I can see that you take it very much to heart.

I don't mean that, Tonks; it seems to me to have changed me outwardly.
I can't believe that I present the same appearance. After all, it is
the mind that makes the man. Tell me, hasn't the war put a new look on
my face?

When you mention it, you change; there's no doubt about it, you seem a
different person. I'll say that.

Do tell me. And Tonks tried to describe the scowl that overspreads my
face.

I'll do a drawing of it, and then you'll see. You glare at us across
the dinner-table. Steer and I were talking about it only yesterday,
and Steer said: Moore looks like that when he remembers we are
Englishmen. Now, isn't it so?

I shouldn't like to say it wasn't, though it seems silly to admit it.
You don't approve of the war, do you, Tonks?

I think it is a very unfortunate affair.

Those concentration camps!

At the words the kind melancholy of the surgeon appeared in Tonks's
face. He was a surgeon before he was a painter, and, seeing that he
was genuinely afflicted, I told him the Ebury Street episode, and my
fears lest my life had been changed, and radically, and that there was
no place now in it for admiration of pictures or of literature.

But what will you do, my dear Moore? Tonks asked, his voice tight with
sympathy.

I don't know; anything may happen to me, for I don't think as I used
to. When it is assumed that justice must give way to expediency,
concentration camps are established and women and children kept
prisoners so that they may die of typhoid and enteric.

No, Moore, it isn't as bad as that. They couldn't be left on the
veldt; we had to do something with the women and children.

Tonks, I'm ashamed of you! After having burnt down their houses you
had to keep them, and as it would be an advantage to you to destroy
the Boer race, you keep them in concentration camps where they drop
off like flies.

Now, my dear Moore, I'm not going to quarrel with you. I'm quite ready
to admit--

When I think of it I feel as if I were going mad, and that I must do
something. This evening when I jumped up from my chair and walked
about the room I could hardly keep myself from breaking Steer's
Chelsea china; those shepherds and shepherdesses were too cynical. Men
and women in roses and ribbons twanging guitars! Why--

Of course, I can see what you mean, but I can't help laughing when you
say you were tempted to break Steer's Chelsea figures.

It is easy, Tonks, to see an absurdity; very little intelligence is
required for that; much more is required to see the abomination of--At
that moment we were joined by Sickert. He had stopped behind to
exchange a few words with Steer.

You really shouldn't, Sickert, Tonks said. The last time you detained
him on the doorstep he was laid up with influenza.

An attack of influenza! And thousands of women and children kept
prisoners in concentration camps--children without milk to drink;
water, perhaps, from springs fouled with the staling of mules!

But if we had Steer laid up, what would happen to the models? Sickert
asked. One is coming at ten tomorrow. Who would support the models?
Would you? And the New English Art Club without a work by Steer! Six
feet by four; a fine Old English prospect with a romantic castle in
the foreground. An august site. As soon as the war is over, one of
those sites will be bought for the Pretoria Art Gallery, and the
tax-payer will be charged an extra halfpenny in the pound for
improving the intellectual status of the Kaffirs, which will be
indefinitely raised.

There was a moment's hesitation between anger and laughter, but no one
is angry when Sickert is by. He has kept in middle age a great deal of
his youth, and during dinner I had noticed that not a streak of grey
showed in the thick rippling shock of yellow-brown hair. The golden
moustache has been shaved away, and the long mouth and closely set
lips give him a distinct clerical look. There was always something of
the cleric and the actor in him, I thought, as I overlooked his new
appearance, drawing conclusions from the special bowler-hat of French
shape that he wore. He had just come over from Dieppe and his trousers
were French corduroy, amazingly peg-top, and the wide braid on the
coat recalled 1860. He was, at this time, addicted to 1860, living in
a hotel in the Tottenham Court Road in which all the steads were
four-posted and all the beds feather, and he was full of contempt for
Steer's collection of Chelsea china, and in favour of wax fruit and
rep curtains, and advocated heavy mahogany sideboards.

He was as Pro-Boer as myself, with less indignation and more wit, and
Tonks and I yielded that night, as we always do, to the charm of his
whimsical imagination, and we laughed when he said:

Our latest casualties are the capture of four hundred Piccadilly
dandies who had been foolish enough to go out to fight the veterans of
the veldt. They were stripped of their clothes, patted on their backs,
and sent home to camp in silk fleshings and embroidered braces....
Hope Bros., Regent Street.

Sickert's wide, shaven lip laughed, and he looked so like himself in
his overcoat and his French bowler-hat that we walked for some yards
delighting in his personality--Tonks a little hurt, but pleased all
the same, myself treasuring up each contemptuous word for further use,
and considering at which of my friends' houses the repetition of
Sickert's wit would give most offence.

Tonks bade us goodnight in the King's Road. Sickert came on with me;
his way took him through Victoria Street, and we stopped outside my
doorway drawn into tense communion by our detestation of the war.

I'm so glad to have met you after this long while, he said, for I
wanted to know if you held the same opinion of Mr Gladstone. Do you
remember how we used to laugh at him? Now we see what a great man he
was.

England is, at present, the ugliest country. Oh, I have changed
towards England. I try to forget that I once thought differently, for
when I remember myself (my former self) I hate myself as much as I
hate England.

Doesn't the lack of humour in the newspapers surprise you? This
morning I read in the _Pall Mall_ that we are an Imperial people, and
being an Imperial people we must think Imperially, and presumably do
everything else Imperially. Splendid, isn't it? Everything, the apple
trees included, must be Imperial. We won't eat apples except Imperial
apples, and the trees are conjured to bear no others, but the apple
trees go on flowering and bearing the same fruit as before, and
Sickert burst into joyous laughter in which I joined.

We bade each other good night, and I went up to my bed looking forward
to the morning paper. Which may bring us some further news of the
Piccadilly dandies, I muttered into my pillow.

In old times my servant would find me in my drawing-room looking at a
picture that I had bought a few days before at Christie's, or at one
that had been some time in my possession, uncertain whether I liked it
as much as last year; but, as I told Tonks, art and literature had
ceased to interest me, and now she found me every morning in the
dining-room reading the paper. The morning after Steer's dinner-party
she came upon me in a very exultant mood. Another win for the Boers, I
told her, and took the paper back to bed with me, thinking how I
should go down and humiliate my tobacconist. The day before he had
said: Buller has trapped the Boers; we shall see a change within the
next few days. He was right. A very nice change, too, and I went out
to ask him if he had any new cigars that would suit me. I did not like
his cigars, and told him so after a ten minutes' discussion as to the
reason for our defeat at Spion Kop. From the tobacconist's I went to
the Stores in the hope of waylaying a friend or two there. A lady that
I knew very well always shopped there in the morning, and it would be
only a kindness to advise her to take her money out of South African
mines.

Parents take pleasure in putting a horrible powder called Gregory into
a spoon, and covering it with jam, and telling the unfortunate child
that he must swallow it; and that afternoon I called on all my
friends, taking a grim pleasure in watching their faces while I
assured them that the recall of our troops would be the wisest thing
we could do.

Love of cruelty is inveterate in the human being, and remembering
this, remorse would sometimes overtake me in the street, and a
passionate resolution surge up not to offend again, and it often
happened to me to go to another house to approve myself; but some
chance phrase would set me talking again; my tongue could not be
checked, not even when the lady, to distract my attention from De Wet,
asked my opinion of some picture or knick-knack. She did not succeed
any better when she strove to engage my attention by an allusion to a
book. Not only books and pictures had lost interest for me, but human
characteristics; opinions were what I demanded, and from everybody. I
remember coming from the North of England in company with a prosaic
middle-aged man who had brought into the carriage with him for his
relaxation three newspapers--the _Builder_, the _Athenaeum_, and
_Vanity Fair_--and in the long journey from Darlington to London I
watched him taking up these papers, one after the other, and reading
them with the same attention. At any other time I should have been
eager to make the acquaintance of one who could find something to
interest him in these papers and should have been much disappointed if
I did not succeed in becoming intimate with him by the end of the
journey. But, strange as it will seem to the reader, who by this time
has begun to know me, I am forced to admit that I was only anxious to
hear his opinion of the war, and my curiosity becoming at last
intolerable, I interrupted his architectural, social, or literary
meditation with the statement that the _Daily Telegraph_ contained
some very grave news. Two eyes looked at me over spectacles, and on
the phrase, Well, the war was bound to come sooner or later, we began
to argue, and it was not until we reached Finsbury Park--he got out
there--that I remembered I had forgotten to ask him if he were a
constant reader of the three newspapers that he rolled up and put away
carefully into a black bag.

The incident is one among hundreds of similar incidents, all pointing
to the same fact that nothing but the war interested me as a subject
of conversation or of thought. Every day the obsession became more
terrible, and the surrender of my sanity more imminent. I shall try to
tell the story as it happened, but I fear that some of it will escape
my pen; yet it is all before me clear as my reflection in the glass:
that evening, for instance, when I walked with a friend through
Berkeley Square and fell out with my friend's appearance, so English
did it seem to me, for he wore his clothes arrogantly; yet it was not
his clothes so much as his sheeplike face that angered me. We were
dining at the same house that night, and on looking round the
dinner-table I saw the same sheep in everybody, in the women as much
as in the men. Next day in Piccadilly I caught sight of it in every
passer-by; every man and woman seemed to wear it, and everybody's
bearing and appearance suggested to me a repugnant, sensual
cosmopolitanism; a heartless lust for gold was read by me in their
faces--for the goldfields of Pretoria which they haven't gotten yet,
and never will get, I hope.

In the dusk, England seemed to rise up before me in person, a shameful
and vulgar materialism from which I turned with horror, and this
passionate revolt against England was aggravated by memories of my
former love of England, and, do what I would, I could not forget that
I had always met in England a warm heart, a beautiful imagination,
firmness and quiet purpose. But I just had to forget that I ever
thought well of England, or to discover that I had been mistaken in
England. To bring the point as clearly as I may before the reader, I
will ask him to think of a man who has lived happily and successfully
with a woman for many years, and suddenly discovers her to be a
criminal or guilty of some infidelity towards him; to be, at all
events, one whose conduct and capacities are not those with which he
had credited her. As his suspicions multiply, the beauties which he
once read in her face and figure fade, and her deportment becomes
aggressive, till she can no longer cross the room without exciting
angry comment in his mind. A little later he finds that he cannot
abide in the house, so offensive is it to him; the disposition of the
furniture reminds him of her; and one day the country through which
they used to walk together turns so distasteful that he longs to take
the train and quit it for ever. How the change has been accomplished
he does not know, and wonders. The hills and the woods compose the
landscape as they did before, but the poetry has gone out of them; no
gleam of sunlight plays along the hillsides for him, and no longer
does the blue hill rise up far away like a land out of which dreams
come and whither they go. The world exists only in our ideas of it,
and as my idea of England changed England died, so far as I was
concerned; an empty materialism was all I could see around me; and
with this idea in my mind my eyes soon saw London as a great sprawl of
brick on either side of a muddy river without a statue that one could
look upon with admiration.

And then I grew interested in my case, and went for long walks with a
view to discovering how much I had been deceived, taking a certain
bitter pleasure in noticing that Westminster Abbey was not comparable
to Notre Dame (nobody ever thought it was, but that was a matter that
did not concern me); Westminster was merely an echo of French genius,
the church that a Norman King had built in a provincial city; and,
going up Parliament Street, I shook my head over my past life, for
there had been a time when the Horse Guards had seemed no mean
structure. The National Gallery was compared to the Madeleine and to
the Bourse; St Martin's Church roused me to special anger, and I went
down the Strand wondering how any one who had seen the beautiful
French churches could admire it. I walked past St Clement Danes,
thinking it at best a poor thing. The Temple Church was built by
Normans, and it pleased me to remember that there were no avenues in
London, no great boulevards. There are parks in London, but they have
not been laid out. Hyde Park is no more than a great enclosure, and St
James's Park, which used to awaken such delicate sympathies in my
heart as I stood on the bridge, seemed to me in 1900 a rather foolish
counterfeit, shamming some French model, I said. The detestable race
has produced nothing original; not one sculptor, nor a great painter,
except, perhaps, John Millais. He came from one of the Channel
Islands. A Frenchman! If English painting can be repudiated, English
literature cannot: Shakespeare, Shelley, and Wordsworth--above all
Shelley, whose poetry I loved more than anything else in the world.
Was he free from the taint of England?

The question occupied my thoughts one evening all the way home, and
after dinner I took down a volume and read, or looked through, the
last act of _Prometheus_. I cast my eyes over _The Sensitive Plant_;
it might have been beautiful once, but all the beauty seemed to have
faded out of it, and I could discover none in the _Ode to the West
Wind._ Nor did any of the hymns interest me, not even the _Hymn of
Pan_, the most beautiful lyric in the world. My indifference to
English poetry extended to the language itself; English seemed to me
to lack consistency that evening--a woolly language without a verbal
system or agreement between the adjectives and nouns. So did I rave
until, wearied of finding fault with everything English, my thoughts
melted away into memories of the French poets.




XIII


It would be better to get away from London and waste no more time
joining people in their walks, to try to persuade them that London was
an ugly city, or to wring some admission from them that the Boer War
was shameful, and that England was on her knees, out-fought,
vanquished by a few thousand Boers, about as many able-bodied men as
one would find in the Province of Connaught.

It was in such empty conflict of opinion that I had been engaged
yesterevening all the way along the King's Road, having button-holed a
little journalist as he came out of Sloane Square railway-station. He
seemed to be laughing at me when we parted, somewhere in the Grosvenor
Road, and I had returned home full of the conviction that I must get
away from opinions. My condition would welcome a pastoral country, and
a vision of a shepherd following his flock rose before my eyes. The
essential was a country unpolluted by opinions, and hoping to find
this in Sussex, I got into the train at Victoria one afternoon, rapt
in a memory of some South Saxon folk that lived in an Italian house
under the downs.

They had come into my life when I was a boy, and had been always the
single part of me that had never changed; ideas had come and gone, but
they had remained, and it was pleasant to ponder on this friendship as
I returned to them and to seek out the secret reason of my love of
these people--the very last that anybody would expect to find me
among. So it was clear that there was nothing superficial in our
affection; it was at the roots of our nature, and I could only think
that I had not wearied of these South Saxons because they were so like
themselves, exemplars of a long history, a great tradition; and as the
train passed through Hayward's Heath I could see them coming over with
Hengist and Horsa. Ever since they had been on their land, cultivating
it, till it had taken on their likeness, or else they had taken on the
likeness of the land. Which had happened I did not know, nor did it
matter much. Hundreds of ---- had come and gone, but the type
remained, affirming itself in habits and customs.

It is my love of what is permanent that has drawn me to them again and
again, I said, and I thought of that sweet returning, when, coming
back from France after a pursuit of painting through the Latin Quarter
and Montmartre, I had met Golville in Regent Street; and without
reproaching me for my long desertion, he had asked me when it would be
convenient for me to come down to Sussex to see them. All my love of
them had sprung up on the instant, and we had gone away together that
very afternoon. My visit, intended to last for two or three days, had
lasted two or three years ... perhaps more.

One reads one's past life like a book out of which some pages have
been torn and many mutilated, and among many scattered and broken
sentences I come upon a paragraph telling of a summer which I spent in
Southwick, writing the _Confessions of a Young Man_, in a lodging
overlooking the green. We all remember that wonderful Jubilee summer,
when the corn was harvested at the end of July; and nearly every
evening of summer-time I had followed the winding road under the downs
until I came to a corner where the sunk fence could be climbed. As I
walked across the park I could see the lights in the dining-room.
Kind, homely, hospitable folk, always glad to see me, among whom the
pleasantest years of my life were passed; so it is a pity that so much
text should be missing or indecipherable. A continuous narrative is
not discoverable until the evening when Colville brought back two
Belgian hares, and asked his mother to look after them. I recall our
first solicitudes, our eagerness to poke lettuces into their hutch;
and when some young rabbits appeared there was no end to our
enthusiasm.

Colville's project of a rabbit-farm was largely his mother's, I think;
be this as it may, by identifying herself with it she had persuaded
herself at the end of two years that she alone could feed rabbits. It
was plain to us she was working beyond her strength; there could be no
doubt about that, and very often I would plead my right to reprove her
and take a heavy barrowful of turnips out of her hands, and insist on
wheeling it across the garden into the rabbit-yard. Everybody knows
how quickly rabbits breed; before three years were out there were four
hundred rabbits in the yard; one could hardly walk into it for fear of
treading on the little ones; the outhouses were absorbed one by one,
and in the fourth year there were rabbit-hutches in the stables, in
the coal-and in the wood-sheds, and we used to say that in another six
months they would be in the kitchen and coming up the stairs into the
drawing-room, if the masons that were building Colville's house on the
downs and the maker of the iron hurdles at Wolverhampton did not
hasten. And every time Colville returned from London he was asked if
he had been able to extract a definite promise from his ironmonger. At
last the poor man, plagued and frightened, went himself to
Wolverhampton, and came back joyful, saying that the manager at the
works had given him special assurances that we might look forward to
the exportation of the rabbits to the downs at the end of the month.
The end of the month seemed a long while off, but we understood that
if the rabbits were turned out on the downs before the ground was
enclosed, the stoats and the foxes would get a great number, and
poachers the rest. A poaching raid would certainly be organised at
Beading, and the labour of years would be wasted.

The last delay was happily not a long one; a few weeks afterwards the
house was declared ready to receive us, and the rabbits went away in
several vans, Colville and I following on foot, talking, as we went by
Thunders Barrow Barn, of the great fortune that always lay about
waiting to be picked up by the adventurous.

Again a great gap comes in my narrative. Memory chooses to retain
certain scenes and to allow others to perish, and her choice often
seems arbitrary and unreasonable. Why should I, for instance, remember
Knight, the keeper at Freshcombe Lodge? A spare, silent man is before
me as I write, and in my memory he still goes about his work just as
he used to do twenty years ago. He strides along, a typical
gamekeeper, stopping by the thorn tree to see if there is anything in
his traps. A red and white animal is struggling in one of them, and is
killed with a blow of his stick and hung up in the thorn-tree, Knight
saying that the young stoats will come there looking round after her,
and that he expects to get the whole litter by the end of the week.

Every morning as I sat at my window writing I used to see Knight
taking food to the great mastiff that was kept some twenty yards from
the house: a poor silent animal, always on a chain, to whom the glory
of strangling a poacher never came. Colville bought a bloodhound; it
was thought she might be useful for tracking, but she was a useless,
timid bitch, to whom we could never teach anything, but some of her
puppies learned to follow a trail in Freshcombe Bottom. Close to the
house there were ten couples of beagles--hard, wiry, blue-haired
beagles; and all these are forgotten but Sailor Lad, who could find
his way over any fence, and would put his nose down and trail a rabbit
when he could run no faster than a hedgehog. We all loved him for his
cleverness, and waited eagerly for the first shooting, feeling sure
that would lead the pack; but Sailor Lad was gun-shy.

The squire and I were very fair shots; we could be counted upon to
shoot well forward, hitting the rabbit in the head, spoiling him as
little as possible for the market; but, in spite of our careful
shooting, Colville soon found that the profit that could be made on
shot rabbits would not pay the interest of the large sum of money that
had been spent on the house and hurdles. He determined to make an end
of the shooting-parties, and told me one night how he thought the
rabbits might be netted. The furze must be planted in strips with
eighty yards of feeding-ground between each strip. The rabbits would
leave the furze at dawn, and the nets could be lifted. It would not be
difficult to invent some mechanism to lift them quickly, so that the
rabbits would not have time to get back into the furze.

But the replanting of the furze, I said, would keep the whole of the
Sussex militia at work for--

I was about to say for ten years, but Colville, interrupting me, said
that he did not propose the work should be done all at once, and I
answered that I hoped he did not propose to himself any such job. It
is not wise to argue with a man who has just risen from an
unsatisfactory examination of his accounts, and later, after some
tactless advice of mine to leave such matters as the catching of the
rabbits to his keeper, he lost his temper, and, rushing to the door
threw it open and begged of me to retire to my own apartments.

When he called me down to breakfast next morning I heard a tremor in
his voice, and after some injudicious attempt at explanation we seemed
to come to a tacit understanding that it would be better to let the
matter drop. He was very wrathful, his temper had been sorely tried,
and for a week at least I am sure that I must have seemed to him a
cruel, unsympathetic fellow. It is not to be doubted that I was in
fault. But Colville could not see that it was my overflowing sympathy
that prevented me from observing that rule of conduct which must be
observed if two men would live together; each must keep from asking
the other questions, and from criticising the other's projects. It
would have been interesting to debate this point with him, but
Colville was not much interested at any time in criticism of the
human mind. He had an ear, however, for music, and whistled
beautifully going up and down stairs; and a few days after, hearing
that the nightingales were singing in the coombe, we went out to
listen to them.

In yon thorn you'll find him, Knight said, and we moved on quietly
till we came within sight of the insignificant brown bird that had
just arrived, possibly from Algeria. Not a wind stirred in the tall
grass, nor was there a cloud in the sky; a dim gold fading into grey
and into blue, darkening overhead. A ghostly moon floated in the
south, and the blue sailless sea was wound about the shoulders of the
hills like a scarf. A fairer evening never breathed upon this world,
nor did a lovelier prospect ever enchant human eyes, and Golville and
I sat, a twain enchanted. It was one of those evenings when
confidences rise to the lips, and Colville, as if to show me that he
had forgotten our quarrel, confided new projects to me. In years to
come he hoped to fill the coombes with apple trees; they would cost
from half a crown to three and sixpence apiece to buy, and in some
twenty years or more orchards would blossom every May from Thunders
Barrow Barn all the way to the foot of the downs.

My imagination was touched, and we returned through the blue dusk
delighted with each other, fearful lest our lives should not continue
to be lived at Freshcombe till the end; we may have even dreamed of
our graves under the apple boughs, and when we reached the top of the
hill we had reached also the top of our friendship.

A few days afterwards the evenings began to seem a little tedious; all
I had to say to Colville I had said, for the time being, at least, and
his sisters and his mother and his father, whom I loved well, were
always glad to see me, and the walk was pleasant along the hillsides,
and it was pleasant to enter that Italian house under the ilex trees
and to find them all glad of my company. The squire liked me to stay
on after dinner to play billiards with him, and to keep to the sheep
path without missing it on a dark night was difficult, so I was often
persuaded to stay the night. These visits became more numerous, and I
went to London more frequently. Life, although pleasant at the top and
at the foot of the downs, was too restricted in view for the purpose
of my literature. If one wants to write, one has to live where writing
is being done, I said, and again I left my friends, this time for a
still longer absence, and I might never have returned to them if the
Boer War had not brought me down to Sussex to find out if there were
anything in England, in the country, in the people with which I could
still sympathise.

The train that I was returning to my friends by did not pass through
Brighton, but came through Preston Park by what is known as the
loop-line, and as we approached Shoreham my thoughts were bent on
that house far away among the hills. It was not likely that I should
find Colville as Pro-Boer as myself; his long militia service would
render an active Pro-Boer policy impossible, but he might regard the
war as a mistake; and, feeling myself to be in a distinctly reasonable
mood, I decided that if Colville would agree to regard the war as a
mistake we might come to terms.

About a quarter of a mile lay between their house and the station, and
up that straight road I walked, wondering if a great deal of my
admiration for the country might be attributed to my love of the
people who lived at the foot of those hills, and catching sight of a
somewhat shapeless line, nowise beautiful in itself, I said: It may be
so; but the downs must not be judged by one hillside. The squire will
lend me a horse, and over to Findan I will go tomorrow. Only after a
long ride shall I know if I still love the downs. And as this
resolution formed in my mind I heard the squire calling me.

He was on the top of the stile, coming out of the corn-field, and it
was pleasant to see him cross it so easily, and to see him still
dressed in breeches and gaiters, hale as an old tree, and not unlike
one--just as spare and as rugged. He gave me a hand covered with a
hard reddish skin, like bark, and the shy smile that I knew so well
trickled down his wide mouth.

We walked on together in delightful sympathy, but had not gone very
far when we caught sight of Colville coming down the drove-way,
walking very fast, his shoulders set well back, his toes turned out
militia fashion. As the drove-way led only to the downs, it could
hardly have been otherwise than that he had been to Freshcombe, so I
asked after the rabbits. He said that he was thinking of letting the
place, and his voice and manner left me in no doubt that he did not
wish to talk about business, a thing that never happens when business
is going well with a man. It may, therefore, have been to escape from
further questions that he begged me to excuse him if he walked on in
front, saying he had some letters to write which he wished to go away
by the night's post. But he had not gone very far when the squire
said, in that low, sad voice which is the best part of my recollection
of him, that Colly had gone to work too expensively, and had left too
many rabbits on the ground. All my sympathy was aroused on the
instant, but the squire's talk was always in sudden remarks, and as he
required a long silence between each, we had passed through the gate
leading to the lawn before he spoke again. Something was preparing in
his mind, but before he could utter it we met Florence and Dulcie,
whom I had hitherto thought of as blonde Saxon girls; they were now
middle-aged women, Dulcie looking as old as Florence, though younger
by a couple of years; silent women, a little abrupt in their speech,
more like their father than their mother.

Their mother's portrait might be introduced into the present text if
it had not been written years ago and published in a volume entitled
_Memoirs of My Dead Life_. My portrait is too long for quotation; it
cannot be curtailed by me, at least; and paraphrase is out of the
question to a man who has written something that he felt deeply, and
written, he thinks, truly. The pages entitled _A Remembrance_ would
have enhanced any charm that my narrative may have, but the omission
cannot be avoided. My reader must read them in the _Memoirs_, and I
doubt not that when he has read them he will ask himself the question
which I am now asking myself: would her gay, kindly mind have saved me
from the folly of talking of the Boer War during dinner? If he has
learned to know me at all, he will probably think she would have
failed. The fact that I had come down to Sussex to escape from
opinions did not save me from talking of the value of small
nationalities before the soup tureen was removed from the table, and
to the dear squire, who thought without circumlocutions. It was enough
for him to know that his country was at war. He answered: My dear
Rory, the Boers invaded our territory, and he sat holding a piece of
cake in both his hands, as if he were afraid that somebody would take
it from him. As he munched it he kept his eyes fixed on the cake
itself with an expression on his face that plainly read, I'll have
another piece presently. Golville and I had often noticed this little
trick of his, and had laughed over it.

The charm of domestic life is its intensity; each learns to know the
other in his or her every peculiarity, physical and mental. We had
often noticed the squire's habit of waggling his foot from time to
time when he lay back in his armchair in the billiard-room after
dinner, purling at his pipe in silence. Colville had drawn my
attention to it, and to the old slippers and the grey socks. Colville
was a friendly fellow, with a good deal of the squire's natural
kindness in him and a disposition for a pleasant talk; but when I went
to ---- for this last time I found him immersed in his accounts and in
himself, to the exclusion of the Boer War and the mistakes of the
English Generals. So preoccupied was he with the business of his farm
that as soon as he had finished his pipe he went to his brown-paper
parcel, which he untied, and produced his diary, saying that his
entries were in arrear; and begging of us to excuse him, he began his
preparations for transcribing his life. They were always the same:
first he sought for scribbling-paper, and taking his letters from his
breast pocket he utilised the envelopes, cutting them open carefully.
It took him some time to unclasp his penknife, and to sharpen the
pencil with which he drafted out the events of the last three days. He
then tramped out of the room, his toes well turned out, returning
with pen and ink and blotting-paper. The diary was unlocked, and
getting it well before him he copied his notes in a caligraphy that
would have honoured a medieval scrivener.

Rory, what has become of the chest of cigars?

With this remark the squire broke the silence abruptly and
laughed--timidly, for he was conscious of a change in the atmosphere.
All the same, he laughed, for he liked to remember how on the occasion
of my first visit he had offered me a cheroot, but I had gone upstairs
saying, Perhaps you would like one of my cigars, and returned with an
oaken chest containing about a thousand of all kinds. My visit was
only for a few days, and in the squire's recollection I had said:
Well, you see, one can only carry half a dozen cigars in a case, and
if one brings a box one never knows if any one will care for that
brand, so I thought it safer to bring the chest. And when the squire
spoke of this chest of cigars of thirty years ago, he never failed to
speak of my adventure that very same evening at Shoreham Gardens,
whither I had insisted on going, though Colville had refused to
accompany me, and strove to dissuade me with the report that on
Saturday nights it was frequented by London roughs come down for the
day; I would get myself into trouble certainly. But I had gone to the
Gardens and the family had sat up, anxious for my safety, and great
indeed was the commotion when I returned about midnight with a long
tale of adventure and an eye that would be black in the morning. My
friends cherished these stories, which had lost all interest for me,
and the squire's next anecdote I had clean forgotten: how on the
Monday I had peppered his keeper at eighty yards because he persisted
in paunching rabbits while still alive, though I had told him I did
not approve of such cruelty. Some hunting anecdotes, in which Colville
had a share, were added, and a little later we went to our several
beds, myself depressed and hopeless, anxious to forget in sleep that I
had been unable to keep the Boer War out of the conversation.

Sleep closed over me, and next morning I awoke thinking that perhaps
it might be as well to go back to London by the twelve o'clock from
Brighton; but the ride to Findan had been mentioned overnight, and
just as if nothing had happened, the squire told me after breakfast
that he had ordered his horse to be saddled for me. Colville said he
would not be able to meet me at Freshcombe, and in a voice that did
not seem altogether friendly. He gave me his hand, however, saying
that he would bid me goodbye, since I was going away by the five
o'clock. His sisters went to their different occupations, expecting me
back for lunch, Florence hoping I would not talk any more about that
horrid war, Dulcie lingering to ask me why I wanted to go to Findan,
and on such a day! I mentioned a horse, but did not know what answer
to give back when she reminded me that the horse fair is in May, and
reading suspicions of some woman in her eyes, I sprang into the saddle
and rode away.

A new nag, the squire had said; she goes easily on the roads, but
pulls a bit on the downs. A rushing, querulous animal, lean as a rake,
I soon discovered her to be. A hide hardly thicker than a glove saved
her but little from the cold showers and the hard winds that rushed
down upon us from the hills. A very different day, I said as I pulled
at her, from the day that the squire and I rode over to Findan to the
fair. One of my pleasantest recollections was that ride, and despite
my exasperated humour it was impossible for me to resist the
temptation, as I rode down the valley, to recall how the squire and
myself had gone out on horseback one morning in May, looking, as we
jogged along side by side by the edge of the valley through which the
Adur flows, like figures out of an old ballad. Never did larks rise
out of the grass and soar roystering as abundantly as they did that
morning. We walked, we trotted, we cantered our horses till we came to
Findan's sunny hollow filled with its fair. Many horses were at
tether, some were being trotted up and down by the gipsies. We reined
in to see a boy ride a bay pony on a halter over a gate held up for
the jump in the middle of the field, and while the squire talked with
an acquaintance, I sat at gaze, lost in admiration of a group of
comely larches; they seemed to me like women engaged with their own
beauty, so gracefully did they loll themselves on the sweet wind,
every one, I felt sure, aware of her own long shadow on the grass. Our
returning, though less vividly remembered, was not less pleasing than
our going forth, and my humour must have been harsh indeed that
February day to have imperilled so delightful a recollection by riding
to Findan alone under dark skies and through bitter winds along grey
river lands. It was not in my intention, I suppose, to find Sussex
beautiful, and the dun tumult of the downs showing against the rainy
sky suggested the welcome thought that I had been befooled, and that
this English country was the ugliest in the world, and its weather the
worst.

Not a living thing in sight, not even a stray sheep in the wintry
hollow, I said, and turned my horse's head towards Freshcombe, asking
myself how I ever could have thought the downs beautiful. By what
distortion of sight? By what trick of the brain? Because of her? And I
rode thinking of her presence in one room and in another, until the
day described in _A Remembrance_ floated by, and we following all that
remained of her to Shoreham churchyard.

Death is in such strange contradiction to life that it is no matter
for wonder that we recoil from it, and turn to remembrances, and find
recompense in perceiving that those we have loved live in our memories
as intensely as if they were still before our eyes; and it would
seem, therefore, that we should garner and treasure our past and
forbear to regret partings with too much grief, however dear our
friends may be; for in parting from us all their imperfections will
pass out of sight, and they will become dearer and nearer to us. The
present is no more than a little arid sand dribbling through the neck
of an hour-glass; but the past may be compared to a shrine in the
coign of some sea-cliff, whither the white birds of recollections come
to roost and rest awhile, and fly away again into the darkness. But
the shrine is never deserted. Far away up from the horizon's line
other white birds come, wheeling and circling, to take the place of
those that have left and are leaving. So did my memories of her seem
to me as they came to me over the downs; her unforgettable
winsomeness, her affection for me, her love of her husband and of her
children, were remembered, and the atrocious war which forbade me to
love them in the present could not prevent me from loving them in the
past.

The scratched and deserted appearance of the hillside interrupted my
meditations, and on looking through the iron hurdles I could see that
what the squire had said was true, for in trying to find the most
profitable way of catching his rabbits Colville had allowed too many
to remain on the ground. Every stoat had been destroyed, and the foxes
driven out, but one cannot disturb the balance of Nature with
impunity. After eating all the grass the rabbits had gnawed the bark
of the furze, and afterwards the thorn trees. These thorns will never
blossom again, I said, as I rode amid sand-heaps and burrows
innumerable, without, however, seeing anywhere a white scut. Only
rabbits can destroy rabbits; and the Belgian hares--what has become of
them? I asked, remembering how haplessly they used to hop about after
the keeper, every season seeing fewer of them; none had mated with the
wild rabbit, and all our labour in the backyard had been in vain.

The lambs bleated after the yoes, a raven balanced himself in the
blast on the lookout for carrion, and after watching the bird for some
time I rode along the iron fence. The lodge seemed deserted, and I
asked myself what would become of the iron hurdles. Will he sell them
as scrap-iron and allow Nature to redeem the hills from trace of our
ambitions? I wondered, and rode away upon my own errand, which, I
reminded myself, was not to muse over the destruction of Freshcombe,
but to discover if there were one spot on the downs which still
appealed to my sympathies. An ugly, rolling country it all seemed:
hill after hill rolled up from the sea with deep valleys set between,
in which the flock follows the bell-wether. Yet these valleys had once
inspired thoughts of the patriarchal ages.

But if the downs didn't please me the weald would, and I rode by the
windmill, its great arms roaring as they went round in the blast,
frightening my horse, and sat for a long time studying, with hatred,
the dim blue expanse that lay before me like a map: Beading, Edburton,
Poynings, New Horton, I knew well: Folking and Newtimber far away lost
in violet haze. And I could see, or fancied I could see, the brook
which Colville had jumped years ago. A landscape, I said, that Rubens
might have thought worth painting, but which Ruysdael would have
turned from, it being without a blue hill or melancholy scarp or
torrent, or anything that raises the soul out of an engulfing
materialism; and all the things that I used to love--a red-tiled
cottage at the end of a lane with a ponderous team coming through a
gateway, followed by a yokel in a smock frock--I hated, and in pursuit
of my hatred I resolved to visit Beading, a town that I had once
loved.

But of what use to descend into it? I asked myself; and without
knowing why I was going there, I let my mare slide herself down the
steep chalk path on her haunches. A straggling village street was all
I could discover in Beading, an ugly brick village; and interested in
my unrelenting humour, I began the ascent of the downs instead of
returning home by the road, so that I might give the restive mare the
gallop she was craving for. She plunged her way up the hillside. Lord
Leconfield's lands were crossed at a hand-gallop, and looking back at
the windmill, I cursed it as an ugly thing, and remembering with
satisfaction that there are few in Ireland, I reined up and overlooked
the great space from Chanctonbury Ring past Lancing, whither Worthing
lies, seeking to discover the reason why I liked the downs no longer.
The names of the different fields as they came up in my mind irritated
me. What name more absurd for that old barn than Thunders Barrow Barn?
A few minutes later I was on the crest above Anchor Hollow, whither
ships came in the old days, so it was said, and, but for the fact that
my friends would lose their land, I doubt if I should have found any
great cause for regret in the news that they were certain to come
there again. I remembered how the coast towns light up in the evening:
garlands of light reaching from Worthing to Lancing, to Amberley, to
Shoreham, to Southwick, and on to Brighton. There is no country in
England; even the downs are encircled with lights; and my thoughts
turned from them to the dim waste about Lough Carra, only lighted here
and there by tallow dips. Passing from Mayo to Galway, I remembered
Edward's castle and the Burran Mountains, and the lake out of which
thirty-six wild swans had risen while Yeats told me of _The-Shadowy
Waters;_ and with such distant lands and such vague, primeval people
in my mind, it was impossible for me to appreciate any longer the
sight of ploughing on the downs. Yet I once watched old Rogers lift
the coulter from the vore when he came to the headland, and the great
horses turn, the ploughboy yarking and lashing his whip all the time;
but now my humour was such that I could hardly answer his cheery Good
day, sir; and when the squire asked me how the mare had carried me, I
said that she didn't like the ploughboy's whip, and very nearly got me
off her ba'ack, as old Rogers would say. He was just at the end of his
vore, and the horses were just a-comin' round. So you no longer care
about our down speech, the squire said, and he would have wished me to
stay on for a few days, for the sake of his billiards in the evening.
But Dulcie said that it would be better if I went away and came down
again, and Florence seemed to agree with her that I had not been as
nice this time as I had been on other occasions. So I am certain that
there must have been a mingled sadness and perplexity in my eyes on
bidding these dear friends of mine goodbye. I must have known that the
friendship of many years--one that meant much to all of us--was now
over, ended, done to death by an idea that had come into my life some
months ago, without warning, undesired, uncalled for. It had been
repulsed more than once, and with all the strength I was capable of,
but it had gotten possession of me all the same, and it was now my
master, making me hate all that I had once loved.




XIV


The best friends a man ever had, yet they had been blown away like
thistledown; and leaning back in my seat, I began to rejoice that the
Irish Literary Theatre was going over to Dublin with three plays--_The
Bending of the Bough_ (my rewritten version of Edward's play, _The
Tale of a Town_), Edward's own beautiful play _Maeve_, and a small
play, _The Last Feast of the Fianna_, by Miss Milligan, and that
Edward, who had cast himself again for baggage-man, was going to take
the company over. We were to follow him--Lady Gregory, Yeats, and
myself--a day later, and our happy travelling is remembered by me,
even to the hop into the carriage after them and the pleasure I took
in their soft western accent. Our project drew us together; we were
delightfully intimate that morning; and I can recall my elation while
watching Yeats reading the paper I had written on the literary
necessity of small languages. It was to be read by me at a lunch that
the Irish Literary Society was giving in our honour, and in it some
ideas especially dear to Yeats had been evolved: that language after a
time becomes like a coin too long current--the English language had
become defaced, and to write in English it was necessary to return to
the dialects. Language rises like a spring among the mountains; it
increases into a rivulet; then it becomes a river (the water is still
unpolluted), but when the river has passed through a town the water
must be filtered. And Milton was mentioned as the first filter, the
first stylist.

Never did I hear so deep a note of earnestness in Yeats's voice as
when he begged of me not to go back upon these opinions. They were his
deepest nature, but in me they were merely intellectual, invented so
that the Gaelic League should be able to justify its existence with
reasonable, literary argument. Lady Gregory sat in the corner, a
little sore, I think, feeling, and not unnaturally, that this fine
defence of the revival of the Irish language should come from her
poet, instead of coming, as it did, from me. In this she was right,
but an apology for the prominent part I was taking in this literary
and national adventure would make matters worse. The most I could do
to make my intrusion acceptable to her was to welcome all Yeats's
emendations of my text with enthusiasm.

There were passages in this lecture intended to capture the popular
ear, and they succeeded in doing this in spite of the noise of
coffee-cups (as soon as the orator rises the waiters become
unnaturally interested in their work); but I can shout, and when I had
shouted above the rattle that I had arranged to disinherit my nephews
if they did not learn Irish from the nurse that had been brought from
Arran, everybody was delighted. The phrase that Ireland's need was not
a Catholic, but a Gaelic University, brought a cloud into the face of
a priest. Edward agreed with me, adding, however, that Gaelic and
Catholicism went hand in hand--a remark which I did not understand at
the time, but I learnt to appreciate it afterwards. There were some
cynics present, Gaelic Leaguers, who, while approving, held doubts,
asking each other if my sincerity were more than skin-deep; and it was
whispered at Edward's table that I had come over to write about the
country and its ideas, and would make fun of them all when it suited
my purpose to do so. It would take years for me to obtain forgiveness
for a certain book of mine, Edward said, and reminded me that Irish
memories are long. But in time, in time.

When I am a grey-headed old man, I answered; and I went back to
England. Irish speakers are dying daily or going to America, and the
League will not avail itself of my services. The folly of it! The
folly of it! I muttered over my fire for the next three months, until
one morning a telegram was handed to me. It was from the League's
secretary. Your presence is requested at a meeting to be held in the
Rotunda to protest against--

What the League would protest against on that occasion has been
forgotten, but my emotion on reading that telegram will never be
forgotten. Ireland had not kept me out in the cold, looking over the
half-door for years, as Edward had anticipated--only three months. The
telegram must be understood to mean complete forgiveness. But they
will want a speech from me, and I am the only living Irishman that
cannot speak for ten minutes. A speech of ten minutes means two
thousand words, and every morning I fail to dictate two thousand
words. My dictations are only so much rigmarole, mere incentives to
work, and have to be all rewritten. On the edge of a platform one
cannot say, Forget what I have said; I'll begin again. One cannot
transpose a paragraph, or revise a sentence. I can't go, I can't go;
and my feet moved towards the writing-table. But it was as difficult
for me to write No as it was to write Yes. The only Irishman living
who cannot make a speech, the only one that ever lived, I added, and
sank into an armchair, awakened from a painful lethargy by the sudden
thought that perhaps the secretary of the Gaelic League might be
persuaded to allow me to read a paper at the meeting. I could do that.
But time was lacking to write the paper. Midday! And the train left
Euston at eight forty-five. _Evelyn Innes_ would have to be abandoned.
The secretary should have given longer notice. A man of letters cannot
uproot himself at a moment's notice. Leave Owen Asher in the middle of
Evelyn's bed to write an argument on the literary necessity of small
languages! Impossible! All the same, I could not spend the evening in
Victoria Street while my kinsmen were engaged in protesting against
the language of the Saxon. A worn-out, defaced coin; and I sought for
an old shilling in my pocket, and finding one of George the Third, and
looking at the blunted image, I said: That is the English language, a
language of commerce. But the Irish language is what the Italian
language was when Dante decided to abandon the Latin. I thought of the
train rattling through the shires, through Rugby, Crewe, and Chester;
I saw it in my thoughts circling through Aber, where Stella was
painting flocks and herds. Bangor is but a few miles farther on, and
the simplest plan would be to meet her on board the boat. Let Stella
be the die that shall decide whether I go or stay. An act relieves the
mind from the strain of thinking, and I believed everything to be
settled until her telegram arrived, saying she would meet me on board
the boat; and my indecisions continued until evening, expressing
themselves in five telegrams.

Five telegrams, she said, when I came up the gangway. Two asking me to
come, two telling me not to come, and the last one reaching me only in
time. You have a servant to pack your things, but in lodgings--

Stella dear, I know, but the fault isn't mine. I came into the world
unable to decide whether I should catch the train or remain at home.
But don't think my many changes of mind came from selfishness. Agonies
were endured while walking up and down Victoria Street between my flat
and the post-office; the sending of each telegram seemed to settle the
matter, but half-way down the street I would stop, asking myself if I
should go or stay, and all the time knowing, I suppose, in some sort
of unconscious way, that my love of you would not allow me to miss
the pleasure of finding you, a lonely, dark figure, leaning over the
bulwarks. How good of you to come!

Yes, it was good of me, for, really, five telegrams! Would you like to
see them?

No, no; throw them away.

She crushed the telegrams in her hand and dropped them into the sea.

You were vexed and perplexed, but I suffered agonies. About some
things I am will-less, and for half my life I believed myself to be
the most weak-minded person in the world.

But you are not weak-minded. I never knew any one more determined
about some things. Your writing--

Aren't you as determined about your painting? You have sent me out of
your studio, preferring your painting to me. But we haven't met under
that moon to wrangle. Here you are and here am I, and we going to
Ireland together.

The boat moved away from the pier, steaming slowly down the long
winding harbour, round the great headland into the sea; and finding
that we were nearly the only passengers on board, and that the saloon
was empty, we ensconced ourselves at the writing-table, and while
dictating to her, I admired her hand, slender, with strong fingers
that held the pen, accomplishing a large, steady, somewhat formal
writing, which would suggest to one learned in handwriting a calm,
clear mind, never fretted by small, mean interests; and if he were to
add, a mind contented with the broad aspect of things, he would prove
to me that her soul was reflected in her manuscript as clearly as in
her pictures. And it was on board the boat and next morning, when,
uncomplaining, she followed me to the writing-table, that I realised
how beautiful her disposition was. And when the last sentences were
written, it seemed that the time had come for me to consider her
pleasure. For she had never been in Dublin before, and would like to
see the National Gallery. We hung together over the railings, admiring
a Mantegna in the long room, and afterwards a Hogarth--a beautiful
sketch of George the Third sitting under a canopy with his family. We
talked of these and stood a long time before Millais' _Hearts are
Trumps_, Stella explaining the painting and exhibiting her mind in
many appreciative subtleties. No one talked painting better than she,
and it was always a delight to me to listen to her; but that day my
attention was distracted from her and from the pictures by an
intolerable agony of nerves. The repose, the unconsciousness of my
animal nature, seemed withdrawn, leaving me nothing but a mere
mentality. In a nervous crisis one seems to be aware of one's whole
being, of one's fingernails, of the roots of one's hair, of the
movements of one's very entrails. One's suffering seems, curiously
enough, in the stomach, a sort of tremor of the entrails. There, I
have got it at last, or the physical side of it! Added to which is the
throb of cerebral perplexity. Why not run away and escape from this
sickness? And the sensation of one's inability to run away is not the
least part of one's suffering. One rolls like a stone that has become
conscious, and often on my way to the Rotunda the thought passed
through my mind that I must love Ireland very much to endure so much
for her sake. Yet I was by no means sure that I loved Ireland at all.
Before this point could be decided I had lost my way in many dark
passages. But the platform was at last discovered, and there was Hyde,
to whom I told that I had come over at the request of the secretary,
having received a wire yestermorning from him, saying my presence was
indispensable at the meeting. He was taken aback when I read out the
telegram I received from the secretary, and said he was sorry I had
been put to so much trouble, trying to hide his indifference under an
excessive effusion which seemed to aggravate my disappointment.

An extraordinary indigence of speech, and an artificiality of
sentiment caught my ear, and I felt that it would be impossible to
refrain from an outburst if he were to say again, in answer to the
simple statement that I arrived this morning: Now, did you come across
last night? You don't tell me so? Tank you, tank you. You'll have a
great reception.

About the reception I care not a fig. I came over because it seemed to
me to be my duty.

Did you, now? It was good of you.

But I am suffering something that words can't express, and it will be
kind in you to call upon me as soon as you have finished speaking.

MacNeill follows me. I'm sorry for you; from the bottom of my heart
I'm sorry.

Well, Hyde, if you don't hasten I'm afraid I shall have to go away.
There is a trembling in my stomach that I would explain.

Somebody called him; a shuffling of chairs was followed by a sudden
silence, and whilst Hyde stood bawling I saw the great skull, its
fringe of long black hair, with extraordinary lucidity, the slope of
the temples, the swell of the bone above the nape, the insignificant
nose, the droop of the moustache through which his Irish frothed like
porter, and when he returned to English it was easy to understand why
he desired to change the language of Ireland.

The next speaker was a bearded man of middle height and middle age,
forty or thereabouts, a post-office official whose oratory was more
reasonable and dignified than our President's, and perhaps for that
reason it was less successful despite its repetitions and commonplace.
But these qualities, which I had begun to see were essential in Irish
oratory, were not considered enough; the audience missed the familiar
note of spite. MacNeill was looked upon as good enough, as small ale
would be by the average Coombe toper. What they want is porther; and
feeling that my paper would interest nobody, I appealed to Hyde again,
and begged him to call on me and let me get it over.

Before he could do so he said he would have to call upon two priests,
Father Meehan and Father Hogarty, and these men spoke whatever
happened to come into their heads, always using twenty words where
five would have been too many, and they rambled on to their own
pleasure and to that of the audience. Snatches of their oratory still
linger in my ears. I remember the language that our forefathers spoke
in time of persecution, hermits and saints said their prayers in
it--which might be true, but seemed to imply that since the
introduction of the English language saints had declined in Ireland.
The next speaker, referring to the eloquent words of the last speaker,
reminded the audience that not a line of heresy had been written in
Irish, an assertion which recalled Father Ford's pamphlet. He must
have been reading it, I said to myself.

Now, will you call on me? I whispered to Hyde.

I'm sorry from the bottom of my heart.

Of what use to bring me over from England?

From the bottom of my heart! I must call upon ----, and he called out
some name that I have forgotten. The success of this speaker when he
declared that the dogs of war were to be loosed was unbounded. In the
vast and densely packed building only one dissenting voice was heard.
It did not come from the body of the hall, but from a man on the
platform--a thick-set fellow, a working man, sitting in a chair next
to me. While Hyde was speaking he had played impatiently with his
hat--a bowler, worn at the brim, greasy and ingrained with dust, very
like Whelan's. His hands were those of a joiner or carpenter or
plumber. Yet, I said to myself, he hears that our President's speech
isn't as beautiful as it should be. It seemed to me that in the midst
of some turgid sentence I had heard him spitting, Good God! Yes, yes;
get on! through his tawny moustache. We all know that. And I had
certainly heard him mutter while MacNeill was speaking, If I'd known
it was to listen to this kind of stuff! While the reverend Fathers
were rigmaroling he had only dared to shuffle his feet from time to
time, making it clear, at all events to me, that he did not judge
ecclesiastical oratory more favourably than lay, thereby winning my
approval and sympathy, and inducing me to accept him as a pure,
disinterested and very able critic, who might possibly find some small
merit in the paper which I began to read as soon as the applause had
ceased which followed upon the declaration that the dogs of war were
to be loosed. Before five lines were read I heard him shuffling his
feet heavily; at the tenth line a loud groan escaped him; and when I
began my third paragraph, which to my mind contained everything that
could be said in favour of the literary necessity of the revival of
small languages, I heard him mutter, It isn't that sort of
sophisticated stuff that we want; and he muttered so loudly that there
was a moment when it began to seem necessary to ask the audience to
choose between us. His impatience increased with every succeeding
speaker, and while wondering what his oratory would be like if Hyde
were to give him a chance of exercising it, I saw him seize the
coat-tails of a little man with a bibulous nose, who had been called
upon to address the meeting. Had such a thing happened to me, my
nerves would have given way utterly; but the little man merely lifted
his coat-tails out of his assailant's reach, and when he had finished
talking somebody proposed a vote of thanks. Then the meeting broke up
rapidly, and as we were leaving the platform the disappointed orator
put his hand on Hyde's shoulder.

For two pins I'd tell you what I think about you; and Hyde was asked
to explain why he did not call upon him to speak.

Your name wasn't given to me, sir.

Wasn't I on the platform?

There were many on the platform that I didn't call on to speak; I only
called those on my list, and you weren't upon it.

A fine lot of blatherers you had on your list, and every one of us
sick listening to them.

The retort seeming to me to be in the fine Irish style, I was tempted
to stand by to listen, but fearing to exhibit a too impertinent
curiosity, I followed the crowd regretfully out of the building,
wondering what Stella would think of her first Gaelic League meeting;
and my first, too, for that matter.

On the boat coming over, she had been assured that it was going to be
a very grand affair, typical of the new spirit that was awakening in
Ireland, and there was no denying that no very high intellectual level
had been reached by anybody. My own paper, that in the making had
seemed a fine thing, had faded away in the reading, and she could not
but have been disappointed with the unintellectual audience that had
gathered to hear it. And the ridiculous wrangle between Hyde and the
disappointed orator! She may have left her seat before it began. But,
even without this episode, a clear-minded Englishwoman, as she
undoubtedly was, could not have failed to have been struck by a
certain absence of sincerity in the speeches. It would, perhaps, have
been better if she hadn't come over; at all events, it would have been
desirable that this meeting had not been her first glimpse of Ireland.
Her tact and her affection for me would save her from the mistake of
laughing at the meeting to my face. There was no real reason why I
should regret having brought her over, only that the meeting had
exhibited Ireland under a rough and uncouth aspect; worse still, as a
country that was essentially insincere and frivolous, and this was
unfortunate, for I wanted her to like Ireland.

The man that hadn't been allowed to blather had described the meeting
as blather (a word derived, no doubt, from lather; and what is lather
but froth?'). Hyde had been all Guinness; and she must have laughed at
the prattle of the priests. Though in sympathy with what they had come
to bless--the revival of the Irish language--I had had to bite my lips
when one of them started talking about the tongue that their
forefathers had spoken in time of persecution, and I had found it
difficult to keep my patience when his fellow, a young cleric, said
that he was in favour of a revival of the Irish language because no
heresy had ever been written in it. A fine reason it was to give why
we should be at pains to revive the language, and it had awakened a
suspicion in me that he was just a lad--in favour of the Irish
language because there was no thought in its literature. What interest
is there in any language but for the literature it has produced or is
going to produce? And there can be no literature when no mental
activities are about. Mental activity begets heresy, I muttered, and
wandered to and fro, looking for Stella, hoping to find her not too
seriously disappointed with her first glimpse into Irish Ireland. If
she had heard only one good speech, or one note of genuine passion,
however imperfectly expressed! But Ireland lacks passion, I said, and
pushed my way through the crowd. It lacks ideas, and worst of all, it
lacks passion ... all the same, it is difficult to find Stella. Where
the devil!--all froth, porther, porther, and I returned to that very
magnanimous statement that the Irish language was worth reviving
because no word of heresy had been written in it. Which is a lie. Damn
that priest! I said. Stella cannot have failed to see through his
advocacy. Without heresy there can be no religion, for heresy means
trying to think out the answer to the riddle of life and death for
ourselves. We don't succeed, of course we don't, but we do lift
ourselves out of the ruts when we think for ourselves--in other words,
when we live. But acquiescence in dogma means decay, dead leaves in
the mire, nothing more. The only thing that counts is personal
feeling. And if this be true, it may be said that Ireland has never
shown any interest in religious questions--merely a wrangle between
Protestants and Catholics.

Part of the speech of another orator started into my mind; he had said
he would shoulder a musket--he didn't say a rifle mark you, but a
musket; I wonder he didn't say a pike! Dead leaves in the mire, dead
traditions, a people living on the tradition of '98. But there were
heroes in '98. In those days men thought for themselves and lived
according to their passions. But if the meeting I have just come from
is to be taken as typical, Ireland has melted away. Maybe, to be
revived again in the language ... if the language can be revived. But
can it be revived? Ah, there is Stella! And never did she seem so
essentially English to me as at that moment--so English that I
experienced a certain sense of resentment against her for wearing the
look that, before the Boer War, had attracted me to her--I might say
had attracted me even before I had seen her--that English air of hers
which she wore with such dignity. Until I met her, the women I had
loved were like myself, capricious and impulsive; some had been
amusing, some charming, some pretty, and one had enchanted me by her
joy in life and belief that everything she did was right because she
did it. High spirits are delightful, but incompatible with dignity,
and, deep down in my heart, I had always wished to love a chin that
deflected, calm, clear, intelligent eyes, and a quiet and grave
demeanour, for that is the English face, and the English face and
temperament have always been in my blood; and it was doubtless these
qualities that attracted me to my friends in Sussex. Stella might be
more intelligent than they, or her intelligence was of a different
kind--the measure of intellect differs in every individual, but the
temperament of the race (in essentials) is the same, and it endures
longer. But now her very English appearance and temperament vexed me
in Sackville Street, and my vexation was aggravated by the fact that
it was impossible to tell her why I was so dissatisfied with her. She
had not laughed at nor said a word in disparagement of the meeting,
nor told me that, in seeking to revive the language, I was on a
wild-goose chase. But out of sorts with her I was, knowing myself all
the while for a fool, and cursing myself as a weakling for not having
been able to come to Ireland without her.

The incident seemed symbolic; neither country is able to do without
the other; and it would have been easy for Stella and me to have
quarrelled that evening, though we weren't man and wife. She spoke so
kindly and warmly of the meeting, seeing all that was good in it, and
laughing with such agreeable humour at the incident of the
disappointed orator, that I told her I loved her, despite her English
face and voice and manner, making her laugh thereby.

The tact of women cannot be overpraised; and they need all their tact
to live with us; and how delightfully they accept the religions we
invent, and the morals that we like to worry over, though they
understand neither! A wonderful race is the race of women, easily
misunderstood by men, for they understand only lovers, children, and
flowers. To fill many pages on the subject of women would be easy, and
perhaps my sympathy would be more interesting than the tale I have to
tell. Even so, I should have to continue telling how, some months
after my visit to Dublin, when the cloud cast by the meeting at the
Rotunda upon my belief in the possibility of a Celtic Renaissance had
dissolved, another escape from England presented itself. A letter
arrived one morning from Yeats, summoning me to Ireland, so that we
might come to some decision about _Diarmuid and Grania_, the play that
we had agreed to write in collaboration. We had exchanged many
letters, but as every one had seemed to estrange us, Lady Gregory had
charged Yeats to invite me to Coole, where he was staying at the time;
and reading in this letter a week spent in the very heart of Ireland,
among lakes and hills, and the most delightful conversation in the
world, I accepted the invitation with pleasure.

As I write, the wind whistles and yells in the street; the waves must
be mountains high in the Channel, I said, but the Irish Sea has always
been propitious to me--all my crossings have been accomplished amid
sparkling waves and dipping gulls, and the crossing that I am trying
to remember when I went to Coole to write _Diarmuid and Grania_ was
doubtless as fine as those that had gone before. I can recall myself
waiting eagerly for the beautiful shape of Howth to appear above the
sea-line, my head filled with its legends. Or, maybe, my memory fails
me, and it may well have been that I crossed under the moon and stars,
for I remember catching the morning mail from the Broadstone and
journeying, pale for want of sleep and tired, through the beautiful
county of Dublin, alongside of the canal, here and there slipping into
swamp, with an abandoned boat in the rushes. But when we leave County
Dublin the country begins to drop away into bogland, the hovel appears
(there is a good deal of the West of Ireland all through Ireland), but
as soon as the middle of Ireland has been crossed the green country
begins again; and, seeing many woods, I fell to thinking how Ireland
once had been known as the Island of Many Woods, cultivated in
patches, and overrun by tribes always at war one with the other. So it
must have been in the fourth century when Grania fled from Tara with
Diarmuid--her adventure; and mine--to write Ireland's greatest
love-story in conjunction with Yeats.

Athlone came into sight, and I looked upon the Shannon with a strange
and new tenderness, thinking that it might have been in a certain bed
of rushes that Grania lifted her kirtle, the sweetness of her legs
blighting in Diarmuid all memory of his oath of fealty to Finn, and
compelling him to take her in his arms, and in the words of the old
Irish story-teller to make a woman of her. And without doubt it would
be a great thing to shape this primitive story into a play, if we
could do it without losing any of the grandeur and significance of the
legend. I thought of the beauty of Diarmuid, his doom, and how he
should court it at the end of the second act when the great fame of
Finn captures Grania's imagination. The third act would be the pursuit
of the boar through the forest, followed by Finn's great hounds--Bran,
Sgeolan, Lomairly.

In happy meditation mile after mile went by. Lady Gregory's station is
Gort. Coole was beginning to be known to the general public at the
time I went there to write _Diarmuid and Grania_ with Yeats. Hyde had
been to Coole, and had been inspired to write several short plays in
Irish; one of them, _The Twisting of the Rope_, we hoped we should be
able to induce Mr Benson to allow us to produce after _Diarmuid and
Grania_. If Yeats had not begun _The Shadowy Waters_ at Coole he had
at least written several versions of it under Lady Gregory's
roof-tree; and so Coole will be historic; later still, it will become
a legend, a sort of Minstrelburg, the home of the Bell Branch Singers,
I said, trying to keep my bicycle from skidding, for I had told the
coachman to look after my luggage and bring it with him on the car,
hoping in this way to reach Coole in time for breakfast.

The sun was shining, but the road was dangerously greasy, and I had
much difficulty in saving myself from falling. A lovely morning, I
said, pleasantly ventilated by light breezes from the Burran
Mountains. We shall all become folklore in time to come, Finns and
Diarmuids and Usheens, every one of us, and Lady Gregory a new Niamh
who--At that moment my bicycle nearly succeeded in throwing me into
the mud, but by lifting it on to the footpath, and by giving all my
attention to it, I managed to reach the lodge-gates without a fall. A
horn, I said, should hang on the gatepost, and the gate should not
open till the visitor has blown forth a motif; but Yeats would be kept
a long time waiting, for he is not musical, and thinking of the
various funny noises he would produce on the horn, I admired the
hawthorns that AE painted last year; and at the end of a long drive a
portico appeared in red and blue glass, partly hidden by masses of
reddening creeper. Sir William's marbles detained me on the staircase,
and whilst I compared present with past appreciations Lady Gregory
came to meet me with news of Yeats. He was still composing; we should
have to wait breakfast for him; and we waited till Lady Gregory,
taking pity on me, rang the bell. But the meal we sat down to was
disturbed not a little by thoughts of Yeats, who still tarried. The
whisper went round the table that he must have been overtaken by some
inspiration, and Lady Gregory, fluttered with care, was about to send
the servant to inquire if Mr Yeats would like to have his breakfast in
his room. At that moment the poet appeared, smiling and delightful,
saying that just as the clocks were striking ten the metre had begun
to beat, and abandoning himself to the emotion of the tune, he had
allowed his pen to run till it had completed nearly eight and a half
lines, and the conversation turned on the embarrassment his prose
caused him, forcing him to reconstruct his scenario. He would have
written his play in half the time if he had begun writing it in verse.

As soon as we rose from the table Lady Gregory told us we should be
undisturbed in the drawing-room till tea-time, and thanking her, we
moved into the room. The moment had come, and feeling like a swordsman
that meets for the first time a redoubtable rival, I reminded Yeats
that in his last letter he had said we must decide in what language
the play should be written--not whether it should be written in
English or in Irish (neither of us knew Irish), but in what style.

Yes, we must arrive at some agreement as to the style. Of what good
will your dialogue be to me if it is written, let us say, in the
language of _Esther Waters_?

Nor would it be of any use to you if I were to write it in Irish
dialect?

Yeats was not sure on that point; a peasant Grania appealed to him,
and I regretted that my words should have suggested to him so
hazardous an experiment as a peasant Grania.

We're writing an heroic play. And a long time was spent over the
question whether the Galway dialect was possible in the mouths of
heroes, I contending that it would render the characters farcical, for
it is not until the language has been strained through many minds that
tragedy can be written in it. Balzac wrote _Les Contes Drlatiques_ in
Old French because Old French lends itself well to droll stories. Our
play had better be written in the language of the Bible. Avoiding all
turns of speech, said Yeats, which immediately recall the Bible. You
will not write Angus and his son Diarmuid which is in heaven, I hope.
We don't want to recall the Lord's Prayer. And, for the same reason,
you will not use any archaic words. You will avoid words that recall
any particular epoch.

I'm not sure that I understand.

The words honour and ideal suggest the Middle Ages, and should not be
used. The word glory is charged with modern idea--the glory of God and
the glory that shall cover Lord Kitchener when he returns from Africa.
You will not use it. The word soldier represents to us a man that
wears a red tunic; an equivalent must be found, swordsman or fighting
man. Hill is a better word than mountain; I can't give you a reason,
but that is my feeling, and the word ocean was not known to the early
Irish, only the sea.

We shall have to begin by writing a dictionary of the words that may
not be used, and all the ideas that may not be introduced. Last week
you wrote begging me not to waste time writing descriptions of Nature.
Primitive man, you said, did not look at trees for the beauty of the
branches and the agreeable shade they cast, but for the fruits they
bore and the wood they furnished for making spear-shafts and canoes. A
most ingenious theory, Yeats, and it may be that you are right: but I
think it is safer to assume that primitive man thought and felt much
as we do. Life in its essentials changes very little, and are we not
writing about essentials, or trying to?

Yeats said that the ancient writer wrote about things, and that the
softness, the weakness, the effeminacy of modern literature could be
attributed to ideas. There are no ideas in ancient literature, only
things, and, in support of this theory, reference was made to the
sagas, to the Iliad, to the Odyssey, and I listened to him, forgetful
of the subject which we had met to discuss. It is through the dialect,
he continued, that one escapes from abstract words, back to the
sensation inspired directly by the thing itself.

But, Yeats, a play cannot be written in dialect; nor do I think it can
be written by turning common phrases which rise up in the mind into
uncommon phrases.

That is what one is always doing.

If, for the sake of one's literature, one had the courage to don a
tramp's weed--you object to the word don? And still more to weed?
Well, if one had the courage to put on a tramp's jacket and wander
through the country, sleeping in hovels, eating American bacon, and
lying five in a bed, one might be able to write the dialect naturally;
but I don't think that one can acquire the dialect by going out to
walk with Lady Gregory. She goes into the cottage and listens to the
story, takes it down while you wait outside, sitting on a bit of wall.
Yeats, like an old jackdaw, and then filching her manuscript to put
style upon it, just as you want to put style on me.

Yeats laughed vaguely; his laugh is one of the most melancholy things
in the world, and it seemed to me that I had come to Coole on a
fruitless errand--that we should never be able to write _Diarmuid and
Grania_ in collaboration.




XV


A seat had been placed under a weeping ash for collaborators, and in
the warmth and fragrance of the garden we spent many pleasant hours,
quarrelling as to how the play should be written, Lady Gregory
intervening when our talk waxed loud. She would cross the sward and
pacify us, and tempt us out of argument into the work of construction
with some such simple question as--And your second act--how is it to
end? And when we are agreed on this point she would say:

Let the play be written by one or the other of you, and then let the
other go over it. Surely that is the best way--and the only way? Try
to confine yourselves to the construction of the play while you are
together.

Yeats had left the construction pretty nearly in my hands; but he
could theorise as well about construction as about style, and when
Lady Gregory left us he would say that the first act of every good
play is horizontal, the second perpendicular.

And the third, I suppose, circular?

Quite so. In the third act we must return to the theme stated in the
first scene; and he described with long, thin hands the shapes the act
should take. The first act begins with laying the feast for the
Fianna; this is followed by a scene between Grania and the Druidess;
then we have a short scene between King Cormac and his daughter. The
Fianna arrive and Grania is at once captured by the beauty of
Diarmuid, and she compels the Druidess (her foster-mother) to speak a
spell over the wine, turning it into a drug that will make all men
sleepy ... now, there we have a horizontal act. You see how it extends
from right to left?

And while I considered whether he would not have done better to say
that it extended from left to right, he told me that the second act
was clearly perpendicular. Did it not begin far away in the country,
at the foot of Ben Bulben? And after the shearing of a sheep, which
Diarmuid has performed very skilfully, Grania begins to speak of Finn,
who is encamped in the neighbourhood, her object being to persuade
Diarmuid to invite Finn to his dun. The reconciliation of Finn and
Diarmuid is interrupted by Conan, who comes in telling that a great
boar has broken loose and is harrying the country, and Diarmuid,
though he knows that his destiny is to be killed by the boar, agrees
to hunt the boar with Finn.

What could be more perpendicular than that? Don't you see what I mean?
and Yeats's hands went up and down; and then he told me that the third
act, with some slight alteration, could be made even more circular
than the first and second were horizontal and perpendicular.

Agreed, agreed! I cried, and getting up, I strode about the sward,
raising my voice out of its normal pitch until a sudden sight of Lady
Gregory reminded me that to lose my temper would be to lose the play.
You'll allow me a free hand in the construction? But it's the writing
we are not agreed about, and if the writing is altered as you propose
to alter it, the construction will be altered too. It may suit you to
prepare your palette and distribute phrases like garlands of roses on
the backs of chairs.... But there's no use getting angry. I'll try to
write within the limits of the vocabulary you impose upon me, although
the burden is heavier than that of a foreign language.... I'd sooner
write the play in French.

Why not write it in French? Lady Gregory will translate it.

And that night I was awakened by a loud knocking at my door, causing
me to start up in bed.

What is it? Who is it? Yeats!

I'm sorry to disturb you, but an idea has just occurred to me.

And sitting on the edge of my bed he explained that the casual
suggestion that I preferred to write the play in French rather than in
his vocabulary was a better idea than he had thought at the time.

How is that, Yeats? I asked, rubbing my eyes.

Well, you see, through the Irish language we can get a peasant Grania.

But Grania is a King's daughter. I don't know what you mean, Yeats;
and my French--

Lady Gregory will translate your text into English. Taidgh O'Donoghue
will translate the English text into Irish, and Lady Gregory will
translate the Irish text back into English.

And then you'll put style upon it? And it was for that you awoke me?

But don't you think a peasant Grania--

No, Yeats, I don't, but I'll sleep on it and tomorrow morning I may
think differently. It is some satisfaction, however, to hear that you
can bear my English style at four removes. And as I turned over in the
hope of escaping from further literary discussion, I heard the thin,
hollow laugh which Yeats uses on such occasions to disguise his
disapproval of a joke if it tells ever so little against himself. I
heard him moving towards the door, but he returned to my bedside,
brought back by a sudden inspiration to win me over to his idea that
Grania, instead of running in front of her nurse gathering primroses
as I wished her to do, might wake at midnight, and finding the door of
the dun on the latch, wander out into the garden and stand among the
gooseberry-bushes, her naked feet taking pleasure in the sensation of
the warm earth.

You've a nice sense of folk, though you are an indifferent collector,
I muttered from my pillow; and, as I lay between sleeping and waking,
I heard, some time later in the night, a dialogue going on between two
men--a young man seemed to me to be telling an old man that a
two-headed chicken was hatched in Cairbre's barn last night, and I
heard the old man asking the young man if he had seen the chicken, and
the young man answering that it had been burnt before he arrived, but
it had been seen by many. Even so, I began, but my thoughts were no
longer under my command and I saw and heard no more till the dawn
divided the window-curtains and the rooks began to fly overhead.

The next morning was spent in thinking of Yeats's talent, and
wondering what it would come to eventually. If he would only--But
there is always an only, and at breakfast there seemed very little
chance of our ever coming to an agreement as to how the play should be
written, for Lady Gregory said that Yeats had asked to have his
breakfast sent upstairs to him, as he was very busy experimenting in
rhyme. She spoke of Dryden, whose plays were always written in rhyme;
we listened reverentially, and when we rose from table she asked me to
come into the garden with her. It was on our way to the seat under the
weeping ash that she intimated to me that the best way to put an end
to these verbal disputes between myself and my collaborator would be
to do what I had myself suggested yesterday--to write a French version
of the play.

Which I will translate, she said.

But, Lady Gregory, wouldn't it be better for you to use your influence
with Yeats, to persuade him to concede something?

He has made all the concessions he can possibly make.

I don't know if you are aware of our difficulties?

It would be no use my taking sides on a question of style, even if I
were capable of doing so, she said gently. One has to accept Yeats as
he is, or not at all. We are both friends of his, and he has told me
that it is really his friendship for you which has enabled him--

To suggest that I should try to write the play in French! I cried.

But I will translate it with all deference to your style.

To my French style! Good heavens! And then it is be translated into
Irish and back into English. Now I know what poor Edward suffered when
I altered his play. Edward yielded for the sake of Ireland--But as I
was about to tell Lady Gregory that I declined to descend into the
kitchen, to don the cap and apron, to turn the spit while the _chef
des sauces_ prepared his gravies and stirred his saucepans, the
adventure of writing a play in French, to be translated three times
back and forwards before a last and immortal relish was to be poured
upon it, began to appeal to me. Literary adventures have always been
my quest, and here was one; and seeing in it a way of escape from the
English language, which I had come to hate for political reasons, and
from the English country and the English people, I said:

It is impossible to write this play in French in Galway. A French
atmosphere is necessary; I will go to France and send it to you, act
by act. And overjoyed when the news was brought to his bedroom, Yeats
came down at once and began to speak about the value of dialect, and a
peasant Grania. If I did not like that, at all events a Grania--

Who would be racy of the soil, I said.

A cloud came into Yeats's face, but we parted the best of friends, and
it was in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of a hotel sitting-room that I
wrote the first scene of our second act in French--if not in French,
in a language comprehensible to a Frenchman.

     _Une caverne_. GRANIA _est couche sur une peau d'ours; se
     rveillant en sursaut_

     GRANIA

     J'ai entendu un bruit. Quelqu'un passe dans la nuit des rochers.
     Diarmuid!

     DIARMUID

     Je t'ai fait peur.

     GRANIA

     Non. Mais qu'est-ce que tu m'apportes? Quels sont ces fruits
     d'or?

     DIARMUID

     Je t'apporte des pommes, j'ai trouv un pommier dans ces landes,
     trs loin dans une valle dsole. Cela doit tre le pommier dont
     le berger nous a parl. Regarde le fruit! Comme ces pommes sont
     belles! Cela doit tre le pommier des admirable vertus. Le berger
     l'a dit.

     (_Il donne la branche _ GRANIA)

     GRANIA

     Ces pommes sont vraiment belles, elles sont comme de l'or. (_Elle
     fait glisser une pomme dans sa robe_.) Les solitudes de ces
     landes nous ont sauvegards de toute poursuite. N'est-ce pas,
     Diarmuid? Ici nous sommes sauvegards. C'est la solitude qui nous
     sauvegarde, et ce pommier sacr dont le berger nous a parl. Mais
     les pommes si belles doivent tre le signe d'un grand malheur ou
     peut-tre bien, Diarmuid, d'une grand joie. Diarmuid! j'entends
     des pas. coute! Cherche tes armes!

     DIARMUID

     Non, Grania, tu n'entends rien. Nous sommes loin de toute
     poursuite. (_On coute et alors_ DIARMUID _reprend le bouclier
     qu'il a jet par terre; avanant d'un pas_.) Oui, Grania,
     quelqu'un passe dans la nuit des rochers.... Qui tes-vous? D'o
     venez-vous? Pourquoi venez-vous ici?

     _Entrent deux_ Jeunes Hommes.

     1er JEUNE HOMME

     Nous venons de Finn.

     DIARMUID

     Et vous venez pour me tuer?

     1er JEUNE HOMME

     Oui.

     GRANIA

     Vous tes donc venus ici en assassins! Pourquoi cherchez-vous 
     tuer deux amants? Quel mal vous avons-nous donc fait? Nous sommes
     ici dans les landes inconnues, et si nous ne sommes pas morts
     c'est parce que la Nature nous a sauvegards. La Nature aime les
     amants et les protge. Qu'avons-nous donc fait pour que vous
     veniez aussi loin nous tuer?

     2me JEUNE HOMME

     Nous avons voulu faire partie du Fianna, et nous avons pass par
     toutes les preuves de la prouesse que l'on nous a demande.

     1er JEUNE HOMME

     Nous avons fait des armes avec les guerriers de Finn.

     2me JEUNE HOMME

     La lance lourde et la lance lgre, nous avons couru et saut
     avec eux.

     1er JEUNE HOMME

     Nous sommes sortis acclams de toutes les preuves.

     DIARMUID

     Et vous tes venus chercher la dernire preuve. Finn vous a
     demand ma tte?

     1er JEUNE HOMME

     Avant d'tre admis au Fianna il faut que nous apportions la tte
     de Diarmuid  Finn.

     GRANIA

     Et ne savez-vous pas que tout le Fianna est l'ami de Diarmuid
     except Finn?

     DIARMUID

     Ils veulent ma tte? Eh bien! qu'ils la prennent s'ils le
     peuvent.

     GRANIA

     Qui de vous attaquera Diarmuid le premier?

     1er JEUNE HOMME

     Nous l'attaquerons tous les deux  la fois.

     2me JEUNE HOMME

     Nous ne venons pas ici faire des prouesses d'armes.

     DIARMUID

     Ils ont raison, Grania, ils ne viennent pas ici faire des
     prouesses d'armes, ils viennent comme des btes cherchant leur
     proie; cela leur est gal comment.

     _(Ils commencent l'attaque; l'un est plus imptueux que l'autre,
     et il se met en avant_. DIARMUID _se recule dans un troit
     passage entre les rochers. Soudain il blesse son adversaire qui
     tombe._ DIARMUID _passe par-dessus son corps et s'engage avec
     l'autre. Bien vite il le jette par terre et il commence  lui
     lier les mains, mais l'autre se lve et s'avance l'pe  la main
     gauche_. DIARMUID _donne son poignard _ GRANIA; _laissant  la
     charge de_ GRANIA _l'adversaire qui est par terre, il attaque
     l'autre et dans quelques ripostes fait sauter l'pe de sa main.
     Pendant ce combat_ GRANIA _est reste assise, le poignard en
     main. Aussitt, l'homme ayant voulu se relever, elle le
     poignarde, et avance nonchalamment vers_ DIARMUID.)

     DIARMUID

     Ne le quitte pas.

     GRANIA

     Il est mort.

     DIARMUID

     Tu l'as tu?

     GRANIA

     Oui, je l'ai tu. Et maintenant tue celui-ci; ce sont des lches
     qui n'auraient os t'attaquer un contre un.

     DIARMUID

     Je ne peux pas tuer un homme qui est sans armes. Regarde-le! Son
     regard me trouble, pourtant c'est Finn qui l'a envoy. Laisse-le
     partir.

     GRANIA

     Les malfaiteurs restent les malfaiteurs. Il retournerait  Finn
     et il lui dirait que nous sommes ici. _(S'adressant  l'homme.)_
     Tu ne dis rien, tourne-toi pour que le coup soit plus sr.
     Mets-toi contre le rocher. _(L'homme obeit.)_

     DIARMUID

     Dans la bataille je n'ai jamais frapp que mon adversaire et je
     n'ai jamais frapp quand il n'tait pas sur ses gardes. Et quand
     il tombait, souvent je lui donnais la main; et j'ai souvent
     dchir une charpe pour tancher le sang de ses blessures. (_Il
     coupe un lambeau de son vtement et l'attache autour du bras du
     jeune homme_.)

     GRANIA

     Qu'est-ce qu'il dira  Finn?

     DIARMUID

     Je lui donne ces pommes d'or et Finna saura que ce n'est pas lui
     qui les a trouves. Oui, je lui donnerai cette branche, et Finna
     saura que je tiens mon serment.

     GRANIA

     Entre ses mains les pommes seront fltries, elles n'arriveront
     pas  Finn si elles sont les pommes dont le berger nous a parl,
     elles disparatront comme une poussire lgre. (DIARMUID _donne
     la branche  l'homme, et l'homme s'en va tranant le cadavre de
     son compagnon_.) Tu aurais d le tuer, il conduira Finn  cette
     caverne. Il faut que nous cherchions des landes plus dsertes,
     plus inconnues.

     DIARMUID

     Peut-tre au bout de ces landes o il faut que nous nous cachions
     des annes, peut-tre trouverons-nous une douce valle paisible.

     GRANIA

     Et alors, Diarmuid, dans cette valle que se passerait-il entre
     nous?

     DIARMUID

     Grania, j'ai prte serment  Finn.

     GRANIA

     Oui, mais le serment que tu as prt  Finn ne te poursuit pas
     dans la fort: les dieux  qui tu as fait appel ne rgnent pas
     ici. Ici les divinits sont autres.

     DIARMUID

     Si cet homme nous trahit, il y a deux sorties  cette caverne et,
     comme tu dis, il ne faut pas attendre ici, il faut que nous nous
     en allions trs loin.

     GRANIA

     Je ne puis te suivre. Je pense  toi, Diarmuid, nuit et jour, et
     mon dsir me laisse sans force; je t'aime, Diarmuid, et les
     pommes que tu as trouves dans cette valle dsole ne sont-elles
     pas un signe que ma bouche est pour ta bouche?

     DIARMUID

     Je ne puis t'couter ... nous trouverons un asile quelque part.
     Viens au jour. La caverne te fait peur et elle me fait peur
     aussi. Il y du sang ici et une odeur de sang.

     GRANIA

     Restons, Diarmuid: tu es un guerrier renomm, et tu as vaincu
     deux hommes devant mes yeux. Mais, Diarmuid, la pomme qui est
     tombe dans ma robe ... regarde-la: elle ose plus que toi. Nous
     avons des prils  traverser ensemble, les serments que tu as
     prts  Tara ne te regardent plus. Notre monde sera autre et nos
     divinits seront autres.

     DIARMUID

     Mais j'ai prt serment  Finn. Finn c'est mon frre d'armes, mon
     capitaine. Combien de fois nous avons t contre l'ennemi
     ensemble!--non, Grania, je ne puis.

     (_Il la prend dans ses bras. La scne s'obscurcit_.)

     GRANIA

     Le jour est pour la bataille et pour les prils, pour la
     poursuite et pour la fuite; mais la nuit est le silence pour les
     amants qui n'ont plus rien qu'eux-mmes. (_Un changement de
     scne; maintenant on est dans une valle pierreuse  l'entre
     d'une caverne,  gauche un bois et le soleil commence 
     baisser_.)

       *       *       *       *       *

The introduction of French dialogue into the pages of this book breaks
the harmony of the English narrative, but there is no help for it; for
only by printing my French of Stratford atte Bowe can I hope to
convince the reader that two such literary lunatics as Yeats and
myself existed, contemporaneously, and in Ireland, too, a country not
distinguished for its love of letters. The scene in the ravine, which
follows the scene in the cave, was written in the same casual memory
of the French language, and its literature. We can think, but we
cannot think profoundly, in a foreign language, and though a sudden
sentiment may lift us for a while out of the common rut, we soon fall
back and crawl along through the mud till the pen stops. Mine stopped
suddenly towards the end of the act, and I wandered out of the
reading-room into the verandah to ponder on my folly in having come to
France to write _Diarmuid and Grania_, and to rail against myself for
having accepted Yeats's insulting proposal.

When my fit of ill temper had passed away, I admitted that reason
would be amenable to the writing of _Diarmuid and Grania_ in Irish,
but to do that one would have to know the Irish language, and to learn
it, it would be necessary to live in Arran for some years. A vision of
what my life would be there rose up: a large, bright cottage with
chintz curtains, and homely oaken furniture, and some three or four
Impressionist pictures, and the restless ocean my only companion until
I knew enough Irish for daily speech. But ten years among the
fisherfolk might blot out all desire of literature in me, and even if
it didn't, and if I succeeded in acquiring Irish (which was
impossible), it would be no nearer to the language spoken by Diarmuid
and Grania than modern English is to Beowulf.

But what is all this nonsense that keeps on drumming in my head about
the Irish language and Anglo-Irish? And I went out of the hotel into
the street convinced that any further association with Yeats would be
ruin to me. Lady Gregory feared that I should break up the mould of
his mind. But it is he that is breaking up the mould of mine. I must
step out of his way. And as for writing _Diarmuid and Grania_ in
French--not another line! My folly ends on the scene in my pocket,
which I'll keep to remind me what a damned fool a clever man like
Yeats can be when he is in the mood to be a fool. A moment after, it
seemed to me that it would be well to write and tell him that I would
give the play up to him and Lady Gregory to finish; and I would have
given them _Diarmuid and Grania_ if it had not been my one Irish
subject at the time, life without a subject not being easily conceived
by me; so I decided to retain it, and next day returned to England and
to Sickert.

The pictures on the easels were forgotten, and the manuscripts in
Victoria Street, so obsessed were we by the thought that, while we
were talking, De Wet's army might be caught in one of Kitchener's wire
entanglements, and the war be brought to an end, and I remember that
very often as I stared at Sickert across the studio my thoughts would
resolve into a prayer that the means might be put into my hands to
humiliate this detestable England, this brutal people! A prayer not
very likely to be answered, and I wondered at my folly while I prayed.
Yet it was answered. Every week letters came to me from South Africa,
as they came to every other Englishman, Irishman, and Scotchman, and
it is not likely that any of these letters contained news that others
did not read in their letters or in the newspapers; but soon after my
prayer in Sickert's studio, a letter was put into my hands containing
news so terrific that for a long time I sat, unable to think,
bewildered, holding myself in check, resisting the passion that nearly
compelled me to run into the street and cry aloud the plan that an
English General had devised. De Wet was in the angle formed by the
junction of two rivers; the rivers were in flood; he could go neither
back nor forwards; and troops were being marched along either bank,
the superior officers of every regiment receiving orders, so my
correspondent informed me, that firing was not to cease when De Wet
was caught in the triangle and the white flag raised. My correspondent
said, and said justly, that if notice had been given at the beginning
of the war that quarter would not be asked for nor given, we might
have said, This is too horrible, and covered our faces, but we should
not have been able to charge our Generals with treachery. But no such
notice had been given, and he reminded me that we were accepting
quarter from the Boers at the rate of eight hundred a day. A murder
plot, pure and simple, having nothing in common with any warfare waged
by Europeans for many centuries. It must be stopped, and publication
will stop it. But is there a newspaper in London that will publish it?
One or two were tried, and in vain. And while you dally with me, I
cried, De Wet and his army may be massacred. Only in Ireland is there
any sense of right.

And next day, in Dublin, I dictated the story to the editor of the
_Freeman's Journal_. The _Times_ reprinted it, and the editor of a
Cape paper copies it from the _Times_, upon which the military
authorities in South Africa disowned and repudiated the plot. If they
had not done so, the whole of Cape Colony, as I thought, would have
risen against us; and once the plot was repudiated, the Boers were
safe; it would be impossible to revive the methods of Tamburlaine on
another occasion. The Boer nation was saved and England punished, and
in her capacious pocket that she loves so well. The war, I reflected,
was costing England two millions a week, and with the white flag
respected, it will last some years longer; at the very lowest estimate
my publication will cost England two hundred millions. The calculation
put an alertness into my step, and I walked forth, believing myself to
be the instrument chosen by God whereby an unswerving, strenuous,
Protestant people was saved from the designs of the lascivious and
corrupt Jew, and the stupid machinations of a nail-maker in
Birmingham. In a humbler and more forgiving mood I might have looked
upon myself as having saved England from a crime that would have cried
shame after her till the end of history. A great delirium of the
intellect and the senses had overtaken Englishmen at that time, and
how far they had wandered from their true selves can be guessed from
the fact that that great and good man Kruger, who loved God and his
fellow-countrymen, was scorned throughout the whole British Press--and
why? Because he read his Bible. Even to the point of ridiculing the
reading of the Bible did a Birmingham nail-maker beguile the English
people from their true selves.

There is great joy in believing oneself to be God's instrument, and it
seemed to me, as I walked, that my mission had ended in England with
the exposure of the murder plan, and that I had earned my right to
France, to my own instinctive friends, to the language that should
have been mine; and it was while thinking that England was now behind
me, and for ever, that a presence semed to gather, or rather, seemed
to follow me as I went towards Chelsea. The first sensation was thin,
but it deepened at every moment, and when I entered the Hospital Road
I did not dare to look behind me, yet not for fear lest my eyes should
see something they had never seen before, something not of this world;
and walking in a devout collectedness, I heard a voice speaking within
me: no whispering thought it was, but a resolute voice, saying, Go to
Ireland! The words were so distinct and clear that I could not turn to
look. Nobody was within many yards of me. I walked on, but had not
taken many steps before I heard the voice again. Order your
manuscripts and your pictures and your furniture to be packed at once,
and go to Ireland. Of this I am sure--that the words Go to Ireland did
not come from within, but from without. The minutes passed by, and I
waited to hear the voice again, but I could hear nothing except my own
thoughts telling me that no Messiah had been found by me at the dinner
at the Shelbourne Hotel because the Messiah Ireland was waiting for
was in me and not in another.

So the summons has come, I said--the summons has come; and I walked,
greatly shaken in my mind, feeling that it would be impossible for me
to keep my appointment with the lady who had asked me to tea that
evening. To chatter with her about indifferent things would be
impossible, and I returned to Victoria Street unable to think of
anything but the voice that had spoken to me; its tone, its _timbre_,
lingered in my ear through that day and the next, and for many days my
recollection did not seem to grow weaker. All the same I remained
doubtful; at all events, unconvinced of the authenticity of the
summons that I had received. It was hard to abandon my project of
going to live in my own country, which was France, and I said to
myself, If the summons be a real one and no delusion of the senses, it
will be repeated. Next morning, as I lay between sleeping and waking,
I heard the words, Go to Ireland! Go to Ireland! repeated by the same
voice, and this time it was close by me, speaking into my ear. It
seemed to speak within five or six inches, and it was so clear and
distinct that I put out my hand to detain the speaker. The same voice,
I said to myself; the same words, only this time the words were
repeated twice. When I hear them again they will be repeated three
times, and then I shall know.

But our experience in life never enables us to divine what our destiny
will be, nor the manner in which it may be revealed to us. The voice
was not heard again, but a few weeks afterwards, in my drawing-room,
the presence seemed to fill the room, overpowering me; and though I
strove to resist it, in the end it forced me upon my knees, a prayer
was put into my mouth, and I prayed, but to whom I prayed I do not
know, only that I was conscious of a presence about me and that I
prayed. Doubt was no longer possible. I had been summoned to Ireland!
Tonks collected some friends to dinner; Steer and Sickert were among
the company, and it was pointed out to me that no man could break up
his life as I proposed to break up mine with impunity. It is no use.
Nothing that you can say will change me.

My manner must have impressed them; they must have felt that my
departure was decreed by some unseen authority, and that, no doubt,
the Boer War had made any further stay in England impossible to me.




SALVE




I


As I returned home after the dinner at Tonks's lightly weighing my
friends' talents, the thought suddenly struck me that in leaving
London I was leaving them for ever, whether in a week or six weeks I
did not know; only of this was I sure, that my departure could not be
much longer delayed; and while passing through Grosvenor Gardens, I
began to wonder by what means the Destiny I had just heard would pull
me out of my flat in Victoria Street. Two years or eighteen months of
my lease still remained; this lag end had been advertised, but no
desirable tenant had presented himself, and it did not seem to me that
I could go away to Dublin leaving the flat empty, taking with me all
my pictures and furniture. A house in Dublin would be part of my
equipment as a Gaelic League propagandist, and it would cost me a
hundred pounds a year; houses in Dublin are rarely in good repair,
some hundreds might have to be spent upon it; and, falling into an
armchair, I asked myself where all this money was to come from. My
will is always at ebb when the necessity arises of writing to my
banker to ask him how many hundred pounds are between me and
destitution. We are but a heredity. My father was a spendthrift and
hated accounts, and to me accounts are as mysterious as Chinese, as
repellent. We are the same man with a difference; the pain that his
pecuniary embarrassment caused him seems to have fallen on me with
such force that I am naturally economical. My agent said when he
visited me in the Temple: Very few would be content to live in a
cock-loft like you, George. His remark or a certain lady's objection
to the three flights of stairs had tempted me out of the Temple, and
now hatred of the Boer War was forcing me into what seemed a pit of
ruin. Two hundred and fifty a year I shall be paying for houses, I
said, and yet I must go; even if I am to end my days in the workhouse
I must go, even though to engage in Gaelic League propaganda may break
up the mould of my mind. The mould of my mind doesn't interest me any
longer, it is an English mould; better break it up at once and have
done with it. Whereupon my thoughts faded away into a vague meditation
in which ideas did not shape themselves, and next morning I rose from
my bed undecided whether I should go or stay, but knowing all the
while that I was going. It was a queer feeling, day passing over day,
and myself saying to myself: I am twelve hours nearer departure than I
was yesterday, yet having no idea how I was going to be freed from my
flat, but certain that something would come to free me. And the
something that came was the Westminster Trust, a Company that had been
formed for the purpose of acquiring property in Victoria Street.

It had been creeping up from Westminster for some time past, absorbing
house after house, turning the grey austere residential mansions built
in 1830 into shops. It had reached within a few doors of me about the
time of my landlord's death, and, as soon as his property passed into
the hands of the Trust, notice was served upon the tenants that their
leases would not be renewed. One lease, that of a peaceable General
Officer who lived over my head and never played the piano, expired
about that time, and as arrangements could not be made for turning his
flat at once into offices it was let, temporarily, to a foreign
financier, who demanded more light. The extra windows that were put in
to suit his pleasure and convenience seemed to the Company's architect
such an improvement that the Company offered to put extra windows into
my rooms free of cost.

But don't you see that if two windows be put in, the present admirable
relation of wall space to window will be destroyed?

Light, after all--

I engaged these rooms, I said, because I believed that they would
afford me the quiet necessary for the composition of books, but for
the last three weeks I haven't heard the sweet voice of a silent hour.
Have you an ear for music? Tell me if a silent hour is not comparable
to a melody by Mozart? You live in a quiet suburban neighbourhood, I'm
sure, and can tell me. All the beautiful peace of Peckham is in your
face.

The manager regretted that the improvements over my head had caused me
inconvenience, and he suggested putting me upon half-rent until these
were completed; a surprisingly generous offer, so thought I at the
time; but very soon I discovered that the reduction of my rent gave
him all kinds of rights, including the building of a wall depriving my
pantry of eight or nine inches of light, and the chipping away of my
window-sills. The news that I was about to lose my window-sills
brought me out of my bedroom in pyjamas, and, throwing up the window,
I got out hurriedly and seated myself on the sill, thinking that by so
doing I could defy the workmen. Bill, drop yer 'ammer on his
fingernails. Better wait and see 'ow long 'e'll stand this fine frosty
morning in his pi-jamas. The wisdom of this workman inspired my
servant to cry to me to come in. We both feared pneumonia, but if I
did not dress myself very quickly, the workmen would have knocked
away the window-sill. It was a race between us, and I think that half
the sill was gone when I was partially dressed, so I seated myself on
the last half.

Let him bide, cried one workman to his mate who was threatening my
fingers with the hammer; and they continued their improvements about
my windows, filling my rooms with dust and noise. I know not how it
started, but a tussle began between me and one of the stone-cutters.
We'll see what the magistrate will have to say about this bloody
assault, said the man as he climbed down the ladder, and when I had
finished my dressing I went to my solicitor, who seemed to look upon
the struggle on the scaffolding as very serious. His application for
redress was answered by a letter saying that if a summons were issued
against the Company, a cross-summons would be issued against me for
assault on one of the workmen. A civil action, the solicitor said, was
my remedy; and I should have gone on with this if the Company had not
expressed a good deal of regret when the tradesmen engaged in laying
down a parquet floor for the financier brought down my dining-room
ceiling with a crash. The director sent men at once to sweep up the
litter, and he ordered his new tenant, the financier, to restore the
ceiling; but my solicitor advised me to refuse the tradesmen
admission, and by doing so I found that I had again put myself in the
wrong; the ceiling was put up at my expense after a long interval
during which I dined in the drawing-room. My solicitor's
correspondence with the Company did not procure me any special terms;
the Company merely repeated an offer they had previously made, which
was to buy up the end of my lease for 100, a very inadequate
compensation, it seemed to me, for the annoyance I had endured; but as
I felt that my solicitor could not cope with the Company, I came
gradually to the conclusion that I had better accept the 100. It
would pay for the removal of all my furniture and pictures to Dublin,
leaving something over for the house which I would have to hire and at
once, for the offer of the Company was subject to my giving up
possession at the end of the month.

I ordered my trunk to be packed that evening, and next morning was at
the house-agent's office in Grafton Street; and while the clerk made
out a long list of houses for me I told him my requirements. The
houses in Merrion Square are too large for a single man of limited
income; I had lived with my mother in one when boycotting brought me
back from France; the houses in Stephen's Green are as fine, but even
if one could have been gotten at a reasonable rental, Stephen's Green
did not tempt me, my imagination turning rather to a quiet,
old-fashioned house with a garden situated in some sequestered,
half-forgotten street in which old ladies live--pious women who would
pass my window every Sunday morning along the pavement on their way
to church. The house-agent did not think he had exactly the house,
street, and the inhabitants I described upon his books, but there was
a house he thought would suit me in Upper Mount Street. I remembered
the street dimly; a chilly street with an uninteresting church at the
end of it. A bucolic relation had taken a house in Upper Mount Street
in the 'eighties and had given parties with a view to ridding himself
of two uninteresting sisters-in-law, but the experiment had failed. So
I knew what the houses in Upper Mount Street were like--ugly, common,
expensive. Why trouble to visit them? All the same, I visited two or
three, and from the doorstep of one I caught sight of Mount Street
Crescent, bending prettily about a church. But there were no bills in
any window, and the jarvey was asked why he didn't take me to Lower
Mount Street.

Because, he said, all the houses there are lodging-houses, and he
turned his horse's head and drove me into a delightful draggle-tailed
end of the town, silhouetting charmingly, I remembered, on the evening
sky, for I had never failed to admire Baggot Street when I visited
Dublin. There is always something strangely attractive in a declining
neighbourhood, and thinking of the powdered lackeys that must have
stood on steps that now a poor slavey washes, I began to dream. The
house that I had been directed to was no doubt a fine one, but its
fate is declension, for it lives in my memory not by marble
chimney-pieces nor Adam ceilings, but by the bite of the most
ferocious flea that I ever met, caught from the caretaker, no doubt,
at the last moment, for I was on the car before he nipped me in the
middle of the back, exactly where I can't scratch, and from there he
jumped down upon my loins and nipped me again and again, until I
arrived at the Shelbourne, where I had to strip naked to discover him.

If the Creator of fleas had not endowed them with a passion for
whiteness, humanity would perish, I muttered, descending the stairs.

Are you after catching him, sir? the jarvey asked.

Yes, and easily, for he was drunk with my blood as you might be upon
John Jameson on Saturday night, and we drove away to Fitzwilliam
Square.

The houses there are large and clean, but the rents were higher than I
wished to pay, and it did not seem to me that I should occupy an
important enough position in the Square. Something a little more
personal, I said to myself, and drove away to Leeson Street: a
repetition of Baggot Street, decrepit houses that had once sheltered
an aristocracy, now falling into the hands of nuns and lodging-house
keepers. It was abandoned for Harcourt Street, but despite the
attraction of some magnificent areas and lamp-posts with old lanterns,
I decided that I would not live in Harcourt Street and returned to
the agent, who produced another list and next day I visited Pembroke
Road and admired the great flights of granite steps that lead to
doorways that seemed to bespeak a wife and family so emphatically that
I drove to Clyde Road. And finding it too pompous and suburban, too
significant of distillers and brewers, I told the jarvey to drive me
to Waterloo Road, a long monotonous road, with some pretty houses and
gardens, connecting Pembroke Road with Upper Leeson Street; but unable
to associate it in my mind with my mission to Ireland, I cried out:
Castlewood Avenue! The jarvey took me thither, but the avenue, at once
shabby and genteel, disappointed me. I cried to the jarvey:
Clonskeagh! He took me up the Rathmines Road into Clonskeagh, where I
found some pleasant houses, not one of which was to let--the old story
of houses that had long been let remaining on the agent's books. After
Clonskeagh we wandered through Terenure into a desolate region which
the jarvey told me was Clondalkin, and followed a lonely road that
seemed to lead away from all human habitation.

But you see, I said to the driver, I'm looking for a house in the
town.

It is to The Moat we are going, he answered; and half an hour later
our horse stopped before a drawbridge, which I doubted not would cost
a great deal of money to put it into working order. But when it is
lifted my friends will know that I am composing; and it can be let
down at tea-time. A grand sight it will be to see them, all Gaelic
Leaguers of course, walk across it into the moated grange. About a
thousand pounds, the caretaker said, would make the place quite
comfortable, and I answered that The Moat appealed to me in many ways,
but that I had not come to Ireland in search of a picturesque
residence, but in the hope of reviving the language of the tribe whose
wont it was to come down from the rim of blue hills over yonder to
invade Dublin and to be repulsed by different garrisons of the Pale.
One was no doubt ensconced here, and thinking of Mount Venus, the
house that I had visited high up in the Dublin mountains many years
ago, wondering whether it would suit me better to live there than to
live at The Moat, I said to myself: I shall have to live in one or the
other, for there doesn't seem to be any house to let in Dublin City.

A thousand pounds are needed to make The Moat habitable, and that is
more than I wish to spend, I said to the clerk, and begged him to give
me another list of houses; again he searched his books, and a few more
addresses were added to the list.

I'll try these tomorrow, and, leaving the office, I followed the
pavement along Trinity College Gardens, my feet taking me
instinctively to AE. He settles everybody's difficulties and consoles
the afflicted.

If _I_ don't find a house, I said to him, in Dublin, I shall have to
return to that Inferno which is London, and I attempted a description
of Mafeking night and other nights. There are no houses, AE, to let.
I've searched everywhere and can find nothing but The Moat, and Mount
Venus, no doubt, is still vacant, but it's a good five miles distant
from Ranfarnham, and you won't be able to come to see me very often.

AE's grey eyes lit up with a kindly, witty smile.

Nature, he said, has given you energy, vitality, and perseverance, my
dear Moore, but she has denied you the gift of patience, and patience
above all things is needed when seeking a house.

But I've searched Merrion Square, Fitzwilliam Square, Harcourt Street,
and many a suburb.

There were at the time three bank managers waiting to receive
instructions from him, but he listened to my story, and I noticed that
the anxious typist with a sheaf of letters in her hand did not
distract his attention from me; he dismissed her, but without
abruptness, and came down to the door refusing to believe that it
would be impossible for me to find a house in Dublin.

Ireland thrives in her belief in you, I answered; perhaps I shall. For
two days I did not hear from him, but on the third morning, as I was
asking myself if it would be worth while to hire another car to go
forth again to hunt through Mountjoy Square and Rutland Square where
the aristocracy before the Union had built their mansions, the porter
came to tell me that a gentleman wanted to see me. It was AE, who had
come to tell me that he had found me a house; within a few minutes'
walk of Stephen's Green. The perfect residence, he said, for a man of
letters; one of five little eighteenth-century houses shut off from
the thoroughfare, and with an orchard opposite which may be yours for
two or three pounds a year if you know how to bargain with the
landlord.

As he spoke these words we turned a corner and came into sight of an
old iron gateway; behind it were the five eighteenth-century houses,
five modest little houses, but every one with tall windows; a single
window above the area, no doubt the dining-room, and above it a pair
of windows with balconies; behind them were the drawing-rooms, and the
windows above these were the bedroom windows.

Not a single pane of plate-glass in the house, AE! The room above mine
is the cook's room, and if there are some back rooms?

He assured me that the houses were deep and had several back rooms;
the drawing-rooms were large and lofty, and, as well as he remembered,
the back windows in the dining and drawing-rooms overlooked the
convent garden.

I should have tramped round Dublin for a month without finding
anything, and in three days you have found the house that suits me.
Tell me how you did it.

Number 3 was the home of the Theosophical Society, and I remember,
while editing the _Review_, I used to envy those that had the right to
walk in the orchard.

And now you can walk there whenever you please, and dine with me under
that apple-tree, AE, if the Irish summer is warm enough.

But you haven't seen the house yet.

I don't want to see the house until my furniture is in it. I'm no
judge of unfurnished houses.

But he insisted on ringing the bell, and while he was making inquiries
about the state of the roof and the kitchen flue, I was upstairs
admiring marble mantelpieces of no mean design, and cottages that the
back windows overlooked.

AE, I beseech you to leave off talking about boilers and cisterns and
all such tiresome things. Come upstairs at once and see the dear
little slum, and the two washerwomen in it. I wish we could hear what
they're saying.

One does hear some bad language sometimes, the caretaker murmured,
turning her head away.

I'm sure they blaspheme splendidly. Blasphemy is the literature of
Catholic countries. AE, what an inveterate mystic you are, as
practical as St Teresa; whereas I am content if the windows and
mantelpieces are eighteenth century. Don't let the slum trouble you,
my good woman. A man of letters never objects to a slum. He sharpens
his pen there.

The convent garden, sir, on the right--

Yes, I see, and a great many night-shirts out drying.

No, sir, the nuns' underwear.

Better and better. Into what Eden have you led me, AE? Who is the
agent of this Paradise? Is his name Peter?

No, sir; Mr Thomas Burton.

And his address?

He lives at the Hill, Wimbledon. The landlord lives in Wicklow.

How extraordinary! The landlord of an Irish property living in Ireland
and the agent in London. Shall I have to go back to England and
interview this agent? AE? I can't go back.

You won't be quit of England until your affairs are settled.

But I can't go back.

AE smiled so kindly that I half forgot my anger, and my impulsiveness
began to amuse me.

You're always right, AE.

Don't say so, for there's nobody so boring--

As the righteous man.... But come into the garden, where we shall
dine, I hope, often. A wilderness it seems at present, but the
hen-coops and swings can be removed. He took out his watch. I begged
him to stay. He said he couldn't, and bade me goodbye quickly. But,
AE, I'm going--

Whither I went that evening I cannot remember; all I know for certain
is that at some assembly, not at the Mansion House or at the Rotunda,
therefore in some private house (I am sure it was in some private
house, for I remember gaseliers, silk cushions, ladies' necks), I
rushed up to Hyde, both hands extended, my news upon my lips.

Hyde, I've come over; it's all settled. I've been driving about Dublin
for a week without finding a house, and would have had to go away,
leave you--think of it!--if AE hadn't come to my help in the nick of
time. He has found me such a beautiful house, Hyde, where you'll come
to dine, and where, perhaps, we'll be able to talk together in Irish,
for I am determined to learn the language.

You don't mean it? You don't tell me that you've left London for good?
You're only joking, and he laughed that vacant little laugh which is
so irritating.

But tell me, are you advancing?

We're getting on finely. If we could only get the Intermediate--

The Intermediate is most important; but what I want to know is if I
shall be able to help you.

You've done a great deal already, but--

But what?

Your book _Parnell and His Island_ will go against you with the
League.

I should have thought the League was here to accept those that are
willing to help Ireland to recover her language, and not to bother
about my past.

That's the way we are over here, he said, and again I had to endure
his irritating little laugh. But I'm thinking.... The League might
be reconciled to your book if you were to issue it with a
sub-title--_Parnell and His Island, or Ireland Without Her Language_. I
was reading your book the other day, and do you know I wouldn't say that
it wasn't your best book?

It is mere gabble, I answered, and cannot be reissued.

You can't think that? And dropping a hint that I might be more useful
to them in England than in Ireland, he turned away to tell dear Edward
that he was delighted to see him. Now have you come up from the West
for the meeting? You don't tell me so? I don't believe you. Edward
reassured him. And your friend, George Moore, has come over from
London; and with you both to back the League--

How are you, George? I heard you had arrived.

What, already!

Father Dineen saw you; I met him in Kildare Street this afternoon and
he told me to tell you that the Keating Branch were saying that you're
coming over here to write them up in the English papers.

You start your rumours very quickly in Dublin, I answered angrily, and
a stupider one I never heard. I don't write for the papers; even if I
did, the Keating Branch--I know nothing about it. Hyde, I wish you
would use your influence to stop--

I was just telling him that he should reissue _Parnell and His Island_
with a sub-title _Ireland Without Her Language_. Now, what do you
think? We're all very anxious to hear what you think, Martyn.

It would have been much better if he had never written that book. I
told him so at the time. I have always told you, George, that I
understand Ireland. I mayn't understand England--

But what do you mean when you say that you understand Ireland?

Yeats joined our group, and when Edward said that I had decided to
come to live in Dublin he tried a joke, but it got lost in the folds
of his style, and he looked at Hyde and at Martyn disconsolate.
MacNeill, the Vice-President of the Gaelic League, sidled through the
crowd--an honest fellow with a great deal of brown beard. But I
couldn't get him to express any opinion regarding my coming, or the
view that the League would take of it.

But your subscription will be received gratefully, he said, moving
away to avoid further interrogation.

Money, I answered, is always received with gratitude, but I've come to
work for the League as well as to subscribe to it, and shall be glad
to hear what kind of work you propose to put me to. Would you care to
send me to America to collect funds? What do you think? A Gaelic
League missionary?

MacNeill answered that if I went to America and collected money the
League would be glad to receive it; but he didn't think that the
League would send me over as its representative. They would be glad,
however, to receive some journalistic help from me. One of the
questions that was engaging the League's attention at the time was how
to improve _The Claidheamh Soluis_ and he suggested that I should call
upon the editor at my convenience. The last words, at my convenience,
seemed unnecessary, for had I not come to Dublin to serve the Gaelic
League?

Next morning, in great impatience, I sought the offices of the Gaelic
League, and after many inquiries of the passers-by, discovered the
number hidden away in a passage, and then the offices themselves at
the top of a dusty staircase. An inscription in a strange language was
assuring, and a memory of the County of Mayo in my childhood told me
that the syllables that bade me enter were Gaelic and not German. A
couple of rough-looking men, peasants, no doubt, and native Irish
speakers, sat on either side of a large table with account-books
before them, and in answer to my question if I could see the editor,
one of them told me that he was not in at present.

But you speak Irish? I said.

Both of them nodded, and, forgetful of the business upon which I had
come, I began to question them as to their knowledge of the language,
and I am sure that my eyes beamed when they told me that they both
contributed to the _Claidheamh_.

Your Vice-President MacNeill sent me here. He would like me to write
an article. I am George Moore.

I'll tell the editor when he comes in, and if you'll send in your
article he'll consider it. The next few numbers are full up.

This man must be a member of the Keating Branch, said I to myself;
and, though aware of my folly, I could not restrain my words, but fell
to assuring him at once that I had not come to Ireland to write the
Keating Branch up in the English papers. He was sure I hadn't, but my
article would have to be submitted to the editor all the same.

I appreciate your independence, and I'll submit an article, but in
England editors are not quite so Olympian to me.

The men returned to their account-books, and I left the office a
little crestfallen, seeking somebody who would neither look upon my
coming with suspicion, nor treat it as a joke; but finding no one
until I met AE in College Green coming out of a vegetarian
eating-house, lighting his pipe after his dish of lentils.

Ah, my dear Moore!

It is a great good fortune to have a friend whose eyes light up always
when they see one, and whose mind stoops or lifts itself instinctively
to one's trouble, divining it, whether it be spiritual or material.
Before I had time to speak he had begun to feel that Cathleen ni
Houlihan was not treating me very kindly, and he allowed me to
entertain him with an account of my visit to the Gaelic League, and
the rebuffs that I had received from the assistant-editors of the
_Claidheamh Soluis_.

Neither of them knew my name, neither had seen my article in the
_Nineteenth Century_, and last night Hyde said perhaps I would be more
use to them over in England. Nobody wants me here, AE, and yet I'm
coming. I know I am.

But there is other work to do here, he answered, beside the Gaelic
League.

None that would interest me. All I know for certain is that I am
coming despite jokes and suspicion. When I told Hyde that I had
disposed of the lease of my flat he said: Now, is that so? You don't
tell me you've left London for good? Yeats tries to treat my coming as
an exquisite joke. Edward is afraid that I may trouble somebody's
religious convictions. Nobody wants me, AE. Can you tell me why I am
coming to Dublin? If you can you're a cleverer man than I am. You are
that in any case. All I had hoped for was a welcome and some
enthusiasm; no bonfires, torchlight processions, banners, bands, _Cead
mille failte's_, nothing of that kind, only a welcome. It may be that
I did expect some appreciation of the sacrifice I was making, for you
see I'm throwing everything into the flames. Isn't it strange, AE? You
understand, but the others don't, so I'll tell you something that I
heard Whistler say years ago. It was in the Old Grosvenor Gallery. I
have forgotten what we were talking about; one remembers the words but
not what led up to them. Nothing, he said, I suppose, matters to you
except your writing. And his words went to the very bottom of my soul,
frightening me; and I have asked myself again and again if I were
capable of sacrificing brother, sister, mother, fortune, friend, for a
work of art. One is near madness when nothing really matters but one's
work, and I tell you that Whistler's words frightened me just as
Rochefoucauld's famous epigram has frightened thousands. You know it?
Something about the misfortunes of our best friends never being wholly
disagreeable to us. We don't take pleasure in hearing of the
misfortunes of our friends, but there is a truth in Rochefoucauld's
words all the same; and it wasn't until the Boer War drove me out of
England that I began to think that Whistler's words mightn't be truer
than Rochefoucauld's.

AE took out his watch and said he must be getting back to his office.

I'm crossing tonight, I cried after him, and in the steamer's saloon
all I had not said to him rambled on and on in my head, and the
summary of it all is that it might be better for me if Whistler's
words were true, for in leaving England there could be no doubt that I
was leaving a literary career behind me. England had been my
inspiration. _A Mummer's Wife_ and _Esther Waters_ seemed conclusive
proof that I could only write about England. Then, what is it, I
cried, starting up from my berth, that is driving me out of England?
for it is not natural to feel as determined as I feel, especially for
me, who am not at all self-willed. I am being driven, and I am being
pushed headlong into the unknown.

There was no motion on board, and believing that we must be by this
time nearing the Welsh coast, I climbed the brassy stairs and stood
watching the unwrinkled tide sweeping round the great rock. Along the
foreland the shapes of the fields were visible in the moon-haze, and,
while studying the beauty of the world by night, a lone star reminded
me of Stella and I said:

A man is never wholly unhappy as long as he is sure of his mistress's
love.

After all, she said, some hours later, a month isn't a long while.

It will pass too quickly, I answered, and to avoid reproaches, and in
the hope of enticing her to Ireland, I told her of a garden in the
midst of Dublin with apple-trees and fig-trees and an avenue of
lilac-bushes as one comes down the steps from the wicket.

For the garden is lower than the street, and in the ditch (I know not
how else to explain it) there are hawthorns and laburnums.

Four walks, she said, and a grass plot.

There's a walk down the middle.

Which can be sodded over. But why should I trouble to arrange your
garden for you since I shall not see you any more?

But you will come to paint in Ireland?

Do you think that you'd like me to?

My dear Stella, the question is can I live in Ireland without you? and
I besought her for the sake of her art. The Irish mountains are as
beautiful as the Welsh. Dublin is backed by blue hills, and you won't
be obliged to live in a detestable cottage as you were last year in
Wales, but in a fine house. And I told her that in my search for one
to live in I had come across a house in Clondalkin, or near it, that
would suit her perfectly--a moated stead built in the time of Anne,
and, seeing she was interested, I described how I had crossed the moat
by a little bridge, and between the bridge and the front door there
were about thirty yards of gravel. The left wall of the house rises
sheer out of the moat; on the other side there is a pathway, and at
the back a fairly large garden--close on a hundred yards, I should
say--and you like gardening, Stella.

I'm afraid that so much stagnant water--

But, dear one, the water of the moat is not stagnant; it is fed at the
upper end by a stream, and it trickles away by the bridge into a
brook.

And the house itself? she asked.

It is two-storeyed and there are some fine rooms in it, one that I
think you could paint in. My recollection is a little dim, but I
remember a dining-room and a very handsome drawing-room, and I think
my impression was that a thousand pounds spent upon it would give you
such a house as you couldn't get anywhere else. Of that I am sure, and
the country about it is all that your art requires. I remember a row
of fine chestnuts, and beyond it a far-reaching stretch of tilth to
the valley of the Liffey. Promise me that you'll come? She promised.
And now, dear one, tell me of some one who will remove my furniture.




II


A description of a furniture removal would have appealed to my
aesthetic sense twenty years ago, and my style of Mdan thread was
strong enough to capture packers and their burdens; but the net that I
cast now is woven of fine silk for the capture of dreams, memories,
hopes, aspirations, sorrows, with here and there a secret shame. So I
will say no more than that I was out of the house one morning early,
lest I should see a man seize the coal-scuttle and walk away with it,
and on returning home that night I found that everything in the
drawing-room and the dining-room and the spare-room and the ante-room
had been taken away, only the bedroom remained intact, and I wandered
round the shell that I had lived in so long, pondering on the strange
fact that my life in Victoria Street was no more than a dream, and
with no more reality in it, I added, than the dream that I shall dream
here tonight.

Jane, this is the last time you'll call me, for I'm going away by the
mail at half past eight from Euston.

Your life is all pleasure and glory, but I shall have to look round
for another place, I heard her say, as she pulled at the straps of my
portmanteau, and her resentment against me increased when I put a
sovereign into her hand. She cooked me excellent dinners, making life
infinitely agreeable to me; a present of five pounds was certainly her
due, and a sovereign was more than enough for the porter, whom I
suspected of poisoning my cat--a large, grey, and affectionate animal
upon whom Jane, without the aid of a doctor, had impressed the virtue
of chastity so successfully that he never sought the she, but remained
at home, a quiet, sober animal that did not drink milk, only water,
and who, when thrown up to the ceiling, refrained from turning round,
content to curl himself into a ball, convinced that my hands would
receive him--an animal to whom I was so much attached that I had
decided to bring him with me in a basket; but a few weeks before my
departure he died of a stoppage in his entrails, brought about
probably by a morsel of sponge fried in grease--a detestable and cruel
way of poisoning cats often practised by porters. It was pitiful to
watch the poor animal go to his pan and try to relieve himself, but he
never succeeded in passing anything, and after the third day refused
to try any more. We had recourse to a dose of castor oil, but it did
not move him and after consultation we resolved to give an enema if he
would allow us. The poor animal allowed us to do our will; he seemed
to know that we were trying to help him, and received my caresses and
my words with kindly looks while Jane administered the enema, saying
that she didn't mind if the whole courtyard saw her do it, all she
cared for was to save Jim's life. But the enema did not help him, and
after it he neither ate nor drank, but lay down stoically to die.
Death did not come to him for a long while; it seemed as if he would
never drop off, and at last, unable to bear the sight of his
sufferings any longer, Jane held his head in a pail of water, and
after a few gasps the trial of life was over. It may have been that he
died of the fur that he licked away, collecting in a ball in his
entrails, and that there is no cause for me to regret the sovereign
given to the porter when the great van drove up to my door to take
away the bedroom and kitchen furniture.

Everything except my personal luggage was going to Ireland by a small
coasting steamer, which would not arrive for three weeks, and my hope
was that the house in Upper Ely Place would then be ready to receive
my furniture; but next morning only one workman could be discovered in
my new house, and he lazily sweeping. The builder was rung up on the
telephone; he promised many things. Three weeks passed away; the
furniture arrived, but the vans had to go away again; communications
were received from the firm who removed my furniture, demanding the
return of the vans, and it was not until a fortnight later that my
Aubusson carpet was unrolled in the drawing-room one afternoon in AE's
presence, the purple architecture and the bunches of roses shocking
him so much that I think he was on the point of asking me to burn my
carpet. It affected him so much that it was with difficulty I
persuaded him to withdraw his eyes from it and look at the pictures. I
would conceal the fact if I dared, but a desire of truth compels me to
record that when he first saw Manet's portrait it seemed to him
commonplace, even uncouth.

I asked him if the beautiful grey of the background were not in
harmony with the exquisite grey of the dress, and if the paint were
not spilt upon the canvas like cream, and if the suffused colour in a
tea-rose were more beautiful?

Oh, Moore!

Well, if you will not admire the beauty of Manet's paint, admire its
morality. How winningly it whispers, Be not ashamed of anything but to
be ashamed! And I chose this mauve wallpaper, for upon it this grey
portrait will be triumphant. The other Manet is but a sketch, and the
casual critic only sees that she is cock-eyed; the whiteness of her
shoulders escapes him, and the pink of her breasts blossoms. Manet's
pink--almost a white! I remember a peony.... I'll turn the picture a
little more to the light. Now, AE, I beseech you to look upon it. No,
it doesn't please you. Well, look at my Monet instead; a flooded
meadow and willows evanescent in the mist. Compared with Monet,
Constable's vision is a journeyman's, and he is by no means seen at
his worst in that little picture. But look again at the willows and
tell me if the Impressionists did not bring a delicacy of vision into
art undreamt-of before. In their pictures the world is young again.
Look at this charming girl by Berthe Morisot and tell me, was a girl
ever so young before?--an April girl, hyacinth-coloured dress and
daffodil hair.

AE liked better Berthe Morisot's picture of her little daughter coming
to see the maid who is sewing under a dovecot.

She has caught the mystery of the child's wondering eyes. We call it
mystery, he added, but it is merely stupidity. People often say things
that are not in the least like them, therefore criticism will reprove
me for recording words that AE may have uttered, but which are
admittedly not like him.

Ah, here's my Conder! You can't but like this picture of Brighton--the
blue sea breaking into foam so cheerfully; a happy lady looks from her
balcony at other happy ladies walking in the sunshine. The optimism of
painting! AE sighed. You don't like it? Here is a Mark Fisher; women
singing under trees. _The Land of Wine and Song_, he calls it, and if
you look through the trees you will see an estuary and a town in long
perspective dying in the distance. Like my Mark Fisher, AE. Why do you
hesitate?

I do like it, but--

But what?

It is a landscape in some small world, a third the size of our world.

I know what is the matter with you, AE; you're longing for Watts. You
try to disguise it, but you are sighing for _Time Treading on the Big
Toe of Eternity_, or _Death Bridging Chaos_, or _The Triumph of
Purgatory over Heaven_.

Admit--

No, AE, I'll admit nothing, except that he painted a heron rather
well, and then dropped into sixteenth-century treacle. Impressionism
is a new melodic invention invisible to you at present. One of these
days you'll see it. But there's no use talking about painting. Come
into the garden. I'm expecting a lady; she will join us there, and if
you'll take her out among the hills she'll show you how to draw a
round brush from one side of the canvas to the other without letting
it turn round in the middle, leaving a delicious ridge of paint with a
lot of little waggles--

But little waggles, my dear Moore, are not--

AE, we've talked enough about painting for one afternoon. Come into
the garden.

AE took out his watch; it was nearly three, he must be getting back to
his office; but would I tell the lady that he'd be glad to go out
painting with her any Sunday morning?

It was sad to lose him, and while walking to the wicket it seemed to
me clear that he was the one who could restore to me my confidence in
life; and when he left me, a certain mental sweetness seemed to have
gone out of the air, and, thinking of him, I began to wonder if he
were aware of his own sweetness. It is as spontaneous and instinctive
in him as.... A breath of scent from the lilac-bushes seemed to finish
my sentence for me, and it carried my mind into a little story I had
heard from Hughes. He and AE were students together in the Art School
in Dublin, and in a few weeks masters and students were alike amazed
at AE's talent for drawing and composition; he sketched the naked
model from sight with an ease that was unknown to them, and, turning
from the model, he designed a great assembly of Gods about the shores
of the lake renowned in Celtic tradition. Compared with him we seemed
at that time no more than miserable scratchers and soilers of paper.
Hughes's very words! Yet, in spite of an extraordinary fluency of
expression, abundant inspiration, and the belief of the whole school
that a great artist was in him, AE laid aside his brushes, determined
not to pick them up again until he had mastered the besetting
temptation that art presented at that moment. He feared it as a sort
of self-indulgence which, if yielded to, would stint his life; art
with him is a means rather than an end; it should be sought, for by
its help we can live more purely, more intensely, but we must never
forget that to live as fully as possible is, after all, our main
concern; and he had known this truth ever since he had defied God on
the road to Armagh.

But his life did not take its definite direction until an Indian
missionary arrived in Dublin. It seemed odd that I should have
personal knowledge of this very Brahmin. Chance had thrown me in his
way; I had met him in West Kensington, and had fled before him; but AE
had gone to him instinctively as to a destiny; and a few months later
the Upanishads and the Vedas were born again in verse and in
prose--the metrical version better than the prose; in the twenties our
thoughts run into verse, and AE's flowed into rhyme and metre as
easily as into line and colour. But, deriving the same pleasure from
the writing of verse as he did from painting, he was again assailed by
scruples of conscience, and to free himself from the suspicion that he
might be still living in time rather than in eternity, he charged his
disciples to decide whether he should contribute essays or poems. It
is to their wise decision that we owe the two inspired volumes _The
Earth Breath_ and _Homeward_.

As the reader follows my tracing of AE's soul at a very difficult
point in his life, he must be careful to avoid any inference that AE
endeavoured to escape from the sensual will because he believed it to
be the business of every one to tear it out of his life; an intellect
suckled on the lore of the East does not fall into the error of the
parish priest, who accepts chastity as a virtue in itself, thinking
that if he foregoes the pleasure of Bridget's he is free to devote
himself to that of his own belly; and I smiled, for in my imagination
I could see a Yogi raising his oriental eyes in contempt at the
strange jargon of metaphysics that a burly priest from Connaught, out
of breath from the steep ascent, pours over his bowl of rice.

My thoughts melted away and I dreamed a long while, or a moment, I
know not which, on the pure wisdom of the East and our own grossness.

But of course, I said, waking up suddenly, we have all to yield
something to gain a great deal. Were it otherwise, Society would come
to pieces like a rotten sponge. The right of property holds good in
all Society; but in the West ethics invade the personal life in a
manner unknown to the East, so much so that the Oriental stands agape
at our folly, knowing well that every man brings different instincts
and ideas into the world with him. The East says to the West, You
prate incessantly about monogamy, and the fruit of all your labour is
a house divided against itself, for man is polygamous if he is
anything, and if our deeds go down one set of lines and our ideas go
down another, our lives are wasted, and in the end--

A sudden thought darting across my mind left my sentence unfinished,
and I asked myself what manner of man I was. The question had often
been asked before, had always remained unanswered; but that day,
sitting under my apple-tree, it seemed to me that I had suddenly come
upon the secret lair in which the soul hides itself. An
extraordinarily clear and inflexible moral sense rose up and
confronted me, and, looking down my past life, I was astonished to see
how dependent my deeds had always been upon my ideas. I had never been
able to do anything that I thought wrong, and my conscience had
inspired my books. _A Modern Lover_ is half forgotten, but it seems to
me that even in those early days I was interested in the relation of
thought and deed. The Mummer's Wife declines, for she is without
sufficient personal conscience to detach herself from the conventions
in which she has been brought up. Alice Barton in _Muslin_ is a
preparatory study, a prevision of _Esther Waters_; both represent the
personal conscience striving against the communal, and, feeling that I
had learnt to know myself at last, I rose from the seat, and looked
round, thinking that in AE as in myself thought and action are at one.
Alike, I said, in essentials, though to the casual observer regions
apart.... But everybody in Dublin thinks that he is like AE as
everybody in the world thinks he is like Hamlet.

He comes to see me every day between two and three, riding his old
bicycle through the gateway; I run to the wicket to let him in, and we
walk together to the great apple-tree and sit there talking of Manet
and the immortality of the soul. It is pleasant to remember these
weeks, for I was very happy in these first conversations; but the
reader knows how impossible it is for me to believe that any one likes
me for my own sake, and at the end of a week--my happiness may have
lasted half-way into the second week--at the end of eight or nine days
I was trying to find sufficient reason why AE should seek me out in
my garden every afternoon, saying, and saying vainly, that he was
attracted by something in me he had been seeking a long while and
thought he had found at last. And this seeming to me a very
unsatisfying explanation, I began to cast about in my mind for
another, coming to the belief, or very nearly to it, that AE
recognised me as the spiritual influence that Ireland had been waiting
for so long. And the fact that he was the only one in Dublin who had
shown no surprise at my coming fortified me in the belief, and I
dreamed on until his voice called me out of my dream of himself and
myself; and, as if he had been aware all the time that I had been
thinking about him, he said:

As soon as you had lived as much of your life as was necessary for you
to live in Paris and in London you were led back to us through Yeats?

No, AE, not through Yeats. At most he was an instrument, and it is
possible to go further back than him. Martyn was before Yeats. But,
like Yeats, he was no more than an instrument, for neither of them
wanted me to come back. You did, and somehow I can't help feeling that
you knew I was coming back. You had read my books, and it was my
books, perhaps, that made you wish for my return. Wish--not as one
wishes to smoke a cigarette, but you really did want to have me here?

I certainly did wish that England would return to us some of our men
of talent.

But this wasn't the answer that I wanted.

What I would like to know, AE, is did you wish to have me back for my
own sake, because you felt that something was lacking in my books? Or
was it merely for the sake of Ireland? I'm afraid the questions I'm
putting to you make me seem very silly and egotistical, yet I don't
feel either.

Perhaps Ireland needs you a little.

I wonder. I suppose Ireland needs us all. But there is something I
have never told you--something I have never told anybody.

AE puffed at his pipe in silence, and I strove against the temptation
to confide in him the story of the summons I had received on the road
to Chelsea, for his idea of me was not of one that saw visions or
heard spirit voices. I felt that to be so, without, however, being
able to rid myself of the belief that he had discovered in me the
spiritual influence that Ireland was waiting for. How complicated
everything is!... Nothing will be gained by telling him. I won't tell
him. The conversation took a different turn; I felt relieved; the
temptation seemed to have passed from me, but a few minutes after my
story slipped from my lips as nearly as possible in these words:

You know that I came over here to publish an article in the _Freeman's
Journal_ about the Boer War, and the article attracted a great deal
of attention? AE nodded, and I could see that he was listening
intently. If it hadn't been for that article all the Boers would have
been murdered and England would have saved two hundred million pounds.
Providence has to make a choice of an instrument; you are chosen
today, another tomorrow; that day I was the chosen instrument, and on
the road to Chelsea, thinking of this great and merciful Providence, I
heard a voice bidding me back to Ireland. It is difficult to know for
certain what one hears and what one imagines one has heard; one's
thoughts are sometimes very loud, but the voice was from without. I am
sure it was, AE. Three or four days afterwards I heard the same words
spoken within my ear while I was lying in bed asleep. And the voice
spoke so distinctly that I threw out my arms to retain the speaker.
Nor is this all. Very soon afterwards, in my drawing-room in Victoria
Street about eleven o'clock at night, I experienced an extraordinary
desire to pray, which I resisted for a long time. The temptation
proved stronger than my power to resist it; and I shall never forget
how I fell forward and buried my face in the armchair and prayed.

What prayer did you say?

One can pray without words, surely?

When the hooker that was taking Yeats over to Arran or taking him back
to Galway was caught in a storm Yeats fell upon his knees and tried to
say a prayer; but the nearest thing to one he could think of was Of
man's first disobedience and the fruit, and he spoke as much of
_Paradise Lost_ as he could remember.

But, AE, you either believe or you don't believe what I say.

I can quite understand that you're deeply interested in the voice you
heard, or think you heard; but our concern isn't so much with it as
with the fact that you have been brought back to Ireland.

A cloud then seemed to come between us, and out of this cloud I heard
AE saying that if he were to tell people that all his drawings were
done from sittings given to him by the Gods, it would be easy for him
to sell every stroke he put on canvas, and to pass himself off as a
very wonderful person.

But your drawings are done from sittings given to you by the Gods. I
remember your telling me that three stood at the end of your bed
looking at you one morning.

Three great beings came to my bedside, but I cannot tell you if I saw
them directly, as I see you (if I see you directly), or whether I saw
them reflected as in a mirror. In either case they came from a
spiritual world.

A vision was vouchsafed to you. Why not to me?

I don't dispute the authenticity of your vision, my dear Moore. Why
should I? How could I even wish to dispute it? On what grounds?

But you seem to doubt it?

No. A vision is the personal concern of the visionary.

No more! Who sent the vision? Whose voice did I hear? An angel's?

Angels are Jehovah's messengers and apparitors. And this I can say:
the Gods that inspired your coming were not Asiatic.

The Gods to whom the English are praying that strength may be given
them to destroy the Boers quickly and at little cost--a poor little
nation, no bigger than Connaught! The lust for blood was in
everybody's face. I had to leave. If the news came in that five
hundred Boers were taken prisoners faces darkened, and brightened if
the news were that five hundred had been killed. England has made me
detest Christianity.... Born in the amphitheatre, which it didn't
leave without acquiring a taste for blood, and the newspapers are
filled with scorn of Kruger because he reads the Bible. Think of it,
AE! Because he reads his Bible!

But don't think of it, my dear Moore.

It would be better not, for when I do life seems too shameful to be
endured.... The Bishops of York and Canterbury praying to Jesus or to
His Father--which?

Probably to His Father. But go on with your story.

What story?

The message that you received didn't come round to you by way of
Judaea.

No, indeed, the Gods that inspired me are among our native divinities.
Angus seems to be kind and compassionate, and so far as I know, his
clergy never ordered that any one should be burnt at the stake for
holding that it was not the kisses but the songs of the birds circling
about his forehead that created love. All the same, the Druids--

No one may speak ill of the Druids in AE's presence, and he told me
that he did not know of any mention in Irish legends of human
sacrifices, and if there had been, the Christian revisers of the
legends would not have failed to mention them.

You love the Druids, I said, looking into his calm and earnest face.
When you were earning fifty pounds a year in Pim's shop you used to go
to Bray Head and address a wondering crowd! Standing on a bit of
broken wall, all your hair flowing in the wind, you cried out to them
to return to the kind, compassionate Gods that never ordered burnings
in the market place, and I don't see why, AE, we should not go forth
together and preach the Danaan divinities, north, south, east, and
west. You shall be Paul. Barnabas quarrelled with Paul. I'll be Luke
and take down your words.

It would be your own thoughts, my dear Moore, that you would be
reporting, not mine; and, though Ireland stands in need of a new
religion--

And a new language. One is no good without the other.

We fell to talking of the Irish language, I maintaining that it would
be necessary to revive it, AE thinking that the Anglo-Irish idiom
would be sufficient for literature, until the thought emerged that
perhaps it might have been Diarmuid that bade me to Ireland.

I'd like to see the cromlechs under which the lovers slept, but I
don't know where to find them.

AE answered that at Whitsuntide he would have three or four days'
holiday, and proposed to visit the sacred places with me.

We'll seek the ancient divinities of the Gael together. AE pulled out
his watch and said he must be going, and we strolled across the
greensward to the wicket. The ash will be in leaf the day we start. I
hope, AE, that nothing will happen to prevent us; and I jumped out of
bed every morning to see if the promise were for a fine or a wet day.

I had arrived in Ireland in March; it was raining then, but the
weather had taken a turn in the middle of April; the fifteenth was the
first fine day, and ever since the days had played in the garden like
children, shadows of apple-trees and lilac-bushes moving over the
sweet grass with skies of ashen blue overhead fading into a dim,
creamy pink in the South and East. The hawthorns were in full leaf,
and among the little metallic leaves white and pink stars had just
begun to appear, and the scent of these floated after us, for no
sinister accident had happened. AE called for me as he had promised,
and we went away together on bicycles--myself on a new machine bought
for the occasion, AE on an old one that he has ridden all over
Ireland, from village to village, establishing co-operative creameries
and banks. And side by side we rode together through the early streets
to Amiens Street Station, where we took second-class tickets to
Drogheda--an hour's journey from Dublin. At Drogheda we jumped on our
bicycles again; two tramps we were that day, enjoying the wide world,
and so intoxicating was the sunlight that it was with difficulty I
kept myself from calling to AE that I felt certain the Gods would
answer us. I would have done this if a river had not been passing by,
and such a pretty river--a brook rather than a river.

AE, AE, look and admire it!

A few minutes afterwards our brook or river acquired such a
picturesqueness that perforce he jumped from his bicycle and unslung
his box of pastels which he wore over his shoulder.

Trees, he said, emerging like vapours, and while he discovered the
drawing of a brook purling round a miniature isle between low mossy
banks, I lay beside him, forgetful of everything but the faint
stirring of the breeze in the willows and the song of a bird in the
reeds--a reed-warbler no doubt; and while I lay wondering if the bird
were really a warbler, AE finished his pastel. He leaned it against a
tree, looked at it, and asked me if I liked it.... It was a spiritual
seeing of the world, and I told him that no one had ever seen Nature
more beautifully. He put his picture into his portfolio, I put mine
into my memory, and we went away on our bicycles through the pretty
neglected country until we came to a grey bridge standing thirty,
perhaps fifty, feet above the shallow river; the beauty of its slim
arches compelled me to dismount, and, leaning on the parapet, I
started this lamentation:

No more stone bridges will be built, and it has come to this, that a
crack in one of those arches will supply a zealous county councillor
with a pretext for an iron bridge. The pleasure of these modern days
is to tear down beautiful yesteryear.

No arch will fall within the next ten years, he answered. Admire the
bridge without troubling yourself as to what its fate will be when you
are gone.

AE's optimism is delightful, but, while approving it, I could not keep
back the argument that a mountain fails to move our sympathies, for it
is always with us, whereas a cloud curls and uncurls and disappears.
We cling to life because it is for ever slipping from us. Don't you
think so? It is strange that, although you know more poetry by heart
than any one I ever met, I have never heard you repeat a verse from
_Omar Khayym_. You love what is permanent, and believe yourself
immortal. That is why, perhaps, Shelley's _Hymn of Pan_ is for you the
most beautiful lyric in the world. Do say it again--Sileni and Fauns
and that lovely line ending moist river lawns. One sees it
all--something about Tempe outgrowing the light of the dying day. Say
it all over again.

He repeated the verses as we ascended the hill.

Look at that hound!

He came towards us, trotting amiably, gambolling now and again for
sheer pleasure. The loneliness of the road had awakened the affection
that his nature was capable of. He leaned himself up against me; his
paws rested upon my shoulders; I fondled the silken ears and he
yawned, perhaps because he wished me to admire his teeth--beautiful
they were and skilfully designed for their purpose, to seize and to
tear.

Yet his eyes are gentle. Tell me, is his soul in his eyes or in these
fangs?

My dear Moore, you've been asking me questions since eight o'clock
this morning; and we all three went on together till we reached a
farmhouse in which the hound lived with an old woman.

The dog put his long nose into her hand, and she told us that he had
been brought to her very ill. It was distemper, but I brought him
through it, and now they'll soon be taking him from me. And you'll be
sorry to leave me, won't you, Sampson?

At the end of September, I said, he'll be taken away to scent out
foxes with his brethren in the woods over yonder, and to lead them
across the green plains, for he is a swift hound. Don't you think he
is? But you won't look at him. If he were called Bran or Lomair--

We hopped on our bicycles and rode on till we came to a great river
with large sloping banks, covered with pleasant turf and shadowed by
trees, the famous Boyne, and AE pointed out the monument erected in
commemoration of the battle.

The beastly English won that battle. If they'd only been beaten!

We rode on again until we came to a road as straight as an arrow
stretching indefinitely into the country with hedges on either side--a
tiresome road and so commonplace that the suspicion entered my mind
that this journey to Meath was but a practical joke, and that AE would
lead me up and down these roads from morning till noon, from noon till
evening, and then would burst out laughing in my face; or, perhaps, by
some dodge he would lose me and return to Dublin alone with a fine
tale to tell about me. But such a trick would be a mean one, and there
is no meanness in AE. Besides, the object of the journey was a search
for Divinity and AE does not joke on sacred subjects. We rode on in
silence. A woman appeared with candles and matches in her hand.

But why should we light candles in broad daylight? There isn't a cloud
in the sky.

He told me to buy a candle and a box of matches and follow him across
the stile, which I did, and down a field until we came to a hole in
the ground, and in the hole was a ladder. He descended into it and,
fearing to show the white feather, I stepped down after him. At twenty
feet from the surface he went on his hands and knees and began to
crawl through a passage narrow as a burrow. I crawled behind him, and
after crawling for some yards, found myself in a small chamber about
ten feet in height and ten in width. A short passage connected it with
a larger chamber, perhaps twenty feet in width and height, and built
of great unhewn stones leaned together, each stone jutting a little in
front of the other till they almost met, a large flat stone covering
in the vault. And it was here, I said, that the ancient tribes came to
do honour to the great divinities--tribes, but not savage tribes, for
these stones were placed so that not one has changed its place though
four thousand years have gone by. Look at this great hollowed stone.
Maybe many a sacrificial rite has been performed in it. He did not
answer this remark, and I regretted having made it, for it seemed to
betray a belief that the Druids had indulged in blood sacrifice, and,
to banish the thought from his mind, I asked him if he could read the
strange designs scribbled upon the walls. The spot, he said, within
the first circle is the earth, and the first circle is the sea; the
second circle is the heavens, and the third circle the Infinite Lir,
the God over all Gods, the great fate that surrounds mankind and
Godkind. Let us sit down, I said, and talk of the mysteries of the
Druids, for they were here for certain; and, as nothing dies,
something remains of them and of the demigods and of the Gods. The
Druids, he answered, refrained from committing their mysteries to
writing, for writing is the source of heresies and confusions, and it
was not well that the folk should discuss Divine things among
themselves; for them the arts of war and the chase, and for the Druids
meditation on eternal things. But there is no doubt that the Druids
were well instructed in the heavens; and the orientation of the stones
that surround their temples implies elaborate calculations. At the
same hour every year the sun shines through certain apertures. But,
AE, since nothing dies, and all things are as they have ever been, the
Gods should appear to us, for we believe in them, and not in the Gods
that men have brought from Asia. Angus is more real to me than Christ.
Why should he not appear to me, his worshipper? I am afraid to call
upon Mananaan or on Dana, but do you make appeal.

AE acquiesced, and he was on the ground soon, his legs tucked under
him like a Yogi, waiting for the vision, and, not knowing what else to
do, I withdrew to the second chamber, and ventured to call upon Angus,
Diarmuid's father, that he or his son might show himself to me. There
were moments when it seemed that a divine visitation was about to be
vouchsafed to me, and I strove to concentrate all my thoughts upon him
that lives in the circle that streams about our circle. But the great
being within the light that dawned faded into nothingness. Again I
strove; my thoughts were gathered up, and all my soul went out to him,
and again the darkness lightened. He is near me; in another moment he
will be by me. But that moment did not come, and, fearing my presence
in the tomb might endanger AE's chance of converse with the Immortals,
I crept along the passage and climbed into the upper air and lay down,
disappointed at my failure, thinking that if I had tried a third time
I might have seen Angus or Diarmuid. There are three circles, and it
is at the third call that he should appear. But it would be useless to
return to the tomb; Angus would not gratify so weak a worshipper with
vision, and my hopes were now centred in AE, who was doubtless in the
midst of some great spiritual adventure which he would tell me
presently.

The sun stood overhead, and never shall I forget the stillness of that
blue day, and the beauty of the blue silence with no troublesome lark
in it; a very faint blue when I raised my eyes, fading into grey,
perhaps with some pink colour behind the distant trees--a sky nowise
more remarkable in colour than any piece of faded silk, but beautiful
because of the light that it shed over the green undulations, greener
than any I had seen before, yet without a harsh tone, softened by a
delicate haze, trees emerging like vapours just as AE had painted
them. And as I lay in the warm grass on the tumulus, the green
country unfolded before my eyes, mile after mile, dreaming under the
sun, half asleep, half awake, trees breaking into leaf, hedgerows into
leaf and flower, long herds winding knee-deep in succulent herbage. It
is wonderful to sit on a tumulus and see one's own country under a
divine light. An ache came into my heart, and a longing for the time
when the ancient Irish gathered about the tumulus on which I was lying
to celebrate the marriage of earth and sky. On days as beautiful as
this day they came to make thanksgiving for the return of the sun; and
as I saw them in my imagination arrive with their Druids, two
opaque-looking creatures, the least spiritual of men, with nothing in
their heads but some ignorant Christian routine, lifted their bicycles
over the stile.

They're not going to descend into the sacred places! I said. They
shall not interrupt his vision; they shall not!

As they approached me I saw that they had candles and matches in their
hands, and, resolved at any cost to save the tomb from sacrilege, I
strove to detain them with speech about the beauty of the summer-time
and the endless herbage in which kine were fattening. Fattening was
the word I used, thinking to interest them.

The finest fattening land in all Ireland, one of them said, but we're
going below.

I should have told them the truth, that a great poet, a great painter,
and a great seer was, in their own phraseology, below, and it might be
that the Gods would vouchsafe a vision to him. Would they be good
enough to wait till he ascended? Mere Christian brutes they were,
approvers of the Boer War, but they might have been persuaded to talk
with me for ten or fifteen minutes; they might have been persuaded to
sit upon the mound if I had told them the truth. I leaned over the
opening, listening, hoping their bellies might stick in the narrow
passage; but as they seemed to have succeeded in passing through, I
returned to the tumulus hopeless. The Gods will not show themselves
while Presbyterian ministers are about; AE will not stay in the tomb
with them; and at every moment I expected to see him rise out of the
earth. But it was the ministers who appeared a few minutes afterwards,
and, blowing out their candles in the blue daylight, they asked me if
I had been below.

I have been in the temple, I answered.

Did you see the fellow below?

I'm waiting for him--a great writer and a great painter, I answered
indignantly.

Is it a history he's brooding down there; one of them asked, laughing;
and I lay down on the warm grass thinking of the pain their coarse
remarks must have caused AE, who came out of the hill soon after. And
it was just as I had expected. The vision was about to appear, but the
clergymen had interrupted it, and when they left the mood had passed.




III


As we rode to Newgrange along smooth roads, between tall hedges, the
green undulating country flowing on either side melting into grey
distances, AE told me that we should see at Newgrange the greater
temples of the Druids; and through his discourses the hope glimmered
that perhaps we might be more fortunate at Newgrange than we had been
at Dowth. It was only reasonable that the Gods should show themselves
to us if they deemed us worthy, and if we were not worthy--AE at
least--who were worthy among living men? The Presbyterian ministers
would be absent from Newgrange; and we rode on, AE thinking of Angus
and his singing-birds, myself of Midir at the feast among the spears
and the wine-cups, his arm round Etain, the two passing through the
window in the roof, and how all that the host assembled below saw was
two white swans circling in the air above the palace.

Whither did they go?

Did who go? he answered.

Etain and Midir.

Towards the fairy mountain of Slievenamon, where Etain rejoined her
kindred on the lake.

Legends beguile the monotony of endless roads and hedges, but at the
next cross roads it was plain that AE was uncertain which road to
take, and our eyes sought vainly a man or woman to direct us. Miles
went by without a cottage, and if we came upon one it was locked, the
herdsman being away, opening gates, changing his cattle from pasture
to pasture. The cottages became rarer, and we rode almost in despair
through the green wilderness till we came at last to a ruined
dwelling, and a curious one--not exactly a cabin, for it was built of
brick and stood above the level of the road. A rubble heap had to be
scaled to reach the one room that remained, and it was in this lonely
tenement that we found our guide, a child of seven or eight, dressed
in a little shirt and an immense pair of trousers, which he hitched up
from time to time, a sharp-witted little fellow, as alert as a
terrier.

You've come out of your road altogether and will have to go back a
couple of miles. Or maybe it'd be best for you to go on up this road
till you come to the big hill beyant, and then turn to your left.

The little fellow took our fancy, and, as we were leaving, we turned
back to ask who lived with him. He said his mother lived with him, but
she went out every day to the neighbours to try to get a bit! We told
him that we had ridden many miles and had seen nobody. The little
fellow looked puzzled, and, on pressing him to say where his mother
had gone, he mentioned the name of some town which AE told me was
twenty miles away. Can your mother walk twenty miles?

Faith she can, sir, and back again.

And she leaves you all alone?

We gave him a slice of bread and butter, which he held in his hand,
not daring to eat in our presence. We pressed him to eat, and he took
a bite timidly, and moved away like a shy animal. As a slice of bread
and butter did not seem to us to be a sufficient reward for his
directions to Newgrange, I felt in my pocket for a shilling, and asked
him how much his mother brought back with her.

Sometimes a few coppers.

His eyes lit up when I handed him the shilling, and he said:

That'll buy us two grand dinners; she won't have to be going away
again for a long time.

You don't like your mother to leave you here all day long? Again the
little fellow seemed unwilling to answer us. But she'll be coming back
tonight?

She will if she don't get a sup too much.

And if she does you'll stay here all night by yourself? Aren't you
afraid all alone at night?

I am when the big dog does come.

What dog?

A mad dog. He does wake me up out of my bed.

But the dog doesn't come into the room?

No; but I do be hearing him tearing the stones outside.

And do you ever see him?

When he gets up there I do, and he pointed to the broken wall. He was
up there last night and he looking down at me, and his eyes red as
fire, and his hair all stuck up agin the moon.

What did you do?

I got under the clothes.

A nightmare, I whispered to AE. But if the dog be mad, I said to the
little chap, he shouldn't be allowed to run about the country. He
ought to be shot. Why don't the police?

How could they shoot him and he dead already?

But if he be dead how is it that he comes up on the rafters?

I dunno, sir.

Whose dog is it?

Martin Spellacy ownded him. And we learnt that Martin Spellacy lived
about a mile down the road and had bought the dog at Drogheda to guard
his orchard which was robbed every year; but the dog turned out to be
a sleepy old thing that no one was afraid of, and were robbed every
year until the dog died.

Then were they robbed no longer?

No, because they do be afeard of his ghost; he's in the orchard every
night, a terrible black baste, and nobody would go within a mile of
that orchard as soon as the dark evening comes on.

But if the ghost is in the orchard watching, how is it that he comes
here?

The little fellow looked at me with a puzzled stare, and answered that
he didn't know, but accepted the suggestion that ghosts could be in
two places at once. We rode away, a little overcome at the thought of
the child asleep that night among the rags in the corner, fearing
every moment lest the dog should appear on the rafters. But we
couldn't take him with us; and we bicycled on, thinking how Martin
Spellacy's apples were better watched over by the ghost of a dog than
by a real dog; and when we came to a part of the road shaded by trees,
we got off our bicycles and went through a gate into a drove-way. A
woman came from the cottage and I can still hear her say:

You won't be writing your names on the stones?

On the sacred stones! I answered.

Well, you see, sir, tourists do be coming from all parts, and my
orders are to get a promise from every one visiting the cave not to
write on the walls. Of course, one can't be knowing everybody that
comes here, but I'm sure that no gentleman like you would be doing
such a thing.

Don't stay to expostulate, and AE took me by the arm, and we passed out
of the shadow of the trees into the blue daylight. On our left was the
tumulus, a small hill overgrown with hazel and blackthorn-thickets, with
here and there a young ash coming into leaf. On all sides great stones
stood on end, or had fallen, and I would have stayed to examine the
carvings or the scratches with which these were covered, but AE pointed
to the entrance of the temple--a triangular opening no larger than a
fox's or a badger's den; and at his bidding I went down on my hands and
knees, remembering that we had not come to Newgrange to investigate but
to evoke.

We remained upwards of an hour in the tumulus, and no sign being
vouchsafed to us that the Gods were listening, we began our crawl
through the long, twisting burrow towards the daylight; and in
dejected spirit, wondering at the cause of our failure, asking
ourselves secretly why we had been ignored, we climbed over the hill,
to discover a robin singing in a blackthorn, the descendant, no doubt,
of a robin that had seen the Druids. And it being necessary to say
something, I asked AE whence the stones had come for the building of
the temple under our feet, for we had not passed anything like a
quarry since early morning. But he could not tell me whence they had
come, and our talk branched into a learned discussion regarding the
antiquity of man, myself muttering that about a million years ago man
separated himself from the ape, AE repudiating the ape theory
strenuously all the way down the hillside, saying that the world was
not old enough to make the theory of evolution possible. At least a
billion more years would have to be added to the history of our
planet, so it could not be else than that man had been evolved from
the Gods--there could be no doubt of it, he said; and we sat down in
front of the temple to munch bread and butter. A restless fellow, for
no sooner were the slices finished than he began to sketch the stones;
and I remember thinking that it was as well he had an occupation, for
one cannot talk in front of a Druid temple four thousand years old.

The same landscape that had astonished me at Dowth lay before me, the
same green wilderness, with trees emerging like vapour, just as in
AE's pastels. My eyes closed, and through the lids I began to see
strange forms moving towards the altar headed by Druids. Ireland was
wonderful then, said my dreams, and on opening my eyes Ireland seemed
as wonderful in the blue morning, the sky hanging about her, unfolding
like a great convolvulus. My eyes closed; kind and beneficent Gods
drew near and I was awakened by a God surely, for when I opened my
eyes a giant outline showed through the sun-haze miles away.

Has Angus risen to greet us, or Mac Lir come up from the sea? I asked,
and, shading his eyes with his hand, AE studied the giant outline for
a long time.

It's Tara, he said, that you're looking at. On a clear evening Tara
can be seen from Newgrange.

Tara! Tara appearing in person to him who is relating the story of her
lovers! And certain that there was more in this apparition than
accidental weather, I started to my feet. At that moment sounds of
voices called me back again to 1901--the voices of clergymen coming
through the gate; and askance we watched them cross the field and go
down on their hands and knees.

Let us go, AE. Yes, let us go to Tara and escape from these Christian
belly-gods.

But Tara lies out of our road some twenty miles, AE answered as we
rode away.

But the Gods have shown Tara to us because they await us.

It isn't there that they'd be waiting for us, he answered, and when I
asked him why he thought we should be more likely to meet the Gods
elsewhere, he told me that he did not remember that the Gods had ever
been seen at Tara.

And therefore you think that the apparition of the hill as we lay
among the cromlechs was accidental? Of course you know best; but even
though the hand of Providence be not in it, I'd like to go to Tara,
for I could get into my dialogue glimpses of the great plains about
the hill.

He said that any allusions to the woods that Grania roamed with Laban
should be drawn from my knowledge of Nature rather than from any
particular observation of a particular place.

No one can imagine a landscape that he has not seen, AE.

All my best landscapes come to me in a vision. Last night I saw giants
rolling great stones up a hillside with intent to destroy a city.

Perhaps the hillside you saw was Tara.

No, he said, it wasn't. Tara was not destroyed by giants but by an
ecclesiastic.

And therefore was worthless, I muttered. And we talked a long while of
the monk who had walked round Tara, ringing a bell and cursing the
city, which was taken abandoned and Ireland given over to
division-which has endured ever since, I added. AE admitted that this
memory of Tara did not endear the hill to him, but that was not his
reason for not wishing to go there.

It is at least twenty miles from here, he said, and I don't think
there's an inn on this side, nor am I sure that there is one on the
other. We would have to sleep at ----, and he mentioned the name of
some village which I have forgotten. But Monasterboice is only six
miles from here, and the herdsman's wife will be able to give us tea
and bread and butter.

I remember a man telling me that he had gone to Wales to track Borrow
from village to village. I shall not be accused by any one, he said,
of lacking sympathy for any place visited by Borrow, but all I
remember of my walk from Carnarvon to Bethgelert is that the beer at
Bethgelert was the best I ever drank. And this story has always seemed
to me so human that I am now tempted to fit it into this narrative,
turning excellent beer into tea so delicious that its flavour lingers
for ever in the palate. But if I were to introduce a thread of fiction
into this narrative, the weft would be torn asunder; and any one who
knows me at all would not believe that in a cup of tea, however
delicious, I could drink oblivion of the ruins of the great abbey
through which we wandered one summer evening, almost within hearing of
voices whispering about the arches, the infoliated capitals, and the
worn and broken carvings. The darkness of time lightened, and we saw
monks reading and painting in their cells, one rising suddenly,
delighted, from the Scriptures; he had succeeded in clearing up in a
gloss an obscure point that had troubled him for years. And then
another appeared, bent over a pattern of endless complexity, his hand
moving over the parchment quickly and surely. In the ghostly silence
of the ruins we heard--if I heard vaguely, AE must have heard
distinctly--the mutter of a monk scanning a poem, a saint, no doubt,
that had begun to weary of the promiscuousness of a great monastery,
and was meditating further retirement from the world. We rode away,
thinking that his poem was in praise of some lake island, whither he
would go, like Marban. AE remembered some of Marban's lines, and he
told me that they were written in the halcyon days in which Ireland
lay dreaming, century after century, arriving gradually at the art of
the jeweller, the illuminator, and the carver of symbols. Marban is a
great poet; the lines AE repeated to me are as native as the hazels
under which the poet lived, and as sweet as the nuts he gathered from
the branches.

And we rode forgetful of the excellence of the tea that the herdsman's
wife had set before us, full of dreams of a forgotten civilisation,
each maintaining to the other that the art of ancient Ireland must
have been considerable, since a little handful has come down to us,
despite the ravening Dane, and the Norman, worse than the Dane; for
the Dane only destroyed, whereas the Norman came with a new culture,
when Ireland was beginning to realise herself. If he had come a few
centuries later, we should have had an art as original as the Chinese.

The miles flowed under our wheels. We had come so far that it seemed
as if we might go on for another hundred miles without feeling tired,
and the day, too, seemed as if it could not tire and darken into
night. We passed a girl driving her cows homeward. She drew her shawl
over her head, and I said that I remembered having seen her long ago
in Mayo, and AE answered: Before the tumuli, she was.




IV


You've punctured! AE said, and I could see that he looked upon the
incident as ominous. I can mend your puncture for you, but perhaps the
quickest way will be to go back; the shop isn't more than a quarter of
a mile from here.

And in it we met a young man, who advanced to meet us on long, thin
legs, his blue, Celtic eyes full of inquiry; after listening, I
thought sympathetically, to my mishap (he was really thinking of
something else) he asked me what he could do for me, and, on my
telling him again that I had punctured, he seemed to wake up
sufficiently to call his partner, a thick-set man, who seized my
machine and told me that he was just tightening a gentleman's wheel
for him, but it wouldn't take more than a couple of minutes. In a
quarter of an hour ... could I wait that long?

He spoke with a Lancashire burr, and I began to wonder how the Celt
and the Saxon had come together, so different were they, and why the
red-headed Celt lingered about the shop instead of going to the help
of his fellow. And it was to escape from unpleasant thoughts of my
country's idleness that I asked him if the language movement was
making progress in Dundalk; but when he told me that a branch of the
Gaelic League had been started about two years ago, and that he was a
constant attendant at the classes, I apologised to him, inwardly, for
a hasty judgment, and, seeing in him, perhaps, a future apostle, I
commenced preaching. A few people had just dropped in for a chat after
dinner, and taking for my text the words that I had heard spoken on
the road to Chelsea, I said:

A few days after the voice spoke to me again, this time not out of the
clouds, but within a few inches of my ear, and the words that it spoke
were, Go to Ireland, go to Ireland, and not long after this second
revelation, a force completely outside of myself compelled me to fall
upon my knees, and I prayed for the first time for many years. But it
was not to any Christian God that I prayed.

AE looked up, hoping, no doubt, that I would not shock the young man's
Catholic susceptibilities to the point of his asking me to leave his
shop; and, thinking that in saying I had not prayed to a Christian God
I had said enough, I admitted that the future religion of Ireland was
not our business, but one for the next generation to settle. Our
business was to revive the Irish language, for the soul of Ireland was
implicit in it, and, pulling out of my pocket a copy of the
_Claidheamh Soluis_, I described the aims and ambitions of the paper.
But a cloud came into the young man's face and into the faces of the
three or four people present, whom I invited to subscribe to it, and
the thought dashed through my mind that I was being mistaken for an
advertising agent, and to remove such sordid suspicion I told them
that I had no pecuniary interest in the paper whatever, but was
working for the language of our forefathers, and to support this paper
(the organ of the League) seemed to me part of the work I had been
sent to do in Ireland. The best way to do this was by getting
advertisements for the paper, and my way of getting advertisements was
simple and advantageous to all parties. I had rented a house in
Dublin. The roof was leaking, and a builder had to be called in; he
had been given the job of repairing the roof on condition that he
advertised in the _Claidheamh Soluis_. The upholsterer had furnished
my house under the same conditions, and as soon as I came to live in
it I had gone to the butcher, the grocer, the chandler, the
greengrocer, the apothecary, the baker, the tailor, the draper, the
boot-maker: You shall have my custom if you advertise in the
_Claidheamh Soluis...._ And you, sir, having bicycles to sell, might
like to do business with me on the same terms.

The young Celt agreed that he would like to do business with me, but,
being somewhat slow-witted, said he must refer the matter to his
partner.

But why refer it to your partner? I answered. Everybody will advertise
if he is sure of getting custom. I am the only advertising agent in
the world who can insure a speedy return for the money laid out.

As the young man hesitated, AE took me aside and reminded me that my
method was not as applicable to bicycles as to furniture and food, for
if I were to buy a bicycle every time I punctured I should have more
machines on my hands than it would be possible for me to find use for.

If you'll be good enough to wait till my partner comes back, chimed in
the young Celt, I'll be able to give you your answer.

And when the Lancashire man came in with the bicycle on his shoulders,
the conditions of sale were explained to him (conditions which I could
see by the partner's face he was quite willing to accept).

We shan't get to Slievegullion today if you don't hasten, AE said; but
the Lancashire man, loath to lose a chance of selling a bicycle, sent
the young Celt along with us, the pretext being to put us on the right
road; and we all three pedalled away together, myself riding in the
middle, explaining to the Celt that language wears out like a coat,
and just as a man has to change his coat when it becomes threadbare, a
nation has to change its language if it is to produce a new
literature. There could be no doubt about this. Italy had produced a
new literature because Italy had changed her language; whereas Greece
had not changed hers, and there was no literature in Greece, and there
could be none until the modern language had separated itself
sufficiently from the ancient.

The young man seemed to wish to interpose a remark, but I dashed into
a new theory. Ideas were climatic; the climate of Ireland had produced
certain modes of thought, and these could only transpire in the
language of the country, for of course language is only the echo of
the mind. The young man again tried to interpose a remark, and AE
tried too, but neither succeeded in getting heard, for it seemed to me
of primary importance to convince the young man that literary genius
depended upon the language as much as upon the writer, and Ireland was
proof of it, for, though Irishmen had been speaking English for
centuries, they had never mastered that language.

If Irishmen would only read English literature, AE shouted from the
other side of the road, but they read the daily paper.

But, AE, a nation reads the literature that itself produces. Ireland
cannot be as much interested in Shakespeare as England is, or in the
Bible, Ireland having accepted the Church of Rome, and the two ways of
learning English are through the Bible and Shakespeare.

But there is an excellent Irish translation of the Bible, nearly as
good as the English Bible, and AE appealed to the young Celt, who
admitted that he had heard that Bedell's Bible was in very good Irish.

But it isn't read in the classes.

And why isn't it read in the classes? I asked.

Well, you see, it was done by a Protestant.

I screamed at him that it was ridiculous to reject good Irish because
a Protestant wrote it.

You are a native speaker, sir?

No, I answered, I don't know any Irish.

The young man gazed at me, and AE began to laugh.

You should begin to learn, and I hope you won't mind taking this
little book from me; it is O'Growney's. I am in the fifth. And now, he
said, I don't think I can go any farther with you. The cromlech--you
can't miss it when you come to the first gate on the left.

He left us so abruptly that I could not return the book to him, and
had to put it into my pocket; and the incident amused AE until we came
to a gate about half a mile up the road, which we passed through,
coming upon the altar of our forefathers in the middle of a large
green field--a great rock poised upon three or four upright stones,
nine or ten feet high, and one stone worn away at the base, but
rebuilt by some pious hand, for the belief abides that Diarmuid and
Grania slept under the cromlech in their flight from Finn.

Traditions are often more truthful than scripts, AE said, and,
believing in this as in everything he says, I walked round the
cromlech three times, praying, and when my devotions were finished, I
returned to AE, who was putting the last touches to a beautiful
drawing of the altar, a little nervous lest he should question me as
to the prayers I had offered up. But instead of groping in any one's
religious belief AE talks sympathetically of Gods ascending and
descending in many-coloured spirals of flame, and of the ages before
men turned from the reading of earth to the reading of scrolls, and of
the earth herself, the origin of all things and the miracle of
miracles. AE is extraordinarily forthcoming, and while speaking on a
subject that interests him, nothing of himself remains behind, the
revelation is continuous, and the belief imminent that he comes of
Divine stock, and has been sent into the world on an errand.

I watched him packing up his pastels, and we went together to the
warrior's grave at the other end of the field, and stood by it,
wondering in the beautiful summer weather what his story might be. And
then my memory disappears. It emerges again some miles farther on, for
we were brought to a standstill by another puncture, and this second
puncture so greatly stirred AE's fears lest the Gods did not wish to
see me on the top of their mountain, that it was difficult for me to
persuade him to go into the cottage for a basin of water. At last he
consented, and, while he worked hard, heaving the tyre from off the
wheel with many curious instruments, which he extracted from a leather
pocket behind the saddle of his machine, I talked to him of Ireland,
hoping thereby to distract his attention from the heat of the day. It
was not difficult to do this, for AE, like Dujardin, can be interested
in ideas at any time of the day or night, though the sweat pours from
his forehead; and I could see that he was listening while I told him
that we should have room to dream and think in Ireland when America
had drawn from us another million and a half of the population.

Two millions is the ideal population for Ireland and about four for
England. Do you know, AE, there could not have been more than two
million people in England when Robin Hood and his merry men haunted
Sherwood Forest. How much more variegated the world was then! At any
moment one might come upon an archer who had just split a willow wand
distant a hundred yards, or upon charcoal-burners with their fingers
and thumbs cut off for shooting deer, or jugglers standing on each
other's heads in the middle of sunlit interspaces! A little later, on
the fringe of the forest, the wayfarer stops to listen to the hymn of
pilgrims on their way to Canterbury! Oh, how beautiful is the world of
vagrancy lost to us for ever, AE!

There is plenty of vagrancy still in Ireland, he answered, and we
spoke seriously of the destiny of the two countries. As England had
undertaken to supply Ireland with hardware, he would not hang the pall
cloud of Wolverhampton over Dundalk. The economic conditions of the
two countries are quite different, he said, and many other interesting
things which would have gladdened Plunkett's heart, but my memory
curls and rushes into darkness at the word economic, and a
considerable time must have elapsed, for we were well on our way when
I heard my own voice saying:

Will this hill never cease?

We're going to Slievegullion.

True for you, I said, for at every half-mile the road gets steeper,
which I suppose is always the case when one is going towards a
mountain. But, despite the steepness which should have left no doubt
upon his mind, AE was not satisfied that we were in the right road,
and he jumped off his bicycle to call to a man, who left his work
willingly to come to our assistance, whether from Irish politeness or
because of the heat of the day, I am still in doubt. As he came
towards us his pale and perplexed eyes attracted my attention; they
recalled to mind the ratlike faces with the long upper lip that used
to come from the mountains to Moore Hall, with bank-notes in their
tall hats, a little decaying race in knee-breeches, worsted stockings,
and heavy shoon, whom our wont was to despise because they could not
speak English. Now it was the other way round; I was angry with this
little fellow because he had no Irish. His father, he said, was a
great Irish speaker, and he would have told us the story of the
decline of the language in the district if AE had not suddenly
interrupted him with questions regarding the distance to
Slievegullion.

If it's to the tip-top you're thinking of going, about another four
miles, and he told us we would come upon a cabin about half a mile up
the road, and the woman in it would mind our bicycles while we were at
the top of the hill, and from her house he had always heard that it
was three miles to the top of the mountain; that was how he reckoned
it was four miles from where we stood to the lake. He had never been
to the top of Slievegullion himself, but he had heard of the lake from
those that had been up there, and he thought that he had heard of Finn
from his father, but he disremembered if Finn had plunged into the
lake after some beautiful queen.

Those who have lived too long in the same place become melancholy, AE.
Let him emigrate. He has forgotten his Irish and the old stories that
carried the soul of the ancient Gael right down to the present
generation. I'm afraid, AE, that ancient Ireland died at the beginning
of the nineteenth century and beyond hope of resurrection.

AE was thinking at that moment if the peasant had directed us rightly,
and impatient for an answer I continued:

Can the dreams, the aspirations and traditions of the ancient Gael be
translated into English? And being easily cast down, I asked if the
beliefs of the ancient Gael were not a part of his civilisation and
have lost all meaning for us?

That would be so, AE answered, if truth were a casual thing of today
and tomorrow, but men knew the great truths thousand of years ago, and
it seems to me that these truths are returning, and that we shall soon
possess them, not perhaps exactly as the ancient Gael--

I hope that you are right, for all my life is engaged in this
adventure, and I think you are right, and that the ancient Gael was
nearer to Nature than we have ever been since we turned for
inspiration to Galilee.

The fault I find with Christianity is that it is no more than a code
of morals, whereas three things are required for a religion--a
cosmogony, a psychology, and a moral code.

I'm sure you're right, AE, but the heat is so great that I feel I
cannot push this bicycle up the hill any farther. You must wait for me
till I take off my drawers. And behind a hedge I rid myself of them.
You were telling me that the dreams and aspirations and visions of the
Celtic race have lost none of their ancient power as they descended
from generation to generation.

I don't think they have. And I listened to him telling how these have
crept through dream after dream of the manifold nature of man, and how
each dream, heroism, or beauty, has laid itself nigh the Divine power
it represents. Deirdre was like Helen.... It went to my heart to
interrupt him, but the heat was so great that to listen to him with
all my soul I must rid myself of the rest of my hosiery, and so once
more I retired behind a hedge, and, returning with nothing on my moist
body but a pair of trousers and a shirt, I leaned over the
handle-bars, and by putting forth all my strength, mental as well as
physical, contrived to reach the cottage.

We left our bicycles with the woman of the house and started for the
top of the mountain. The spare, scant fields were cracked and hot
underfoot, but AE seemed unaware of any physical discomfort.
Miraculously sustained by the hope of reaching the sacred lake, he
hopped over the walls dividing the fields like a goat, though these
were built out of loose stones, every one as hot as if it had just
come out of a fire; and I heard him say, as I fell back exhausted
among some brambles, that man was not a momentary seeming but a
pilgrim of eternity.

What is the matter, Moore? Can't you get up?

I am unbearably tired, and the heat is so great that I can't get over
this wall.

Take a little rest, and then you'll be able to come along with me.

No, no, I'm certain that today it would be impossible, all the way up
that mountain, a long struggle over stones and through heather. No,
no! If a donkey or a pony were handy!

He conjured me to rise.

It is very unfortunate, for you will see Finn, and I might see him,
too, whether in the spirit or in the flesh I know not; and having seen
him, we should come down from that mountain different beings, that I
know; but it's impossible.

Get up. I tell you to get up. You must get up.

A lithe figure in grey clothes and an old brown hat bade me arise and
walk; his shining grey eyes were filled with all the will he had
taught himself to concentrate when, after a long day's work at Pim's
as accountant, he retired to his little room and communicated with
Weekes and Johnson, though they were miles away; but, great as the
force of his will undoubtedly is, he could not infuse in me enough
energy to proceed; my body remained inert, and he left me, saying that
alone he would climb the mountain, and I saw him going away, and the
gritty and grimy mountain showing aloft in ugly outline upon a burning
sky.

Going to see Finn, I murmured, and had I strength I would sit with him
by the holy lake waiting for the vision; but I may not. He'll
certainly spend an hour by the lake, and he will take two hours to
come back, and all that time I shall sit in a baking field where there
is no shade to speak of. I had struggled into a hazel-copse, but my
feet were burnt by the sun and my tongue was like a dry stick. The
touch of the hazel-leaves put my teeth on edge, and, remembering that
AE would be away for hours, I walked across the field towards the
cottage where we had left our bicycles.

May I have a drink of water? I asked, looking over the half-door.

Two women came out of the gloom, and, after talking between
themselves, one of them asked wouldn't I rather have a drop of
milk?--a fine-looking girl with soft grey eyes and a friendly manner;
the other was a rougher, an uglier sort.

I drank from the bowl, and could have easily finished the milk, but
lifting my eyes suddenly I caught sight of a flat-faced child with
flaxen hair all in curl watching me, and it occurring to me at that
moment that it might be his milk I was drinking, I put down the bowl
and my hand went to my pocket.

How much is the milk?

You're heartily welcome to it, sir, the young woman answered. Sure, it
was only a sup.

No, I must pay you.

But all my money had been left in Dundalk, and I stood penniless
before these poor people, having drunk their milk.

My friend will come from the mountain to fetch his bicycle, and he
will pay you. Again the young woman said I was welcome to the milk;
but I didn't know that AE had any money upon him, and it occurred to
me to offer her my vest and drawers. She said she couldn't think of
taking them, eyeing them all the while. At last she took them and
asked me to sit down and take the weight off my limbs. Thank you
kindly, and, sitting on the proffered stool, I asked if they were
Irish speakers.

Himself's mother can speak it, and I turned towards the old woman who
sat by the ashes of a peat fire, her yellow hands hanging over her
knees, her thick white hair showing under a black knitted cap. Her
eyes never left me, but she made no attempt to answer my questions.
She's gone a little bothered lately and wouldn't know what you'd be
asking for. I could make nothing of the younger women, the child and
the grandmother only stared. It was like being in a den with some shy
animals, so I left a message with them for AE, that I would bicycle on
to Dundalk very slowly, and hoped he would overtake me. And it was
about two hours after he came up with me, not a bit tired after his
long walk, and very willing to tell me how he had had to rest under
the rocks on his way to the summit, enduring dreadful thirst, for
there was no rill; all were dry, and he had been glad to dip his hat
into the lake and drink the soft bog water, and then to lie at length
among the heather. So intense was the silence that his thoughts were
afraid to move, and he had lain, his eyes roving over boundless
space, seeing nothing but the phantom tops of distant mountains, the
outer rim of the world, so did they seem to him. At each end of the
crescent-shaped lake there is a great cairn built of cyclopean stones;
and into one of these cairns he had descended and had followed the
passage leading into the heart of the mountain till he came upon a
great boulder, which twenty men could not move, and which looked as if
it had been hurled by some giant down there.

Perchance to save the Druid mysteries from curious eyes, I said, and a
great regret welled up in me that I had not been strong enough to
climb that mountain with him. What have I missed, AE? Oh, what have I
missed? And as if to console me for my weakness he told me that he had
made a drawing of the cairn, which he would show me as soon as we
reached Dundalk. All the while I was afraid to ask him if he had seen
Finn, for if he had seen the hero plunge into the lake after the
queen's white limbs, I should have looked upon myself as among the
most unfortunate of men, and it was a relief to hear that he had not
seen Finn. Such is the selfishness of men. He spoke of alien
influences, and as we rode down the long roads under the deepening
sky, we wondered how the powers of the material world could have
reached as far as the sacred lake, violating even the mysterious
silence that sings about the Gods. That the silence of the lake had
been violated was certain, for the trance that was beginning to gather
had melted away; his eyes had opened in the knowledge that the Gods
were no longer by him, and seeing that the evening was gathering on
the mountain he had packed up his drawings.

But the night will be starlit. If I had been able to get there I
shouldn't have minded waiting. Were you on the mountain, now, you
would be seeing that horned moon reflected in the crescent-shaped
lake. It was faint-hearted of you.

At that moment two broad backs bicycling in front of us explained the
sudden withdrawal of the Gods. Our two Christian wayfarers had been
prowling about Slievegullion, and our wheels had not revolved many
times before we had overtaken them.

We meet again, sir, and your day has been a pleasant one, I hope?

It has been very hot, he answered, too hot for Slievegullion. We
couldn't get more than half-way. It was my friend that sat down
overcome by the heat.

AE began to laugh.

What is your friend laughing at?

And the story of how my strength had failed me at the third wall was
told.

I quite sympathise with you, said the one that had been overcome like
myself by the heat. Did the poet get to the top?

Yes, he did, I replied sharply.

And did the view compensate you for the walk?

There is no view, AE answered; only a rim of pearl-coloured mountains,
the edge of the world they seemed, and an intense silence.

That isn't enough to climb a thousand feet for, said the chubbier of
the two.

But it wasn't for the view he went there, I replied indignantly, but
for the Gods.

For the Gods!

And why not? Are there no Gods but yours?

My question was not answered, and at the end of an awkward silence we
talked about the wonderful weather and the crops, the ministers
showing themselves to be such good fellows that when we came to the
inn AE proposed we should ask them to dine with us. A supper of ideas
indeed it was, for before our dish of chops came to table they had
learnt that Slievegullion was the most celebrated mountain in all
Celtic theology. The birthplace of many beautiful gospels, AE said,
leaning across the table, so deep in his discourse that I could not do
else than insist on his finishing his chop before he unpacked his
portfolio and showed the drawing he had made of the crescent-shaped
lake. He ate for a little while, but it was impossible to restrain him
from telling how Finn had seen a fairy face rise above the waters of
the lake and had plunged after it. Whether Finn captured the nymph,
and for how long he had enjoyed her, he did not tell, only that when
Finn rose to the surface again he was an old man, old as the mountains
and the rocks of the world. But his youth was given back to him by
enchantment, and of the adventure nothing remained except his
snow-white hair, which was so beautiful, and became him so well, that
it had not been restored to its original colour. It was on this
mountain that Cuchulain had found the fabled horse, Leath Macha, and
he told us, in language which still rings in my memory, of the great
battle of the ford and the giant chivalry of the Ultonians. He spoke
to us of their untamable manhood, and of the exploits of Cuchulain and
the children of Rury, more admirable, he said, as types, more noble
and inspiring than the hierarchy of little saints who came later and
cursed their memories.

This last passage seemed to conciliate the Presbyterians; they looked
approvingly; but AE's soul refuses to recognise the miserable disputes
of certain Christian sects. He was thinking of Culain, the smith, who
lived in the mountain and who forged the Ultonians their armour. And
when that story had been related he remembered that he had not told
them of Mananaan Mac Lir, the most remote and most spiritual of all
Gaelic divinities, the uttermost God, and of the Feast of Age, the
Druid counterpart of the mysteries, and how any one who partook of
that Feast became himself immortal.

It is a great grief to me that no single note was taken at the time of
that extraordinary evening spent with AE in the inn at Dundalk, eating
hard chops and drinking stale beer. The fare was poor, but what
thoughts and what eloquence! A shorthand writer should have been by
me. She is never with us when she should be. I might have gone to my
room and taken notes, but no note was taken, alas!... A change came
into the faces of the Presbyterians as they listened to AE; even their
attitudes seemed to become noble. AE did not see them; he was too
absorbed in his ideas; but I saw them, and thought the while of barren
rocks that the sun gilds for a moment. And then, not satisfied with
that simile, I thought how at midday a ray finds its way even into the
darkest valley. We had remained in the valley of the senses--our weak
flesh had kept us there, but AE had ascended the mountain of the
spirit and a Divine light was about him. It is the mission of some men
to enable their fellows to live beyond themselves. AE possesses this
power in an extraordinary degree, and we were lifted above ourselves.

My memory of that evening is one which Time is powerless to efface,
and though years have passed by, the moment is remembered when AE said
that a religion must always be exotic which makes a far-off land
sacred rather than the earth underfoot; and then he denied that the
Genius of the Gael had ever owed any of its inspiration to priestly
teaching. Its own folk-tales--our talk is always reported incorrectly,
and in these memories of AE there must be a great deal of myself, it
sounds indeed so like myself, that I hesitate to attribute this
sentence to him; yet it seems to me that I can still hear him speaking
it--the folk-tales of Connaught have ever lain nearer to the hearts of
the people than those of Galilee. Whatever there is of worth in Celtic
song and story is woven into them, imagery handed down from the dim
Druidic ages. And did I not hear him say that soon the children of
Eri, a new race, shall roll out their thoughts on the hillsides before
your very doors, O priests! calling your flocks from your dark chapels
and twilit sanctuaries to a temple not built with hands, sunlit,
starlit, sweet with the odour and incense of earth, from your altars
call them to the altars of the hills, soon to be lit up as of old,
soon to be blazing torches of God over the land? These heroes I see
emerging. Have they not come forth in every land and race when there
was need? Here, too, they will arise. My ears retain memories of his
voice, when he cried, Ah, my darlings, you will have to fight and
suffer; you must endure loneliness, the coldness of friends, the
alienation of love, warmed only by the bright interior hope of a
future you must toil for but may never see, letting the deed be its
own reward; laying in dark places the foundations of that high and
holy Eri of prophecy, the isle of enchantment, burning with Druidic
splendours, bright with immortal presences, with the face of the
everlasting Beauty looking in upon all its ways, Divine with
terrestrial mingling till God and the world are one.

But how much more eloquent were thy words than any that my memory
recalls! Yet sometimes it seems to me that thy words have floated back
almost as thou didst speak them, aggravating the calumny of an
imperfect record. But for the record to be perfect the accent of thy
voice and the light in thine eyes, and the whole scene--the maculated
tablecloth, the chops, everything would have to be reproduced. How
vain is art! That hour in the inn in Dundalk is lost for ever--the
drifting of the ministers to their beds. Faint, indeed, is the memory
of their passing, so faint that it will be better not to attempt to
record it, but to pass on to another event, to the portrait which AE
drew that evening; for, kept awake by the presences of the Gods on the
mountain, he said he must do a portrait of me, and the portrait is a
better record of the dream that he brought down with him from the
mountain than any words of mine. It hangs in a house in Galway, and it
is clearly the work of one who has been with the Gods, for in it my
hair is hyacinthine and my eyes are full of holy light. The portrait
was executed in an hour, and even this work could not quell AE's
ardour. He would have sat up till morning had I allowed him, telling
me his theory of numbers, but I said:

Suppose we reserve that theory for tomorrow? Sufficient for the day is
the blessing thereof.




V


A suspicion stops my pen that I am caricaturing AE, setting him forth
not unlike a keepsake hero. It may be that this criticism is not
altogether unfounded, and to redeem my portrait I will tell how I saw
AE roused like a lion out of his lair. A man sitting opposite to him
in the railway carriage began to lament that Queen Victoria had not
been received with more profuse expressions of loyalty; AE took this
West Briton very gently at first, getting him to define what he meant
by the word loyalty, and, when it transpired that the stranger
attached the same meaning to the word as the newspapers, that, for
him, as for the newspapers, a queen or king is a fetish, an idol, an
effigy, a thing for men to hail and to bow before, he burst out into a
fiery denunciation of this base and witless conception of loyalty, as
insulting to the worshipped as to the worshipper. The man quailed
before AE's face, so stern was it; AE's eyes flashed, and righteous
indignation poured from his lips, but never for one instant did he
seek to abase his foe. Whilst defending his principles, he appealed to
the man's deeper nature, and I remember him saying: In your heart you
think as I do, but, shocked at the desire of some people to affront an
aged woman, you fall into the other extreme, and would like to see the
Irish race dig a hole and hide itself, leaving nothing of itself above
ground but an insinuating tail.

My ears retain his words, and I can still hear our goodbye at the
corner of Hume Street. We had been with the Gods for four days, if not
with the Gods themselves at least with our dreams of the Gods, and in
my armchair in Ely Place I was born again to daily life in anguish and
helplessness, even as a child is. The enchantment of the opiate is
passing, I said. AE alone possesses the magic philter. He is an adept
and can lead both lives, and is on such terms with the Gods that he
can come and go at will, doing his work in heaven and on earth.
Yesterday he was with Finn by the crescent-shaped lake on
Slievegullion; tomorrow he will trundle his old bicycle down to the
offices of the I.A.O.S. in Lincoln Place, to take his orders from
Anderson.

But there must be some readers who cannot translate these letters into
the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society, and who know nothing of
the Society, when it was founded, or for what purpose it exists, and
the best story in the world becomes the worst if the narrator is not
careful to explain certain essential facts that will enable his
listeners to understand it.

Years ago the idea of co-operation overtook Plunkett in America. He
had seen co-operation at work in America, or had read a book in
America, or had spoken to somebody in America, or had dreamed a dream
in America. Suffice it to say that he hurried home, certain of himself
as the redeemer that Ireland was waiting for; and at more than a
hundred meetings he told the farmers that through co-operation they
would be able to get unadulterated manure at forty per cent less than
they were paying the gombeen man for rubbish. At more than a hundred
meetings he told the farmers that a foreign country was exploiting the
dairy industry that rightly belonged to Ireland, and that the Dane was
doing this successfully because he had learnt to do his own business
for himself--a very simple idea, almost a platitude, but Plunkett had
the courage of his platitudes, and preached them in and out of season,
without, however, making a single convert. He chanced, however, on
Anderson, a man with a gift of organisation and an exact knowledge of
Irish rural life, two things Plunkett did not possess, but which he
knew were necessary for his enterprise. Away they went together, and
they preached, and they preached, and back they came together to
Dublin, feeling that something was wanting, something which they had
not gotten. What was it? Neither could say. Plunkett looked into
Anderson's eyes, and Anderson looked into Plunkett's. At last Anderson
said: The idea is right enough, but--

Plunkett had brought the skeleton; Anderson had brought the flesh; but
the body lay stark, and all their efforts to breathe life into it were
so unavailing that they had ceased to try. They walked round their
dead idea, or perhaps I should say the idea that had not yet come to
life; they watched by it, and they bemoaned its inaction night and
day. Plunkett chanted the litany of the economic man and the
uneconomic holding, and when he had finished Anderson chanted the
litany of the uneconomic man and the economic holding, and this
continued until their chants brought out of the brushwood a tall
figure, wearing a long black cloak, with a manuscript sticking out of
the pocket. He asked them what they were doing, and they said, Trying
to revive Ireland. But Ireland is deaf, he answered, she is deaf to
your economics, for you do not know her folk-tales, and cannot croon
them by the firesides. Plunkett looked at Anderson, and took Yeats for
a little trip on an outside car through a mountainous district. It
appears that Plunkett was, unfortunately, suffering from toothache,
and only half listened to Yeats, who was telling him across the car
that he was going to make his speech more interesting by introducing
into it the folk-tales that the people for generation after generation
had been telling over their firesides. For example, he told how three
men in a barn were playing cards, and so intently that they did not
perceive that a hare with a white ear jumped out of the cards, and ran
out of the door and away over the hills. More cards were dealt, and
then a greyhound jumped out of the cards and ran out of the door after
the hare. The story was symbolical of man's desire; Plunkett
understood co-operation, and Yeats may have mentioned the blessed
word, but at the meeting it was a boar without bristles that rushed
out of the cards, and went away into the East, rooting the sun and the
moon and the stars out of the sky. And while Plunkett was wondering
why this story should portend co-operative movement, a voice from the
back of the hall cried out. The blessings of God on him if he rooted
up Limerick. A bad day it was for us--and a murmur began at the back
of the hall. Yeats's allusion to the pig was an unfortunate one; the
people had lost a great deal of money by following Plunkett's advice
to send their pigs to Limerick. It was quite true that Limerick gave
better prices for pigs than the jobbers, but only for the pigs that it
wanted. Yeats, however, is an accomplished platform speaker, and not
easily cowed, and he soon recaptured the attention of the audience. We
always know, he said, when we are among our own people. That pleased
everybody; and Plunkett had to admit that the meeting had gone better
than usual. A poet was necessary, that was clear, but he did not think
that Yeats was exactly the poet they wanted. If they could get a poet
with some knowledge of detail (Plunkett reserved the right to dream to
himself), the country might be awakened to the advantages of
co-operation.

I think I know somebody, Yeats answered, who might suit you. Plunkett
and Anderson forthwith lent their ears to the story of a young man, a
poet, who was at present earning his living as accountant in Pim's. A
poet-accountant sounds well, Plunkett muttered, and looked at
Anderson, and Anderson nodded significantly; and Yeats murmured some
phrase about beautiful verses, and seemed to lose himself; but
Anderson woke him up, and said: Tell us about this young man. Why do
you think he would suit us?

Well, said Yeats, his personal influence pervades the whole shop, from
the smallest clerk up to the manager, and all eyes go to him when he
passes. Plunkett and Anderson looked across the table at each other,
and Yeats went on to tell a story, how a young man, a ne'er-do-well,
had once seen AE crossing from one desk to another with some papers in
his hand, and had gone to him, saying, Something tells me you are the
man who may redeem me. Plunkett and Anderson frowned a little, for
they foresaw a preacher; and Yeats, guessing what was in Anderson's
mind, said: What will surprise you is that he never preaches. The
influence he exercises is entirely involuntary. He told the young man
that if he came round to see him he would introduce him to new
friends, and the young man came, and heard AE talking, and thenceforth
beat his wife no more, forswore the public-house, and is now an
admirable member of society.

There was no further doubt in the minds of Plunkett and Anderson that
AE was the man they wanted. Plunkett sent him an invitation to come to
see him, and they saw a tall, thin man, overflowing with wild humour;
the ends of his eyes went up and he seemed to them like a kindly
satyr, something that had not yet experienced civilisation, for the
first stipulation was that he should not receive more than three
pounds a week. No man's work, according to him, was worth more. He
would need a bicycle, and on being pressed he accepted the present of
one; and he rode through Ireland, preaching the doctrine of
co-operation and dairy-farming from village to village, winning
friends to the movement by the personal magnetism which he exercises
wherever he goes. As soon as he arrived in a village everybody's heart
became a little warmer, a little friendlier; the sensation of
isolation and loneliness, which all human beings feel, thawed a
little; everybody must have felt happier the night that that kindly
man mounted a platform, threw back his long hair, and began to talk to
them, giving them shrewd advice and making them feel that he loved
them and that they were not unworthy of his love. The only house in
the poor village in which he could lodge would be the priest's house,
and the lonely village priest, who does not meet a friend with whom he
can exchange an idea once every three months, would spend a memorable
evening with AE. The priests in these villages have little bookshelves
along their rooms, and AE would go to these shelves and find a book
that had not interested the priest since the enthusiasm of his youth
had died down; he would open this book, and read passages, and awaken
the heart of the priest. In the morning the old bicycle would be
brought out, and away AE would go, and the priest, I am sure, looked
after him, sorry that he was going. Protestants, Catholics,
Presbyterians, Methodists--all united in loving AE. Although other
things might be wrong, one thing was right--AE; and they followed him,
captivated by the tune he played on his pipes, and before the year was
out the skeleton that was Plunkett's, and the flesh and the muscles
that were Anderson's began to stir. The watchers called to each other.
Anderson, see, it has shifted its leg! Plunkett, see, it has moved an
inch; life is creeping over it, from the crown of its head to the
soles of its feet; in other words, creameries were springing up in
every part of the country, and then Plunkett conceived again. He was a
member for South Dublin, and on the friendliest terms with the
Unionist Government, so he had no difficulty in forming a committee to
inquire into what had been done on the Continent for the co-ordination
of State and voluntary action. Many members of this committee were
members of Parliament; the committee met during Recess, and was called
the Recess Committee.

As well as I remember, Gill's beard was being trimmed in France while
the Recess Committee was forming. He was called over by Plunkett to be
his secretary. Gill knew French, and it was understood that he had
talked co-operative economics with Frenchmen. A newspaper was
required, to explain these ideas to the public. The _Express_ had been
purchased by Mr Dalziel, who made over the control to Plunkett; Gill
was appointed editor; Rolleston, Healy, Longworth, AE, Yeats, John
Eglinton, all contributed articles; economics and folklore, Celtic and
Indian Gods, all went into the same pot--an extraordinary broth very
much disliked by the _Freeman's Journal_ and the Parliamentary Party.
Dillon made wry faces, all the same the broth was swallowed and Gerald
Balfour brought in his Bill for the creation of a State Department;
Plunkett was appointed Vice-President, and it was understood that the
whole central authority should be in his hands, though the nominal
head was the Home Secretary. About one hundred and seventy thousand a
year was voted, and a great part of this money would go in providing
for an immense staff of secretaries, inspectors, and lecturers. AE
could have had any one of these places for the asking, luxurious
places from three hundred to a thousand a year; but he preferred to
remain with the I.A.O.S. If it was not his own child, he had reared
it and taught it to walk. Now should he desert it? Besides, a
comfortable house and servants, a quiet walk down to his office in the
morning to sign a few letters, and the quiet conviction that he is
running the country by doing so, is not like AE; his soul is too
personal for office life, he must be doing his own work; the work is
of different kinds, but it is always his own work. He is himself when
he rides all over the country, preaching co-operation to the farmers,
as much as when he returns to Dublin and begins a poem or paints a
picture. Besides, the post of secretary seemed from the very beginning
to belong to Gill. During the year he edited the _Express_ he had
prepared the public and the official mind for the Department of
Agriculture and Technical Instruction, constituted on Continental
lines; but Gill had been a Plan-of-Campaigner, and a Nationalist
member of Parliament, and at Tillyra, while the adaptation of _The
Tale of a Town_ was in progress, Gill's dilemma was often under
consideration. Edward was a large recipient of his confidence and
often spoke to me, and very seriously, on the matter. He believed Gill
to be, if not in the flesh, at least in the spirit a member of the
Parliamentary Party, and his unalterable opinion was that a
Nationalist should never accept office under an English Government.
But it seemed to me that Gill would act very unwisely if he refused
the Secretaryship, and I think I remember saying to Edward that Gill
should have consulted me instead, for he would have gotten from me the
advice that would have been agreeable to him--to take the primrose
path, the scent of which is already in his nostrils. One of the charms
of Edward's character is its simplicity; he knows so little about life
that it was a surprise to him to hear that men do not consult their
friends when their determination is to walk in the thorny path.

The martyr, I said, doesn't consult among his brethren; his resolve
hardens in the loneliness of his heart.

I see what you mean--I see what you mean, Edward answered. So then you
think--

No, my dear Edward, we are among the complexities of human nature. Our
hesitations continue, even though we know, in our subconsciousness,
that the end is decreed. Gill's nationalism is quite sincere; the
flame doesn't burn very fiercely, but then his nature is not a great
nature like Davitt's, and our natures give--overlook the
platitude--only what they are capable of giving. But though a flame
throws out little heat and light, it is a flame for all that, and the
faintest flame is worthy of our respect.

All the same, I don't think that a Nationalist should ever take office
from the English Government, and Edward marched off to his tower to
reconsider his third act, which Yeats and I had agreed he never would
be able to write satisfactorily. Gill came to Tillyra a little before
Edward's play was finally refused by Yeats and myself, and seated
himself firmly on the fence, as is his wont. Edward, I believe,
continued to consult him regarding the revisions Yeats and I were
daily proposing. All the same, his name was omitted from that part of
my narrative--he seemed a side issue--and in Dublin I was obliged to
cast him out of it again. But now my narrative demands his presence
and his voice, and I hasten to tell that as soon as Edward left me in
Merrion Street (the reader remembers that he refused to advise me
regarding he political situation), Gill's name occurred to me; he
seemed to be, on the instant, the very person who could guide me
through the maze of Irish political intrigue, and my steps turned
mechanically from the Shelbourne Hotel, whither I was going, towards
Clare Street. A few minutes later I was on Gill's doorstep asking
myself why Gill had chosen to confide in Edward rather than in me, and
hoping for a long talk with him, after the reading of the play.
Scruples of conscience are my speciality, and I was genuinely
concerned about his future, being naturally _trs bon pour la vie_,
that is to say, _trs officieux aux voisins_. On the doorstep it
seemed to me that he was bound to consider not only himself but his
wife and his children. My thoughts turned about them while I read the
play, and when the reading was over, Gill began to talk on the
political questions that were then agitating Ireland. He is always
diffuse and vague without much power of concentration, but that night
it was easy to see that his thoughts were elsewhere. He will confide
in me presently, I said, and, to lead him into confidence, I spoke of
the _Express_, which had then spent all the capital that had been
advanced by Mr Dalziel. Nor was it likely that Horace Plunkett would
put any more capital into the newspaper, and, after a little discourse
as to what might be done with this newspaper, if a capitalist could be
found, Gill mentioned that he had been offered the post of Secretary
to the Department.

That's the best bit of news I've heard this long while. Edward told me
that you had consulted him, but he thinks that, on account of the
pledge--

I am no longer a member of Parliament, but my sympathies are with my
friend, John Redmond, who, to take the rough with the smooth, seems to
be doing very well.

But, Gill, Edward and some others who advised you against accepting
the post haven't considered your interests.

And they do right, Gill answered, not to consider my interests. My
interests don't count with me for a moment. What I am thinking is that
Plunkett may miss a magnificent chance if he has nobody by him who
knows the country.

But Plunkett is an Irishman.

Plunkett is a Protestant, and a Protestant can never know Ireland.

A Protestant that has always lived in Ireland?

Even so. Ireland is Catholic if she is anything.

And you're a Catholic first of all, Gill, for you abandoned the Plan
of Campaign when the Church condemned it.

Certainly I did, and what strikes me now is that it is hard if Ireland
should be deprived of the labour of one of her sons because he once
belonged to the Parliamentary Party. I've written to Gerald Balfour on
the subject, and Gill rose from his chair and walked to his
writing-table.

Will you read me the letter?

Yes, I'll read it to you. And when he had finished it I said:

The letter you've just read me is a very good letter, but it fills me
with apprehension, for it seems to me that you leave Gerald Balfour to
decide whether you should accept the appointment that he is offering
you. Remember your wife and children.

If I were convinced that the best service I could render to Ireland--

But what could you do for Ireland better than to put your gift of
co-ordination at the country's service?

Yes, co-ordination is the thing, the delegation of all detail to
subordinates, reserving to oneself the consideration of the main
outline, the general scheme, yet I am not sure that at the head of a
great newspaper I shouldn't be able to serve Ireland better than as
the Secretary of the Department. Or perhaps the great newspaper might
come after the Secretaryship. It will take some years to get the
Department into working order; Home Rule is bound to come sooner or
later, and the Department will create an immense batch of officials,
all well equipped with ideas, and the preparation of this great
machine would be a task worthy of any man's talent. When Home Rule
comes there will be an immense change in the government of the
country, and very likely the old civil servants will be pensioned off.
If such a change were to happen it would interest me to take charge of
a great daily.

And have you any idea of a policy for the paper? What line do you
think Ireland should take in the present crisis?

And while drawing the golden hair of his beard through his
insignificant little hands, Gill began to tell me that, unlike
England. Ireland had never known how to compromise. I gathered that he
had been reading John Morley, and had discovered arguments that had
satisfied him it would not be wise for the race, or for the
individual, to persevere in the Nationalism begotten of a belief that
a great European conflagration might give birth to a hero who would
conquer England, and, incidentally, give Ireland her freedom. He is
beginning to see, I thought, that if the long-dreamed-of hero did
arise he might propose to enlist Ireland's help for his own purposes,
and not surrender her for ever to Donnybrook Fair and an eternal
singing of _The Wearin' o' the Green_. He has just reached the age
when the Catholic Celt begins to see, that, though he may continue in
his belief in magicians with power to turn God into a wafer, to
forgive sins and redeem souls from Purgatory, it would be wise for him
to put by his dreams of Brian Boru, to keep them in the background of
his mind, a sort of Tir-n'an-og into which he retires in the evening
in moments of lassitude and leisure. England allows the Catholic Celt
to continue his idle dreaming, knowing well that as soon as sappy
youth is over he will come asking for terms. Some become policemen,
some soldiers, some barristers; only a negligible minority fails to
fall into line, and that is why the Celt is so ineffectual; his dreams
go one way and his actions go another. But why blame the race? Every
race produces more Gills than Davitts; a man like Davitt, immune from
the temptations of compromise, whose ideas and whose actions are
identical--

My thoughts, breaking off, returned to Gill, and, while listening to
him drawing political wisdom from the very ends of his beard, it
seemed to me a pity that Edward had not confided his plot to me from
the beginning, for then we should have been able to create a character
quite different from Jasper Deane, and much more real. But the play
would have to be finished at once, and next morning I went away to
London, to patch up one that should not compromise too flagrantly
Yeats's literary integrity.

It seems to me now that I have made up some arrears of story, and am
free to tell that in the year 1901, when I came to live in Ireland, I
found Gill the centre of the Irish Literary and Agricultural party,
and looked upon by it as the one man who could weather the political
peril and bring the Irish nation into port. When I arrived I found
Yeats speaking of Gill as a man of very serious ability, but, as if
afraid lest he might compromise literature, he always added, an
excellent journalist. AE may have thought with Edward that Gill should
have refused the post of Secretary, but to criticise Gill's hobby for
compromise would be to criticise Plunkett, and, as well as I
recollect, AE's view of the appointment was that Gill understood
Catholic Ireland, and would be able to give effect to Plunkett's
ideas. Edward, whenever the subject was mentioned, growled out that he
had not hesitated to tell Gill when he came to him for advice, that,
in his opinion, a Nationalist should never accept office from an
English Government.

He rolled out this opinion like a great rock, and, after having done
it, he seemed duly impressed by his own steadfastness of purpose, and
his own strength of mind. It may be that abstract morality of every
kind is repugnant to me, for I used to resent Edward's apothegm. Or
was it that the temptation could not be resisted to measure Edward's
intellect once again?

Your political morality is of course impeccable; but, dear Edward,
will you tell me why you are coming out to Dalkey on this Sunday
afternoon to see Gill? Why do you associate with people of whose
political morality you cannot altogether approve?

My dear George, all my life I have lived with people whose moralities
I do not approve of. You don't think that I approve of yours, do you?
But, you know, I never believed that your life is anything else but
pure; it is only your mind that is indecent, and Edward laughed,
enjoying himself hugely.

As soon as you have finished your joke perhaps you'll tell me what you
think Gill ought to have done?

I don't see why he shouldn't have got his living by journalism. He did
so before.

But you don't know what it is to get your living by journalism; you
can't, for you've got three thousand a year, or is it four? And not a
wife, not even a mistress--

Now, George!

As the tram passed Blackrock Catholic Church I said:

You used to insist on sending me to Mass when I was staying with you
in Galway. Do you know, Edward, that Whelan suggested he should turn
the horse's head into Coole, and, while you thought we were at Mass,
Yeats and I were talking _Diarmuid and Grania_?

A great blankness swept over Edward's face, and very often between
Blackrock and Dalkey, in the pauses of our conversation, I reproached
myself for having shaken his belief that he had made himself secure
against God's reproaches for the conduct of his guests at Tillyra.

Did Gill abstain from meat on Fridays when he was at Tillyra?

Gill is a good Catholic, but you are a bad Catholic.

To call me a bad Catholic is one of Edward's jokes, and my retort is
always that Rome would not regard me as such, that no man is
answerable for his baptism.

In calling me a bad Catholic you are very near to heresy.

His face became grave again, and he muttered _Mon ami Moore, mon ami
Moore_.

Old friends have always their own jokes, and this joke has tickled
Edward in his sense of humour for the last twenty years or more. It
appears that in a moment of intense boredom I had asked a very
dignified old lady in a solemn salon in the Faubourg St Germain _Si
elle jouait aux cartes, si elle aimait le jeu_; and, on receiving an
answer in the negative, I had replied: _Vous aimez sans doute bien
mieux, madame, le petit jeu d'amour._ The old lady appealed to her
husband, and explanations had ensued, and my friend Marshall, of _The
Confessions_, had to explain _que son ami Moore n'a pas voulu_--what,
history does not relate.

The story has no other point except that it has tickled Edward in all
his fat for twenty years, and that he regaled Gill with it that
afternoon, shaking with laughter all the while, and repeating the
phrase _vous aimez sans doute, madame, le petit jeu d'amour_, until at
last, to stop him, I had to say:

My dear Edward, I am ashamed to find you indulging in such improper
conversation.

A pleasant place on Sunday afternoons was that terrace, hanging some
hundred feet or more above the sea, for on that terrace between the
grey house and the cliff's edge Gill often forgot that he was wise,
and was willing to let us enjoy his real self, his cheerful
superficial nature, a pleasant coming and going of light impressions,
and this real self was to us, strenuous ones, what a quiet pool is to
the thirsty deer at noontide. He reflected all our aspirations, giving
back to Yeats _The Wanderings of Usheen_ as the one Irish epic, and
_The Heather Field_ to Edward as pure, fresh Ibsen. AE often scanned
the pool for a glimpse of economic Ireland, and Edward gazed long and
anxiously into it without discovering any faintest shadow of the Irish
language. Gill did not sink out of sight like the wild duck in Ibsen's
play, who dives down to the bottom and holds on to the weeds; he was
for once decisive: he was going to send his boys to Trinity College,
where, as Yeats said, our own folk-tales had never been crooned over
the fireside. Yeats was splendid that afternoon, reminding Gill that
it was not myths from Palestine, nor from India, that had inspired the
Celt, but remembrances of the many beautiful women that had lived long
ago and the deeds of the heroes. Edward bit his lips at the words,
myths from Palestine, and took me aside to confide the fact that words
like these hurt him just as if he had sat upon a pin. Gill knew that
such words hurt nobody, and he continued airy, cheerful, benign, until
he thought it time to return to his wisdom, and then he spoke of what
he thought the policy of the Gaelic League should be in Irish-speaking
districts, long-drawn-out platitudes and aphorisms of lead falling
from his lips; and, to escape from these, I began to take an interest
in the colour and texture of his necktie, both of which were
exquisite, and then in the beauty of the flight of a tired gull,
floating down the quiet air to its roost among the clefts. A flutter
of wings and it alighted; the fishing boats beat up to windward; and I
thought of the lonely, silent night that awaited the fishers, until
Edward's voice roused me from my meditations. He was telling Yeats
that he liked the English language and the Irish, but he hated the
Anglo-Irish.

I hate the peasant. I like the drama of intellect.

Yeats sniggered, and a cormorant came over the sea, and alighted upon
a rock, with a fish for the chicks in the nest, Gill said to his
children, who had come to tell him that supper was on the table. All
our literary differences were laid to rest in the interest that we
soon began to feel for the food. Only AE prefers his ideas to his
food; Yeats pecked, and Edward gobbled, and, looking round this happy
table, it seemed to me that we liked coming to Dalkey because Gill
liked to have us about him. Our pleasure was dependent on the pleasure
that our host felt in our company; as kind-tempered a man as ever
lived, I said to myself, and listened with more indulgence to him than
I had been able to show in the afternoon, when, stretched out on the
sofa, he abandoned himself to memories of the days when a boy lepped
out from behind a hedge and whispered polis! I asked: Was that the
night you were arrested? and he told us of his trial and conviction,
and we felt, despite the languor of the narrative, that he was telling
us of what was most real and intense in his life. And I listened,
noting how unselfish instincts rise to the surface and sink back
again, making way for selfish instincts, and how this kindly tempered
man had floated down the tide of casual ideas into the harbour of
thirteen hundred a year. And all the way home on top of the tram we
thought of Gill's kindly sympathetic nature, revealed to me a few
weeks later in an incident which I cannot do else than include. A
rumour reached me that AE was sick and dangerously ill with a bad cold
and cough which he did not seem able to shake off, and which--whoever
brought me the news did not finish the sentence, for one does not like
to mention the word consumption in Ireland.

If he starts out again on another bicycle tour, riding his old bicycle
in all kinds of weathers, sleeping in any inn--you know how he
neglects his food?

He must leave Ireland for a long holiday, I said, and went down to see
Gill.

The shame of it, Gill, the application of the finest intelligence we
have in Ireland to preaching economics in Connemara villages. Plunkett
should do his own work. A great poet must needs be chosen, a great
spirit! Were the moon to drop out of the sky the nights would be
darker, but Dublin without AE would be like the sky without a sun in
it. Gill, come out for a walk; this is a matter on which I must speak
to you seriously.

It is indeed a serious matter, Gill answered. I will come out with
you. We must get him out of the country. I know of nothing more
serious than this cough and cold you speak of. How long do you say it
has been upon him?

He has been ailing for the last six weeks, and now, in this beautiful
month of July, he is lying in his bed without sufficient attendance.
You know how careless he is. He will not send for a doctor, nor will
he have a nurse.

We certainly must get him out of the country. I will devise some
excuse to send him to Italy to report on--Gill mentioned some system
of agriculture which had been tried successfully in Italy, and which
might be reproduced successfully here. But no matter whether it can or
not, it will serve as an excuse, and it will be easy for me to provide
for the expenses of the journey. But he'll never consent to go to
Italy alone. Will you go with him?

Yes, I'll go with him and look after him as best I can. Three months
in Italy will throw me back with my work, but never mind, _cote que
cote_, I will go to Italy. And you agree with me, that AE is the most
important man in Ireland?




VI


Sienna, Assisi, and Ravenna appeared in the imagination, and ourselves
toiling up the narrow streets, talking of Raphael, and as we would
return through France, we might well stop at Montauban to see Ingres
at home--Raphael re-arisen after three centuries, a Raphael of finer
perceptions. AE would have been delightful on this subject, but the
journey to Italy was not upon the chart of our destinies; he recovered
rapidly; Plunkett arranged that he was to edit _The Homestead_, and
every Saturday evening he was in my house at dinner, talking about
poetry, pictures, and W. B. Yeats, who came every morning to edit the
dialogue I had written for _Diarmuid and Grania_, and to regret that I
had not persevered with the French version, which Lady Gregory was to
translate into English, Taidgh O'Donoghue into Irish, Lady Gregory
back into English, and Yeats was to put style upon. This literary
brewing used to remind AE of an American drink:

       The bar-keeper present,
  His two arms describing a crescent

(most readers know Bret Harte's celebrated parody); and then, feeling
that he had laughed too long at his old friend, his face would become
suddenly grave, and he would quote long passages from Yeats's early
poems, the original and the amended versions, always preferring the
original.

That's just it, I answered. The words that he likes today he will
weary of and alter a few days afterwards.

Forgetting, AE said, that words wear out like everything else. He once
said to me that he would like to spend the rest of his life rewriting
the poems that he had already written.

He is a very clever man, and the worst of it is that there is
something to be said for the alterations, even the most trivial. Miss
Gough pointed out to me the other day that he had altered Here is a
drug that will put the Fianna to sleep into Here is a drug I have made
sleepy. Of course it's better, more like folk, but his alterations
seem to drain the text of all vitality. An operatic text is what we
should be writing together, for we are always agreed about the
construction, and the musician would be free from his criticism.

AE was not quite sure that Yeats would not want a _caoine_, and would
propose to the musician a journey to Arran.

But, AE, we shall require some music for the play. And in the silence
that followed this remark the memory of some music I had heard long
ago at Leeds, by Edward Elgar, came into my mind. If I knew Elgar, I'd
write and ask him to send me a horn-call. Do you know, I think I will.

Mr Benson, I wrote, is going to produce _Diarmuid and Grania_, a drama
written by Mr Yeats and myself on the great Irish legend. Finn's horn
is heard in the second act, and all my pleasure in the performance
will be spoilt if a cornet-player tootles out whatever comes into his
head, perhaps some vulgar phrase the audience has heard already in the
streets. Beautiful phrases come into the mind while one is doing odd
jobs, and if you do not look upon my request as an impertinence, and
if you will provide yourself with a sheet of music-paper before you
shave in the morning, and if you do not forget the pencil, you will be
able to write down a horn-call, before you turn from the right to the
left cheek, that will save my play from a moment of vulgarity.

Elgar sent me six horn-calls to choose from, and, in my letter
thanking him for his courtesy, I told him of the scene in the third
act, when Diarmuid, mortally wounded by the boar, asks Finn to fetch
water from the spring. Finn brings it in his helmet, but, seeing that
Grania and Finn stand looking at each other, Diarmuid refuses to
drink. This, and the scene which follows, the making of the litter on
which the body of Diarmuid is borne away to the funeral pyre, seem to
me to crave a musical setting; and how impressive a death-march would
come after Grania's description of the burning of Diarmuid!

Elgar wrote, asking for the act, and it went to him by the next post,
but without much hope that he would write the music, it being my way
always to take disappointment by the forelock, thereby softening the
blows of evil fortune. And without this precautionary dose of
pessimism Elgar's manuscript would not have given me anything like the
pleasure that it did. I was so tired of thats and whichs, fors and
buts, that I stood for a long time admiring the crotchets, the
quavers, the lovely rests; and the long columns set apart for
violins, columns for flutes, and further columns for oboes, fairly
transported me. Elgar sent a letter with it saying that the manuscript
was the only one in existence, and that if it were lost he could not
supply me with another; so it was put hurriedly under lock and key,
and the rest of my day was spent going up one mean street and down
another, climbing small staircases, opening bedroom doors, and meeting
disappointment everywhere. At last, a tenor from a cathedral choir was
discovered, swearing from among the bedclothes that he could do
musical copying with any one in the world, and pledging his word of
honour that he would be with me at ten o'clock next morning. He smelt
like a corpse, but no matter, a score is a score, and Benson had to
receive a copy of it within the next fortnight. The conductor at the
Gaiety said he would like to copy the parts; in copying them he would
learn the music, so I yielded to him Elgar's score, begging of him not
to lose it, at which he laughed; and some days afterwards he asked me
to the music-room and called to his orchestra to follow. The parts
were distributed, and the conductor took up his baton, and singing to
the fiddles, the slow and melancholy march began, the conductor
singing the entrance of every instrument, preserving an unruffled
demeanour till the horn went quack. We will start that again, number
seventeen. The horn again went quack, and I shall always remember how
the player shook his head and looked at the conductor as if to say
that the composer should have been warned that, in such long
intervals, there is no depending on the horn. When it was over, the
conductor turned to me, saying:

There's your march. What do you think of it?

It will have to be played better than that before I can tell, a remark
the orchestra did not like, and for which I felt sorry, but it is
difficult to have the courage of one's opinions on the spot, and,
while walking home, I thought of the many fine things that I might
have said; that Elgar had drawn all the wail of the _caoine_ into the
languorous rhythm of his march, and that he had been able to do this
because he had not thought for a single instant of the external forms
of native music, but had allowed the sentiment of the scene to inspire
him. Out of the harmony a little melody floats, pathetic as an autumn
leaf, and it seemed to me that Elgar must have seen the primeval
forest as he wrote, and the tribe moving among the falling
leaves--oak-leaves, hazel-leaves, for the world began with oak and
hazel.

His mourners--Diarmuid's mourners--were without doubt wistful folk
with eyes as sad as the waters of western lakes, very like their
descendants whom I found waiting for me in my dining-room. Irish
speakers I knew them to be by their long upper lips, and it was almost
unnecessary for them to tell me that they were the actors and
actresses chosen for Dr Hyde's play, _The Twisting of the Rope_.

We've never acted before, said a fine healthy country-woman, speaking
with a rich brogue. But we can all speak Irish.

I suppose you can, as you're going to act in an Irish play.

We mean that we are all native speakers except Miss O'Kennedy and Miss
O'Sullivan, and they have learnt Irish as well as you've learnt
French, she added, somewhat tartly.

I hope they've learnt it a great deal better, I answered, for I've
never been able to learn that language.

What we mean is, said Taidgh O'Donoghue, that we can speak Irish
fluently.

I was very anxious to know how long it would take to learn Irish
perfectly, and if Miss O'Sullivan and Miss O'Kennedy knew it as well
as English? We talked for about half an hour, and then they all stood
up together.

I suppose the best thing we can do is to go home and learn our parts.

If I am to rehearse the play I would sooner that you learnt your parts
with me at rehearsal. Again we engaged in conversation, and I learnt
that they all made their living by teaching Irish; pupils were waiting
for them at that moment, and that was why they could not stay to tea.
They would, however, meet me tomorrow evening in the rooms of the
Keating Branch of the Gaelic League. Dr Hyde was coming at the end of
the week. And for three weeks I followed the Irish play in a
translation made by Hyde himself, teaching every one his or her part,
throwing all my energy into the production, giving it as much
attention as the most conscientious _rgisseur_ ever gave to a play at
the Franais.

And while we were rehearsing _The Twisting of the Rope_, Mr Benson was
rehearsing _Diarmuid and Grania_ in Birmingham. A letter came from him
one morning, telling me that he did not feel altogether sure that I
would be satisfied with the casting of the part of Laban, and Yeats,
who sometimes attended my rehearsals, said--

You had better go over to Birmingham and see if you can't get another
woman to play the part.

But our play doesn't matter, Yeats; what matters is _The Twisting of
the Rope_. We either want to make Irish the language of Ireland, or we
don't; and if we do, nothing else matters. Hyde is excellent in his
part, and if I can get the rest straightened out, and if the play be
well received, the Irish language will at last have gotten its chance.

Yeats did not take so exaggerated a view of the performance of Hyde's
play as I did.

I see that Benson says that the lady who is going to play Laban has a
beautiful voice, and he suggests that you might write to Elgar, asking
him if he would contribute a song to the first act.

The more music we get from Elgar the better. Now, Yeats, if you'll go
home and write some verses and let me go on with the rehearsal, we'll
send them to Elgar tonight.

Yeats said he would see what he could do, and, to my surprise, brought
back that afternoon a very pretty unrhymed lyric, nothing, however, to
do with the play. It was sent to Elgar, who sent back a very beautiful
melody by return of post, and both went away to Benson and were
forgotten until I went to the Gaiety Theatre with Yeats to a rehearsal
of our play. The lady that played Laban sang the lyric very well, but
Schubert's _Ave Maria_ could not have been more out of place; as for
the acting--Benson was right, the lady was not a tragic actress; even
if she had been she could not have acted the part, so much was her
appearance against her. She looked more like a quiet nun than a
Druidess, and, drawing aside Yeats, who was telling her how she should
hold a wine-cup, I said:

It's no use, Yeats; you're only wasting time. The performance will be
ridiculous.

Why didn't you go to Birmingham, as I asked you?

Because Hyde's play would have suffered. One can't have one's cake and
eat it. Of course, it's dreadfully disappointing; it is quite
hopeless. I shall not go to see the play tonight.

I meant what I said, and was reading in my armchair about eight
o'clock when Frank Fay called to tell me he was writing about the
play, and would be better able to do so if I could lend him the
manuscript.

I'll try to find you one. And after searching for some time in my
secretary's room I came back with some loose sheets. This is the best
I can do for you, I said, bidding him goodbye.

But aren't you coming to the theatre?

No. I saw the play rehearsed this afternoon. Benson is very good as
Diarmuid, and I like Mrs Benson. Rodney plays the part of Finn. He is
one of the best actors in England, and Conan will please you.

Then why won't you come?

The lady that plays Laban sings a ballad very beautifully in the first
act; but--

You will come to see your play. You won't sit here all night.... No,
you'll come.

For nothing in the world: I couldn't bear it! All the same he
succeeded in persuading me.




VII


But who is Frank Fay? the reader asks. In the days of _Diarmuid and
Grania_ he was earning his living as a shorthand writer and typist in
an accountant's office, and when his day's work was over he went to
the National Library to read books on stage history. His brother
Willie was a clerk in some gas-works, and painted scenery when his
work was over, and both brothers, whenever the opportunity offered,
were ready to arrange for the performances of sketches, farces,
one-act plays in temperance halls. But _Box and Cox_ did not satisfy
their ambitions; and the enthusiasm which _The Twisting of the Rope_
had evoked brought Willie Fay to my house one evening, to ask me if I
would use my influence with the Gaelic League to send himself and his
brother out, with a little stock company, to play an equal number of
plays in English and Irish.

But do you know Irish sufficiently?

He admitted that neither of them had any Irish at all, and my brow
clouded.

We must have a few plays in English; we wouldn't always be sure of an
Irish-speaking audience.

If English plays are allowed, precedence will be given to them. The
line of least resistance, I said; but the idea of stock company
travelling all over the country seemed an excellent one, and I
promised that on the morrow, as soon as I had finished my writing, I
would go down to the Gaelic League offices and lay the project before
the secretary.

We writers are always glad of any little excuse for an afternoon walk.
Our brains are exhausted after five or six hours of composition, and
the question arises how are the hours before dinner to be whiled away,
and the hours after dinner, for if we go to bed before twelve we may
lie awake thinking of what we have written during the day, and of what
we hope to write on the morrow. The reader sees us spending our
evenings reading, but we have read all the books that we want to read;
the modern theatre is merely servant-girlism (I make no difference
between the kitchen and the drawing-room variety). After forty,
shooting and hunting amuse us no longer, and women, though still
enchanting, are not quite so enchanting as they used to be. There's
one.... She turned round the corner into Baggot Street, and I stood
hesitating between a choice of ways. The Green tempted me, and I
thought of Grafton Street and of the women running in and out of its
shops, and after each other, talking and gathering up the finery which
brings the young barristers from the Courts--spruce young fellows,
whom I had often seen in little groups of threes and fours, each one
trying to look as if he were busy disentangling some knotty point of
law, but thinking all the while of his coloured socks and of the women
going by. In Grafton Street I should meet little Tommy O'Shaughnessy
on his way home from Green Street Court House which he never really
leaves, talking to himself, and tapping his snuff-box from time to
time; and Gill would be floating along there, lost in admiration of
his own wisdom. Sir Thornley Stoker rarely misses Grafton Street
between four and five; I should certainly catch sight of him hopping
about a silversmith's, like an old magpie, prying out spoons and
forks, and the immodest bulk of Larky Waldron, waiting outside for
him, looking into the window. A hundred other odds and oddments I
should meet there, every one amusing to see and to hear; all the same
for a change of spectacle it might be as well to stroll to the Gaelic
League offices through Merrion Street and along Nassau Street. I
should meet students on their way to the National Library, girls and
boys, and an old derelict Jesuit whom I liked to see going by in his
threadbare coat, tightly buttoned, a great Irish scholar; and then
there are the clerics to see, out for their afternoon walks, with
perhaps a glimpse of Edward talking to them. He always says that he
likes Bohemians or priests. The rural clergy tell him about the
country, and he tells the urban priest that he has very nearly
succeeded in inveigling Archbishop Walsh into accepting ten thousand
pounds for the establishment of a choir to sing Palestrina and Orlando
di Lasso. The priests go away, smiling inwardly, thinking him a little
eccentric, but a very good Catholic. If Edward is out of town and my
taste runs that day towards trees and greenswards, all I have to do is
to go down Leinster Street and through a gateway into Trinity College
Gardens. Professor Mahaffy sometimes walks in the path under the
railings shaded by beautiful trees, and if it had not been for a
ferocious article published at the time, attacking him for his lack of
sympathy for the Gaelic Movement, we might have spent many pleasant
hours together under the hawthorns. Professor Tyrrell's hostility to
our movement was less aggressive, and I liked to meet him in the
gardens, and to walk a little way with him, listening to his pleasant
ancient warble about the literature that he has lived in all his life,
and with which he is so saturated that, involuntarily, he transports
me out of the grey modern day to Athens, where Aristophanes walked to
the Piraeus to watch for the galleys from Sicily.

If these two men are not about, there are other professors, and I have
often been through the gardens talking with the fellow that teaches
French. He is, of course, learned in Corneille, Racine, and Ronsard,
and, by some strange chance, he knows Stuart Merrill, a poet of some
distinction, a contributor to the old _Revue Indpendante_, Dujardin's
_Revue_, but unfortunately he never met Dujardin, and as it is
impossible to talk of Stuart Merrill for more than half an hour, he
was generally sent away at Carlisle Bridge. On the other side one was
sure to run up against Taidgh O'Donoghue, the modern Irish poet, the
rival of the Munster poets of the eighteenth century, and my Irish
translator, though O'Neill Russell had begged me to beware of him,
saying that the Irish that Taidgh wrote would not be understood out of
Munster--a libel on the Irish language, proved to be one soon after
the arrival of a boy from Galway, my nephew's Irish tutor, for Comber,
who had never been out of Galway before, understood every word of
Taidgh's beautiful translation of my story, _The Wedding Gown_.

The great old cock was O'Neill Russell, whom we never looked upon as
an old man, despite his eighty years. How could we, since he was
straight as a maypole, and went for walks of two-and-twenty miles
among the Dublin mountains? He came back to me one day after one of
these strolls, the news bubbling upon his lips that he had composed an
entire scenario on the subject of an heroic adventure that had
happened to an Irish king in the thirteenth century; but he would not
stay to dinner, nor even to relate it; he was in too great a hurry to
verify a fact in the National Library, to get his scenario down on
paper. For one reason or another he never dined at my house, though he
liked to come in after dinner for a talk on Saturday nights. It was no
use offering him a cigar, he always begged to be allowed to smoke his
pipe, and there being no spittoons in my dining-room the coal-scuttle
was put by him. A great old cock, head upreared, fine neck, grand
shoulders, a stately piece of architecture, fine in detail as in
general effect. A big nose divided the face, wandering grey eyes lit
it. The large hands had worked for sixty years in America, in France,
in the East. He had been all over the world, and had returned to
Ireland with some seventy, eighty, perhaps a hundred pounds a year. He
was gibed in songs, for he had gone away as a boy, speaking bad Irish,
and come back after sixty years, speaking bad Irish still; so said the
song's refrain, and a story followed at his heels that he had vilified
a man for twenty years in the American newspapers, denouncing him as a
renegade Irishman, because had advocated a certain use of the
genitive. A great old cock, as young as the youngest of the men that
came to my house, were it not for a certain sadness--a very beautiful
sadness, not for himself, but for his country. He had hoped all his
life for Ireland's resurrection, but at the end of his life it seemed
as far distant as ever.

He haunted the Gaelic League offices, and the day he pushed the door
open, entering the room with a great stride, I began to wonder who the
intruder could be--this great tall man, dressed in a faded blue jacket
and a pair of grey trousers, and a calico shirt. The editor of the
_Claidheamh_ introduced us, and my heart went out to him at once, as
every heart did, for he was the recognisable Irishman, the adventurer,
the wild goose. And after that meeting we met frequently between five
and six o'clock; the Gaelic League offices were then a pleasant
resort; all kinds and conditions of men assembled there, and we
discussed the Irish language sitting upon tables while smoking
cigarettes. It appeared every week in the _Claidheamh Soluis_, and I
liked to dictate a paragraph for somebody to turn into Irish before
my eyes, and, when the editor paused for an equivalent, every one
ransacked his memory, but our dictionary was always O'Neill Russell--a
rambling, incoherent, untrustworthy, old dictionary--but one that none
of us would have willingly been without. It is pleasant to remember
that he was in the offices of the League the day that I called to
unfold my project for a little travelling company to the secretary and
that he approved of it; but his conversation soon diverged from the
matter in hand into an argument regarding the relative merits of
Munster and Connaught Irish.

I'm afraid, he said, that you've come too late to revive the Irish
language. There are only three men in Ireland who can write pure
Irish. It's dialect, sir, they write.

This may be true, my dear Mr O'Neill Russell, but bad Irish is better
than good English and I care little what Irish we get so long as we
get ourselves out of English.

A few days after, I returned triumphant to the secretary, Kuno Meyer
having told me the night before that Goethe, when he was asked how the
German language might be fostered in Poland, had answered, Not so much
by schools, or by books, but by travelling companies that will play,
not necessarily good plays--good plays are not even desirable--but
homely little plays that will interest the villagers. Everybody likes
the theatre, and people will take the trouble to learn a language so
that they may understand plays.

I'm giving you Goethe's own words, and you'll be well advised to
accept the wisdom of the wisest man since Antiquity. The secretary did
not answer, and I continued angrily: Up to the present you have done
nothing but tell the people that they should learn Irish, and the
people are asking themselves what good the language will do them when
they have got it. The question is not unreasonable, and it cannot be
left unanswered. Willie Fay is willing to undertake the management of
a company acting little plays in Irish. You don't answer, and if I
read your face correctly, you are not of Goethe's opinion?

That is not what I was going to say, sir. I was thinking of our
finances. Our organisers cost the League a great deal of money.

But your organisers will not be able to do half as much for the
language as a company of strolling players. How much do you pay your
organisers?

About two hundred a year.

Two hundred a year to bawl from market place to market place: Now, my
fine fellows, will you be telling me why don't you speak the language
of your forefathers? If it was good enough for them it ought to be
good enough for you. And you, Joe Maguire, why aren't you talking
Irish?

The secretary was not disposed to admit that the organisers of the
League were as uncouth as I wished to represent them.

It matters little whether they are couth or uncouth, my good sir; you
must provide a reason for the learning of Irish, and there are only
two valid reasons--to read books and to understand plays.

Bedell's Bible was mentioned; a masterpiece of modern Irish, the
secretary admitted it to be.

But what would Father Riley be saying if we were caught putting
forward a Protestant book? We can't afford to have the priests against
us.

I know that; but the priest couldn't object to the travelling company?

The secretary admitted that he did not see how he could, and he
promised to lay my project for the financing of a small company of
strolling players before the Coisde Gnotha on the eighteenth, and on
the nineteenth he told me the matter had been carefully considered,
but--

If the Coisde Gnotha would only give me an opportunity of laying my
project before them. You see it is impossible for you to tell them all
that is in my mind. The secretary said he thought he had listened very
carefully to me, and had repeated all I had said. You will excuse me
if I say that I could plead my own case better than you. Among other
things I forgot to tell you that the travelling company might prove a
paying concern. If it were to pay ten pounds a week after expenses?

Of course if it did that.... But besides the money there are other
difficulties, he said. There are women's parts in the plays you
propose to have acted? The ladies who play these parts could hardly
travel about unprotected. Father Riley, who is on the Coisde Gnotha--

He is everywhere.

He's a great man for the Irish, and he brought out this point very
clearly, and everybody agreed with him.

Of course, if Ireland is to be governed by parish priests! and I fumed
about the office, talking of the Italian Renaissance.

There is nothing to hinder you and Mr Martyn from starting a company.

Fiddlesticks. The Moore and Martyn Company would have no success
whatever. If it is to be done at all it will have to be called The
Gaelic League Touring Company. Besides, Mr Martyn wouldn't go into any
project that the priests opposed on the ground of faith and morals; so
I suppose the thing is at an end.

I wouldn't advise you to go on with it, for I've always noticed that
nothing succeeded in Ireland unless the priests take it up.

So the Irish language is going to be sacrificed for the sake of a
little female virtue. But girls are seducing young men ... and old
men, too, for the matter of that, all over the world, and every hour
of the night and day. That such a profligacy is not desirable in
England I readily understand; but in Ireland! You know what I mean.

I'm afraid I don't.

You surprise me. And taking a sovereign out of my pocket, I held it up
to his gaze. The depreciation of the gold species. Now you understand?

I'm afraid I don't.

If a man employs fifty girls in a factory he wishes them to practise
virtue, for if they don't they will not be able to give him that
amount of work which will enable him to pay dividends. But in Ireland
there are no factories, and consequently female virtue is not a
natural necessity, as in England.

I'm afraid you'll never get Father Riley to see it from your point of
view.

Probably not. Irish Catholics have taken their morality from English
Puritans. I should have said economists. Good morning.

But half-way down the stairs a new ideas occurred to me, and the
temptation was very great to return and tell the secretary that the
safety bicycle has brought a new morality into the world, even into
Ireland, for, by freeing girls from the control of their mothers, it
has given them the right to earn their own living; and the right of
women to earn their living on their feet has--and I paused to consider
the question--has brought to a close the oldest of all the trades. The
light-of-love is becoming as rare as the chough, and on the dusty
stairs of the Gaelic League I remembered how numerous they used to be
on Kingstown Pier on Sundays, all of them beautifully dressed in
sea-green dresses and sealskin jackets. All the same, there is no
reason why the moralist should rejoice; their places are being taken
by bands of enthusiastic amateurs. Thousands of years ago in India, I
said, the Buddhist spoke of the wheel of Life, or was it the wheel of
Change? And, thinking how quickly this wheel revolves in the middle of
us, I imagined myself in a pulpit, preaching a great sermon on
morality, its cause and cure; and the wonderful things I could say on
this subject ran on in my head until I caught sight of three large,
healthy-looking priests standing on the kerb, dressed in admirable
broadcloth, and wearing finely stitched American boots, their fat and
freckled hands playing with their watch-chains. At that moment dear
Edward joined them, and from the complacency that his arrival brought
into the clerical faces it seemed certain that he was asking how the
country was looking, meaning thereby, how is the Irish language going
along? And they are answering his questions sympathetically, I said;
but on approaching the group the words Her Excellency caught my ear,
and I guessed that they were talking of the caravan which Lady
Aberdeen had sent round the country--a caravan of plastic protests and
warnings against the danger of spitting, and of sleeping within closed
windows.

But it will not occur to them that insufficient food is the cause of
much consumption, I said, thinking of the vanman who goes out at six
o'clock in the morning and returns home at midday wet to the skin,
and, after a dinner of potatoes and dripping (lucky if he gets a bit
of American bacon), goes out again, and comes back about eight or nine
to a cup of tea, lucky if he gets that before lying down in his wet
shirt. Father Riley had set me against the clerics, and it was in a
spirit of rebuke that I listened to the priests proposing that sermons
denouncing spitting should be delivered in every parish from the
altar.

Edward introduced me to the holy ones, and, after listening to them
for a while, the temptation stole over me to tell them that I had
written to Her Excellency last night, asking her to use her very great
influence to make known the cure that had been discovered.

And what cure is that? Edward asked innocently.

Holy Orders. Now, listen! I have come upon a great truth: that for the
last hundred years no Archbishop has died from consumption, nor a
Bishop, nor a parish priest, only two or three outlying curates.
Therefore, my letter to Her Excellency is a serious advocacy that all
Ireland should take Orders, those who want to lead celibate lives
remaining or becoming Catholics, those who wish to enter the marriage
state remaining, or discovering themselves, Protestants. In this way,
and only in this way, will Her Excellency be able to kill a fatal
disease and rid Ireland of religious differences. What do you think of
the new cure, gentlemen? But, Edward, wait a moment. As the priests
did not seem ready with an answer, I bade them goodbye abruptly, and
hurried after Edward. Why all this haste? I asked, overtaking him.

I don't like that kind of talk. It's most offensive to me; and I,
after introducing you--

But, my dear Edward, how can it be offensive to propose that all
Ireland shall take Orders? Didn't Father Sheehan say in his last
masterpiece that he looked forward to the day when Ireland should be
one vast monastery?

When that day comes they'll make short work of fellows like you--ship
you all off. But I daren't linger at the corner talking; I'll catch
another cold.

But, Edward, I've just come from the Gaelic League, and have to speak
to you on a matter of importance.

Well, then, come along.

We might follow the quays to Ringsend.

That way means loitering, looking at ships, and Edward, who had been
feeling a little bit livery lately, proposed that we should walk to
Ballsbridge and follow the Dodder on to Donnybrook, returning home by
Leeson Street. We crossed Carlisle Bridge at the rate of four miles
an hour, and at the end of Westmoreland Street Edward said This way,
and we turned into Brunswick Street. At Westland Row he said, We'll
turn up here and avoid the back streets, and away we went, through
Merrion Square and Lower Mount Street, Edward thinking all the time of
his liver, never for a moment of the business that I wished to speak
to him about, and my irritation increased against him at every
lamp-post in Lower Mount Street, but I restrained myself till we
reached Ballsbridge.

Was a man ever absorbed in himself as you are, I wonder?

How is that? he asked, becoming interested at once.

You've forgotten that I told you I had an important matter to speak to
you about.

No, I haven't. But I'm waiting for you to speak about it.

And all this while--

Come now, no fussing. What have you got to say?

Feeling the uselessness of being angry with him, I told him of my
interview with the secretary. Apparently the touring company is all
off; and though you were in favour of it a fortnight ago, you weren't
enthusiastic when it came up for discussion. You were asleep.

Who told you I was asleep? You'd fall asleep, too, if you were kept
out of your bed till three o'clock in the morning, listening to them
saying the same things over and over again.

Well, when you woke up you voted against me with Father Riley. Deny it
if you can.

It wasn't till Father Riley brought out the point--

But you were asleep.

No, I wasn't asleep. I followed the argument very closely, and I agree
with Father Riley that it would be a very serious thing, indeed, to
persuade four or five girls to leave their mothers, and cast them into
the promiscuous current of theatrical life without proper chaperons.

A breath of theology blows you hither and thither. You'd have yielded
to the persuasion of the learned friar to throw out _The Countess
Cathleen_, if you hadn't found a backing in Father Barry and Father
Tom Finlay. Your own play would have had to go with it; even that
sacrifice would not have stopped you; and because we wouldn't produce
your play, _The Tale of a Town_--

I don't know that anybody else would have acted as I did. When you
sided with Yeats against me, I gave you my play to adapt, to cut up,
to turn inside out, for I had always preached unity, and was
determined that nobody should say I didn't practise what I preached
when my turn came.

We produced _Maeve_ instead of _The Tale of a Town_. You didn't
expect that we were going to produce two plays by you in one year, did
you? We preferred _Maeve_. All the same you threw us over. Your
agreement with Yeats was to provide money for three years, and when
you backed out we had to go to Benson. He agreed to produce _Diarmuid
and Grania_, else the Irish Literary Theatre would not have completed
its three years.

There was a great deal in _Diarmuid and Grania_ which I didn't approve
of--many coarse expressions, and a tendency to place Pagan Ireland
above Christian Ireland. I'm not taken in--I'm not taken in by you and
Yeats and ... the old proselytiser in the background.

The long loose mouth tightened; a look of resolution came into the
eyes; the woollen gloves grasped the umbrella, and the step grew
quicker. I lagged a little behind to obtain a better view of the great
boots. Years ago, in London, I had asked him to come and see the
Robinsons with me, not noticing the size of his boots until he was
seated in their drawing-room; on the hearthrug at Earl's Terrace they
seemed to take up so much room that I felt obliged to tell Edward that
he would do well to get himself a pair of patent leathers, which, I am
bound to say, he ordered at once, and in Jermyn Street, presenting on
his next visit a more spruce appearance. But he had always felt out of
his element in drawing-rooms, and had long ago returned to the
original boots and to the black overcoat, in which he wraps himself in
winter as in a blanket. Under the brim of the bowler hat I could just
catch sight of the line of his aquiline nose--a drop hung at the end
of it; it fell as we entered Leeson Street, at the moment when he was
telling me of the agreement he would draw up if he succeeded in
persuading the Archbishop to accept his ten thousand pounds for the
support of the polyphonic choir. Edward is shrewd enough in business,
and I admired the scrupulosity of the wording of the bond which would
prevent the clerics from ever returning to Gounod's _Ave Maria_.

My money will be tied up in such a way that there will be no setting
aside of Palestrina for Verdi's _Requiem_ when I'm out of the way.

It amused me to think of the embarrassment of the Archbishop fairly
caught between the devil and the deep sea, reduced to the necessity of
refusing ten thousand pounds, or entering into the strictest covenant
for the performance of sixteenth-century polyphonic music for ever and
ever. On one point, however, Edward was inclined to yield. If some
great composer of religious music should arise, the fact that he was
born out of due time should not exclude his works from performance at
the Dublin Cathedral.

But as that possibility is very remote, it is not probable that my
choir will ever stray beyond Palestrina, Vittoria, Orlando di Lasso,
and Clemens non Papa.

His appearance seemed so strangely at variance with his tastes that I
could not help smiling; the old grey trousers challenged the eye at
that moment, and I thought of the thin decadent youth, very fastidious
in his dress, writing Latin, Greek, or French poems, that one would
have naturally imagined as the revivalist of old polyphonic music. An
old castle would be the inevitable dwelling of this youth; he would
have purchased one for the purpose. But Edward had inherited the
castle. He is, as his mother used to say, the last male of his race. A
very old race the Martyns are, having been in Ireland since the
earliest times. It is said that they came over with William the
Conqueror from France, so Edward is a descendant of ancient knights on
one side, the very lineage that the Parsifal side of Edward's nature
would choose, but the Parsifal side is remote and intermittent, it
does not form part of his actual life, and he is prouder of the Smiths
than the Martyns, attributing any talent that he may have to his
grandfather, John Smith of Masonbrook, a pure peasant, a man of great
original genius, who, without education or assistance from any one,
succeeded in piling up a great fortune in the county of Galway. He had
invested his money in land when estates were being sold in the
Encumbered Estates Court, and so successful were his speculations that
he was able to marry his daughter to old John Martyn of Tillyra, to
whom she brought a fortune of ten thousand pounds. She had inherited
from her father some good looks, a distinguished appearance, many
refined tastes, and the reader has not forgotten altogether her grief
at Edward's celibacy, which would deprive the Gothic house he built to
please her of an heir.

My recollections of mother and son go back to the very beginning of my
life, to the time when Edward returned from Oxford, writing poems that
I admired for their merit, and probably a little for the sake of my
friend, in whom I discerned an original nature. I am too different
from other people, he used to say, ever to be a success, and the poems
were ultimately burnt, for they seemed to him to be, on reflection, in
disagreement with the teachings of his Church. So he was in the
beginning what he is in the end, I said, and a great psychologist
might have predicted his solitary life in two musty rooms above a
tobacconist's shop, and his last habits, such as pouring his tea into
a saucer, balancing the saucer on three fingers like an old woman in
the country. Edward is all right if he gets his Mass in the morning
and his pipe in the evening. A great bulk of peasantry with a
delicious strain of Palestrina running through it.

I must be getting my dinner, he said.

But won't you come home and dine with me? There are many other
points--

No, he said, I don't care to dine with you. You're never agreeable at
table. You find fault with the cooking.

If you come back I swear to you that whatever the cook may send me
up--

The last time I dined at your house you made remarks about my
appetite.

If I did, it was because I feared apoplexy. Several parish priests
have died lately.

His great back disappeared in the direction of a tavern.




VIII


As it seemed easier to tell Willie Fay the bad news than to write a
letter I left a message with one of his friends asking him to call at
my house. Any evening except Saturday would suit me. On Saturday
evenings I received my friends, and it would be difficult to discuss
the matter freely before them. So Willie Fay came to see me one
Thursday night, and perching himself on the highest chair in the room
in spite of my protests, he fidgeted in it like a man in a hurry,
anxious to get through an interview which had no longer any interest
for him, answering me with a yes and a no, receiving the suggestion
very coldly that in a few months new members would be elected to the
Coisde Gnotha.

Men, I said, who will take a different view from Father Riley. I
suppose you wouldn't care to wait?

They'll go their way and I'll go mine, he answered, and with such a
grand air of indifference that I began to suspect he had already heard
of my failure to persuade the Gaelic League to accept him as the
manager of a touring company and had gotten something else in view.
The acoustics of Dublin are very perfect. But when I questioned him
regarding his plans he gave a vague answer and took his leave as soon
as he decently could.

A secret there certainly was, and I thought it over till AE mentioned
on Saturday night that the Fays had come to ask him to allow them to
perform his _Deirdre._

Your _Deirdre_!

And forthwith he confided to me that one morning, about six weeks
before, as he rose from his bed, he had seen her in the woods, where
she lived with Levarcham. I saw the lilacs blooming in the corner of
the yard, and herself running through the woods towards the dun. She
came crying to her dear foster-mother, half for protection, half for
glee--she had seen a young man for the first time, Naisi, who, in
pursuit of a deer, had passed through the glen unperceived, though it
was strictly guarded by the king's spearmen.

And what happens then? I asked, interested in the setting forth of the
story.

A love-scene with Naisi, who begs Deirdre to fly with him to Scotland,
for only by putting a sea between them can they escape the wrath of
Concubar. And it was while returning home over Portobello Bridge that
he saw Naisi in his Scottish dun mending a spear, a memory of the
chivalry of the Ultonians having kindled in him during the night.

So far have I written, AE said, and as soon as I get another free
evening I shall finish the act for the Fays.

But he had to wait a long while for his next inspiration, and in great
patience the actors and actresses continued to chant their parts
through the winter nights until the third act was brought to them.

It was then discovered that AE's play was too short for an evening's
entertainment, and Yeats was asked for his _Cathleen ni Houlihan_; he
had met her last summer in one of the Seven Woods of Coole--in which,
a future historian will decide; for me it is to tell merely that the
two plays were performed on April 15 in St Teresa's Hall, Clarendon
Street, before an enthusiastic and demonstrative crowd of men and
women. A later historian will also have to determine whether AE took
the part of the God Mananaan Mac Lir at this performance, or whether
he only appeared in the part at the preliminary performance in
Coffey's drawing-room. All I know for certain is that none will ever
forget the terrible emphasis he gave to the syllables Man-aan-nawn
MacLeer in Coffey's drawing-room. He very likely had something to do
with the bringing over of Maud Gonne from France to play the part of
Cathleen ni Houlihan. Or did she come for Yeats's sake? However, she
came, and dreaming of the many rebel societies that awaited her coming
she gave point to the line since become famous:

  They have taken from me my four beautiful fields,

a line which I have no hesitation in taking from Lady Gregory and
attributing to Yeats.

An Irish audience always likes to be reminded of the time when Ireland
was a nation, and the Fays determined that some organisation must be
started to keep the idea alive; the Presidency of the National Theatre
Society was offered to AE, but he seemed to have considered his
dramatic mission over, and contented himself with drawing up the rules
and advising the members to elect Yeats as their President. He may
have noticed that Yeats had been seeking an outlet for Irish dramatic
genius ever since the break-up of the Irish Literary Theatre, and for
sure the fact was not lost upon him that Yeats's ears pricked up only
when the word play was mentioned, and that his eyes were never lifted
from the ground in his walks except to overlook a piece of waste
ground as a possible site for a theatre. He could not but have heard
Yeats mutter on more than one occasion, Goethe had a theatre ...
Wagner had a theatre; and he had drawn the just conclusion that Yeats
was seeking an outlet for Irish dramatic talent, and would bring
courage and energy to the aid of the new movement. Oh, the wise AE,
for Yeats as soon as he was elected President took the Fays in hand,
discovering almost immediately that their art was of French descent
and could be traced back to the middle of the seventeenth century in
France. Some explanation of this kind was necessary, for Dublin had to
be persuaded that two little clerks had suddenly become great artists,
and to confirm Dublin in this belief the newspapers were requested to
state that Mr W. B. Yeats was writing a play for Mr William Fay on the
subject of _The Pot of Broth_.

Well, the best of us are sometimes short-sighted and superficial, and
let it be freely confessed that it seemed to me at the time
disgraceful that the author of _The Wanderings of Usheen_ should stoop
to writing a farce, for the subject Yeats had chosen was farcical, and
the word represented to me only the merely conventional drolleries
that I had seen on the London stage. My excuse for my blindness is
that I have spent much of my life in France among French writers:
folklore was unknown in Montmartre in my time, and no French writer
that I know of, except Molire and George Sand, has made use of
_patois_ in literature; we are only beginning to become alive to the
beauty of living speech when living speech is fast being driven out by
journalists. But to return to Yeats, whose claim to immortality is
well founded, for he knew from the first that literature rises in the
mountains like a spring and descends, enlarging into a rivulet and
then into a river. All this is clear to me today, but when he spoke to
me of _The Pot of Broth_, I asked him if he weren't ashamed of
himself; and when he proposed that I should choose a similar subject
and write a farce for Willie Fay, I rose from my chair, relying on
gesture to express my abhorrence of his scheme. But not liking to be
left out of anything, I consented, at last, to write half a dozen
plays to be translated into Irish.

It may not be necessary to have them translated. Wouldn't it do you as
well if Lady Gregory put idiom on them?

We shall get the idiom much better, I answered, by having the plays
translated into Irish. I will publish the Irish text, and you can do
what you like with the brogue.

The stupid answer of a man intellectually run down; but next day I was
down at the Gaelic League unfolding my project to the secretary, who
thought it a very good one for the advancement of the Irish language,
and as soon as the plays were written the Coisde Gnotha would decide.

My good man, do you think that I came over from England to submit
plays to the Coisde Gnotha?

And we two stood looking at each other until the futility of my
question began to dawn upon me; and then, to pass the matter over, I
asked him if he knew of any Irish writers who could clothe the
skeletons which I would supply with suitable dialogue. He said that
Taidgh O'Donoghue was very busy at present, but a Feis was being held
in Galway, and he suggested that I should go down and seek what I
wanted among the prize-winners.

Mr Edward Martyn is one of the judges of traditional singing; you'll
see him. Mr Yeats and Lady Gregory are certain to be there. So I am
going to interview the ancient Irish language in the historic town of
Galway, I said to myself as the train rattled westward, and the pretty
weather in which Ireland has attired herself is in keeping with the
occasion. And on alighting from the train my thoughts ran on to the
same tune, that the old grey city lay in the sun seemingly stirred in
her sleep by the sound of her language, the remnant having come from
the islands beyond the bay. The remnant surely, I repeated as I passed
into a long low room pleasantly lighted by four square shining
windows. A peasant sang uncouth rhythms, but Edward, the old
melomaniac, sat with his hand to his ear.

How are you, Edward?

A traditional singer, he answered, come from the middle island. Listen
to him.

And to please Edward I listened to the singer, but could catch only a
vague drift of sound, rising and falling, unmeasured as the wind
soughing among the trees or the lament of the waves on the shore,
something that might go on all day long, and the old fellow thatching
his cabin all the while. The singer was followed by a piper, and the
music that Michael Fluddery, a blind man from Connemara, drew from his
pipes was hardly more articulate, and I began to think that the
doleful pipes, now and again breaking into a jig tune, represented the
soul of the Irish people better than any words could do, music being
more fundamental. A long wail from the pipes startled me, and I was
awake again in the long low room with May sunlight streaming through
the square windows; Edward's hand was still at his ear, just as if he
was afraid of missing a note; and at a little distance away Yeats and
Lady Gregory sat colloguing together, their faces telling me nothing.
Dancers rushed in, hopped up and down, round about and back again, the
women's petticoats whirling above grey worsted legs, the tails of the
men's frieze coats flying behind them, their hobnails hammering a
great dust out of the floor, and as soon as the jig was over the
story-teller came in, and, taking a chair, he warmed his hands over an
imaginary peat fire, and began to tell of a man lost in a field, who
had to turn his coat inside out to rid himself of the fairy spell;
and, glancing round the audience, I could see the eyes of the Irish
speakers kindling (it was easy to pick them out), the wandering Celtic
eye, pale as their own hills. Creatures of marsh and jungle they
seemed to me, sad as the primitive Nature in which they lived. I had
known them from childhood but was always afraid of them, and used to
run into the woods when I saw the women coming with the men's dinners
from Derrinanny (the name is like them), and the marsh behind the
village and the dim line of the Partry Mountains were always alien
from me.

Edward, let's get away. We're losing all the sunlight.

He could not leave the Feis just then, but if I would wait till the
story-teller had finished he might be able to get away for an hour.

We're expecting a piper from Arran, the great piper of the middle
island--

And a great number of story-tellers, Yeats added.

You see, I'm the President of the Pipers' Club, Edward broke in.

They should be here by now, only there is no wind in the bay, Yeats
muttered.

I begged of him to come away, but he did not know if he could leave
Lady Gregory. He leaned over her, and at the end of some affable
murmuring she seemed satisfied to let him go, accepting his promise to
come back to fetch her in time for lunch; and we three went out
together for a walk through the town.

How happy the sunlight makes me! Don't you feel a little tipsy,
Edward? How could you have wanted to sit listening any longer to that
eternal rigmarole without beginning or end?

You mean the traditional singer? He wasn't very good, and only got
poor marks, Edward said, and he asked me what I thought of the piper.

He recalled many memories and a landscape. But if you like folk-music
how is it that you don't like folk-tales?

I do like folk-tales in the Irish language or in the English--

Folk is our refuge from vulgarity, Yeats answered, and we strolled
aimlessly through the sunlight.

Where would you like to go? Edward asked me abruptly.

To see the salmon. All my life I've heard of the salmon lying in the
river, four and five deep, like sardines in a box.

Well, you'll see them today, Yeats answered.

There were other idlers besides ourselves enjoying the fair weather,
and their arms resting on the stone bridge they looked into the brown
rippling water, remarking from time to time that the river was very
low (no one had ever seen it lower), and that the fish would have to
wait a long time before there was enough water for them to get up the
weir. But my eyes could not distinguish a fish till Yeats told me to
look straight down through the brown water, and I saw one, and
immediately afterwards a second a third and a fourth. And then the
great shoal, hundreds, thousands of salmon, each fish keeping its
place in the current, a slight movement of the tail being sufficient.

But if they should get tired of waiting and return to the sea?

Yeats is a bit of a naturalist, and in an indolent mood it was
pleasant to listen to him telling of the habits of the salmon which
only feeds in the sea. If the fishermen were to get a rise it would be
because the fish were tired of waiting and snapped at anything to
relieve the tedium of daily life.

A lovely day it was, the town lying under a white canopy of cloud, not
a wind in all the air, but a line of houses sheer and dim along the
river mingling with grey shadows; and on the other bank there were
waste places difficult to account for, ruins showing dimly through the
soft diffused light, like old castles, but Yeats said they were the
ruins of ancient mills, for Galway had once been a prosperous town.
Maybe, my spirit answered, but less beautiful than she is today; and
after this remark Yeats was forgotten in the fisherman who threw his
fly in vain, for the fish were too absorbed in their natural instinct
to think of anything but the coming flood which would carry them up
the river. I saw him change his fly many times, and at last, with some
strange medley of red and blue and purple, he roused a fish out of its
lethargy. It snapped; the hook caught in its gills, and a battle began
which lasted up and down the stream, till at last a wearied fish was
drawn up to the bank for the gillie to gaff. The fisherman prepared to
throw his fly again across the river. Another silly fish would be
tempted to snap at the gaudy thing dragged across its very nose sooner
or later.... But we had seen enough of fishing for one day, and Edward
led us through a dusty, dilapidated square; we stopped by the broken
railings of the garden, for in the middle of the grass-plot somebody
had set up an ancient gateway, all that remained of some great house;
and when we had admired it we followed him through some crumbling
streets to the town house of the Martyns, for in the eighteenth
century the western gentry did not go to Dublin for the season. Dublin
was two long days' journey away; going to Dublin meant spending a
night on the road, and so every important county family had its town
house in Galway. My grandfathers must have danced in Galway, there
being no important town in Mayo, and in fine houses, if one may judge
from what remains of Edward's. We viewed it from the courtyard, and he
told us it had been let out in tenements and was nearly a ruin when it
came into his hands; the roof was falling, the police had ordered him
to have it taken down, for it was a public danger, and we listened to
him, and we considered the archway under which the four-horsed coach
used to pass into the courtyard, whilst he pointed out some marble
chimney-pieces high up on the naked walls, saying he had better have
them taken away. I hoped he would leave them, for a scattered vision
of ladies in high-peaked bodices and gentlemen with swords had just
appeared to me, dancing in mid air--appeared to me, not to him.

Leave them, and these steps where the lackeys have set down sedan
chairs; embroidered shoes have run up these steps, flowered trains
following, to dance minuet or gavotte ... or waltzes.

And arguing whether the waltz had penetrated to Galway in the
eighteenth century, we followed Edward to the cathedral. Edward likes
arches, even when the service held beneath them is Anglican, and he
made himself agreeable, telling us that the cathedral was built late
in the fifteenth century, and we wandered down the aisles, deploring
the vulgarity of the modern world.

It would be impossible, he said, to build as beautiful a cathedral
today, and he called on us to remember that there could not have been
much culture in Galway in the fifteenth century, yet Galway could
build a cathedral.

Galway was then without knowledge, I answered. We corrupt in knowledge
and purify ourselves in ignorance.

Who said that? Yeats asked sharply.

Balzac, but I cannot answer for the exact words.

True! How true! Edward repeated, and, leading us down a lane-way, he
pointed out some stone carvings which seemed to him conclusive of the
fifteenth, but which might be fourteenth-century sculpture, Ireland
being always a century behind England, and England being always a
century behind France. All the same he believed that the gateway was
late fifteenth century, for at that time Galway was trading with Spain
and the gateway bore traces of Spanish influence. He spoke of the
great galleons that once came floating up the bay, their sails filled
with the sunset, and called our attention to the wide sweeping
outlines of the headlands stretching far away into the Atlantic. Not
only in certain buildings but in flesh and blood are traces of the
Spaniard to be found in Galway, I said, and pointed to a group of
yellow-skinned boys basking among the brown nets drying along the
great wharf. Edward told me that these were Claddagh boys, and that
the Claddagh are all Irish speakers; and we stopped to question them
as to what language they were in the habit of using, only to learn
with sorrow that English and Irish were all the same to them.

That is how a language dies, Edward said. The parents speak it, the
children understand it, but don't speak it, and the grandchildren
neither speak nor understand. I like the English language and I like
the Irish, but I hate the mixture.

Yeats sighed, and the boys told us that the hooker from Arran was
lying out there in the west, becalmed, and we need not expect her
before evening, unless the men put out the oars, and she was too heavy
for rowing.

On a warm day like this, not likely, I answered, and the indolent boys
laughed, and we continued our walk down the wharf, thinking of the
great labour spent upon it. The bringing of all these stones and the
building of them so firmly and for such a long way into the sea could
only have been done in famine times. A long wharf, so long that we had
not walked half its length when Yeats and Edward began to speak of
returning to the Feis; and, leaving them undecided, staring into the
mist, hoping to catch sight every moment of the black hull of the
hooker, I strayed on ahead, looking round, wondering, tempted to
explore the mystery of the wharf's end. Yet what mystery could there
be? Only a lot of tumbled stones. But the wonder of the world has
hardly decreased for me since the days when I longed to explore the
wilderness of rocks at the end of Kingstown Pier, the great clefts
frightening me, sending me back, ashamed of my cowardice, to where my
uncles and aunts and cousins were seated, listening to the band (in
the 'sixties fashionable Dublin used to assemble on the pier on Sunday
afternoons). One day I was bolder, and descended into the wilderness,
returning after a long absence, very excited, and telling that I had
met the King of the Fairies fishing at the mouth of the cave. The
story that I had brought back was that he had caught three fish when I
had met him and had given me one. I was silent when asked why I had
forgotten to bring it back with me, my interest in the adventure being
centred in the fact that in answer to my question how far Fairyland
was from Kingstown, he had told me that a great wave rises out of the
sea every month, and that I must go away upon it, and then wait for
another great wave, which would take me another piece of the way. I
must wait for a third wave, and it would be the ninth that would throw
me right up on to Fairyland.

But the story interested nobody but me; my uncles and aunts looked at
me, evidently considering if I weren't a little daft; and one of the
crudest of the Blakes, a girl with a wide, ugly mouth and a loud
voice, laughed harshly, saying that I could not be taken anywhere,
even to Kingstown Pier, without something wonderful happening to me.
These Blakes were my first critics, and their gibes filled me with
shame, and I remember coming to a resolve that night to avoid all the
places where one would be likely to meet a fairy fisherman, and if I
did come across another by ill chance, to run away from him, my
fingers in my ears. But notwithstanding that early vow and many
subsequent vows, I have failed to see and hear as the Blakes do, and I
go on meeting adventures everywhere, even on the wharf at Galway,
which should have been safe from them. By Edward one is always safe
from adventures, and it would have been well for me not to have
stirred from his side. I only strayed fifty yards, but that short
distance was enough, for while looking down into the summer sea,
thinking how it moved up against the land's side like a soft, feline
animal, the voices of some women engaged my attention, and turning I
saw that three girls had come down to a pool sequestered out of
observation, in a hollow of the headland. Sitting on the bank they
drew off their shoes and stockings and advanced into the water,
kilting their petticoats above their knees as it deepened. On seeing
me they laughed invitingly; and, as if desiring my appreciation, one
girl walked across the pool, lifting her red petticoat to her waist,
and forgetting to drop it when the water shallowed, she showed me
thighs whiter and rounder than any I have ever seen, their country
coarseness heightening the temptation. She continued to come towards
me. A few steps would have taken me behind a hillock. They might have
bathed naked before me, and it would have been the boldest I should
have chosen, if fortune had favoured me. But Yeats and Edward began
calling, and, dropping her petticoats, she waded from me.

What are you doing down there, George? Hurry up! Here's the hooker
being rowed into the bay bringing the piper and the story-tellers from
Arran.




IX


Edward, I said, if the Irish language is to be revived, something in
the way of reading must be provided for the people.

Haven't they Hyde's _Folk Tales_?

Yes, and these are well enough in their way, but a work is what is
needed--a book.

Edward thought that as soon as the Irish people had learnt their
language somebody would be sure to write a national work.

There's plenty of talent about.

But, my dear friend, there isn't sufficient application.

You're quite right. And we talked of atmosphere and literary
tradition, neither of which we had, nor could have for a hundred
years. And therefore are without hope of an original work in the Irish
language. But we can get a translation of a masterpiece. We want a
book and can't go on any further without one. I hear everybody
complaining that when he has learnt Irish there is nothing for him to
read.

But do you think they would deign to read a translation? Edward
answered, laughing, and he agreed with me that, outside of folklore,
there is no art except that which comes of great culture.

A translation of a world-wide masterpiece is what we want, and we have
to decide on a work before we reach Athlone.

Why Athlone?

Athlone or Mullingar. Now, Edward, you are to give your whole mind to
the question.

Nothing English, he said resolutely. Something Continental--some great
Continental work. His eyes became fixed, and I saw that he was
thinking. _Tlmaque_, he said at last.

_Tlmaque_ would be quite safe, but aren't you afraid that it is a
little tedious?

_Gil Blast_?

I never read _Gil Bias_, but have heard many people say that they
couldn't get through it. What do you think of _Don Quixote_? It comes
from a great Catholic country, and it was written by a Catholic; and
until we remembered the story of _The Curious Impertinent_, and the
other stories interwoven into the narrative, _Don Quixote_ seemed to
be the very thing we needed. We want short stories, I said. A
selection of tales from Maupassant.

The Gaelic League might object.

It certainly would if my name were mentioned. I've got it,
Edward!--_The Arabian Nights_. There are no stories the people would
read so readily.

Edward was inclined to agree with me, and before we reached Dublin it
was arranged that he should give fifty pounds and I five-and-twenty
towards the publication of Taidgh O'Donoghue's translation.

And if more is wanted, Edward said, they can have it. But remember one
thing. It must be sanctioned by the Gaelic League and published under
its auspices; as you well know, my interests are in public life. I
have no private life.

Oh yes, you have, Edward; I'm your private life.

Edward snorted and took refuge in his joke _Mon ami Moore_; but this
time he showed himself trustworthy. He wrote to the _Freeman's
Journal_, disclosing our project, and winding up his letter with an
expression of belief that the entire cost of the work could not be
much more than one hundred and fifty pounds, and that he was quite
sure there were many who would like to help.

Many were willing to help us--with advice. The _Freeman's Journal_
came out next day full up of letters signed by various Dublin
literati, approving of the project, but suggesting a different book
for translation. One writer thought that Plutarch's _Lives_ would
supply the people with a certain culture, which he ventured to say was
needed in the country. Another was disposed to look favourably upon a
translation of _St Thomas Aquinas_; another proposed _Caesar's
Commentaries_; and the debate was continued until the truth leaked out
that the proposed translation of _The Arabian Nights_ was due to my
suggestion. Then, of course, all the fat was in the fire. Sacerdos
contributed a column and a half which may be reduced to this sentence:
Mr George Moore has selected _The Arabian Nights_ because he wishes an
indecent book to be put into the hands of every Irish peasant. We do
not take our ideas of love from Mohammedan countries; we are a pure
race.

The paper slipped from my hand and I lay back in my chair overwhelmed,
presenting a very mournful spectacle to any one coming into the room.
How long I lay inert I don't know, but I remember starting out of my
chair, crying, I must go and see Edward.

Well, George, you see you've got the reputation for a certain kind of
writing, and you can't blame the priests if--

Edward, Edward!

After all it is their business to watch over their flocks, and to see
that none is corrupted.

Ba, ba, ba! ba, ba, ba!

_Mon ami Moore, mon ami Moore!_

You'll drive me mad, Edward, if you continue that idiotic joke any
longer. The matter is a serious one. I came over to Ireland--

You have no patience.

No patience! I cried, looking at the great man. He is the Irish
Catholic people, I said, and later in the afternoon my disappointment
caused me to doze away in front of my beautiful grey Manet, my
exquisite mauve Monet, and my sad Pissaro. The Irish are a
cantankerous, hateful race, I muttered, on awaking. And the mood of
hate endured for some days, myself continually asking myself why I had
ventured back into Ireland. But at the end of the week a new plan for
the regeneration of the Irish race came into my head. It seemed a good
thing for me to write a volume of short stories dealing with peasant
life, and these would be saved from the criticism of Sacerdos and his
clan if they were first published in a clerical review. One can only
get the better of the clergy by setting the clergy against the clergy.
In that way Louis XV ridded France of the Jesuits, and obtained
possession of all their property; and in Ireland, no more than in
France, are the Jesuits on the best of terms with the secular clergy
... they might be inclined to take me up.

My hopes in this direction were not altogether unwarranted. I had read
a paper when I came over to Ireland for the performance of _The
Bending of the Bough_, on the necessity of the revival of the Irish
language, for literary as well as for national reasons, at a public
luncheon given by the Irish Literary Society, and a few days after the
reading of this paper, a neighbour of mine in Mayo wrote to me, saying
that a friend of hers desired to make my acquaintance. It was natural
to suppose that it could not be any one but some tiresome woman, and
up went my nose. No, it isn't a woman; it is a priest. My nose went up
still higher. Father Finlay, she said, and I was at once overjoyed,
for I had long desired to make Father Tom's acquaintance. But it was
not to Father Tom, but to his brother Peter that she proposed to
introduce me. A much superior person, she said, a man of great
learning who has lived in Rome many years and speaks Latin.

As well as he should be able to speak Irish, I clamoured.

You will like him much better than the agriculturist, she answered
earnestly.

It did not seem at all sure to me that she was right; but, not wishing
to lose a chance of winning friends for the Irish language, I
accompanied her somewhat reluctantly to the Jesuit College in
Milltown.

A curious and absurd little meeting it was; myself producing all my
arguments, trying to convince the Jesuit with them, and the Jesuit
taking up a different position, and the lady listening to our
wearisome talk with long patience. At last it struck me that Dante
must be boring her prodigiously, and getting up to go I spoke about
trains.

Father Peter accompanied us to the College gate, and on the way there
he asked me if I would give the paper that I had read at the luncheon
for publication in their review.

But I thought your brother was the editor?

He is, Peter answered, but that doesn't make any difference.

As I did not know Tom, the paper went to Peter, and it was published
in the _New Ireland Review_. My contribution did not, however, seem to
bring me any nearer Father Tom. He did not write to me about it, nor
did he write asking me to contribute again; and when I came to live in
Dublin, though I heard everybody speaking of him, no one offered to
introduce us--not even Peter, whom I often met in the streets and once
in the house where the young lady who had introduced us lodged. No one
seemed willing to undertake the risk of introducing me to Tom, and the
mystery so heightened my desire of Tom's acquaintance that one day I
invited Peter to walk round Stephen's Green with me, in the hope that
he might say, Let's call on Tom. But at every step my aversion from
Peter increased, without ever prompting the thought that I might
dislike Tom equally. Peter Finlay is not an attractive name; there
seems to be a little snivel in it, but Tom is a fine, robust name, and
it goes well with Finlay; and all that I had heard about him had
excited my curiosity. My friends were his friends, and they spoke of
him as of a cryptogram which nobody could decipher, and this had set
me wondering if I should succeed where others had failed, till at last
the ridiculous superstition glided into my mind that Father Tom looked
upon me as a dangerous person, one to be avoided--which was tantamount
to the belief that Father Tom lacked courage, that he was afraid of
me, as absurd a thought as ever strayed into a man's head. But human
nature is such that we seek an explanation in every accident.

One day AE stopped to speak to somebody in Merrion Street. Turning
suddenly, he said: Let me introduce you to Father Tom Finlay. I felt a
look of pleasure come into my face, and I knew myself at once to be in
sympathy with this long-bodied man, fleshy everywhere--hands, paunch,
calves, thighs, forearm, and neck. I liked the russet-coloured face,
withered like an apple, the small, bright, affectionate eyes, the
insignificant nose, the short grey hair. I liked his speech--simple,
direct, and intimate, and his rough clothes. I was whirled away into
admiration of Father Tom, and for the next few days thought of nothing
but when I should see him again. A few days after, seeing him coming
towards me, hurrying along on his short legs (one cannot imagine
Father Tom strolling), I tried to summon courage to speak to him. He
passed, saluting me, lifting his hat with a smile in his little
eyes--a smile which passed rapidly. One sees that his salute and his
smile are a mere formality. So I nearly let him pass me, but summoning
all my courage at the last moment I called to him, and he stopped at
once, like one ready to render a service to whoever required one.

I thought of writing to you, Father Tom, about a matter which has been
troubling me; but refrained. On consideration it seemed too absurd.

Father Tom waited for me to continue, but my courage forsook me
suddenly, and I began to speak about other things. Father Tom listened
to Gaelic League propaganda with kindness and deference; and it was
not till I was about to bid him goodbye that he said:

But what was the matter to which you alluded in the beginning of our
conversation? You said you wished to consult me upon something.

Well, it is so stupid that I am afraid to tell you.

I shall be glad if you will tell me, he answered, taking me into his
confidence; and I told him that I had been down at the _Freeman_
office to ask the editor if he would publish a letter from me.

But, Father Tom, what I'm going to say is absurd.

Father Tom smiled encouragingly; his smile seemed to say, Nothing you
can say is absurd.

Well, it doesn't seem to me that people are dancing enough in Ireland.

You mean there isn't enough amusement in Ireland? I quite agree with
you.

It's a relief to find oneself in agreement with somebody, especially
with you, Father Tom. Father Tom smiled amiably, and then, becoming
suddenly serious, I said, Ever since I've been here I find myself up
against somebody or something, and I told him about the touring
company, admitting that perhaps the League did not find itself
justified in incurring any further expenses. But our project for _The
Arabian Nights_ translation--could anything be more inoffensive--yet
the _Freeman_--What is one to do?

One mustn't pay any attention to criticism. The best way is to go on
doing what one has to do. In these words Father Tom seemed to reveal
himself a little, and we talked about the cross-road dances. He said
he would speak on the subject; and he did, astonishing the editor of
the _Freeman_, and, when I next ran across Father Tom, he told me he
had just come back from his holidays in Donegal, where he had attended
a gathering of young people--the young girls came with their mothers
and went home with them after the dance. These words were spoken with
a certain fat unction, a certain gross moral satisfaction which did
not seem like Father Tom, and I was much inclined to tell him that to
dance under the eye of a priest and be taken home by one's mother must
seem a somewhat trite amusement to a healthy country girl, unless,
indeed, the Irish people experience little passion in their courtships
or their marriages. These opinions were, however, not vented, and we
walked on side by side till the silence became painful, and, to
interrupt it, Father Tom asked if I had seen Peter lately.

Peter? I answered. What Peter? For I had completely forgotten him.
Father Tom answered, My brother, and I said, No, I haven't seen him
this long while, and we walked on, I listening to Tom with half my
mind, the other half meditating on the difference between the two
brothers. Whereas Peter seemed to me to be sunk in the Order, Father
Tom seemed to have struck out and saved himself. It was possible to
imagine Peter reading the _Exercises of St Ignatius_, and by their
help quelling all original speculation regarding the value of life and
death; for he that reads often of the beatific faces in Heaven, and
the flames that lick up the entrails of the damned without ever
consuming them, is not troubled with doubt that perhaps, after all,
the flower in the grass, the cloud in the sky, and his own beating
heart may be parcel of Divinity. Tom must have studied these
_Exercises_ too, but it would seem that they had influenced Peter more
deeply, and, thinking of Peter again, it seemed to me that to them
might be fairly attributed the dryness and the angularity of mind that
I observed in him. But how was it that these _Exercises_ passed so
lightly over Tom's mind? For it was difficult to think he had ever
been tempted by pantheism. He has had his temptations, like all of us,
but pantheism was not one of them, and, on thinking the matter out,
the conclusion was forced upon me that he had escaped from the
influences of the _Exercises_ by throwing himself into all manners and
kinds of work. He is the busiest man in Ireland--on every Board,
pushing the wheel of education and industry, the editor of a review,
the author of innumerable text-books, a friend to those who need a
friend, finding time somehow for everybody and everything, and himself
full of good humour and kindness, outspoken and impetuous, a keen
intellect, a ready and incisive speaker, a politician at heart, who,
if he had been one actually, would have led his own party and not been
led by it.

One has to think for a while to discover some trace of the discipline
of the Order in him. If he were a secular priest he would not bow so
elaborately perhaps, nor wear so enigmatic a smile in his eyes. Father
Tom is a little conscious of _his_ intellectual superiority, I think.
He is looked upon as a mystery by many people, and perhaps is a little
eccentric. Intelligence and moral courage are eccentricities in the
Irish character, and one would not look for them in a Jesuit priest.
It seems to me that I understand him, but one may understand without
being able to interpret, and to write Father Tom's _Apology_ would
require the genius of Robert Browning. He could write his own
_Apology_, and if he set himself to the task he would produce a book
much more interesting than Newman's. But Father Tom would not care to
write about himself unless he wrote quite sincerely, and it would be
necessary to tell the waverings that preceded his decision to become a
Jesuit. He must have known that by joining the Order he risked losing
his personality, the chief business of the Order being to blot out
personality. Now, how was this problem solved by Father Tom? Did the
Order present such an irresistible attraction to his imagination that
he resolved to risk himself in the Order? Or did he know himself to be
so strong that he would be able to survive the discipline to which he
would have to submit? If he wrote his _Apology_ he would have to tell
us whether he does things because he likes to do things efficiently,
or because he thinks it right they should be done. This chapter should
be especially interesting, and the one in which Father Tom would
speculate on the relation of his soul to his intelligence! He values
his intelligence--indeed, I think he prides himself on it. As a priest
he would have to place his soul above his intelligence, and he would
do this very skilfully.... But oneself is a dangerous subject for a
priest to write about, and perhaps Father Tom avoids the subject,
foreseeing the several difficulties that would confront him before he
had gone very far. Once his pen was set going, however, he would not
abandon his work, and any misunderstanding which might arise out of
his _Apology_ would revert to the co-operative movement of which he is
so able an advocate. All the same, I reflected, it's a pity that so
delightful an intelligence should be wasted on agriculture, and I
thought how I might ensnare Father Tom's literary instincts.

I've been thinking, Father Tom, I said, in our next walk, about the
book you told me you once wished to write--_The Psychology of
Religion_. A more interesting subject I cannot imagine, or one more
suited to your genius, and I am full of hope that you will write that
book.

Father Tom muttered a little to himself, and I think I heard him say
that there was more important work to be done in Ireland.

What work?

Father Tom did not seem to like being questioned, and when I pressed
him for an answer, he spoke of the regeneration of the countryside.

Mere agriculture, that anybody can do; but this book would be
yourself, and Ireland is without ideas and literary ideals. We would
prefer your book to agriculture, and you must write it. And ... I
wonder how it is that you have never written a book; you are full of
literary interests.

Then, very coquettishly, Father Tom admitted that he had once written
a novel.

A novel! You must let me see it. And I stared at him nervously,
frightened lest he might refuse.

I don't think it would interest you.

Oh, but it would. I was afraid to say how much it would interest
me--more it seemed to me than any novel by Balzac or Turgenev, for it
would reveal Father Tom to me. However inadequate the words might be,
I should be able to see the man behind them; and I pleaded for the
book all the way to the College in Stephen's Green.

I shall have to go upstairs to my bedroom to fetch it.

I'll wait. And I waited in the hall, saying to myself, Something will
prevent him from giving it to me. He may stop to think on the stairs,
or, overtaken by a sudden scruple, he may go to Father Delany's room
to ask his advice. Father Delany may say, Perhaps it will be better
not to lend him the book. If that happens he will have to obey his
Superior. So did my thoughts wander till he appeared on the staircase
with the book in his hand--a repellent-looking book, bound in red
boards, which I grasped eagerly, and stopped under a lamp to examine.
The print seemed as uninviting as tin-tacks, but a book cannot be read
under a street lamp and in the rain, so I slipped the volume into my
overcoat and hurried home.

AE, I've discovered a novel by a well-known Irishman--a friend of
yours.

Have I read it?

I don't think so; you'd have spoken about it to me if you had. You'll
never guess--the most unlikely man in Ireland.

The most unlikely man in Ireland to have written a novel? AE answered.
Then it must be Plunkett.

You're near it.

Anderson?

No.

Father Tom?

I nodded, very proud of myself at having found out something about
Father Tom that AE did not know.

If Father Tom has written a novel I think I shall be able to read the
man behind the words.

Just what I said to myself as I came along the Green, and I watched AE
reading.

With a cast-iron style like that, a man has nothing to fear from the
prying eyes, and he handed the book back to me.

But let us, I replied, discover the story that he has to tell.

AE looked through some pages and said, There seems to be an
insurrection going on somewhere; the soldiers have arrived, and are
surrounding a castle in the moonlight. AE always finds something to
say about a book, even if it be in cast-iron, and I loved him better
than before, when he said, Father Tom loves Ireland. That Father Tom's
love of Ireland should have penetrated his cast-iron style mitigated
my disappointment.

I wonder why he lent me the book?

Possibly to prevent you worrying him any more to write _The Psychology
of Religion_.

Every time I go for a bicycle ride with him, or a walk, I am at him
about that book--but it's no use.

A cloud appeared in AE's face. He suspects Father Tom, I said to
myself, of angling for my soul; and, to tease AE, I told him that I
often spent my evenings talking to Father Tom, in his bedroom, on
literary subjects, and that I had arranged with him for the
publication of several short stories in the _New Ireland Review_.

These stories are to be translated into Irish by Taidgh O'Donoghue,
and Father Tom will probably get the book accepted as a text-book by
the Intermediate Board of Education.

But do you think that it was to write these stories that you came from
England?

Well, for what other purpose do you think I came? And to what better
purpose can a man's energy be devoted, and his talents, than the
resuscitation of his country's language? What do you think I came for?

I hoped that you would do in Ireland what Voltaire did in France,
that, whenever Walsh or Logue said something stupid in the papers, you
would just reply to them in some sharp cutting letter, showing them up
in the most ridiculous light, terrifying them into silence.

I'm afraid you were mistaken if you thought that I came to Ireland on
any enterprise so trivial. I came to give back to Ireland her
language.

But what use will her language be to Ireland if she is not granted the
right to think?

The filing of theological fetters will be a task for the next
generation.

Oh, Moore, Moore, Moore! he muttered, in his chimney-corner. And then,
seeing him disappointed, the temptation to tread on his corns overcame
me.

Of what avail, I asked, are our ideas if they be expressed in a
worn-out language? Moreover, it is not ideas that we are seeking. An
idea is so impersonal; it is yours today and the whole world's
tomorrow. We would isolate Ireland from what you call ideas, from all
European influence; we believe that art will arise in Ireland if we
segregate Ireland, and the language will enable us to do that.

However fast the language movement might progress, AE answered,
Ireland will not be an Irish-speaking country for the next fifty or
sixty years, and a hundred years will have to pass before literature
will begin in Ireland; besides, you can't have literature without
ideas.

The only time Ireland had a literature was when she had no ideas--in
the eighth and ninth centuries.

Oh, Moore, Moore, Moore!

The bell rang, and we wondered who the visitor might be. Walter
Osborne? John Eglinton? Hughes? Which of our friends? Edward, by all
that's holy! We were surprised and pleased to see him, for Edward
lives outside my ring of friends; they meet him in the streets, and he
is glad to stand and talk with them at the kerb, if the wind be not
blowing too sharply. Thinking, therefore, that he had for a wonder
yielded to a desire to go out to talk to somebody, my welcome was
affectionate. But, alas! he had come to speak to me on some Gaelic
League business, an opera that somebody had written, and hoped he was
not interrupting our conversation.

I cried, Good Heaven! and handed him the cigar-box, and we began to
talk about Yeats, and when we could find nothing more to say about
either his mistakes or his genius, AE spoke to us about Plunkett's
ideas, and when these were exhausted Hyde's mistakes were discussed
with passion by Edward and me. We wanted a forward policy.

If the Boers, I said, had only pressed forward after their first
victories--

I beg your pardon, Edward suddenly interrupted, but have either of you
heard the news? The Boers seem to have brought it off this time, and
he told us that Lord Methuen and fifteen hundred troops had been
captured by the Boers.

But what you say can't be true. Edward. You are joking.

No, I'm not. It is all in the evening papers.

And you come here to talk Gaelic League business, forgetful of the
greatest event that has happened since Thermopylae. If the Boers
should win after all!

It will be the same in the end, only prolonging the war.

His words shocked me, and immediately the conviction overpowered me
that nothing would be the same again, and I was lifted suddenly out of
my ordinary senses. The walls about me seemed to recede, and myself to
be transported ineffably above a dim plain rolling on and on till it
mingled with the sky. An encampment was there in a hallowed light, and
one face, stern and strong, yet gentle, was taken by me for the face
of the Eternal Good, upreared after combat with the Eternal Evil. What
I saw was a symbol of a guiding Providence in the world. There is one,
there is one! I exclaimed. It is about me and in me. And all the night
long I heard as the deaf hear, and answered as the dumb answer. A
night of fierce exultations and prolonged joys murmuring through the
darkness like a river. For how can it be otherwise? I cried, starting
up in bed. Yet I believed this many a year that all was blind chance.
And I fell back and lay like one consumed by a secret fire. Life
seemed to have no more for giving, and I cried out: It is terrible to
feel things so violently. It were better to pass through life quietly
like Edward; and on these words, or soon after, I must have dropped
away into sleep.




X


One day, while walking home with John Eglinton from Professor
Dowden's, I mentioned that I was thinking of writing a volume of short
stories about Irish life.

Like Turgenev's _Tales of a Sportsman_? And the face that would be
ugly if unlighted by the intelligence lit up. And you will require how
many stories to make the volume?

Nine, ten, or a dozen--a year's work.

Do you think you'll be able to find subjects all the while?

The question kindled my vanity, and I answered: Turgenev wrote _The
Tales of a Sportsman_ in Paris, and sent them to a Russian newspaper
week by week. Maupassant contributed two stories a week to the _Gil
Bias_, but it does not follow that because Maupassant and Turgenev
were always able to find new subjects I shall, and Father Tom
restricting the zone of my stories. The stories I am thinking of are
longer than Maupassant's.

As soon as I had bidden him goodbye my thoughts went away in search of
subjects, and before many steps were taken I remembered Dick Lennox,
the fat man in _A Mummer's Wife_, He used to lodge in a factory-town
in Lancashire in the house of a maiden lady, and one day she opened a
drawer and showed him her wedding-gown. It had never gone to church,
but how she had lost her swain it was impossible to remember--Dick
Lennox may never have told me--but the wedding-gown I remembered, and
a new story was woven round it that same evening, and it pleased
Father Tom so much that he wished to publish the English text with the
Irish.

The publication of the English text seemed to me to render useless the
publication of the story, and Father Tom failed to persuade me; and
only Taidgh O'Donoghue's translation appeared in the _New Ireland
Review_--a beautiful translation, if I can judge it from Rolleston's
retranslation, full of exquisite little turns of phrase. Kuno
Meyer--and who knows better?--tells me that the Irish text exhales the
folk-flavour that I sought for and missed, and Hyde, who will never
take sides on any subject, admits that the Irish version gives him
more pleasure, for though I often meet good English, it is seldom I
come across a good piece of Irish. _Alms-giving_ and _The Clerk's
Quest_ were published subsequently in the _New Ireland Review_, and
both pleased Father Tom. And it was not till the fourth month that I
began to feel the restrictions of the _New Ireland Review_. I had
plenty of subjects in stock, but not one that I thought Father Tom
would think suitable. _Home Sickness_ might go into the _Review_, but
somehow, I could not see it included in a school-book--_The Exile_
still less, and the worst of it was that _The Exile_ was nearly
written; it had taken a fortnight to write--a longish short story, and
a downright good subject for narrative, if I may say so without
impertinence. And it was for no fault in the writing that Father Tom
rejected it. He liked the story, and he liked _Home Sickness_ even
better than _The Exile_, but he made me feel that it could hardly be
included in a collection of stories which he could recommend as a
text-book for the Intermediate.

Yes, I answered, I quite see. Stories about things, without moral or
literary tendencies--stories like Turgenev's, of the horse that is
stolen and recovered again, so the owner thinks at first, but after a
little while he begins to think the horse less wonderful than the
horse he lost, and the uncertainty preys upon his mind to such an
extent that he ends by shooting the horse.

That is what we want--a wonderful story, and one excellently well
suited to a text-book, for all children love horses; it is one of
their first interests.

But my mind seemed closed for the time being to the stories suitable
to a text-book, and wide open to those that would lead me away from
Father Tom and the _New Ireland Review_. And this was a grief to me,
for I knew full well that my contributions to the _New Ireland Review_
were the link that bound me to my friend, if he will allow me to call
him friend. We shall not meet again, and if we do, of what use? We are
like ships; all and sundry have destinies and destinations. There is
very little Nietzsche in me, but this much of him I remember, that we
must pursue our courses valiantly, come what may. Father Tom and I had
lain side by side in harbour for a while, but the magnetism of the
ocean drew me, and I continued to write, feeling all the while that my
stories were drawing me away from Catholic Ireland.

Story followed story, each coming into my mind before the story on the
blotting pad was finished, and each suggested by something seen or
something heard. When I was called to Castlebar to fulfil the office
of High Sheriff, Father Lyons showed me the theatre he had built, and
it was AE, I think, who told me that he knew a priest who lived in the
great waste lying between Crossmalina and Belmullet. He once liked
reading, but he now spent his evenings knitting. I can see your
priest, I cried, and wrote _The Playhouse in the Waste_, and _A Letter
to Rome_. A little wreath of stories was woven one evening at the Moat
House out of the gossip of a maid who was prone to relate the whole
countryside, and she did this so well that she seemed to be relating a
village Odyssey, incident following incident with bewildering
prodigality. To omit any seemed a losing. But in writing, order and
sequence are necessary, and all I could make use of were the four
little tales entitled _Some Parishioners_. It is a pity that more time
was not spent on the writing of them, but the English language was
still abhorrent to me; and my text was looked upon by me as a mere
foundation for an Irish one, and the stories might never have been
finished, or not finished at the time, for I could trust Taidgh
O'Donoghue to fill up the ruts for me, if it had not been for Stella's
interest in them. Part of our bargain was that I should read them to
her in the drawing-room in the Moat House after dinner, and her mind
being one of those large tidy minds that can find no pleasure in
broken stories or harsh or incomplete sentences, I got from her the
advice I needed--to put the finishing hand to the stories before
sending them to Taidgh.

Whose task, she said, will be much lightened thereby; badly
constructed sentences are difficult to translate.

We stood by the bridge, looking into the moat, and hearing water
faintly trickling through the summer tangle of flowering weeds, we
fetched a pole and measured four or five feet of mud; below the mud
was a flagged bottom, which went far to prove that Stella was right in
her surmise that the moat had once been used as a breeding place for
trout.

But if trout had been bred in the moat, trout could be bred in it
again, and Stella was at last persuaded that the cleansing of the moat
would be a pleasant summer's work for the villagers, and that we
should take great interest in the laying down of the spawn and in
netting the fish when they had grown to half a pound. Trout grew to
that size in a piscina, and talking of the pleasure of the netting,
she trailing the net on one side of the stream and I on the other, we
passed round the house into the rich garden she had planted.

I think you care more for weeds than for flowers, she said, her little
hardship being my lack of interest in her garden, for a garden was
part of her instinct as much as her painting; and my clearest
remembrance of her is a tall figure in the evening light moving
through flower-beds.

In front of us was a great sweeping corn-field covering several acres,
rare in Ireland, where all the country is grass; and on the other side
the Valley of the Liffey extended mile after mile, blue hills
gathering the landscape up into its rest at last. Our eyes sought for
Rathfarnham, four or five miles away, and we spoke of the two rivers,
the Liffey and the Dodder, and of the herdsmen that followed the
cattle. Ireland was new to us both, almost as new to me as it was to
her, and we were interested in the country we had come to live in, she
more playfully and more humanely than I, being a painter, whereas the
Boer War still continued to vex me, driving me forward relentlessly,
and making me a tiresome companion at times. Stella's cordial unmoral
appreciation of Ireland was a great help to me, and her fine ear for
idiom drew my attention to the beauty of peasant speech in our walks
through the Valley of the Liffey, her eyes measuring the landscape all
the while, noting the shapely trees and the lonely farmhouses. She and
Florence often spent nights together in the Sussex woods, and now,
inspired by the summer-time, she began to speak to me of a night out
upon the mountain; and one evening we drove to the end of the mountain
road, and walked half a mile with our rugs and lay down under the
ruins of the Hell Fire Club. Hard by is the gaunt ruin of an
unfinished castle, begun with reckless extravagance--by whom? Names
slip away, but the sight of the ruin against the hillside remains
distinct.

And for two long summers we drove and walked through these
neighbourhoods. Coming one day upon a picturesque farmhouse, and
wondering who the folk might be that lived within walls as strong as a
fortress, we wandered round the house, looking into the great areas.
The farmer introduced us to his daughter, a pretty red-headed girl
about twenty, who said they were just going to sit down to tea, and
would we join them? Among other things, they spoke of a cousin from
America who was coming to Ireland for a rest; he had been all through
Cuba, reporting the war for the American papers. He, too, seemed
typical of Ireland, and before we reached the Moat House I had begun
to see him strolling about Tara, dreaming of Ireland's past, till he
fell in love with the farmer's pretty daughter, sensual love bridging
over, for a while, intellectual differences. And this story seeming
to me representative of Irish life, I decided to include it in the
collection, though in length it did not correspond with the others.
Each story in the volume entitled _The Unfilled Field_ had helped me
to understand my own country, but it was while writing _The Wild
Goose_ that it occurred to me for the first time that, it being
impossible to enjoy independence of body and soul in Ireland, the
thought of every brave-hearted boy is to cry, Now, off with my coat so
that I may earn five pounds to take me out of the country.

Every race gets the religion it deserves, I said, and only as
policemen, pugilists, and priests have they succeeded, with here and
there a successful lawyer. The theory of the germ cell floated into my
mind: It may be that Nature did not intend them to advance beyond the
stage of the herdsmen--the finest in the world! I cried, rising from
the composition of _The Wild Goose_. They were that in the beginning,
when the greater part of Ireland was forest and marsh, with great
pasture lands through which long herds of cattle wandered from dawn to
evening, watched over by barbarous men in kilts with terrible dogs;
and since those days we have lost the civilisation that obtained in
the monasteries. We have declined in everything except our cattle, and
our herdsmen, the finest in the world, divining the steak in the
bullock with the same certainty as the Greek divined the statue in the
block of marble.

My discovery produced in me a kind of rapture, and I sat looking at my
Monet for a long while, thinking that perhaps, after all, it is
unnecessary for a race to produce pictures or literature or sculpture
or music, for to do one thing extremely well justifies the existence
of a race, and the beef-steaks that Ireland produces justify
Ireland--in a way, for though the Irish have produced the finest
steaks, they have never invented a sauce for the steak; and I fell to
thinking that if some meditative herdsman, while leaning over a gate,
had been inspired to compose a sauce whereby the steak might be eaten
with relish, the Irish race would be able to hold up its head in the
world. One finds excuses always for one's country's shortcomings, and
it pleased me to think that if none had imagined _Sauce Barnaise_ it
was because his attention was always needed to keep the cattle from
straying. There were wolves in Ireland always lurking round the herd,
ready to separate a heifer or a calf from the protection of the bulls.
But to find an excuse for the monks dwelling in commodious monasteries
is more difficult. The talk of the monks must have been frequently
about the pleasures of the table, yet none was inspired to go to the
Prior with the sacred word _Barnaise_ upon his lips. That word would
have secured an immortality as secure as Chateaubriand, who is read no
more, but is eaten every day. The intellect perishes, but the belly is
always with us. Or may we acquit the race of lack of imagination, and
lay the blame upon the Irish language, which is, perhaps, too harsh
and bitter for such a buttery word as _Barnaise_? And could a
language in which there is no butter be capable of inventing a
succulent sauce? It may be that the Irish language was intended for
the sale of bullocks--a language that has never been to school, as
John Eglinton once said. If it had only fled to the kitchen one might
forgive it for having played truant--the Irish language, a language
that has never been spoken in a drawing-room, only in rude towers, and
very like those towers are the blocks of rough sound that a Gaelic
speaker hurls at his audience when he speaks. Whereas one can hardly
imagine any other language but French being spoken along the beautiful
winding roads of France, lined with poplar-trees, and about the
hillsides dotted with red-tiled roofs, and behind the pierced green
shutters, which enchant us when we see them as the train moves on
towards Paris from Amiens. The French language is implicit in the
balconies, lanterns, _perrons_, that we see as the train nears Paris,
and still more implicit in the high-pitched roofs of the chateau of
Fontainebleau when _allmes_ and _alltes_ came naturally into
conversation. In a trice we leave the Court of Louis XV for a fte at
Melun, and there, though the past tenses are no longer in use, the
language still sparkles; it foams and goes to the head, a lovely
language, very like champagne. True that the English language has
never been much in the kitchen nor in the vineyard, but it has been
spoken in the dales and along the downs, and there is a finer breeze
in it than there is in French, and a bite in it like Elizabethan
ale--all the same, a declining language; thee and thou have been lost
beyond hope of restoration, and many words that I remember in common
use are now nearly archaic; a language wearied with child-bearing, and
I pondered the endless poetry of England, and admitted English
literature to be the most beautiful, Boer War or no Boer War. Whereas
the Irish language, notwithstanding its declensions and its
grammatical use of thee and thou, has failed. As Bergin said once to
me, We did nothing with it when we had it. By this, did he mean that
the Irish race was never destined to rise above the herdsman? And if
he did, his instinctive judgment is important; it shows that we know
ourselves. We see, I cried, the rump-steak in the animal as clearly as
the Greek saw the statue in the marble, and the epigram pleased me so
much that I felt I must go out at once to collogue with somebody.

But it was eleven o'clock, and no one is available at that hour but
dear Edward; a few hundred yards are as nothing to one with a passion
for literary conversation; and away I went down Ely Place, across
Merrion Row, through Merrion Street, and as soon as the corner of
Clare Street was turned, I began to look out for the light above the
tobacconist's shop. The light was there! My heart was as faint as a
lover's, and the serenade which I used to beguile him down from his
books rose to my lips. He will only answer to this one, or to a
motive from _The Ring_. And it is necessary to whistle very loudly,
for the trams make a great deal of noise, and Edward sometimes dozes
on the sofa.

On the other side is a public-house, and the serenading of Edward
draws comments from the topers as they go away wiping their mouths.
One has to choose a quiet moment between the trams; and when the
serenade has been whistled twice, the light of Edward's candle
appears, coming very slowly down the stairs, and there he is in the
doorway, if anything larger than life, in the voluminous grey
trousers, and over his shoulders a buff jacket which he wears in the
evening. Two short flights of stairs, and we are in his room. It never
changes--the same litter from day to day, from year to year, the same
old and broken mahogany furniture, the same musty wallpaper, dusty
manuscripts lying about in heaps, and many dusty books. If one likes a
man one likes his habits, and never do I go into Edward's room without
admiring the old prints that he tacks on the wall, or looking through
the books on the great round table, or admiring the little sofa
between the round table and the Japanese screen, which Edward bought
for a few shillings down on the quays--a torn, dusty, ragged screen,
but serviceable enough; it keeps out the draught; and Edward is
especially susceptible to draughts, the very slightest will give him a
cold. Between the folds of the screen we find a small harmonium of
about three octaves, and on it a score of Palestrina. As well might
one try to play the Mass upon a flute, and one can only think that it
serves to give the keynote to a choir-boy. On the table is a
candlestick made out of white tin, designed probably by Edward
himself, for it holds four candles. He prefers candles for reading,
but he snuffs them when I enter and lights the gas, offers me a cigar,
refills his churchwarden, and closes his book.

What book are you reading, Edward?

I am reading Ruskin's _Modern Painters_, but it is very long and
rather prosy, and the fifth volume is inexpressibly tedious. It
doesn't seem to me that I shall ever get through it.

But if it doesn't interest you why do you read it?

Oh, I don't like to leave a book.

You prefer reading a tiresome book to my conversation.

But you live so far away.

How far, Edward? Five hundred yards.

And after dinner I like to get home to my pipe. You see, I'm at
business all day; I've business relations with a great number of
people. Our lives aren't the same; and I assure you that in the
evening a quiet hour is a luxury to me.

But how can you find business to do all day? There is Mass in the
morning and the Angelus at twelve?

I know what all that kind of talk is worth. And Edward puffed
sullenly at his churchwarden while I assured him that I was thinking
of his play.

All this public business, I said, leaves very little time for your
work.

In the afternoon between four and seven I get a couple of hours.
Yesterday I had a run; I got off thirty lines, but today I'm stuck
again, and shall have to invent something to get one of the characters
off the stage naturally. You see, I'm still in the pencil stage. In
about two years I shall be in ink, and then I'll give you the play to
read.

As my help would not be needed for the next two years, it seemed to me
that I might speak of _The Wild Goose_, and Edward listened, giving
his whole mind to the story.

But why, he asked, should Ned Carmody object to his wife suckling her
baby?

He fears that it might spoil her figure.

Is that so? I didn't know. And he puffed at his pipe in silence. But
do you think Ned Carmody would bother?

You think it introduces a streak of Sir Frederick Leighton? But who
can say that an aesthetic aspiration may not break out even in a Celt,
who is but a herdsman, the finest in the world, and I launched my
epigram. But it met with no response. Edward's face deepened into
monumental solemnity, and I understood that the proposition that the
Irish race was not destined to rise above the herdsman was too
disagreeable to be entertained. Shutting our eyes to facts will not
change the facts.

In the eighth and ninth centuries--

The decline of art was coincident with the union of the Irish Church
with Rome; till then Ireland was a Protestant country.

A Protestant country! St Patrick a Protestant!

Protestant in the sense that he merely preached Christianity, and the
Irish Church was Protestant up to the eleventh or twelfth century; I
don't know the exact date. I crossed the room to get myself another
cigar; and returned, muttering something about a peasant people that
had never risen out of the vague emotions of the clan.

We were talking about a very interesting question--that as soon as the
Irish Church became united to Rome, art declined in Ireland. That
isn't a matter of opinion, but of fact.

Edward spoke of the Penal Laws.

But the Penal Laws are not hereditary, like syphilis, and Father Tom
admits that Irish Catholics have written very little.

Edward was curious to hear if I still went for bicycle rides in the
country with Father Tom, and smoked cigarettes with him in his
bedroom.

What can it matter how intimate my relations may or may not be with
Father Tom? We are talking now on a serious subject, Edward, and I was
about to tell you, when you interrupted me, that one evening, as I was
walking round the green with Father Tom, I said to him: It is strange
that Catholics have written so little in Ireland. It is, indeed, he
answered, and Maynooth is a case in point; after a hundred years of
education it has not succeeded in producing a book of any value, not
even a theological work.

I don't know that Father Tom has produced anything very wonderful
himself.

Very likely he hasn't. Father Tom's lack of original literary
inspiration is a matter of no importance to any one except to Father
Tom. The question before us is, Which is at fault--the race or
Catholicism?

Edward would not admit that it could be Catholicism.

Don't you think that yourself have suffered? I said, as I went down
the stairs. You burnt a volume of poems, and if Father Tom had not
abandoned _The Psychology of Religion_ he would have found himself up
against half a dozen heresies before he had written fifty pages.

It seemed to me that I was on the threshold of a great discovery.




XI


Highly favoured, indeed, am I among authors, I said, pushing open the
wicket; but before many turns had been taken up and down the
greensward, I began to fear that my reading had been too particular.
My heart sank at the prospect of the years I should have to spend in
the National Library, for a knowledge of all the literature of the
world was necessary for the writing of the article I had in my mind.
Then with a rising heart I remembered that I could engage the services
of some poor scholar--John Eglinton knew for certain many who had read
everything without having learnt to make use of their learning. My
quickest way will be to lay the nose of one of these fellows on the
scent; he will run it through many literatures, and with the results
of his reading before me I shall be able to deal Catholicism such a
blow as has not been dealt since the Reformation.

A light breeze rustled the lilacs, and I stood for a long time,
forgetful of my idea, seeking within the long, pointed leaves for the
blossom breaking into purple and white, thinking that the tranquil
little path under the bushes was just the one Peter would choose for
philosophic meditation; but, feeling that the sunlight beguiled my
mind into thought, I wandered round the garden, still thinking, but
noticing all the while the changes that had come into it within the
last few days. The great ash by the garden gate seems to be making
some progress. The catkins are gone, and in about three weeks the
plumy foliage will be fluttering in the light breezes of the
summer-time. The laburnum blossom is still enclosed in grey-green ears
about the size of a caterpillar, I added, with here and there a spot
of yellow. And pondering on Nature's unending miracles, I walked under
the hawthorns, stopping, of course, to admire the hard little leaves
like the medals that Catholics wear, I said, on my way to the corner
where the Solomon-seal flourishes year after year, and the blooms of
the everlasting pea creep up the wall nine or ten feet, to the level
of the street, hard by the rosemary, which should perfume the whole
garden, but the smoke from Plunkett's chimney robs the flowers of
their perfume. The little blossom freckling the dark green spiky
foliage held me at gaze. Above the rosemary is thick ivy; it was
clipped close a few years ago, but it is again swarming up the wall,
and Gogarty, the arch-mocker, the author of all the jokes that enable
us to live in Dublin--Gogarty, the author of the Limericks of the
Golden Age, the youngest of my friends, full in the face, with a smile
in his eyes and always a witticism on his lips, overflowing with
quotation, called yesterday to ask me to send a man with a shears,
saying, Your ivy is threatening my slates. A survival of the Bardic
Age he is, reciting whole ballads to me when we go for walks; and when
I tell him my great discovery he will say, Sparrows and sweet-peas are
as incompatible as Literature and Dogma; and you will cut the ivy,
won't you?

And wandering across my greensward, I came to my apple-trees, now in
bridal attire; not a petal yet fallen, but tomorrow or the day after
the grass will be covered with them, I said. Gogarty told me yesterday
how the poet rose early to see the daisy open. He describes himself
a-kneeling always till it unclosed was upon the soft, sweet, small
grass. But if he liked the grass so much, why did he love the daisy?
For if sparrows and sweet-peas are incompatible, it may be said with
equal truth that the daisy is the grass's natural enemy; and worse
than daisies are dandelions. A few still remain, though poison was
poured upon them last year. My flower-beds are a sad spectacle;
wallflowers straggling--sad are they as Plunkett's beard. Sweet-peas
once grew there; the first year a tall hedge sprung up, despite the
College of Science; for the soil was almost virgin then, and it sent
forth plenty of canterbury bells, columbine, poppies, and larkspur;
but year by year my flowers have died, and the garden will now grow
only a few lilies and pinks, carnations, larkspur, poppies. At that
moment a smut fell across my knuckles, and, looking up, I saw a great
black cloud issuing from the chimney of the College of Science. Isn't
it a poor thing that all my flowers should die, so that a few students
should be allowed the privilege of burning their eyelids for the sake
of Ireland?

My garden is but a rood, and the only beauty it can boast of is its
grass and its apple-trees--one tree as large as a house, under whose
boughs I might dine in the summer-time were it not for the smuts from
Plunkett's chimney. One of its great boughs is dying, and will have to
be cut away lest it should poison the rest of the tree. My garden is
but a rood, and following the walk round the square of glad grass, I
am back again in a few minutes, admiring tall bushes flourishing over
the high wall, and, as if to greet me, the robin sings the little
roundelay that he utters all the year--a saucy little bird that will
take bread from my hand in winter, but now it is easy to see he is
thinking of his mate, whose nest is in the great tangle of
traveller's-joy that covers the southern wall, somewhere near the bush
where a thrust is sitting on her eggs--not so bold a bird as the
robin. My curiosity last year drove her from her eggs; and it will be
well for me to walk the other way.

Now, which will my countrymen choose--Literature or Dogma?

It is difficult to think in a garden where amorous birds are going
hither and thither, so amorous that one cannot but be interested in
them. If one had to think about books, one would choose to think of
Gogarty's extravagances, or Gogarty's remembrances of the poets; and
these would be especially pleasant while a blackbird is singing the
same rich lay that he sang by a lake's edge a thousand years ago. A
blackbird delighted the hermits of old time, those that were poets,
and we are grateful to one for having recorded his pleasure in the
bird's song, and for the adjective that defines it, and to Kuno Meyer,
who discovered the old Irish poem and translated it.

My garden is an enchantment in the spring, and I sit bewitched by the
sunlight and by my idea.

A man of letters goes into a garden with an idea; he and his idea
spend happy days under apple-boughs in the sun; he plays with his idea
as a mother with her child, chasing it about the lilac-bushes;
sometimes the child cries with rage, and the mother cannot pacify her
baby, but, however naughty her baby may be, she never wearies; her
patience is endless, and the patience of a man of letters is endless
too. His idea becomes unmanageable, but he does not weary of it; and
then his idea grows up, just like the child, passing from blue smock
and sash into knickerbockers, in other words into typewriting, and as
every mother looks back upon the days of smocks and sashes, we authors
look back upon the days when our ideas were meditated in a garden
within hearing of amorous sparrows in the ivy, the soft coo--for it is
nearly a coo--of the jackdaw as he passes to some disused chimney
where he nests, the shrill of the starling, and the reiterated little
rigmarole of the chaffinch. The swallows arrive in Dublin in the
middle of May; they fly over my garden in the June evenings, and I
continued to think of them coming hither over the sea--like my
thoughts, I said. And while listening to the breeze in the
apple-boughs, my thoughts drift unconsciously across the centuries to
the beginning of Christian literature. It began well, I said, with the
_Confessions_ of that most sympathetic of saints, Augustine, who was
not all theology, but began his life, and began it well, in free
thought and free love; his mistress and his illegitimate child endear
him to us, and the music of his prose--those beautiful pages where he
and Monica, his mother, stand by a window overlooking the Tiber! We
are all spirit while we read the flight of his soul and Monica's
Godward, each sentence lifting them a little higher till he and she
seem to dissolve before our eyes in white rapture.

I have read that Augustine owed something of the ecstasy of his style
to the Alexandrian mystics--and this is not unlikely, for he came from
Africa and saw the end of paganism and the beginning of
Christianity.... He was Julian's contemporary, a thing which never
struck anybody before. Augustine and Julian--how wonderful! Landor
should have thought of the learned twain as a subject for dialogue, or
Shakespeare might have taken Julian for hero. The ascetic Emperor was
a subject for him ... but I am thinking casually. Shakespeare could
not have done much with Julian. So perhaps it is well that one day the
sudden interruption of his secretary, Ben Jonson, jerked his thoughts
away from Julian, leaving the Emperor for Ibsen--two rather clumsy
dramas, _Emperor and Galilean_, containing, however, many splendid
scenes. But there was more in Julian than the bleak Norwegian could
understand, and Ibsen does little more than follow the bare outline
that history gave him, including, of course, the story of the old
priest sitting on the steps of a fallen temple with a goose in his
lap--the only trace of ancient worship that the Emperor could discover
in the countries he passed through while leading his army against the
Persians.

Were Gogarty here he would tell me the verses in which Swinburne
includes the Emperor's last words; unable to remember them, I loiter,
amused by the paraphrase of the lines from the _Hymn to Proserpine_
that the circumstance of the moment had put into my head:

  Thou hast conquered, O pale Galileo, the world has moved on since thy death,
  We cared hardly tuppence for Leo and on Pius we waste not our breath.

The last line is weak, I said--so weak that I must ask Gogarty to
alter it, but I like The world has moved on since thy death.

I should like Ibsen's Julian better if some reason for the Emperor's
opposition to Christianity were given; a mere caprice for the ancient
divinities is not enough for a philosopher who might have foreseen
the Middle Ages. A vision for him would have been a procession of
monks, and over against them the lights of the Renaissance beginning
among the Tuscan hills. I should like him to have foreseen Borgia. But
which would he have liked--Alexander or Caesar? Neither. Their
paganism was not at all of the kind that appealed to Julian, and the
revival of Christianity with Luther at its head would have shocked him
more than the gross materialism into which it had declined. He would
have hated the Christian monk who said that every man likes a wife
with rosy cheeks and white legs, which is true of every man except
Julian, who chose for wife one whose age might be pleaded for his
abstinence from her bed. Julian is one of Nature's perversities; none
but Nature herself would have thought of setting up an ascetic mystic
to oppose Christianity--a real believer, for he prayed at the ancient
shrines, looking on the Gods not merely as symbols, like many of his
predecessors, but as Divine entities.

But after his death the belief nourished like a grain of mustard seed
that the secret of life and death had been discovered in a monastery;
and men no longer went to the academies of arts but into the
wilderness to interpret the fable according to their temperaments.
Christianity was soon split up into sects, all at variance one with
the other; texts which could not be explained by common sense were
disputed by the theologians, till the founding of a town became less
important than the meaning of a text: that one, He knew her not till
she had brought forth her first-born Son, was the cause of much
perplexity and comment, the opinions of the theologians being divided,
many going further than the strict letter of the text, averring that
nothing had ever happened under the quilt in Galilee before or after
the birth of the Saviour, Joseph being a virgin even as Mary. And
battles were fought and many slain because men could not agree about
the meaning of the word _Filioque_. The world went clean mad about the
new God just come over from Asia. Gods had been coming for some seven
hundred years. The first, or one of the first, was Mithras, and he had
obtained a very considerable following; none can say why he failed to
capture Europe. He brought the Trinity with him, I think--certainly
the sacraments, but he forgot the pathetic story of the Passion. Mark
wrote it well, and his excellent narrative turned the scale. Mithras
was many hundred years before Jesus, and he was succeeded by ---- my
scholar would come in useful here. He would furnish me with a list of
Gods, whereas the only names that come up in my mind at the moment are
Adonis, Cybele, Attis, Isis, Serapis; but there were many more.
Christian heresies came like locusts from the desert--Arians,
Nestorians, Donatists, Manicheans. A century or a century and a half
later the Mohammedans poured out of Arabia, crying, Allah, Allah, all
round Persia and Asia Minor, fighting their way along the North of
Africa, crossing the Straits into Spain, getting through the Pyrenees
and the South of France as far as Tours.

The French seem to have been especially created to save us from
Asiatics; they defeated Attila at Chlons two hundred years before;
his God would not have plagued us with theology; he was plain Mr
Booty. But if it had not been for the defeat of the Arabs at Tours we
might all have been Mohammedans, and the question arises whether the
succeeding centuries would have been crueller under Allah than they
were under Jesus. The Middle Ages were the cruellest of all the
centuries, and the most ignorant. It would be difficult to choose
between Byzantine mosaics and arabesques; literature disappeared after
the death of Augustine. Catholicism claims the cathedrals; the claim
is a valid one, and it claims Dante, born in 1265, the great
anti-cleric, he, who walks before men's eyes like a figure risen from
a medieval tomb pedantic, cruel, unclean, like the Middle Ages,
venting his hatred on Popes, Cardinals, Bishops, priests, and on his
own countrymen, hating them with the hatred of his own Asiatic God.
But Dante is likewise the tremulous lover. There is the poet of the
_Vita Nuova_ and the poet of _The Divine Comedy._ Landor reveals both
to us. The first in a love-scene in a garden between Dante and
Beatrice. The lovers have wandered from some _fte_ in progress, in
the garden itself or in an adjacent house, to some quiet marble seat
shaded by myrtles, and in this dialogue we see Dante pale and
tremulous with passion, and Beatrice admonishing him with grave eyes
and the wisdom of the seraphic doctor whom Dante met in the
_Paradise_. One thinks of _Tristan_ (the second act), when Beatrice
begs her lover not to take her hands violently; she recognises him as
heir to all eternity, and her own mission to inspire him to write the
poem which will outlast all other poems and make them and their love
wander for ever among the generations. Not in this dialogue, but in
another, Landor sets Petrarch and Boccaccio discoursing on their great
contemporary--Petrarch only saw Dante once, Boccaccio never saw him,
but they talk about him as a contemporary. Landor does not seek to
differentiate between Boccaccio's criticism of Dante and Petrarch's;
ideas are impersonal, and every wise remark about Dante might have
been uttered by either speaker. But would Petrarch have accepted the
statement that less than a twentieth part of _The Divine Comedy_ is
good, as representing his own opinions? And would Boccaccio admit that
he loved _The Divine Comedy_ merely because it brought him happier
dreams? It is Petrarch who says that the filthiness of some passages
in _The Divine Comedy_ would disgrace the drunkenest horse-dealer, and
that the names of such criminals are recorded by the poet as would be
forgotten by the hangman in six months. A little later in the dialogue
Boccaccio reminds Petrarch that the scenes from the _Inferno_, the
_Purgatorio_, and the _Paradiso_ are little more than pictures from
the walls of churches turned into verse, and that in several of these
we detect the cruelty, the satire, and the indecency of the Middle
Ages. Yes, and Boccaccio adds that he does not see the necessity for
three verses out of six of the third canto of the _Inferno_, and he
does not hesitate to say that there are passages in which he cannot
find his way, and where he suspects the poet could not show it to him.
Petrarch answers quickly that Dante not only throws together the most
opposite and distant characters, he even makes Jupiter and the Saviour
the same person, and in a prose lofty and hallowed the Italian poets
continue their ingenious fault-finding page after page, but neither
doubts the justice of placing Dante higher than any of the Latin
poets.

It is disappointing that I cannot remember to whom to attribute. They
have less hair-cloth about them and smell less cloisterly, yet they
are only choristers. It sounds more like Boccaccio than Petrarch, and
this placing of Dante above the Latin poets endears one to Landor, for
he loved the Latin poets and understood them very well. He was the
last of the Latinists, and we can imagine Horace reading Landor's
Latin verses with a certain appreciation, saying: If he had been born
in Italy he might have been amongst us. Horace would relish Landor's
wisdom. But is it sure--is it certain that Landor's wisdom would not
seem oppressive at times? Wisdom estranges an author from his fellows,
and in no writer does the intellect shine more clearly than in Landor.
His intellect enabled him to admire all that Dante owed to the
Renaissance--and to forget the hair shirt. As well as I remember,
neither poet refers to Dante's anti-clericalism; its importance was
overlooked by Landor; but Boccaccio and Petrarch would not have
overlooked it; either might have approved or disapproved, but one or
the other would have mentioned it, and Petrarch might have had qualms
for the faith of the next generation; he might have foreseen easily
that the anti-clericalism of one generation would be followed by a
pagan revival. And this is what happened. Borgia was on the throne,
two hundred years later, and a reactionary priest was being told that
everybody was prepared to admit in theory that Jesus was an
interesting figure, but, for the moment, everybody was anxious to talk
about a new torso that had been unearthed. But instead of running to
see the Greek God, and contributing to the general enthusiasm by
praise of the pectoral muscles, Savonarola gathered a few disciples
about him and told the people that a much greater discovery would have
been part of the tree on which the Saviour hung. Of course, Borgia did
not like signing the order for the burning of Savonarola and his
monks, but he could not allow the Renaissance to be stopped, and if he
had not intervened, the Renaissance would have stopped at Fra
Angelico; Pinturicchio might have been allowed to continue his little
religious anecdotes, but Mantegna would have been told that his vases
and draperies hark back to the heathen, before Christ was, and as
likely as not Botticelli's light-hearted women might have had tears
painted into their eyes. The world had had enough of the Middle Ages,
and the reaction was a Pope who loved his own daughter Lucretia, and
ordered the murder of his own son. Or was it Caesar who planned this
murder? A wonderful day it was when he pursued the Pope's chamberlain
into the Vatican and stabbed him to death in his father's arms, for
such a deed attests, perhaps better than any argument, that men's
thoughts had turned definitely from the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom
of Earth had been swallowed up in theology for some eight or nine
centuries, and it was the genius of the sixteenth century to disinter
it, and to make merry in it without giving a thought to the
super-man--the silly vanity of a Christian gone wrong. In this
re-arisen kingdom were all the arts, sculpture, painting, literature,
and music, and with the discovery of America the world seemed
indefinitely enlarged. A hint was in the air that the world moved.
Borgia sat on the Papal chair; Caesar his son might have succeeded
him; and, with the genius of Italy, insurgent since 1265, behind him,
it is not unlikely that he would have triumphed where Napoleon failed.
Machiavelli tells us that Caesar's plans were well laid and would not
have miscarried, had it not been for a certain fatal accident, his
eating of the poisoned meats at a banquet which Alexander had prepared
for a dozen Cardinals, his enemies. Alexander ate, too, of these
meats, and being an old man, succumbed to the poison; Caesar recovered
partially and, when he staggered convalescent from his bed, he was
told that his father had been a fortnight in the tomb, and that a new
Pope, entirely out of sympathy with the Renaissance, had been elected.
Caesar had to withdraw from Rome to Neppi, where he nearly died of a
second attack--of what? Of Roman fever?--for I do not believe in the
story of poisoned meats. The French were on foot for Naples and,
having nowhere to lay his head, he begged permission to return to
Rome.

My gardener's rake ceased suddenly, and, opening my eyes, I saw him
snail-hunting among the long blades of the irises.

It had been raining in the morning; he would get a good many; and my
thoughts dropped back into a pleasant meditation regarding the nature
of man and our lack of reverence for Caesar, who represented, more
than any one who ever lived, the qualities that have enabled men to
raise themselves above the lower animals. He was, I remember now,
allowed to return to Rome; but no sooner was he there than it became
plain to him that it would be useless to reassume the Cardinalate
which he had abandoned. He had no chance of being elected to the
Papacy, the late Pope having created many new Cardinals, all of whom
were determined to oppose him. But Caesar had influence among the
Spanish Cardinals, and he promised their votes to Julius in exchange
for the office of Standard-Bearer to the Church. Julius agreed, but
Caesar was deprived of the office, or perhaps it was never given to
him. It seems a pity that Catholic history should be robbed of so
picturesque an event as the accession of Caesar to the Papacy, but the
next best thing happened: another Renaissance Pope was elected, Julius
the Second--a warrior-Pope who entered Mirandola sword in hand, and
gave Rome back to the paganism of Michael Angelo, Raphael, Del Sarto,
Leonardo da Vinci, and Donatello.

These five great artists lived contemporaneously, and in a city called
Florence, at that time not much bigger than Rathmines, every one of
them as pagan as Caesar himself in their lives, and as Phidias in
their art. Were Tonks here he would at once interrupt me, for he
paints anecdotes; and, very anxious to defend his principles, he would
say, Explain yourself, and if I know him, he would ask why the art of
Michael Angelo is as pagan as that of Phidias. My answer would be that
_The Last Judgment_ is not an anecdote, but merely a pretext for
drawing, and that Michael Angelo chose it for the same reason as
Phidias chose _Olympus_--because it gave him an opportunity of
exhibiting man in all his attributes and perfections. In _The Holy
Family_ Raphael discovered a like opportunity; and to make the
Fornarina seem more beautiful he placed a child in her arms and
another against her knees. Leonardo was not less a pagan than Raphael;
it was pagan mysticism that inspired _Our Lady of the Rocks_ and _St
Anne_; and these pictures would certainly have been admired by the
Apostate. Thou hast not conquered, Galilean, he would have cried out
when he raised his eyes to the great temple that Michael Angelo was
building for the glory of a Roman Emperor. He would have believed in
Tetzel who went along the road shaking his money-box, crying, As your
money falls into my till your soul will jump out of Hell; for he
attached great importance to medals and amulets; but on meeting Luther
he would have said, Why, this is Christianity over again; St Paul
re-arisen. Julian hated St Paul and wrote confuting his doctrines, and
he would have written against Luther who, ever since his visit to
Rome, had been translating the Scriptures and praying that grace might
be given to Rome to regain her lost Christianity--the very
Christianity that Julian had striven against in the fourth century, a
democratic Christianity, without a hierarchy, without external forms,
in the heart, dear to Luther whose teaching was that, since Christ
died on the Cross to save our souls, and left a Gospel for our
guidance, it may be assumed that he left one that could be
comprehended by everybody, otherwise he had died in vain. And
everybody wondered why he had not understood before that Christianity
is a personal thing given into every man's own keeping, whereby he may
save his own soul or lose it. The priest comes between me and Christ,
was the universal cry in North Germany; England followed Germany, and
the spirit of the Reformation swept through Sweden, Norway, Holland.
France, the eldest daughter of the Church, nearly went over to
Protestantism, Henry IV declaring that he would become a Catholic for
the sake of Paris. The Papacy was in tragic times, two-thirds of
Europe had slipped away from her, and to save the third that remained
a Council assembled at Trent.

The shell has been cracked, and we are at the kernel of the argument,
that hitherto everybody had gone his own way and thought very much as
he pleased; but at Trent the Church drew a circle about faith and
morals, forbidding speculation on the meaning of life and the conduct
of life, and arranging the Catholic's journey from the cradle to the
grave as carefully as any tour planned by that excellent firm, Messrs
Cook and Sons. He who puts himself in the hands of this firm does not
waste time inquiring out the departure and the arrival of trains and
steamboats. Edward knows that if he goes to confession his sins will
be forgiven him; that if he misses Mass he is guilty of mortal sin; if
he loses his temper, of venial sin. If he didn't believe these things
he wouldn't be a Catholic. So there we are, and all this is as simple
as Columbia's egg, but how strange that nobody should have seen before
that Catholicism is an intellectual desert!




XII


In Mayo, almost in my own parish, was fought the most famous battle in
Irish legend; from Mayo came Davitt, the Land League, and now a
discovery which will re-create Ireland. The shepherds will fight hard,
but the sword I found in my garden will prevail against the crozier,
and by degrees the parish priest will pass away, like his ancestor the
Druid.

I remembered the absurd review _The Times_ published about the
_Descent of Man_, and Matthew Arnold's fine phrase about the
difficulty of persuading men to rise out of the unclean straw of their
intellectual habits--his very words, no doubt--and his wisest, for the
human mind declines if not turned out occasionally; mental, like
bodily, cleanliness is a habit; and when Papists have been persuaded
to bring up their children Protestants the next generation may cross
over to the Agnostic end of the quadrille. My co-religionists will not
like to hear me say it, but I will say it all the same: Protestantism
is but a stage in the human journey; and man will continue to follow
his natural evolution despite the endless solemnity of Wolfgang
Goethe, who captured the admiration of all the pundits when he said
that it would have been better if Luther had never been born, meaning
thereby that Luther saved perishing Christianity. Arnold, who is
nearly as pompous as Goethe and more vindictive, saw that man likes to
bide like a pig in a sty. But enough of Arnold; I must not lead my
readers into thinking that a single striking phrase is sufficient
condonation for his very Rugby prose, epitomised in that absurd line
about seeing life steadily and seeing it whole, a line that led one
generation gaping into the wilderness, John Eglinton heading it.... To
John I shall have to go presently, but I shall have to tell AE the
great news first. Today is Wednesday, Thursday, Friday--on Saturday
night!

And on Saturday night I was out on my doorstep, looking down the
street to see if AE were coming, trying to discover his appearance in
that of every distant passer-by. He did not come, and dinner dragged
itself slowly through its three courses, and vowing that I didn't care
a brass farthing whether he came or stayed, I rose up from the table
and pitched myself into an armchair. All the same I was glad to hear
his knock about nine. He came in sweeping a great mass of hair from
his forehead and telling me that he had had to go to Foxrock to meet
some man from Germany who had written a book about economics, and,
having discussed rural banks all the afternoon, he was ready to talk
to me about impressionist painting till midnight, and to read me an
article which would have interested me if I had not been already
absorbed by my idea.

AE, I've made a discovery that will revolutionise Ireland.

It seemed to me that he should start up from his chair and wave his
hands; but he continued smoking his old pipe, looking at me from time
to time, till at last there was nothing else for me to do but to throw
myself upon his mercy, asking him if it weren't very wonderful that
nobody had noticed the fact that dogma and literature are
incompatible. He seemed to think that everybody knew that this was so;
and is there anything more discouraging than to find one's daring
definitions accepted as commonplace truths?

Then, my dear AE, you've been extraordinarily remiss. You should have
gone down and preached in Bray, taking for your text, Dogma corrodes
the intelligence. You weren't stoned when you preached that--

The Catholics will not admit their intellectual inferiority.

But if the history of the world proves it?

All the same--

When I say no Catholic literature, of course I mean that ninety and
five per cent of the world's literature was written by Protestants and
Agnostics.

Even so, AE answered, Catholics will continue to bring up their
children in a faith that hasn't produced a book worth reading since
the Reformation.

Well, what's to be done?

AE was dry, very dry. The German economist seemed to have taken all
the sting out of him, and I began to see that in this new adventure he
would be of little use to me. Rolleston has read every literature, but
he had retired to Wicklow, his family having outgrown the house on
Pembroke Road, and it was reported that he now was more interested in
sheep than in books. Besides, he is a Protestant, and it would be more
enlightening to hear a Catholic on the subject of my great discovery.
A Catholic would have to put up some sort of defence, unless, indeed,
he entrenched himself in theology, saying that it was no part of the
business of Catholicism to consider whether dogma tended to encourage
or repress literary activities. To this defence, the true one, I
should have no answer.

Gill is my man, I said, as I got out of bed on Monday morning. He was
educated at Trinity, and has lived in France. It will no doubt be
disagreeable to him to listen to my proofs one after the other, but my
business today is not to take Gill out for a pleasant walk, but to
find out what defence an educated Catholic can put up.

Hullo, my dear Moore! Gill said, raising his eyes from his
writing-table.

I've come to take you for a walk, Gill.

I'll be ready in a few minutes.

And I watched my friend, who closed one eye curiously as he signed his
letters, his secretary standing over him, handing them to him, one
after the other, and answering questions until one of his lecturers
came in, a man called Fletcher. The lecturer and Gill talked away,
each answering the other as echoes do down a mountain-side, until at
last I had to beg Fletcher to desist, and giving Gill his hat, I
persuaded him out of the office down the stairs. Even when we were in
the street he was undecided whether we should go along the square,
wandering down Grafton street, or whether we should treat ourselves to
the Pembroke Road. The hawthorns are in flower and thrushes are
singing there. Gill agreed and we tripped along together, Gill yawning
in the midst of his enjoyment, as is his wont--delightful little
yawns. We yawn like dogs, a sudden gape and all is over; but Gill
yawns like a cat, and a cat yawns as he eats, with _gourmandise_. We
can read a cat's yawn in his eyes long before it appears in his jaws.
Tom settles himself and waits for the yawn, enjoying it in
anticipation. His sensuality is expressed in his yawn; his moustaches
go up just like a cat's. His yawn is one of the sights of our town,
and is on exhibition constantly at the Abbey Theatre. We do not go to
the Abbey Theatre to watch it, but we watch it when we are at the
Abbey, and we enjoy it oftener during a bad play than we do during a
good one--_The Play Boy_ distracts our attention from it, but when
_Deirdre_ is performed his yawns while our tedium away. His yawn is
what is most real, most essential in him; it is himself; it inspires
him; and out of his yawn wisdom comes. (Does this theory regarding the
source of his wisdom conflict with an earlier theory?) He yawns in the
middle of his own speeches, oftener, so I am assured, than any one of
his auditors. He has been seen yawning in chapel, and it is said that
he yawns even in those intimate moments of existence when--but I will
not labour the point; we can have no exact knowledge on this subject
whether or no Gill yawns when he--we will dismiss all the stories that
have collected about these yawns as apocryphal, restricting our
account to those yawns that happen--well, in our faces.

Gill and I leaned over Baggot Street Bridge, watching the canal-boat
rising up in the lock, the opening of the gates to allow the boat to
go through, and the hitching on of the rope to the cross-bar. The
browsing-horse, roused by a cry, stuck his toes into the towing-path,
and the strain began again all the way to the next lock, the boy
flourishing a leafy bough, just pulled from the hedge. We continued
our interrupted walk, glad that we had not been born canal-horses,
Gill's step as airy as his thoughts, and, as we walked under flowering
boughs, he began to talk to me about my volume of peasant stories. I
was glad he did, for I had just found another translator, an Irish
speaker, a Kerry man, and reckoned on this piece of news to interest
him. But as soon as I mentioned that my friend was a Protestant and
was going to take Orders, Gill spoke of Soupers, and on my asking him
his reason for doing so, he said a man with so Irish a name, and
coming from so Catholic a part of the country, could not have come
from any but Catholic stock.

It has always seemed to me that if a man may modify his political
attitude as Gill had done, the right to modify his spiritual can
hardly be denied. But among Catholics the vert is regarded with
detestation. With them religion is looked upon as a family
inheritance, even more than politics. A damned irreligious lot, I
thought, but did not speak my thought, for I wished the subject, dogma
or literature, to arise naturally out of the conversation; I did not
attempt to guide it, but just dropped a remark that even if the man in
question came of Catholic stock and had separated himself from Roman
formulas for worldly reasons, it did not seem to me that we should
blame him, life being what it is, a tangle of motives. But it is
difficult to stint oneself, and I was soon asking Gill for what reason
would he have a man change his religion if pecuniary and sexual
motives were excluded? No man 'verts for theological, except Newman,
I said. Do you know another? And during our walk all the reasons used
for 'verting were discussed. A new reason has just occurred to me,
Gill--literature.

Rome was always the patron of the arts.

Pagan Rome, yes. Alexander VI saved the world from a revival of the
Middle Ages by burning that disagreeable monk, Savonarola; and Julius
II saved the Renaissance; but since the Council of Trent Catholics
have almost ceased to write.

Gill laughed a little recklessly and contented himself with saying,
Yes, it is very extraordinary ... if it be a fact.

But, Gill, why not consider this question in our walk?

I would sooner that the defence of Catholicism were taken by one more
capable than myself.

Whom would you care to see undertake the task if not yourself? He
spoke of Father Tom Finlay. But it was Father Tom that set me thinking
on this very subject, for when I said that Irish Catholics had written
very little, he concurred, saying that Maynooth, with all its
education, had not produced even a theological work--his very words.

Did he say that? Gill asked, with the interest that all Catholics take
in every word that comes from their priests.

But I would sooner hear what you, a layman, have to say.

Flattered by the invitation, Gill's somewhat meagre mind began to put
forth long weedy sentences, and from these I gathered that I was
possibly right in saying that the Church had defined her doctrines at
the Council of Trent, and therefore it might be said that the Catholic
mind was less free in the twentieth century than in the Middle Ages.

All the same, the great period of French literature came after the
Reformation.

You know French literature as well as I do, Gill, and we'll just run
through it. French literature in the sixteenth century is represented
by Descartes, Rabelais, and Montaigne, all three Agnostics. In the
seventeenth century French literature in the Court of Louis Quatorze,
which you look upon as the Golden Age, began with Corneille and
Racine, but the tragedies of Corneille and Racine do not attempt any
criticism of life and the conduct of life, for their heroes and
heroines were not Christians and their ideas could not come under the
ban of the Church.

Fnelon?

A gentle light suited to weak eyes, but remember always that my
contention is not that no Catholic ever wrote a book, but that
ninety-five per cent of the world's literature is written by Agnostics
and Protestants.

Bossuet?

A very elaborate and erudite rhetorician, whom Louis XIV employed to
unite all the Protestant sects in one Gallican Church. He set himself
to this task, but before it was finished Louis XIV had settled his
differences with the Pope.

The beauty of Pascal's writing you will not deny, and his
Catholicism--

Is more than doubtful, Gill. The Port Royal School has always been
suspected of Protestantism, and you will not deny that Pascal's
repudiation of the Sacraments justified the suspicion. _Naturellement
mme cela vous fera croire et vous abtira_. A difficult phrase to
translate, Gill; the best that I can do at this moment is, Sacraments
help you to believe, but they stupefy you. But you know French as well
as I do. Gill protested against my interpretation.

Then why was the phrase suppressed in the Port Royal edition by the
Jesuits? Cousin restored it after referring to the original
manuscript. Now, in the eighteenth century we have Voltaire, the
deist, the arch-mocker, the real _briseur de fers_; Rousseau, a
Protestant, whose writings it is said brought about the French
Revolution; Diderot and Montesquieu. The nineteenth century in France
was all Agnostic.

Chateaubriand!

You can have him and welcome, for through him we shall escape the
danger of proving too much, but--

But what?

I was thinking of his name, which is very like him. Upon my word,
Gill, our names are our souls. A most suitable name for the author of
_Le Gnie du Christianisme_, a name to be incised on the sepulchre at
St Malo among the rocks out at sea, but he ordered that none should be
put upon the slab; a name for an ambassador, a diplomatist, a
religious reformer, but not one for a poet, an artist; a pompous
ridiculous name, a soft, unreal name, a grandiose name, a windly name,
a spongy name, spongy as a _brioche_--Chateaubrioche. And looking into
Gill's face I read a gentle distress. His books were a means to an end
instead of being an end in themselves. To criticise him in a phrase
that he would have appreciated, I might say, _Je ne trouve dans ses
oeuvres que vapeur et tumulte._

Whatever you may think of his writings, you cannot deny his
Catholicism, and one of these days when I'm feeling less tired--

He wrote _Le Gnie du Christianisme_ in his mistress's house, reading
her a chapter every night before they went to bed. It is true that
Catholics must have mistresses, as well as Protestants, but you are an
Irish Catholic, and would be loath to admit as much. Chateaubriand was
content to regret _Atala_, but Edward burnt his early poems. Verlaine
was a Catholic and he was a great poet, there is no question about
that, Gill. You see I am dealing fairly with you, but like
Chateaubriand, Verlaine's Catholicism _ne l'a nullement gn dans sa
vie_. He wrote lovely poems in the French language, some were pious,
some were indecent, and he spaced them out in _Paralllement_. He did
not look upon Catholicism as a means of government, he just liked the
Liturgy. Mary and the saints were pleasing to him in stained glass,
and when he came out of prison he was repentant and wrote _Sagesse_.
Paul Verlaine! Since the Elizabethan days, was a poet ever dowered
with a more beautiful name? And his verses correspond to his name. _O
donc est l'me de Verlaine_? A refrain for a ballad! What shall we
say? Out of hatred of the Voltairean grocer my old friend Huysmanns
plunged into magic. The more ridiculous the miracle the more he
believed in it; and the French ecclesiastics would be sorry to have
about them many Catholics like him. Upon my word, Gill, my theory that
Catholicism hasn't produced a readable book since the Reformation
stands on more legs than four.

Some carts were passing at the time, and when the rattle of their
wheels died down, I asked Gill what he thought of my discovery, but,
detecting or seeming to detect a certain petulance in his voice, I
interrupted:

But, Gill, I don't see why the discussion should annoy you. It isn't
as if I were asking you to reconsider your position regarding the
doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, of Transubstantiation and the
Pope's Infallibility. So far as I know there is no dogma declaring
that Catholics are not intellectually inferior to Protestants and
Agnostics. Your religion leaves you quite free to accept my theory;
indeed, I think it encourages you to do so, for does not Catholicism
always prefer the obedient and the poor in spirit to the courageous,
the learned, and the wise? And I spoke of the _Imitation of Christ_
till Gill became so petulant that I thought it would be well to
desist, and began to speak instead on one of his favourite
subjects--compromise. At once he held forth, disclaiming the
ideologues of the French Revolution, who would remake the world
according to their idea, without regard to the facts of human nature,
and then, as if preoccupied by his intellectual relationship with
Machiavelli, Gill entered upon a discussion regarding the duties of a
statesman, saying that all great reforms had been effected by
compromise, and it was by her genius for compromise that England had
built up the Empire; and he continued in this strain until at last it
was impossible for me to resist the temptation to ask him to explain
to me the difference between trimming and compromise, which he did
very well, inflicting defeat upon me. The trimmer, he said,
compromises for his own advantage, irrespective of the welfare of the
State, but the statesman who compromises is influenced by his sympathy
for the needs of humanity, which should not be changed too quickly.

And this, the lag end of our argument, carried us pleasantly back
over Baggot Street Bridge, but at the corner of Herbert Street, the
street in which Gill lives, I could not resist a Parthian shot.

But, Gill, if compromise be so essential in human affairs, is it not a
pity that the Irish haven't followed the example of the English?
Especially in religion, I said.

As Gill did not answer me at once I followed him to the door of his
house.

It can't be denied that Protestantism is a compromise? This Gill had
to admit. But it is not one, I said, that you are likely to accept. He
laughed and I returned to Ely Place, pleased by the rickety
lodging-house appearance of Baggot Street against the evening sky,
and, for the moment forgetful of the incompatibility of dogma and
literature, my thoughts melted into a meditation, the subject of which
was that the sun sets nowhere so beautifully as it does at the end of
Baggot Street.

As the clocks had not yet struck seven, I turned into Stephen's Green
and followed the sleek borders of the brimming lake, admiring the
willow-trees in their first greenness and their reflections in the
tranquil water. The old eighteenth-century brick, the slender
balconies and the wide flights of steps seemed conscious that they had
fallen into evil days; and horrified at the sight of a shop that had
been run up at the corner of the Green, I cried, Other shops will
follow it, and this beautiful city of Dublin will become in very few
years as garish as London. To keep Dublin it might be well to allow it
to slumber in its Catholicism.

And at these words my talk with Gill, which had already become a
memory, rose up before me. He isn't a stupid man, I said, but why does
his intelligence differ from mine and from the intelligence of every
Protestant and Agnostic? We are different. Catholics lack initiative,
I suppose that that is it. The Catholic mind loses its edge quickly.
Sex sharpens it for a little while, but when the Catholic marries and
settles down he very soon becomes like an old carving-knife that
carves nothing. The two whetstones are sex and religious discussion,
and we must keep passing our intelligences up one and down the other.

The ducks climbed out of the water. And the gulls? There was not one
in the air nor on the water; and, after wondering a while if they had
returned to the sea, I decided for good and all that I owed the
preservation of my own intelligence to my theological interests. Some
readers may prefer, or think they prefer, my earlier books, but none
will deny that my intelligence has sharpened, whereas Gill's--My cook
will grumble if I keep dinner waiting, and I returned to Ely Place to
eat, and to meditate on the effect of dogma on literature.




XIII


The great French writers of the nineteenth century were Victor Hugo,
Lamartine, Balzac, Gautier, Michelet, Renan, Taine, Sainte-Beuve,
Grard de Nerval, Mrime, les Goncourts, George Sand, Flaubert, Zola.
Maupassant, and all these were Agnostics; Guizot was a Protestant, his
historical works have I suppose some value; John Eglinton will tell me
about him, and glad of an excuse for a visit to the National Library,
I went forth after dinner to talk literature again, arriving in
Kildare Street about half past nine, when John Eglinton was writing
the last of those mysterious slips of paper, cataloguing, I think he
calls it. A visitor is welcome after half past nine, and in the sizzle
of electric light we debate till ten. Then he comes back to smoke a
cigar with me or I go home with him. He lacks the long, clear vision
of AE, but when an idea is brought close to him he appreciates it
shrewdly and it is the surety that he will understand, a little later,
my idea better than I understand it myself, that makes his first
embarrassment so attractive to me.

In the evening I am about to relate I found him a little more
short-sighted than usual; his little face wrinkled up as he sought to
grasp, to understand my discovery that Catholics had not produced a
book worth reading since the Reformation, for John Eglinton only
understands his own thoughts, and it is with difficulty that he is
rolled out of them.

You mean that all English literature has been produced in the
Protestant tradition, but I'm afraid that Protestants will think this
is a somewhat too obvious truth. Of course, we all know that Chaucer
is the only English Catholic poet--

My dear John Eglinton, you've not understood! A worried look came into
his face, and in his desire to understand he seemed like getting cross
with me. My belief is that Catholic countries haven't produced a book.

John gasped.

But France?

We went into that question, and were talking of Pascal when the
attendant came in to ask John for the keys; it was three minutes to
ten.

Shall I ring the bell, sir?

John agreed that the bell might be rung, and we watched the odd
mixture of men and women leave their books on the counter and go
through the turnstiles. John had to wait till the last left, and the
last was a little old gentleman about five feet high who has come to
the library every night for the last thirty years to read Dickens and
nothing but Dickens. He passed through the turnstile; we followed him;
the fireman was consulted; and when all the lights were out John was
free to go for a walk with me, and I think it was in Baggot Street
that I succeeded in bringing home to him the importance of my
discovery.

But Spain? he interjected. _Don Quixote_?

Spanish literature is contemporaneous with the Council of Trent when
the Church defined her dogmas, and--

And _Don Quixote_ is as unethical, he said, as _David Copperfield_.

Whatever merit Lope de Vega may have had in his day, he has none now;
and we discussed for a while the interesting question whether the
merits of books are permanent or temporary. Byron's poetry conquered
Europe, and today everybody knows it to be doggerel; and in our
understanding Calderon's plays are merely rows of little wooden
figures moved hither and thither by a mind that seems gracious despite
his conviction that the Inquisition was a kind and beneficent
institution. All the same Shelley and Goethe admired Calderon; Shelley
translated some pages, and John Eglinton agreed with me that these are
the only pages of Shelley that we cannot read. He spoke of St
Patrick's Purgatory.

It passes beyond perception, and he laughed steadily.

Calderon, in spite of his piety, didn't succeed in avoiding heresy,
for in ecclesiastic zeal he seems to have identified himself with
Antinomianism. Perhaps he was condemned. You quite understand that my
point isn't that a Catholic hasn't written a book since the
Reformation, but that ninety and nine per cent, well, ninety and five
per cent of the literature of the world has been produced by
Protestants and Agnostics.

I see what you mean now, and the dear little man of the puckered face
listened on his doorstep to an exhortation to write a little more of
that beautiful English which he so wastefully spends in his
conversation. He listened, but unwillingly; he does not like my
literary exhortations, and I pondered on his future as I walked home.
He will sink deeper and deeper into his armchair, and into his own
thoughts.

The closing of the public-houses told me that it must be near eleven,
and the thought of dear Edward sitting behind his screen, smoking, led
me to Leinster Street. The Sword Motive brought the candle-light
glimmering down the stairs; the door opened, and two old cronies went
upstairs to talk once more of painting and literature--two old cronies
who had known each other in boyhood, who had talked all through our
lives on the same subjects, Edward feeling things perhaps a little
deeper than I have ever done. When the _Master Builder_ has been
played he walks from the theatre into the Green, and sits under the
hawthorns in some secluded spot, his eyes filled with tears at the
memory, as he would say it himself, of so much beauty. Was it Yeats
described him as the sketch of a great man--the sketch, he said;
_l'bauche_ better realises his idea of dear Edward; but Yeats does
not know French; and while my eyes followed Edward about the room I
wondered if it would be wise for me to exchange, were it possible, a
wine-glass of intelligence for a rummer of temperament. We have gone
through life together, myself charging windmills, Edward holding up
his hands in amazement.

More culture and less common sense than the Spanish original, I said,
and I watched him moving ponderously about his ungainly room, so like
himself. There is something eternal about Edward, an entity come down
through the ages, and myself another entity. Reciprocating entities, I
said, glancing at some pictures of famous churches. (Edward pins
photographic reproductions on the dusty wallpaper.) A beautiful church
caught my eye, and, desiring Edward's criticism of it, as one desires
an old familiar tune, I asked him if the church were an ancient or a
modern one; and, answering that it was one of Pugin's churches, he
lifted his glasses up on his nose and peered into the photograph,
absorbed for some moments by the beauty which he perceived in it.

The church set us talking of Pugin's genius, and whether the world
would ever invent a new form of architecture, or whether the age of
architecture was over and done like the Stone and the Bronze Ages.
Edward's churchwarden was now drawing famously, his glass of grog was
by his side, and the nights in the Temple, when he used to tell me
that he would like to write his plays in Irish, rose up before me. All
his prejudices are the same, I said, more intense, perhaps; he is a
little older, a little more liable to catch cold, and he spoke to me
of the necessity of a screen to protect him from the draught coming
under the door.

Have a cigar. He pushed the box towards me and continued to smoke his
pipe.

Although not a priest, there is something hierarchic about him, and I
thought of Ancient Egypt and then of our friendship. It was drawing to
a close mysteriously as a long summer evening. We shall not see much
of each other at the end of our lives, I said, wondering how the
separation was going to come about, not liking to tell him of my great
discovery, fearing to pain him.

You're very silent tonight, George, he jerked out, breaking the
silence at last. Of what are you thinking?

Of a great discovery--

What, another! I thought you had come to the end of them. Your first
was the naturalistic novel, your second impressionistic painting--

My third was your plays, Edward, and the Irish Renaissance which is
but a bubble.

Oh, it's only a bubble, is it? he said, his jolly great purple face
shaking like a jelly.

You may laugh, I said, but it is no laughing matter for the Catholic
Church if it can be shown that no Catholic has written a book since
the Reformation. I wish you wouldn't laugh like that.

At the end of the next fit of laughter he bit a piece off the end of
his churchwarden, and, getting up from the sofa, he searched for
another along the chimney-piece, and, when he had filled it, he said
to me, who had been sitting quite silent:

Now, tell me about this new mare's-nest.

I've told you already. There has been no Catholic literature since the
Reformation, and very little before it. Boccaccio and Ariosto were
pagans, Michael Angelo and Raphael--

But Michael Angelo painted _The Last Judgment_ and Raphael _The Holy
Family_.

We talked for an hour, and, his brain cleaning suddenly, he said:
Raphael and Michael Angelo lived in a Catholic country, came of
Catholic inheritance, and painted Christian subjects.

You seem to me, Edward, to be satisfied with a very simple inquiry, I
might say superficial inquiry, into a matter of great interest and
intimately concerned with our movement; for why should we change the
language of a country in which literature is forbidden? unless indeed
some special indulgences are granted for prayers in Irish. Of course,
if so, the Irish Renaissance is but a bubble.

And what about your mission?

Good God! I hadn't thought of that, I said. And getting out of my
chair, I walked up and down the room, overcome.

What are you thinking of? Edward asked at the end of a long silence.

Of what am I thinking? Of what you said just now.

What did I say?

You reminded me of my mission. Great God, Edward!

I wish you wouldn't take the Sacred Name in vain.

My life has been sacrificed for a bubble.

But you knew Ireland was a Catholic country.

I was bidden here. If some nun said she had seen a troop of angels and
the Virgin Mary, you would believe it all, but when I tell you that on
the road to Chelsea--

Seeing that I was profoundly moved, Edward ceased laughing, and began
to speak of Newman.

Newman was a convert, I said, and he brought some of the original
liberty of the Protestant into his Catholicism; isn't that so?

Edward puffed at his pipe and seemed to think that perhaps the convert
was not quite so obedient as the born Catholic.

It's a very serious thing for me, I said, rising. I suppose I must be
getting home.

He lit the candle and took me downstairs, and at the grating which
guards the tobacconist's door I said:

I haven't examined the question thoroughly. I may discover some
Catholic writers. Do you know of any?

Edward said he could not say offhand, and I crossed the tramline,
thinking how I had been ensnared, and wondering who was the snarer.




XIV


Some volumes of Lingard's _History of England_ were brought down from
my grandfather's library about fifty years ago, and Miss Westby had
striven to teach me reading and history out of them. Now, Lingard was
a Catholic, and Pascal, too, in spite of his many doubts. His thoughts
(_Les Penses_) were written in the hope that doubts might be reasoned
away; it must have been in a moment of irritation that he scribbled
that sacraments stupefy the recipient, for in the celebrated dialogue
the believer escapes from the dilemma into which the unbeliever is
pressing him by offering to make the matter between them the subject
of a bet. The Kingdom of Earth is such a poor pleasure-ground that the
believer decides to put his money on the Kingdom of Heaven; even if it
should prove mythical my plight will not be worse than thine, he says;
and if it should out a reality--how much better!

When I was half-way up Merrion Square I caught myself considering the
word belief--the vainest word in the language, and the cause of all
our misunderstandings, for nobody knows what he believes or
disbelieves. We attach ourselves to certain ideas and detach ourselves
from others; so runs the world away; and it was by the gateway in Ely
Place that I remembered Saint-Simon and La Bruyre, two fine writers,
and both of them Catholics. La Fontaine reached literary perfection in
his _Fables_, but he could not have been interested in bird-life, else
he would not have written of the reed bending beneath the weight of
the wren. The image is charming, but wrens do not live among reeds.
Was it the rhyme that lured him--_roseau_ and _fardeau_? Rhyme never
lured Shelley into mistakes about the habits of birds and flowers. But
in the seventeenth century there was little love of Nature. However,
it is with La Fontaine's Catholicism and not his ornithology that I am
concerned. He wrote some improper stories. Fnelon, the author of
_Tlmaque_ (fie upon it!), was a very poor writer, but he seems to
have been an amiable gentleman, and we like to think of him, and hate
to think of Bossuet, that detestable man, who persecuted Madame de
Genlis and wrote a very artificial style. I cannot think of any other
writers, but all the same, the seventeenth century shows up far
better than I thought for. The eighteenth is, of course, Agnostic from
end to end, unless we count Chateaubriand as an eighteenth-century
writer, and we may, for he was born about 1760, and lived a long way
into the nineteenth, dying at the end of the 'thirties ... he may have
lived right into the 'forties. Montalembert remained a staunch
Catholic in spite of the Infallibility, declared about that time; and
there were some Abbs who did not write badly, one Lamennais, whose
writings got him into trouble with Rome.

English literature is, of course, Protestant--back, belly, and sides.
Chaucer was pre-Reformation; Crashaw and Dryden returned to
Catholicism; Pope seems to have called himself a Catholic, but his
_Essay on Man_ proves him to be an Agnostic. In the beginning of the
nineteenth century there were a good many conversions, and some
writers should be found among them. Newman! Arthur Symons mentioned
him in the _Saturday Review_ as having a style, so I suppose he must
have one. I must read his _Apologia_, for Symons may have taken him on
trust. Among the present-day writers are W. S. Lilly and Hilaire
Belloc, professional Catholics, always ready to argue that the English
decadence began with the suppression of the monasteries. Hilarious
regards the sixteenth century as altogether blameworthy, from an
artistic point of view, I suppose, for in one of his polemics he
declared himself to be no theologian, a strange admission from a
professional Catholic, ranking him in my eyes with the veterinary
surgeon who admits that he knows nothing about spavins. W. S. Lilly is
more thoroughly interpenetrated with Catholic doctrine; his articles
in the _Fortnightly_ are harder, weightier, denser; he reads Aquinas
every day, and dear Edward looks upon him as an admirable defender of
the faith. Of late years the shepherds have taken up novel-writing,
hoping, no doubt to beguile their flocks away from the dangerous
bowers of the lady-novelists, the beds of rose-leaves, the
tiger-skins, and the other lustful displays and temptations. Amiable
and educated gentlemen, every one of them, no doubt, but without any
faintest literary gift. They would do better to return to their slums,
where work suitable to their heads and hands awaits them.

I turned over in bed, and must have dozed a little while, for I
suddenly found myself thinking of a tall sallow girl, with brown eyes
and a receding chin, who used to show me her poems in manuscript ages
ago. I thought them very beautiful at the time, and this early
appreciation I need not be ashamed, for the poems have lived a
pleasant modest life ever since in a slight volume tediously
illustrated, entitled _Preludes._ Unfortunately these poems preluded
nothing but a great deal of Catholic journalism, a Catholic husband
who once read me a chaplet of sixty sonnets which he had written to
his wife, and a numerous Catholic progeny who have published their
love of God in a volume entitled _Eyes of Youth_, which I might never
have seen had not the title been mentioned one day by a friend who,
fearing my sacrilegious mind, refused to lend me the book. But moved
by a remembrance of Alice Meynell, I sent immediately for a copy.

And it came to me some hours later brought by a messenger, a slim grey
volume of poems, with an introduction by G. K. Chesterton, an able
journalist, it is true, but that is hardly a reason for asking him to
introduce a number of young Catholic writers to Protestant readers
unless he has gone over to Rome. He could not have done that without
reading the Fathers; and he could not have read them without their
influencing his style. It rollicks down Fleet Street as pleasantly as
ever, and we are there in the first lines, when he writes that all
serious critics class Francis Thompson with Shelley and Keats. A
critic may be learned, ignorant, discriminating, dense, subtle,
venial, honest, and a hundred other things, but serious seems just the
one adjective that Mr Chesterton should have avoided. He must have
been thinking with the surface of his brain when he compared Francis
Thompson with Shelley; casual thinking always puts wrong words into
our heads; a thoughtful critic would have classed Thompson with
Crashaw; _un fond de Crashaw avec une garniture de Shelley_ is a
definition of Francis Thompson which I put forward, hoping that it may
please somebody. Francis Thompson accepted Catholic dogma; it provided
him with themes, whereupon he might exercise his art; he wrote for the
sake of words, they were his all, and avoided piety, for piety is
incompatible with a great wealth of poetic diction. He left piety to
his poetic inferiors, to the sisters Meynell, Olivia and Viola, who
seem to be drawn to verse-writing because it allows them to speak of
Mary's knee, the blood-stained Cross, the Fold, the Shepherd, and the
Lamb. They must have deplored Monica Saleeby's _Retrospect_, for it
does not contain a single pious allusion, and welcomed her _Rebuke_,
for in this poem Monica makes amends for her abstinence, and uses up
all her sister's pious phrases, and adds to them. (I am assuming that
Monica Saleeby was originally a Meynell, for her verse is so
distinctly Meynell that one hardly believes it to be an imitation.)
The volume concludes with the poems of Francis Meynell; but, though
the name of God occurs six times in a poem of four stanzas, I think he
lacks the piety of his sisters; he does not produce the word with the
admirable unction and sanctimonious grace of Maurice Healy, Ruth
Lindsay, and Judith Lytton. Were Judith and Ruth like Monica
originally Meynells, or are they merely of the school of Meynell? I
have pondered their poems now for nearly an hour without being able to
satisfy myself on this point. Francis is a Meynell with a drop of
Coventry Patmore, but the drop must have gone crossways in him, as we
say in Ireland, for even when writing about the marriage-bed he cannot
refrain from pietistic allusion:

  For when she dreams, who is beloved,
  The ancient miracle stands proved--
  Virginity's much motherhood!
  For O the unborn babes she keeps,
  The unthought glory, lips unwooed.

But I must be thinking of my readers, for not a doubt of it every one
of them is saying: We will assume that the ladies go to confession
once a week, and the gentlemen once a month. Get on with your story.
Tell us, is there any Catholic literature in Scandinavia?

My dear readers, Scandinavia seems to be entirely free from Catholic
literature; and, looking from Ibsen and Bjrnson towards Russia, I am
afraid that Turgenev, the most thoughtful of all tale-tellers, must be
reckoned as an Agnostic writer, and Tolstoy, for his lack of belief in
the Resurrection, would have been denied Christian burial by St Paul.
Lermontov was certainly an Agnostic. My dear readers, it seems
impossible to discover a Catholic writer of importance in Europe.

A voice cries in my ear, Have you looked into German literature? and I
answer back, I know nothing of German literature, but will call upon
John Eglinton tonight. But John will only tell me that Goethe and
Schiller were Protestants, and that Heine was a Jew. He may mention
that the Schlegels turned Catholic in their old age. Perhaps Best will
be able to tell me. Best is John's coadjutor in the National Library:
a young man with beautiful shining hair and features so fine and
delicate that many a young girl must have dreamed of him at her
casement window, and would have loved him if he had not been so
passionately interested in the in-fixed pronoun--one of the great
difficulties of ancient Irish. So I went to Best at the end of the
evening (John Eglinton being on duty in the mornings).

Kuno Meyer, he said, will be here at the end of the month, and he'll
be able to tell you all that you want to know about German literature.

You are quite right, Best. Meyer is my man; he'll understand at once.
Best is Kuno Meyer's favourite lamb and Kuno Meyer is a great German
scholar who comes over to Dublin from Liverpool occasionally to
shepherd the little flock that browses about this Celtic erudition;
and a pressing invitation was sent to him next day, asking him to
spend a week or a fortnight with me. An invitation of a fortnight did
not strike me as excessive. We had been friends for over a year, ever
since the day he had come to a rehearsal of _The Tinker and the
Fairy_, a delightful one-act play that Hyde had written for the
entertainment of a Gaelic assembly in my garden. He was prompting
Hyde, who was not sure of his words, when I came into the room, and my
surprise was great, for it is not usual to meet the Irish language in
a light brown overcoat and a large, soft brown hat; beards are
uncommon among Gaelic speakers, and long, flowing moustaches unknown.
A Gaelic Leaguer's eyes are not clear and quiet, and he does not speak
with a smooth even voice; his mind is not a comfortable mind; and by
these contraries, in defiance of Aristotle, I am describing Kuno
Meyer, the great scholar-artist, the pleasure of whose life it has
been to disinter the literature of the ancient Celt, and to translate
it so faithfully that when we read we seem to see those early times as
in a mirror.

It would be a pleasure to me to write some pages on this subject, and
I would write them now if the man did not stand before me as he was
when I first saw him, a wreck with rheumatism, looking at me sideways,
unable to move his neck, his hands and feet swollen. He must have
suffered a good deal of pain, but it never showed itself in his face,
and though he was well aware that his disease was progressive
ossification, he did not complain of his hardship in being so
strangely afflicted. At that time death did not seem to be very far
away, but he did not fear death, and I admired his unruffled mind,
often reminding me of a calm evening, and thought myself the most
fortunate of men when he promised to stay at my house next time he
came to Dublin. His intelligence and his learning were a great
temptation, and during the long evenings we spent together my constant
effort was to get him to talk about himself. But he did not seem very
much interested in the subject; he does not see himself as a separate
entity; and the facts that dribbled out were that he had come to
England when he was seventeen, the first visit not being a long one.
He returned, however, two years later, and thought that it had taken
him about five years to learn English and to capture the spirit of the
language. I seemed to get a better sight of him when he mentioned that
he had been private tutor for two years. A studious German, I said to
myself, who, when not engaged with his pupils, was preparing himself
for a University career. He must have told me how he became a
Professor of Romantic Languages at Queen's College, Liverpool, but he
could not have made much of the story, else I should have remembered
it. I learnt from Best that he was once an excellent cricketer, and
though now crippled with rheumatism it was easy to see that he must
have looked well on the cricket-field in white flannels and a blue
belt, and he must have been a strong man, but never a fast runner, I
am sure of that, therefore I place him at point ... and can see him in
my imagination, the sleeves of his shirt turned up, revealing a sinewy
brown arm.

But the cause of his illness, his affection? The cause may have been
the Liverpool climate, or his disease may have been constitutional.
Who shall trace the disease back to its source? Not the specialists,
certainly; for years they were consulted. What do you eat? said the
first. I often eat beef, was Meyer's answer. Beef is poison to you,
mutton as much as you like. Meyer did not touch beef again for three
months, but the disease continued. He consulted another specialist.
What do you eat? Mutton? Mutton is poison to you; beef as much as you
like. To be on the safe side Meyer ate neither one nor the other, but,
notwithstanding his obedience to the different diets imposed upon him,
his disease continued unabated. Another specialist was consulted. What
do you drink? Claret? Claret is poison to you; whisky as much as you
like. With whisky for his daily drink his disease developed
alarmingly; Meyer went abroad; he consulted French and German
specialists; some gave him pills, some recommended champagne and Rhine
wines; but his disease gained steadily, and at last the doctors
contented themselves by advising him to avoid everything that he found
disagreed with him, which was the best advice they could have given,
for a man is often his own best doctor. Meyer's instincts prompted him
to spend some months in a warm climate, and it was while travelling in
Portugal that Meyer drank some champagne, feeling very depressed, and
during a night of agony it occurred to him that perhaps alcohol was
the bane. He determined to give abstinence from alcohol a trial,
avoiding it in its every form, even light claret. The disease seemed
to stop; and, speaking of his affliction to a fellow-traveller in the
train from Lisbon to Oporto, he heard of some baths in Hungary.

You have tried so many remedies that I don't dare to ask you to go
there, but if you should ever find yourself in Hungary you might try
them.

Meyer went to Hungary, hopeless; but he returned convinced that if he
had gone there some years earlier the treatment would have boiled all
the stiffness out of his neck and shoulders; he had gone, however,
soon enough to rid himself of the greater part of his affection, and
to secure himself against any further advances.

He will die like another, but not of ossification, I muttered, as I
paced the greensward, looking at every turn through the
hawthorn-boughs. Why, there he is! and, banging the wicket, I ran
across the street to let him in with my latchkey.

Let me help you off with your overcoat, I said, as soon as we were in
the passage. You got my letter? It was kind of you to come over so
soon, and my eyes dropped to the papers in his hand.

I've long wanted to come to Dublin.

And for why? I asked sympathetically.

You have always taken a kindly and very appreciative interest in the
ancient Irish poems which I have been fortunate enough to discover.

And to translate so exquisitely that you and Lang are our only
translators, I said, my eyes going back to the papers in his hand.
When did you arrive?

He admitted that he had been a couple of days in Dublin without
finding time to come to see me, and I thought of Best, who is always
frisking about Meyer, gathering up every scrap of his time, sometimes
unjustifiably, as I thought in the present case, for Best knew how
necessary Meyer's learning was to me.

And where are you staying? I asked.

As far back as three months ago I promised Best to stay with him, but
my visit to Percy Place is now over, and when you are tired of me I'm
going to take a lodging at Kingstown, so we shall see a good deal of
each other.

You are on the track of something important, I said. Do tell me about
it. Have you discovered another Marban--another Liadain and Curithir?

Meyer smiled at my enthusiasm through his long moustache, and told me
that he had spent the morning in Trinity College library and had come
upon--

Another Nature Poem?

No, but a very curious religious poem. My face clouded. I think it
will interest you. It throws a light on the life of those times, for
the author, a monk, tells us that he left his monastery, which had
become noisy, as he required perfect quiet for the composition of his
poem, _God's Grandfather_.

Whose grandfather?

_God's Grandfather_; that is the title of the poem.

I never knew God had a grandfather.

Mary had a mother; the Biblical narrative is silent regarding her
parentage, but the early Greek writers were known to our author, and
he read in Epiphanius that Mary's mother, Anne, had had three
husbands--Joachim, Cleophas, and Salomas, and that she had been
brought to bed of a daughter by each husband. Each daughter was called
Mary, but only one Conception was Immaculate. By an Immaculate
Conception he understood a conception outside of common sensuality,
brought about by some spiritual longing into which obedience to the
will of God entered largely.

How very curious! I wonder if the Meynells would have included the
poem in their collection?

Meyer became interested at once, but his interest slackened when he
heard that their poems were modern, and a kindly smile began in his
gold-brown moustache, and he said:

A long family separating in the afternoon for the composition of pious
poems.

Like your hermits, I said; but the Catholicism of the desert is more
interesting than the Catholicism of the suburbs. Let's get back to the
thirteenth century.

His monastery was too noisy for the composition of _God's
Grandfather_, and he retired into the wilderness to think out the
circumstances of Mary's Immaculate Conception. And this is how he
imagined it: Joachim, as he was driving his cattle home one evening,
met some travellers who wished to purchase a bullock from him. He
begged of them to choose an animal; they did so, asking Joachim to
name a price. But instead of putting the money agreed upon into his
hand the travellers poured several blessings on Joachim and told him
to return home as quickly as he could. He was at first loath to go
without his money, but the travellers told him he must accept the
blessings they had poured over him in lieu of money, and on his asking
innocently what he was to do with the blessings, he was told that the
use of the blessings would be revealed to him when he reached home.
And being a man of faith, he ran with the blessings he had received
clasped to his bosom, not stopping till he saw Anne, his wife, who
happened to be gathering some brushwood to light the fire for their
evening meal, and sure enough, as the travellers had told him,
unexpected words were put into his mouth; Anne, put down the sticks
thou art gathering, and follow me into the inner room. She did his
bidding, as a wife should do, and, as they lay face to face, Joachim
showered upon her the blessings that the travellers had given him, and
it was these blessings that caused the conception recognised as
miraculous by Joachim, and afterwards by the Church.

And you have translated that poem? I asked. He answered that he had
made a rough translation of some stanzas, and while he read them to me
I marvelled at the realism of early Christianity, and when he had
finished reading, I cried: How different from our sloppy modern piety!
In the poem you have just read to me, there isn't a single abstract
term. Meyer, you are making wonderful literary discoveries, unearthing
a buried civilisation. And on these words the conversation dropped.
The moment had come for me to tell Meyer that I, too, was making
discoveries. His cigar was only half-way through, and it was plain
that the suave and lucid mind of Meyer was at my disposal. My argument
had been repeated so often that it had become a little trite, and a
suspicion intruded upon my mind as I hurried from St Augustine,
through Dante, Boccaccio, and Ariosto, that my narrative had grown
weary. Or was it that Meyer, being a professor, could not grasp at
once that we must choose between literature and dogma? A perplexed
look came into his face as I sketched in broad lines the
sixteenth-and seventeenth-century literature in France, and as I was
about to proceed northward through Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, he
asked questions which revealed the professor latent in him; and whilst
I sought to persuade him out of his professorial humours, it began to
dawn upon me that he would show to better advantage in a debate on the
Shakespearean drama, or on the debt that the dramatists of the
Restoration owed to Molire. A better subject still for discussion, I
continued on a rising temper, would be Mademoiselle de Scudry, whose
festoons and astragals are of course plainly to be descried in the
works of Pope and Prior. But I still hoped that Meyer's intelligence
would awaken, and so I restrained snarl and sneer, exhibiting myself
for at least five minutes as a miracle of patience.

You find that Catholicism draws men's thoughts away from this world,
and that Catholic literature lacks healthy realism; but surely
literature has nothing to do with theology?

Of course it hasn't, Meyer. But I haven't succeeded in explaining
myself, and I must begin it all over again. St Augustine--but perhaps
it is not necessary to go over it all again. In the Middle Ages there
was no literature, only some legends, and a good deal of theology. Why
was this? Because if you plant an acorn in a vase the oak must burst
the vase or become dwarfed. I can't put it plainer. Do you understand?

You spoke just now of the intense realism of the Irish poets.

The poem you read me was pre-Reformation.

It seems to me that if one outlet be closed to man's thoughts he will
find another, and perhaps in a more concentrated and violent form.
Even in Spain, he said, where thought was stifled by such potent
organisations as Church and State, we find man expressing himself
daringly. Velasquez.

You mean the Venus in the National Gallery--that stupid thing for
which the nation paid forty-five thousand pounds; the thighs and the
back are very likely by Velasquez, but not the head nor the curtain
nor the Cupid. But, Meyer, bums have never been actually condemned by
the Church, and for the moment I am not interested in the fact that
realistic painting throve in Spain when the Inquisition was most
powerful.

Goethe speaks of free spirits, and from that moment Meyer began to
rouse himself.

Of course the spirit must be free. And Germany, being divided equally
between Catholics and Protestants--

A troubled look came into Meyer's face. I fail to see how your theory
can be settled one way or the other by German literature, but if you
want me to tell you the names of the great German writers, he answered
in his most professorial manner, those that occur to me at the moment
are Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, the Schlegels, Kant, Schelling,
Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Jean Paul Richter, Herder, Lenau, and
Nietzsche.

And all these were North German writers? None came from the South. Are
there no Catholics among them, not one?

No, he said, none. One of the Schlegels turned Catholic in his old
age.

And did he write after he turned Catholic?

No; as well as I remember he wrote nothing afterwards.

Austria is a great country. Has it produced no Catholic writers?

None of any note, Meyer answered. There was--and he mentioned the
names of two writers, and as they were unknown to me I asked him to
tell me about them. Writers of fairy-tales, he said, of feeble
novels--writers of the fifth and sixth and seventh rank. No one
outside Austria knows their names.

Then, I said, I'm done for. Meyer raised his eyes.

Done for?

I was led into this country in the hopes of reviving the language. It
seemed to me that a new language was required to enwomb a new
literature. I am done for. Ireland will not forgo her superstitions
for the sake of literature--accursed superstitions that have lowered
her in intelligence and made her a slut among nations. All the same it
is strange that you fail to see that dogma and literature are
incompatible. I suppose the idea is new to you.

We talked for a little while longer, and then Meyer asked me if he
might go to the writing-table and continue the translation of his
poem. And while listening to his pen moving over the paper it seemed
to me that a chance still remained, a small one, for the evidence that
Germany offered could hardly be refuted. Justice demanded that a
Catholic should be heard, and the Colonel would be able to put up as
good a defence as another; and a letter to him began in my head, half
a dozen lines, reminding him that he had been away a long time in the
country, and asking him to come up to Dublin and spend a few days with
me.




XV


When I rushed up to tell him of my discovery he was in breeches and
riding-boots, presenting in my drawing-room an incongruous spectacle
of sport on a background of impressionist pictures.

You don't mean to tell me that you brought me all the way from Mayo to
argue with you about Catholicism and Protestantism, leaving important
work?

What work?

Clearing the stone park.

A darker cloud than that I had anticipated appeared in his long,
narrow face, and as he seemed very angry I thought it better to listen
to his plan for allowing the villagers to cut wood in the stone park.
But the temptation to hear him argue that literature and dogma were
compatible compelled me to break in.

Do let me tell you; it won't take more than ten minutes for me to
state my case. And this is a matter that interests me much more than
the stone park. The question must be threshed out.

He protested much, beseeching me to believe that he had neither the
learning nor the ability to argue with me.

Father Finlay--

That's what Gill said. But the matter is one that can be decided by
anybody of ordinary education; even education isn't necessary, for it
must be clear to anybody who will face the question without prejudice
that the mind petrifies if a circle be drawn round it, and it can
hardly be denied that dogma draws a circle round the mind.

The Colonel was very wroth, and his words were that I lived among
Protestants, who were inclined to use me as a stalking-horse.

I came to Ireland, as you know, to help literature, and if I see that
dogma and literature are incompatible, I must say so.

At that moment the parlourmaid opened the door and announced dinner.

You'll be late for dinner, Maurice.

If I am, you're to blame, and he rushed upstairs; and as we sat down
to dinner he begged me, in French, to drop the subject, Teresa being a
Catholic.

I suppose you are afraid she might hear something to cause her to lose
her faith, I said as she went out with the soup-tureen.

I think we should respect her principles.

The word inflamed me. Superstitions that were rammed into her.

She returned with the roast chicken, and the question had to be
dropped until she returned to the kitchen to fetch an apple dumpling;
and we did not really settle down to literature or dogma until coffee
was brought in and my cigar was alight.

It's a great pity that you always set yourself in opposition to all
received ideas. I was full of hope when you wrote saying you were
coming to Ireland. I suppose there's no use asking you not to publish.
You will always go your own way.

But if I limit myself to an essay entitled Literature or Dogma--you
don't object to that?

No, I don't say I object to it; but I'd rather not have the question
raised just now.

I see you don't wish to discuss it.

No, I don't mind discussing it. But I must understand you. Two
propositions are involved in your statement--which is the one you wish
to put forward? Do you mean that all books, which in your opinion may
be classed as literature, contain things that are contrary to Catholic
dogma? Or do you mean that no man professing the Catholic faith has
written a book which, in your opinion, may be classed as literature
since the Reformation?

I put forward both propositions. But my main contention is that the
Catholic may not speculate; and the greatest literature has come out
of speculation on the value of life. Shakespeare--

There is nothing in Shakespeare contrary to Catholic dogma.

You are very prompt.

Moreover, I deny that England had, at that time, gone over entirely to
Protestantism. Italian culture had found its way into England; England
had discovered her voice, I might say her language. A Renaissance has
nothing in common with Puritanism and there is reason for thinking
this. The Brownists? And the Colonel, who is a well-read man, gave me
an interesting account of these earliest Puritans.

The larger part of the English people may have been Protestant, he
continued, in 1590; but England hadn't entirely gone over to
Protestantism. Besides, England's faith has nothing to do with
Shakespeare. Nor does anybody know who wrote the plays.

My dear friend, you won't allow me to develop my argument. It matters
nothing to me whether you prefer the lord or the mummer. The plays
were written, I suppose, by an Englishman; that, at least, will not be
denied; and my contention is--No, there is no reason why I should
contend, for it is sufficiently obvious that only an Agnostic mind
could have woven the fabric of the stories and set the characters one
against the other. A sectarian soul would not have been satisfied to
exhibit merely the passions.

Will you charge me again with interrupting your argument if I say that
I know nothing in Shakespeare that a Catholic might not have written?

Well, I think if I were to take down a volume and read it, I could
find a hundred verses. I see your answer trembling on your lips, that
you don't require a hundred, but two or three. Very well. A Catholic
couldn't have written There is nothing serious in mortality, for he
believes the very contrary; nor could a Catholic have written A tale
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

What reason have you to suppose that Shakespeare was speaking in his
own person? It seems to me that by assuming he was doing so, you
impugn his art as a dramatist, which is to give appropriate speeches
to each of his characters; the writer must never transpire in a drama.

I'm afraid your religious zeal spurs you into dangerous statements,
and you are in an entanglement from which you will find it difficult
to extricate yourself. Shakespeare weaves a plot and sets will against
will, desire against desire, but his plays are suffused by his spirit,
and it is always the same spirit breathing, whether he be writing
about carls or kings, virgins or lights-o'-love. The passage quoted
from _Macbeth_ is an excellent example of the all-pervading
personality of the poet, who knew when to forget the temporal
character of Macbeth, and to put into the mouth of the cattle-spoiler
phrases that seem to us more suited to Hamlet. The poet-philosopher,
at once gracious and cynical, wise with the wisdom of the ages, and
yet akin to the daily necessity of men's foibles and fashions, is as
present in the play of _Macbeth_ as in _King Lear_; and the same fine
Agnostic mind we trace throughout the comedies, and the poems, and the
sonnets, smiling at all systems of thought, knowing well that there is
none that outlasts a generation.

I cannot see why a Catholic might not have written the phrases you
quote. One can only judge these things by one's own conscience, and if
I had thought of these verses--

You would have written them? I've always suspected you of being an
Agnostic Catholic.

The difference between the Agnostic and the Catholic mind seems to me
to be this--we all doubt (to doubt is human), only in the ultimate
analysis the Catholic accepts and the Agnostic rejects.

We know that the saints suffered from doubt, but the Agnostic doesn't
doubt, though he is often without hope of a survival of his
personality. A good case might be made out, metaphysically, if it
weren't that most of us are without any earthly personality. Why then
a heavenly one? You were once a great admirer of Fitzgerald's _Omar
Khayym_, and I doubt if you will dare to say to my face that a
Catholic could have written the _Rubiyt_.

The Colonel was at first inclined to agree with me that there was a
great deal that a Catholic could not have written in Fitzgerald's
poem; but he soon recovered himself, and began to argue that all that
Fitzgerald had done was to contrast ideas, maintaining that the
argument was conducted very fairly, and that if the poem were examined
it would be difficult to adduce proof from it of the author's
Agnosticism.

But we know Fitzgerald was an Agnostic?

You're shifting ground. You started by saying that the poems of
Shakespeare and Fitzgerald revealed the Agnosticism of the writers,
you now fall back upon contemporary evidence.

I don't think I've shifted my ground at all. If we knew nothing about
Fitzgerald's beliefs, there is abundant proof in his writings that he
was an Agnostic. You'll have to admit that his opinions on the
nothingness of life and the futility of all human effort, whether it
strives after pleasure or pain, would read as oddly if introduced into
the writings of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas as sympathetic remarks
about the Immaculate Conception would read in the world of Mr
Swinburne or Professor Huxley. The nothingness of our lives and the
length of the sleep out of which we come, and the still greater length
of the sleep which will very soon fall upon us, is the spring whence
all great poetry flows, and this spring is perforce closed to Catholic
writers for ever. Do you know the beautiful stanza in Moschus's
_Lament for Bion_?

     Ah me! when the mallows wither in the garden, and the green
     parsley and the curled tendrils of the anise, on a later day they
     live again and spring in another year; but we, men, we, the great
     and mighty, or wise, when once we have died, in the hollow earth
     we sleep, gone down into silence, a right long and endless and
     unawakening sleep.

Could these lines have been written by a Catholic?

The Colonel could not see why not.

Because ... but, my dear friend, I won't waste time explaining the
obvious. This you'll admit--that no such verses occur in Catholic
poems?

As poignant expressions regarding the nothingness of life as any in
Moschus, Shakespeare, or Fitzgerald are to be found in the Psalms and
Ecclesiastes. Man walketh in a vain shadow and troubleth himself in
vain.

The Bible wasn't written by Catholics.

The Colonel had to admit that it wasn't, and after watching and
rejoicing in his discomfiture for a while I went on to speak of
Shakespeare's contemporaries, declaring them to be robust livers,
whose philosophy was to live out their day in love of wine and women,
as frequenters of the Mermaid Tavern and of wenches, haters of the
Puritan.

You'll not claim Marlowe, I suppose? You'll admit that there was very
little Catholic about him except a very Catholic taste for life. You
mentioned just now the Brownists; they were overcome, you tell me, for
the time being. But Puritanism is an enemy, if it be really one, that
I can meet in a friendly spirit. Landor says that Virgil and St Thomas
Aquinas could never cordially shake hands; but I dare say I could
shake hands with Knox. The Puritan closed the theatres, an act which I
won't pretend to sympathise with; but England's dramatic genius had
spent itself, and for its intolerance of amusement Puritanism made
handsome amends by giving us Milton, and a literature of its own. Of
course everything can be argued, and some will argue that Milton's
poem was written in spite of Puritan influence; but this I do think,
that if ever a religious movement may be said to have brought a
literature along with it, Puritanism is that one. As much as any man
that ever lived, Milton's whole life was spent in emancipating himself
from dogma. In his old age he was a Unitarian.

You've forgotten _The Pilgrim's Progress_, written out of the very
heart of the language, and out of the mind of the nation.

Thank you for reminding me of it. A manly fellow was Bunyan, without
clerical unction, and a courage in his heart that nothing could cast
down, the glory and symbol of Puritanism for ever and ever.

Puritanism is more inspiring than Protestantism; it is a more original
attitude of mind--

The Agnostic mind is the original mind, the mind which we bring into
the world.

Milton was a Unitarian, Bunyan a Puritan; where does your
Protestantism come in? Who is the great Protestant poet?

I don't limit Protestantism to the Established Church. Protestantism
is a stage in human development. But if you want a poet who would shed
the last drop of his blood for the Established Church, there is one,
Wordsworth, and he is still considered to be a pretty good poet;
Coleridge was nearly a divine.

You make a point with Wordsworth, I admit it. He seems, however, to
have overstepped the line in his _Intimations of Immortality_.

But you miss my point somewhat; it is that there is hardly any line of
Protestantism to overstep.

I set Newman against--

Against whom? Not against Wordsworth, surely? And if you do, think of
the others--shall I enumerate?

It wouldn't be worth while; it is evident that all that is best in
England has gone into Agnosticism.

And into Protestantism; confronted by Wordsworth and Coleridge, you
can't deny to Protestantism a large share in the shaping of modern
poetry. But there isn't a Catholic writer, only a few converts.

Newman.

But, my dear Colonel, we cannot for one moment compare Newman's mind
to Wordsworth's or Coleridge's? To do so I may contend is ridiculous,
without laying myself open to a charge of being much addicted to
either writer. Wordsworth moralised Nature away, and it is impossible,
for me, at least, to forgive him his:

  A primrose by a river's brim
  A yellow primrose was to him,
      And it was nothing more.

That nothing more is a moral stain that no time shall wash away. One
would have thought that flowers, especially wild flowers, might be
freed from all moral obligations. I am an Objectivist, reared among
the Parnassians, an exile from the Nouvelle Athnes, and neither poet
has ever unduly attracted me. Three or four beautiful poems more or
less in the world are not as important as a new mind, a new way of
feeling and seeing. Mere writing--

A theory invented on the spot so as to rid yourself of Newman.

There you are mistaken. Allow me to follow the train of my thoughts,
and you will understand me better. And don't lose your head and run
away frightened if I dare to say that Newman could not write at all.
But you have dislocated my ideas a little. Allow me to continue in my
own way, for what I'm saying to you today will be written tomorrow or
after, and talking my mind to you is a great help. I'm using you as an
audience. Now, we were speaking about Coleridge, and I was saying that
the mere fact that a man has written three or four beautiful poems is
not enough; my primary interest in a writer being in the mind that he
brings into the world; by a mind I mean a new way of feeling and
seeing. I think I've said that before, but no harm is done by
repeating it.

If you'll allow me to interrupt you once more, I will suggest that
Newman brought a new way of feeling and seeing into the world--a new
soul.

I suppose he did; a sort of ragged weed which withered on till it was
ninety. It is a mistake to speak of him as a convert to Catholicism;
he was a born Catholic if ever a man was born one. Were it not for him
the term a born Catholic would be a solecism, for at first sight it
doesn't seem very easy to understand how a man can be born a Catholic.
A man is born blind, or deaf, or dumb, a hunchback, or an idiot, but
it's difficult to see how he can be born a Catholic. Yet it is so;
Newman proves it. A born Catholic would seem to mean one predisposed
to rely upon the help of priests, sacraments, texts, amulets, medals,
indulgences; and Newman, you will not deny, brought into the world an
inordinate appetite for texts, decrees, councils, and the like; even
when he was a Protestant he was always talking about his Bishop. He
was disposed from the beginning to seek authority for his every
thought. Obedience in spiritual matters is the watchword of the
Catholic, and surely Newman was always replete with it. He was a born
Catholic; he justified the phrase. My dear Colonel, I'm aware that I'm
delivering a little sermon, but to speak to you like this is a great
help to me. He seems to have been the least spiritual of men, bereft
of all sense of divinity. He seems to have lived his life in ignorance
that religion existed before Christianity, that Buddhism preceded it,
and that in China--But we need not wander so far afield. Newman was a
sectarian, if ever there was one, astride on a rail between
Protestantism and Catholicism, timidly letting down one leg, drawing
it back, and then letting down the other leg. In the 'sixties men were
frightened lest their ancestors might turn out to be monkeys, and a
great many ran after Newman clapping their hands in praise of his
broken English.

Broken English! interrupted the Colonel.

Yes, broken mutterings about an Edict in the fourth century, and that
the world has been going astray ever since. He seems to have really
believed that the destiny of nations depended on the chatter of the
Fathers, and he totters after them, like an old man in a dark corridor
with a tallow dip in his hand. A simple-minded fellow, who meant well,
I think; one can see his pale soul through his eyes, and his pale
style is on his face. The best that can be said about it is that it is
homely. You never saw _The Private Secretary_, did you?

The Colonel shook his head.

When Mr Spalding came on the stage, saying, I obey my Bishop, I at
once thought of Newman, and, though I have no shred of evidence to
support my case, I shall always maintain that that amusing comedy was
suggested by _The Apologia_. It seems to have risen out of it, and I
can imagine the writer walking up and down his study, his face
radiant, seeing Mr Spalding as a human truth, a human objectification
of an interest in texts, decrees, and in Bishops. I never thought of
it before, but Newman confesses to Mr Spalding's wee sexuality in _The
Apologia._ I have been reading _The Apologia_ this morning, and for
the first time. Here it is:

     I am obliged to mention, though I do it with great reluctance,
     another deep imagination, which at this time, the autumn of 1816,
     took possession of me--there can be no mistake about the fact;
     viz., that it would be the will of God that I should lead a
     single life. This anticipation, which has held its ground almost
     continuously ever since--with the break of a month now and a
     month then, up to 1829, and, after that date, without any break
     at all--was more or less connected in my mind with the notion,
     that my calling in life would require such a sacrifice as
     celibacy involved.

He is himself in this paragraph, and nothing but himself. Even on a
subject in which his whole life concerned he can only write dryly.

And we wrangled for some time over the anticipation which had held its
ground almost continuously.

I admit that it isn't very good; but how do you explain that he has
always been considered a master of English?

All in good time, my dear Colonel. We are now concerned with Newman's
mind; it is the mind that produces the style. Listen to this:

     The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop
     from heaven, for the earth to fall, and for all the many millions
     on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal
     affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be
     lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one
     wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.

This passage, I believe, was read with considerable piety and interest
by the age which produced it, and I wonder why it has fallen out of
favour; for to sentimentalise is to succeed, and it was really very
kind of Newman to sentimentalise over the miseries which our lightest
sins cause our Creator. An unfortunate case his is indeed, since the
Catholic Church holds that venial sins are committed every moment of
the day and night. The Creator torments us after we are dead by
putting us into hell, but while we are on earth we give him hell. And
our difficulties don't end with the statement that we make the
Creator's life a hell for him, for we are told that it would be better
that all humanity should perish in extremest agony than that, etc. If
that be so, why doesn't the Creator bring humanity to an end? The only
possible answer to this question is that the Creator and the Catholic
Church are not agreed on the point, and it would be pretentious on my
part to offer arbitration. They must settle their differences as best
they can. I'm afraid, Colonel, you look at me a little contemptuously,
as if you thought my criticism frivolous.

Logically, of course, the Colonel answered--logically, of course,
Newman is right.

We wasted at least ten minutes discussing how something that seemed
utterly absurd could be said to be logical; and to bring the
discussion to an end, I reminded the Colonel that Carlyle had said
that Newman's mind was not much greater than that of a half-grown
rabbit. Perhaps Carlyle libelled the rabbit; he should have said the
brain of a half-grown insect, a blackbeetle.

But, said the Colonel, do you believe the blackbeetle to be less
intelligent than the rabbit? In my experience--

I'm inclined to agree with you, but we're wandering from the point. I
want to draw your attention to some passages, and to ask you if they
are as badly written as they seem to be?

When you say that Newman wrote very badly, do you mean that he wrote
in a way which does not commend itself to your taste, or that he wrote
incorrectly?

His sentences are frequently incorrect, but I don't lay stress on
their occasional incorrectness. An ungrammatical sentence is by no
mean incompatible with beauty of style; all the great writers have
written ungrammatically; I suppose idiom means ungrammatical phrases
made acceptable by usage; dialect is generally ungrammatical; but
Newman's slips do not help his style in the least. You're watching me,
my dear Colonel, with a smile in your eyes, wondering into what
further exaggeration my detestation of Catholicism will carry me.

You have abused Newman enough. Let us get to facts. You say that he
writes incorrectly.

The passage in which he deplores the suffering that man causes God
convinced me that his mind was but a weed, and, though there was no
necessity for my doing so, I said: Let us see how he expresses
himself. You will admit that a man of weak intellect cannot write a
fine style.

Let us get to the grammatical blunders which you say you have
discovered in Newman.

I turned to the first pages and read:

     He, emphatically, opened my mind, and taught me to think and to
     use my reason.

Don't you think, Colonel, that emphatically opened my mind is a queer
sentence for a master of English style to write, and that we should
search in Carlyle or Landor a long while before we came upon such
draggle-tailed English as we read on page 7?

     He, emphatically, opened my mind, and taught me to think and to
     use my reason. After being first noticed by him in 1822, I became
     very intimate with him in 1825, when I was his Vice-Principal at
     Alban Hall. I gave up that office in 1826, when I became Tutor of
     my College, and his hold upon me gradually relaxed. He had done
     his work _towards me_ or nearly so, when he taught me to see with
     my own eyes and to walk with my own feet. _Not_ that I had _not_
     a good deal to learn from others still, but I influenced them as
     well as they me, and co-operated rather than merely concurred
     with them. As to Dr Whately, his mind was too different from mine
     for us to remain long _on one line_.

I know folks that is in the vegetable line, and I think I know one
chap who should be tuk up for the murder of the King's English if he
warn't dead already.

     I recollect how dissatisfied he was with an Article of mine in
     the _London Review_, which Blanco White, good-humouredly, only
     called Platonic. When I was diverging from him in opinion (which
     he did not like), I thought of dedicating my first book to him,
     in words to the effect that he had not only taught me to think,
     but to think for myself. He left Oxford in 1831; after that, as
     far as I can recollect, I never saw him but twice, when he
     visited the University; once in the street in 1834, once in a
     room in 1838. From the time that he left, I have always felt a
     real affection for what I must call his memory; for, at least
     from the year 1834, he made himself dead to me. He had
     practically _indeed given me up_ from the time that he became
     Archbishop in 1831; but in 1834 a correspondence _took place_
     between us,

A prize fight takes place; a correspondence begins.

     which, though conducted, especially on his side, in a friendly
     spirit, was the expression of differences of opinion which _acted
     as a final close_ to our intercourse. My reason told me that it
     was impossible we could have _got on together_ longer, had he
     stayed in Oxford; yet I loved him too much to bid him farewell
     without pain. After a few years had passed, I began to believe
     that his influence on me in a higher respect than intellectual
     advance,

He means than that of intellectual advance.

     (I will not say through his fault) had not been satisfactory. I
     believe that he has _inserted sharp things_ in his later works
     about me. They have not come in my way, and I have not thought it
     necessary to seek out what would pain me so much in the reading.

The next page consists mainly of quotations from Dr Whately, who
apparently is capable of expressing himself, and we pick up Newman
farther on.

     The case was this: though at that time I had not read Bishop
     Bull's _Defensio_ nor the Fathers, I was just then _very strong_
     for that ante-Nicene view of the Trinitarian doctrine, which some
     writers, both Catholic and non-Catholic, _have accused of
     wearing_ a sort of Arian exterior.

I really don't see, said the Colonel, that that sentence is--

Don't trouble to defend it. There is worse to come. But how is it that
the writer of such sentences is still spoken about as a master of
style? Am I the only man living who has read _The Apologia_? It is
almost impossible to read; that I admit.

     It would be against my nature to act otherwise than I do; but
     besides, it would be to forget the _lessons_ which I _gained_ in
     the experience of my own history in the past.

One doesn't gain lessons. How shall we amend it?--the experience I
gained from the lessons of my own history.

     The Bishop has _but_ said that a certain Tract is objectionable,
     _no reason being stated_.

Without giving his reasons, the Bishop has only said that a certain
Tract is objectionable, is how the editor of the halfpenny paper would
probably revise Newman's sentence. And who will say that the revised
text is not better than the original?

     As I declared on occasion of Tract 90, I claimed, in behalf of
     _who would_ in the Anglican Church,

Can he mean those who so desired in the Anglican Church? But it would
take too long to put this passage right, for it is impossible to know
exactly what the greatest master of lucid English meant--

     the right of holding with Bramhall a comprecation with the
     Saints, and the Mass all but Transubstantiation with Andrewes, or
     with Hooker that Transubstantiation itself is not a point for
     Churches to part communion upon,

The kind of English that one would rap a boy of twelve over the
knuckles for writing!

     or with Hammond that a General Council, truly such, never did,
     never shall err in a matter of faith,

A thousand years of Catholicism is needed to write like this, so
perhaps the present Duke of Norfolk is the author of _The Apologia_.

     or with Bull that man had in Paradise, and lost on the fall, a
     supernatural habit of grace,

The style is the man, a simpleton cleric, especially anxious about his
soul; no, I am mistaken--about a Text.

     or with Thorndike that penance is a propitiation for
     post-baptismal sin, or with Pearson that the all-powerful name
     of Jesus is no otherwise _given_ than in the Catholic Church.

What does he mean by given? In what sense? Does he mean that the name
of Jesus is _rendu_ in all churches in the same way? But, then, what
exactly does he mean by given?

The Colonel, who writes a letter to a newspaper as well as anybody I
know, took the book from my hand, saying:

It is barely credible ... I can write as well as that myself.

A great deal better, I answered, and we continued to look through _The
Apologia_, astonished at the feebleness of the mind behind the words,
and at the words themselves.

Like dead leaves, I said.

What surprises me is the lack of distinction, the Colonel murmured.

If the writing were a little worse it would be better, I answered. Am
I going too far, my dear Colonel, if I say that _The Apologia_ reads
more like a mock at Catholic literature than anything else; and that
it would pass for such if we didn't know that it was written in great
seriousness of spirit, and read with the same seriousness? No
Protestant divine ever wrote so badly. Perhaps Newman--

Haven't you read anything but _The Apologia_?

No, and there is no reason why I should.

How would you like to be judged by one book?

I have shown my friends the passages I have been quoting, and they
think he wrote better when he was a Protestant.

I see your article on Newman from end to end. That Newman was a great
writer until he became a Catholic is a pretty paradox which will suit
your style. You will be able to discover passages in his Protestant
sermons better written, no doubt, than the passages you select from
_The Apologia_. The Colonel lit his candle, and I could hear him
laughing good-humouredly as he went upstairs to bed.

It is dangerous to name a quality, I said to him next morning at
breakfast, whereby we may recognise a great writer, for as soon as we
have done so somebody names somebody whom we must confess deficient in
the quality mentioned. The perils of definition are numerous, but most
people will agree with me that all great writers have possessed an
extraordinary gift of creating images, and if that be so, Newman
cannot be called a writer. We search vainly in the barren, sandy tract
of _The Apologia_ for one, finding only dead phrases, very often used
so incorrectly that it is difficult to tell what he is driving at;
driving at is just the kind of worn-out phrase he would use without a
scruple.

You are judging Newman by _The Apologia_.

I admit I haven't read any other book. But dear Edward once invited
me to look into--I have forgotten the title, but I remember the
sentence that caught my eye--Heresy stalks the land, and you will
agree with me that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the
average reporter would be ashamed to write the words ... unless he
were in a very great hurry.

Newman wrote _The Apologia_ in a great hurry.

However great your hurry, you couldn't, nor could any of the friends
who came here on Saturday night, write as badly, and unless we hold
that to be always thin and colourless is a style--

You've a good case against him, but I'm afraid you'll spoil it by
overstatement.

My concern is neither to overstate nor to understate, but to follow my
own mind, faithfully, tracing its every turn. An idea has been running
in my head that books lose and gain qualities in the course of time,
and I have worried over it a good deal, for what seemed to be a
paradox I felt to be a truth. Our fathers were not so foolish as they
appear to us to be in their admiration of _Lara, The Corsair, The
Bride of Abydos, The Giaour_; they breathed into the clay and vivified
it, and when weary of romance they wandered into theology, and were
lured by a mirage, seeing groves of palm-trees, flowers, and a
bubbling rill, where in truth there was nothing but rocks and sand and
a puddle. And while Byron and Newman turn to dust Shakespeare is
becoming eternal.

There are degrees, then, in immortality?

Of course. The longer the immortality the more perfect it becomes,
Time putting a patina upon the bronze and the marble and wood, and I
think upon texts; you never will persuade me that the text that we
read is the text read in 1623.

The Colonel raised his sad eyes from _The Apologia_ into which they
had been plunged.

I'll admit that we never seem to get any further in metaphysics than
Bishop Berkeley. I see, he said a few minutes later, that Newman has
written a preface for this new and insufficiently revised edition.
Have you read it?

No, but I shall be glad to listen if you'll read it to me after
breakfast.

As soon as he had finished his eggs and bacon, the Colonel fixed his
glasses a little higher on his nose, and it was not long before we
began to feel that our tasks were hard, one as hard as the other, and
when the last sentence was pronounced, the Colonel, despite his
reluctance to decry anything Catholic, was forced to admit a lack of
focus in the composition.

He wanders from one subject to another, never finishing.

Excellent criticism! What you say is in agreement with Stevenson, who
told an interviewer that if a man can group his ideas he is a good
writer, though the words in which he expresses himself be tasteless,
and as you say, Newman, before he has finished with his third section,
returns to his first; from the fifth he returns to the fourth, and in
the sixth section we find some points that should have been included
in the second.

The Colonel did not answer; and feeling that I owed something to my
guest, I said:

The last time you were here you mentioned that you hoped to be able to
get one of the gateways from Newbrook.

The Colonel brightened up at once, and told me that he was only just
in time, for the stones were about to be utilised by the peasants for
the building of pigsties and cottages. But he had followed them in his
gig through the country, and had brought them all to Moore Hall, and
was now only waiting for me to decide whether I would like the gateway
built in a half-circle or in a straight line. The saw-mill he hoped to
get into working order very soon.

It will be of great use for cutting up the timber that we shall get
out of the stone park.

Isn't it in working order?

With emphasis and interest the Colonel began to relate the accident
the saw-mill had met with on the way from Ballinrobe; as it was
entering the farmyard one of the horses had shied, bringing the boiler
right up against a stone pillar, starting some of the rivets. A dark
cloud came into his face, and I learnt from him that he had very
foolishly given heed to the smith at Ballinrobe, a braggart who had
sworn he could rivet a boiler with any man in Ireland; but when it
came to the point he could do nothing. The Castlebar smith, a very
clever man, had not succeeded any better, but there was a smith at
Cong--

A real Cuchulain.

The story, I admit, is assuming all the proportions of an epic, the
Colonel replied joyously, and I allowed him to tell me the whole of
it, listening to it with half my brain, while with the other half I
considered the height of the Colonel's skull and its narrowness across
the temples.

A refined head, I said to myself, and it seemed to me that I had seen,
at some time or other, the same pinched skull in certain portraits of
ecclesiastics by Bellini and the School of Bellini: but not the
Colonel's vague, inconclusive eyes, I added. Italy has always retained
a great deal of her ancient paganism; but Catholicism absorbed Spain
and Ireland. It is into Spanish painting that we must look for the
Colonel, and we find most of him in Velasquez, a somewhat icy painter
who, however, relished and stated with great skill the Colonel's
high-pitched nose, the drawing of the small nostrils, the hard,
grizzled moustache. He painted the true Catholic in all his portraits
of Philip, never failing to catch the faded, empty look that is so
essentially a part of the Catholic face. Our ideas mould a likeness
quickly if Nature supplies certain proportions, and the Colonel--when
he fattens out a little, which he sometimes does, and when his mind is
away--reminds me of the dead King. Of course, there are
dissimilarities. Kingship creates formalities, and the Spanish Court
must have robbed Philip of all sense of humour, or buried it very
deeply in his breast, for it is recorded that he was so pleased on one
occasion with the splendid fight that a bull put up against the
picadors, that he did not deem any swordsman in Spain worthy of the
honour of killing him; the bull had earned his death from the highest
hand in the land, and arming himself with an arquebuse or caliver, he
walked across the arena and shot the bull with his own kingly hand. He
must have walked towards the bull with a kingly stride--a sloven
stride and a kingly act would be incompatible--he must have walked as
if to music; but the Colonel has little or no ear for music, and his
walk is, for this reason or another, the very opposite to Philip's. He
slouches from side to side, a curious gait, the reader will say, for a
soldier of thirty years, but very like himself, and therefore one
likes to see it, and to see him preparing for it, hustling himself
into his old yellow overcoat in the passage. He never carries a stick
or umbrella; he slouches along, his hands dangling ugly out of the
ends of the cuffs. To what business he is going I often wonder as I
stand at the window watching him, remembering all the while how he had
lain back in his armchair after breakfast, reading a book, his
subconsciousness suggesting to him many different errands, and at last
detaching him from his book or his manuscript, for the Colonel has
always meditated a literary career for himself as soon as he was free
from the army.

There are people of today, tomorrow, and yesterday; and the Colonel is
much more of yesterday than of today. If he does not defend the
Inquisition directly, he does so indirectly--all religions have
persecuted, for it is the nature of man to persecute, and he is unable
to understand that Protestantism and Rationalism together redeemed the
world from the disgrace of the Middle Ages. His ideas clank like
chains about him, but not to the ordinary ear, for the Colonel is
reserved by nature; only a fine ear can hear the clanks. Balzac would
never have thought of the Colonel for a modern story, but would have
placed him--I have sufficient confidence in Balzac's genius to believe
that he would have placed him in a Spanish setting; for the Colonel's
mind is so archaic that his clothes distress even me. I am not good at
clothes, but I am sure it is because his natural garment, the doublet,
is forbidden him that he dresses himself in dim grey hues or in
pepper-and-salt. He has never been seen in checks or fancy waistcoats,
or in a bright-coloured tie. He goes, however, willingly into
breeches; at Moore Hall he is never out of breeches; breeches remind
him of his racing and hunting days, besides being convenient. So far
can his country gear be explained, but why he sometimes comes up to
Dublin in breeches, presenting, as I have said, an incongruous
spectacle of sport in my drawing-room on a background of impressionist
pictures, I am unable to offer any opinion.




XVI


A telegram, sir.

Will you please to get the Colonel's room ready, and tell him, when he
arrives, that I shall not be free for a couple of hours? I'm busy with
_The Lake_. And about half past four I went down to the dining-room
and found him in an armchair surrounded by books: _Imaginary
Portraits, Evelyn Innes, Wild Wales_, and a book of Irish _Folk
Tales_, and he was reading Strauss's _Life of Jesus_.

He makes some very good points, he said, and I encouraged him to
continue in his appreciation of Strauss's skill as a dialectician; but
on pressing him to say that the book was influencing him, he said that
his mind had been made up long ago.

Then you are merely reading languidly, without taking sides; a
cricket-match seen from the windows of a railway train--that's about
all. To read without drawing conclusions is fatal. We have known men
and women in our youth who could neither read nor write, but who were
clever at their trades, far cleverer than those who have come after
them. Mahomet could neither read nor write. Forcible education is one
of the follies of the century, I continued. We are agreed in that, for
how can you educate forcibly? Education demands a certain
acquiescence.

Tea was brought in, and the Colonel said he had come up for a meeting
of the Coisde Gnotha, and must go back on Saturday.

On Saturday!

I must get back to look after the men.

Your sawyers? I suppose Paddy Walshe wants some rafters for his barn?

No, there's the garden. Kavanagh is a splendid vegetable grower, but
he doesn't understand the fruit-trees. I have to look after them
myself. The meeting begins at eight. Would you mind if we were to dine
at seven or a little before?

It was irritating to be asked to change the hour of dinner for the
sake of so futile a thing as a meeting of the Coisde Gnotha, and
though I replied, Of course, I could not refrain from adding: In fifty
years' time no one will speak Irish unless you procure a parrot and
teach her. Parrots live a long while; an Irish-speaking Polly in a
hundred years' time! what do you think, Maurice? And about that time
Christianity will be extinct.

The Colonel laughed good-humouredly, he hustled himself into his old
yellow overcoat, and went away leaving me disconcerted, irritated
against him, and still more against myself, for it was impossible not
to feel that I was abominably unsympathetic to other people's ideas.
But am I? Only when phantoms are cherished because they are phantoms.
We are all liable to mistake the phantom for reality. I followed the
Irish language for a while, but as soon as I discovered my mistake I
retraced my steps. Not so the Colonel. He knows at the bottom of his
heart that the Irish language cannot be revived, that it would take
two hundred years to revive it, and that even if it were revived
nothing would come of it unless Ireland dropped Catholicism.

The lamp burned brightly on the table, and, rising from the armchair
to light a cigar, I caught sight of my face and wondered at my anger
against my brother, a sort of incoherent, interior rumbling,
expressing itself in single words and fragments of sentences. An evil
self seemed to be stirring within me; or was it that part of our
nature which lurks in a distant corner of our being and sometimes
breaks its chain and overpowers the normal self which we are pleased
to regard as our true self? Every one has experienced the sensation of
spiritual forces at war within himself, but does any one ever suspect
that the abnormal self which has come up to the surface and is
influencing him may be influencing him for his good; at all events,
for some purpose other than the generally received one--the desire to
lead poor human nature into temptation? The Christian idea of horns
and hooves and tail has been rammed into us so thoroughly that we
seldom cease to be Christians; but I must have nearly ceased to be one
in the evening I am describing, for I seemed to be aware all the while
that there was good purpose behind my anger at my brother's untidy
mind. I was not certain what adjective to apply to it--untidy,
unfinished, or prejudiced.

He reads Strauss's _Life of Jesus_, admitting that no proofs, however
conclusive, would persuade him that the son of Mary and Joseph was
anything else but the Son of God. Christ never said that he was, and I
suppose he knew. Even St Paul never spoke of him as God. How precisely
I can see that brother of mine, I cried, surprised myself at the
clearness with which I remembered the long, pear-shaped head with some
fine lines in it; but too narrow at the temples, I muttered, and the
eyes are vague and lacking in the light of any great spiritual
conviction, and they tell the truth, for has he not admitted to me
that substantially the host does not change, and the rest is merely
whatever philosophical idea you like to attach to it? Worse still, he
has said that the Decrees the Pope issues affecting excommunication do
not interest him in the least, and this proves him to be a heretic, a
Modernist. He always eats meat on Friday; of course he may have
obtained a dispensation to eat the chicken as well as the egg, but I
am not at all sure that he acquiesces in priestly rule enough to apply
for a dispensation; and I began to wonder how long it was since his
last confession. When the Bishop questioned the parish priest on the
subject, the Colonel was very angry, and said it was hitting below the
belt. He did not go to Mass when he came to see me in Dublin until I
reproached him for neglect of his duties, and then he never failed
afterwards to step away to Westland Row, his white hair blowing over
the collar of the old yellow overcoat--never failed while I was in the
house, but when I left it he remained in bed, so I have been told. He
may have been ill, but I don't believe it. There has always been a
vein of humbug in the depths of his deeply affectionate nature; when
he was a little child of four or five he was caught with his fingers
in a jam-pot, but instead of saying, I took the jam because I liked
it, he fled to his mother and flung himself into her arms, begging of
her not to believe the nurse, crying, I am your own innocent yam
(lamb).

The Colonel's key in the lock interrupted my thoughts, and there he
was before me, overflowing with anecdote, his hilarity as unpleasing
as it was surprising; high spirits sit ill upon the constitutionally
sad, and the humorous sententious are very trying at times. His
chatter about the doings of the League seemed endless, and I felt that
I could not abide that family attitude into which he at once fell: the
hand held in front of the fire, the elbow resting on the knee. The
Colonel had fattened in the face since his last visit. Everybody
should cultivate a kindly patience, imitating AE, who, while going his
way, can watch others going theirs without seeming invidious or
disdainful. But AE was born with a beautiful mind, and can pass a
criticism on a copy of bad verses, and send the poet home unwounded in
his self-respect. He will never change. He knows himself to be
immortal, and is content to overlook or claim my periodical
aggressiveness, as part of my character. But not being as wise as AE,
I would alter myself if I could. How often have I tried! In vain, in
vain! We are what we are, for better or worse, and there are no
stepping stones ... except in bad verses. Enough of myself and back to
the Colonel.

He was telling me how one orator's loquacity had driven his supporters
out of the room, and when the amendment was put there was nobody to
support it. The incident amused me for a moment, and then a sudden
sense of the triviality of the proceedings boiled up in my mind.

Of course, I said, the amendment you speak of was invaluable, and its
loss a great blow to the movement. But tell me, do you propose to
spend the rest of your life coming up from Mayo to listen to these
fellows chattering about the best means of reviving a language which
the few who can speak it are ashamed to speak, or have fallen out of
the habit of speaking, like Alec McDonnell and his wife?

I have never denied that the difficulties are very great.

But of what use would the language be to anybody if it could be
revived? Prayers, I have often said, are equally valuable in whatever
language they may be said.

The Colonel smiled a little contemptuously, and his smile irritated me
still further.

As I have said a thousand times, unless Ireland ceases to be
Catholic--

That question has been gone into.

Gone into; but you've never been able to explain why there is so
little Catholic literature. It must be clear to everybody that dogma
draws a circle round the mind; within this circle you may think, but
outside of it your thoughts may not stray. An acorn planted in a pot--

Even if what you say be true, it seems to me that the small languages
should be preserved. You were in favour of the movement till--

There's no using going over the whole argument again. You've tried to
bring up your children Irish speakers, and have failed.

The Colonel laughed, for he could not deny that he had failed in this
respect.

They must have professions.

You would like other people to sacrifice their children's chances of
life for the sake of the Irish language, but you are not prepared to
go as far as you would like others to go. You will only go half-way.

How is that?

You bring them up Catholics. The younger is in a convent school, and
the elder is now with the Jesuits. I don't think that our father would
have approved of the narrow, bigoted education which they are
receiving.

I cannot see why. He never disapproved of the religious orders.

You must feel that the atmosphere of a convent isn't manly, and will
rob the mind of something, warp or bias it in a direction--

Of which you don't approve?

It seems to me that the mind of the child should be allowed to grow up
more naturally.

You can't let a boy grow up naturally. He must be brought up in some
theory of what is right and what is wrong. Now, I ask why my children
should be taught your right and wrong rather than mine?

I admit that they must be taught something.

Once you admit that, it seems to me that the parent is the proper
person.

It all depends on what you mean by teaching. The Jesuit says: Give me
the boy till he is fourteen and I don't care who gets him after. And
his words mean that the mind shall be so crushed that he will for
ever remain dependent. I don't know if you remember a story ... our
mother used to tell of a beggar woman who went about Ireland with four
or five blind children, their eyes resembling the eyes of those who
are born blind so closely that every oculist was deceived. But one day
a child's crying attracted attention, but it was discovered that the
mother had tied walnut-shells over his eyes, and in each shell was a
beetle; the scratching of the beetle on the eyeball produced the
appearance of natural blindness--an ingenious method, part, no doubt,
of the common folklore of Europe, come down to us from the Middle Ages
when the Courts of Kings had to be kept supplied with dwarfs, eunuchs,
buffoons; amusing disfigurements were the fashion, and high prices
were paid for them. We are too sensitive to hear even how a permanent
leer may be put on a child's face, but we are very much interested in
the crushing, I should say the moulding, of children's minds, and all
over Europe the Jesuits are busy preparing monstrosities for the
Courts of Heaven.

My dear George, St Francis of Assisi and St Teresa, whom you admire so
much, were prepared for Heaven in the Catholic religion, and there are
others. St John of the Cross is one to whom I am sure you will
graciously extend your admiration.

To them, certainly, much rather than to the inevitable Aquinas; but
those you mention belong to the Middle Ages.

Not St Teresa.

The Middle Ages existed in Spain long after St Teresa, for the burning
of heretics went on till the end of the eighteenth century. Religions!
The world is littered with religions; they grow, flourish, and die,
and if you can't see that Christianity is dying--

The Colonel spoke of revivals.

After each revival, I said, it grows fainter, and would be dead long
ago if it hadn't been that children are taken young and their minds
crushed. The Jesuits have admitted that that is so. Give me the child,
they cry.

Toby has learnt nothing from the nuns except a shocking accent, and
Rory is learning very little, and dislikes the Jesuits. I'm thinking
of sending him to the Benedictines.

Monks or priests, it's all the same. You know how worthless the
education was which we received at Oscott.

There was none. I admit that priests don't seem to be very good
educationalists.

Then why have your sons educated by priests? Priests are in all the
Catholic schools, but there are excellent Protestant schools--

And bring them up Protestants?

Why not?

You, an Agnostic!

Protestantism is harmless, as I have often pointed out to you. It
leaves the mind free, or very nearly.

I can understand that you, who seem constitutionally incapable of
seeing anything in life but art, should prefer Agnosticism, but I
don't understand your proposing a Christian dogma for my children that
you yourself don't believe in.

Don't you? Would you like to hear?

Very much.

I'll give you three excellent reasons. I look upon Protestantism as a
sort of safeguard--

A sort of vaccine?

Just so. If the Agnostic catches the smallpox he generally catches it
in an acute form; and ninety-five per cent remain in the religion they
are brought up in. Isn't that so?

Well, let us hear your second reason.

Protestantism supplies a book out of which the child can learn. I
think it is John Eglinton who says in one of his essays that, however
beautifully a book may be written, it will not be read by the
multitude for the sake of its style. Shakespeare is read in England,
for England produced Shakespeare; and the Bible is read in England,
for the Bible produced Protestantism. And Protestantism produced the
Irish Bible, the one beautiful book you have. Catholics are forbidden
to read it.

A stupid prohibition, for the difference between the Catholic and the
Protestant version is so slight that not one reader in ten thousand
would be able to trace it.

Yes, isn't it stupid? But what is to be done? I can think of
nothing--can you? We learnt no English at Oscott; any English I know I
learnt in Sussex out of the Prayer-book, and gossiping with the
labourers, bailiffs, and especially with gamekeepers; gamekeepers
speak the best English. I can't tell why, but it is so.

A new reason for preserving the game laws. A sally at which we both
laughed.

But I was going to give you a third reason for my preference for
Protestantism. Protestantism engenders religious discussion. You'll
admit that?

Indeed I will, and can imagine nothing more useless or tedious.

Useless it may be for the Catholic, who goes from the cradle to the
grave with every point of interest settled for him. How, then, can
Catholics be intelligent? We know they're not. But what is much more
interesting is the fact that they know themselves they are not
intelligent. They admit it freely. At dinner the other day I met a
Catholic and spoke to him on this subject. He answered me that the
Catholic religion absorbs a man's mind so completely that no energy is
left for literary activities, only enough for the practical business
of life.

I hate Catholics who speak like that. They're worse than Protestants.
There are Uriah Heeps, I admit, and plenty of them, in our Church.

Servant-maids and working-folk are quite free from hypocrisy, and
often I've heard them say, It's strange we don't get on as well as
Protestants. Once I heard a beggar in Galway saying, There must be
something in Protestants since they get on so well in the world. A
wiser man than you, my dear friend, or shall I say a less prejudiced
one? You remember I told you there was no Catholic literature when you
were last in Dublin, but I only half stated my case; the discussion
wandered into an argument about Newman.

And what have you discovered since then?

That Russian literature is against you, Scandinavian, too, and, worst
of all, North and South America.

The mention of North and South America roused the Colonel, and he did
not hesitate to say that it always astonished him that North America
had produced so little literature.

I believe that South America can show some records of missionary work
done among the Indians.

The Colonel replied that South America was colonised much later than
North America--an answer which angered me, for I knew that the Colonel
was relying on my ignorance of history.

The first colonisations were made in Peru and Brazil, you know that
very well. But what can it profit you to insist that Catholics have
written books since the Reformation? What can it profit you to deny
facts? Of course there is a book or two--one per cent, two per cent of
the world's literature--but if you were to tell me that there is no
negro literature, you would think me very stupid if I were to answer,
Yes, there is. I can produce a good many songs from Hayti, and I once
knew a negro who had written a novel. Catholic literature has declined
steadily since the Reformation, and today it is one degree better than
Sambo.

No sooner had the words passed my lips than I saw I had, as the phrase
goes, given myself away, for the negroes are nearly all Methodists or
Wesleyans, and I mentioned the fact to the Colonel, feeling sure that
if I did not do so he would mention it himself, but he refused to
accept my suggestion, saying that he had once believed that religion
was race and climate, but he thought so no longer. He has sunk deeper
into Catholicism than I thought, for he believes now in a universal
truth; for him there is no hope, but I cannot allow his children to
perish without saying a word in their favour, and I spoke of Rory and
Toby again.

My children will have as good a chance of making their way as I have
had. I was brought up a Catholic.

Why shouldn't your children have a better chance?

The only way, said the impassible Colonel, that children may be
educated is either by abolishing religious education in the schools,
and nobody is in favour of that, or by sending them to schools in
which they will be taught the religion of their parents.

But what you call bringing up children in the religion of their
parents is estranging them from every other influence, until they
become incapable of thinking for themselves. Give me the child till
he's fourteen, and I don't care who gets him afterwards. There is no
question of religious truth; there is no such thing, we know that;
what concerns me is that your truth is being forced upon your boys to
the exclusion of every other. You keep them from me lest they should
hear mine.

I hope you will never say anything in the presence of my children that
would be likely to destroy their faith. I rely on your honour.

It is no part of my honour to withhold the truth, or what I believe to
be the truth, from any human being. The fact that you happen to be
their father doesn't give you the right over their minds to deform and
mutilate them as you please, any more than it gives you the right to
mutilate their bodies. Gelding and splaying--You don't claim such
rights, do you?

And do you claim the right to seek my children out and destroy their
faith?

Can you define the difference between faith and superstition? The
right I claim is that of every human being, to speak what he believes
to be the truth to whomever he may meet on his way. Brotherhood
doesn't forfeit me that right.

Then I am to understand that you will seek my children out?

Seek them out, no. But do you keep them out of my way. But, if you
think like this, you'd have done better not to have married a
Protestant. I suppose your children believe their mother will go to
hell; and if you love Ireland as well as you profess to, why did you
go into the English army?

It's impossible for me to continue this argument any longer, your
intention being to say what you think will wound me most. What you
have just said I know to have been said with a view to wounding my
feelings.

No, but to express my mind. So they're not to get a chance? Well, it's
a shame. Why shouldn't their mother have as much voice as you have in
their education? Why shouldn't I have a voice?

In the education of my children!

We haven't an idea in common. We are as much separated as though we
came from the ends of the earth; yet we were brought up together in
the same house, we learnt the same lessons.

The Colonel walked out of the room suddenly, and I heard him take his
hat from the table in the hall and go out of the house. The door
closed behind him, and I sat in the silence, alarmed by his sudden
departure. It seemed to me that I could see him walking, hardly
conscious of the street he was passing through, absorbed by the
horrible quarrel that had been thrust upon us, a quarrel that might
never.... And I began to quake at the thought that we might never be
friends again.

The argument had been conducted in quite a friendly spirit, here and
there a little heated, but no more, till words had been put into my
mouth that wounded him to the quick, sending him out of the house. He
would come back, and forgive me, no doubt. But was it sure that he
would? And even if he did, the quarrel would begin again the next time
we met; the discussion had never ceased since the day he had
unsuspectingly come up from Mayo to argue against me that literature
and dogma are not incompatible. No matter what the subject of our
conversation might be, it drifted sooner or later into religious
argument, into something about Protestants and Catholics, and a moment
after we were angry, hostile, alienated. Since boyhood our lives had
been lived apart, but we had been united by mutual love and
remembrances, and as the years went by we had begun to dream that the
end of our lives should be lived out together. He had written from
South Africa that there was no one he would care to live with as much
as with me, and no words that I can call upon can tell the eagerness
with which I awaited his return from the Boer War. He was coming home
on six months' leave; and three of these he spent with me in Ely
Place--delightful months in which we seemed to realise the dearest
wishes of our hearts. Our common love of Ireland brought us closer
together than we had hoped was possible ... and then? Bitterness,
strife, disunion. He had been an idol in my eyes, and my idol lay
broken in pieces about me--broken, and by whom? God knows; not by me
... I swear it. That he would not write a book about camp-life in
South Africa was a disappointment to me; his dilatoriness in getting
grandfather's manuscript in order was another; and now his sticking to
Catholicism, despite the proofs that I had laid before him of its
inherent illiteracy, had estranged us completely.

An endless whirl of thoughts, and a sudden pause on a recollection of
the words I had used: If you hate Protestantism, why did you marry a
Protestant? There could be no great harm in saying that. A man who has
been married for fifteen years generally knows his wife's religion.
Nor in the remark that followed it, that notwithstanding his love of
Ireland he had gone into the English army; for a man does not go into
the English army and remain in it for thirty years without knowing
that he is in it; and I began to wonder if he had gone into the army
because he was afraid he could not make his living in any other way?
Or was there behind his mind, far back in it, some little flickering
thought that if Ireland rose against English dominion he would be able
to bring to the services of his country the tactics he had learnt in
the enemy's ranks? A sentiment of that kind would be very like him,
and I fell to thinking of him, following his life from the beginning
of his manhood up to the present time. All his dreams had been of the
Irish race, of its literature, of its traditions, and his clinging to
Catholicism can be accounted for by his love of Ireland. Or was it
that his mind lacked elasticity, and that he failed at the right
moment to twist himself out of the theological snare? It must have
been so, for one day, while playing at Red Indians in the woods of
Moore Hall, during a rest under the lilac-bush that grows at the turn
of the drive, I had asked him if he intended to continue to believe in
all the priest said about his Sacraments and about God. A look came
into his face, and he answered that he couldn't do without it--meaning
religion. But why that religion? I asked. The idea of changing his
religion seemed to frighten him even more than dropping religion
altogether, and he has persisted in that faith, trying to believe all
it enjoins, his thoughts and his deeds going down parallel lines--a
true Irishman, his dreams always in conflict with reality....

It seemed to me that some time had passed, for when I awoke from my
reverie I was thinking of Balzac, thinking that I had read somewhere
that it is not ideas which divide us, but _le choc des caractres_.
Balzac must have written very casually when he wrote that, for surely
the very opposite is the case. Men are drawn together by their ideas;
temperament counts for nothing, or for very little. But it is
temperament, I said, that creates our ideas, and my mind reverted to
the Colonel, and he stood up in my mind, Ireland in essence, the
refined melancholy of her mountains and lakes, and her old castles
crumbling among the last echoes of a dying language. In his face, so
refined and melancholy, I could trace a constant conflict between
dreams and reality, and it is this conflict that makes Ireland so
unsuccessful. But I stop, perceiving that I am falling into the stuff
one writes in the newspapers. Why judge anybody? Analyse, state the
case; that is interesting, but pass no judgments, for all judgments
are superficial and transitory. The Colonel has always been a
sentimentalist. Something seemed to break in my mind. Yes, a
sentimentalist he has always been. Now I understand him, and I thought
for a long while, understanding not only my brother, but human nature
much better than I had done at the beginning of the evening. It was
like looking under the waves, seeing down to the depths where strange
vegetation moves and lives. The waves flowed on and on, and I peered,
and I dreamed, and I thought, awaking suddenly with this cry upon my
lips: Freed from the artificial life of the army he is free to follow
an idea, and the Gael loves to follow an idea rather than a thing, and
the more shadowy and elusive the idea the greater the enchantment it
lends, and he follows the ghost of his language now with outstretched
arms. But how little feeling there is in me! I cried, starting up from
my chair. My brother all this while walking the streets, his heart
rent, and I sitting, meditating, dissecting him, arguing with myself.

Now, the question to be settled was whether I should go to bed or wait
for him to come in. To go to bed would be wiser, and speak to him in
the morning. But I should lie awake all night, thinking. It seemed
impossible to go to sleep until some understanding had been arrived
at.




XVII


There seemed a little strain in his voice, and I wondered what
thoughts had passed through his mind last night about me, and if his
affection for me had really changed.

If you leave like this it will never be the same again, and I begged
of him not to go away. You thought that I spoke with the express
intention of wounding your feelings, but you are wrong.

He did not answer for some time, and when I pressed him he repeated
what he had said before, adding that the engagement could not be
broken.

And when are you going back to the West?

At the end of next week or the week following.

But won't you spend the interval here?

No; I'm going on to see some other friends.

And then?

Well, then I shall go back to the West.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry ... this religion has estranged us.

Don't let us speak on that subject again.

No, let us never speak on that subject again.

But you can't help yourself.

By going away you'll give importance to words which they really don't
deserve. Nothing has happened, only a few words--nothing more. And
after all, you can't blame me if I'm interested in your children. It's
only natural.

You said you'd seek my children out for the express purpose--

Excuse me; I said I would not seek them out.

And as I stood looking at him the thought crossed my mind that there
was a good deal to be said in support of his view, so I said: I
suppose that if the father's right to bring up his children as he
chooses be taken from him, he loses all his pleasure in his children.

It seems the more humane view.

His voice altered, and, seeing that we were on the point of being
reconciled, I said: You always had more conscience than I had; even
when you were four years old you objected to my putting back the clock
in the passage to deceive Miss Westby. And in the hope of distracting
his thoughts from last night's quarrel, I asked him if he remembered
my first governess, Miss Beard. I remember crying when she went away
to be married; and it was possibly for those tears that she came to
see me at Oscott, and brought a cake with her. A tall, blond girl
succeeded her, but she had to leave because of something the matter
with her hip.

The Colonel did not remember either.

Nor grandmother?

Oh yes, I remember grandmother quite well.

But only as a cripple. My first memory is going along the passage with
her to the dining-room, and hearing her say the gingerbread nuts were
too hard, and my first disappointment was at seeing them sent back to
the kitchen. She promised that some more should be made. But a few
days or a few weeks after she was picked up at the foot of the stairs.
She never recovered from that fall; she never walked again, but was
carried out by two villagers in a chair on poles.

I remember seeing her dead, and the funeral train going up the narrow
path through the dark wood to Kiltoon.

Half-way up that pathway there is a stone seat. It was she who had it
put there. She walked to Kiltoon every day till her accident. She is
there now, and father and mother are there. The tomb must be nearly
full of us. Are you going there? I'm not. Does it ever occur to you
that we have very little more life to live, only the lag end of the
journey? I cannot believe myself to be an old man.

You're not.

I don't know what else to call myself. How unreal it all is! For if we
look back, we discover very few traces of our flight. Our lives float
away like the clouds. Father was in London fighting Ireland's battle
when mother and I used to spend the evening together in the summer
room--she in one armchair, I in another. Our lives begin in a grey
dusk. I can remember settling myself in the chair every night and
waiting for her to begin her tale of loneliness; and I must have
enjoyed it, for when she started up out of her chair, crying, Why,
it's eleven o'clock; we must get to bed, I was loath to go. She used
to read father's speeches.

To whom?

To grandmother. She was a young woman at the time--not thirty, and
was glad when father's political career ended and he returned to live
in Moore Hall with her. You're writing his life, and have heard me
tell how he was pricked by a sudden curiosity to hear me read aloud,
and how the long _ff_'s broke me down again and again. My mother and
Miss Westby were called in, and father assured us that he used to read
_The Times_ aloud to his parents when he was three. And then I think
he ceased to interest himself in my education for some while--a
respite much appreciated by me and my governess. He turned to racing--

The usual thing for an Irish gentleman of those days to do when he
left politics.

You know about Wolf Dog and Carenna--you have read the subject up; but
you don't remember the old Cook--the last of the first racing stud: an
old mare that had drifted into the shafts of the side-car that used to
take us to church and to Ballinrobe. How very Irish it all is! But
when father gave up politics, she was sent to the Curragh to be served
by Mountain Deer. Her first foal was a chestnut filly--Molly
Carew--but she was too slow to win a selling race, and I don't know
what became of her. She bred another chestnut filly--the Cat--and she
was as slow as her sister--a very vicious animal that nearly killed
both my father and mother. After her came Croagh Patrick, a brown
colt. There seems never to have been any doubt that he was a good one.
I remember hearing--and perhaps you do, too--that when the grooms
appeared at the gate with sieves of oats Croagh Patrick always came up
the field streets ahead.

No, I never heard that. I'm glad to you told me.

All the same, he didn't win his two-year-old races at the Curragh.

Yes, he did; he won the Madrids, for I saw him win. He was a black,
ratlike horse, with four white legs. And what I remember best is how I
made my way to the railings, and gradually slipped down them till I
was on my knees, for I wanted to say a little prayer that the horse
might win; and I remember then how I looked round, terribly frightened
lest any one had seen me pray.

He couldn't have won the Madrids before he won the Steward's Cup, for
the handicapper let him in at six stone. It must have been as a
four-year-old you saw him run, or in the autumn. You were a baby boy
when Croagh Patrick went to Cliff's to do his last gallops before
running at Goodwood. I was at Cliff's at the time and saw him do them.
Father and mother went away with the horse--

And what became of you?

I was left at Cliff's, and enjoyed myself immensely among the
stable-boys. There was a green parrot in the parlour--it was the first
time I had ever seen a parrot, and Polly was often brought out into
the stable-yard, and I thought it cruel to throw water on her, till it
was pointed out to me that the bird enjoyed her bath.

Who looked after you at Cliff's?

I don't know. Mrs Cliff probably saw that I put on my trousers. But I
remember the pony I used to ride out on the downs, and Vulture, a
horse so vicious that if he had succeeded in ridding himself of the
boy he would have eaten him. The Lawyer was there at the time, the
last half-bred that won a flat race. Once I lost myself on the downs.
You never heard of my stay at Cliff's?

I always thought that you went straight from Moore Hall to Oscott.

After Goodwood father and mother went off somewhere, and presumably
forgot all about me. Of course, they knew I was quite safe.

Among stable-boys! I don't think I should care to leave Rory and Ulick
at a racing-stable for three weeks. How long were you there?

A month, perhaps; but I can't say. And then a little kid of nine was
pitched headlong into the midst of a hundred and fifty boys. How well
I remember leaving Cliff's for Oscott! My one thought at the time was
that the train didn't travel fast enough, and all the way I was asking
father how far we were from Oscott, and if we should get there before
evening. You remember the fringe of trees and the gate-house rising
above them, and the great red-brick building, the castellated tower
with the clock in it, and the tall belfry! I left father and mother
talking with the President in the pompous room reserved for visitors,
and raced through the empty playgrounds (it was class-time) delirious;
and it was with difficulty that I was found when the time came for
father and mother to bid me goodbye. They were a little shocked, I
think, at my seeming heartlessness, but I could only think of the boys
waiting to make my acquaintance. A few hours later they came trooping
out of the classrooms, formed a procession, and marched into the
refectory, I bringing up the rear. Father Martin came down the
refectory and, to my great surprise, told me that I must hold my
tongue. As soon as he had turned his back I asked my neighbour in a
loud voice why the priest had told me I wasn't to talk. The question
caused a loud titter, and before the meal had ended I had become a
little character in the school. I never told you of my first day at
Oscott. It seemed to me a fine thing to offer to match myself to fight
the smallest boy present in the play-room after supper. But he was two
or three years older than I was, and, though a Peruvian, he pummelled
me, and the glamour of school-life must have begun to dim very
soon--probably that very night, as soon as my swollen head was laid on
the pillow. At Hedgeford Mrs Cliff must have helped me a little, but
at Oscott there was no one to help me. Imagine a child of nine getting
up at half-past six, dressing himself, and beaten if he was not down
in time for Mass. There was no matron, no kindness, no pity, nor, as
well as I can remember, the faintest recognition of the fact that I
was but a baby. When my parents returned they found that the
high-spirited child they had left at Oscott had been changed into a
frightened, blubbering little coward that begged to be taken home. In
those days children were not treated mercifully, and I remained at
Oscott till my health yielded to cold and hunger and floggings. You
remember my coming home and hearing that I wasn't returning to Oscott
for a year or two.

You very nearly died, and if it hadn't been for cod-liver oil you
would have died. But how difficult it was to get you to take it!

Those two years spent at Moore Hall were the best part of my
childhood. Long days spent on the lake, two boatmen rowing us from
island to island, fishing for trout and eels. How delightful! We
sought for birds' nests in the woods and the bogs; I made a collection
of wild birds' eggs, and wrote to my school-fellows of my finds. One
of our tutors, Feeney, passed you afterwards for the army. We had many
tutors, but Father James Browne is the only one that I remember with
real affection. He loved literature for its own sake. Father didn't. I
always felt he didn't, and that's what separated us.

He was a man of action.

Yes, I suppose he was, and could, therefore, learn lessons.

He seems to have been a model schoolboy. It was not till he went to
Cambridge--

Whereas I couldn't learn.

You could learn quickly enough when there was anything to be gained
that you wanted especially; and the Colonel reminded me that I had
learnt up Greek and Latin history in a few weeks, because the reward
was a day's outing in Warwickshire.

Any one can learn a little history. I often asked mother if I was
really stupid, but was never able to get a clear answer from her. But
you often see our old governess--would you mind asking her?

I have asked her, and she remembers you as the most amiable child she
ever knew.

Did she tell you anything more about me?

No; I think that's all she said.

You like seeing the old people who knew us in childhood, but I don't.
I never know what to say to them.

The Colonel did not answer, and at the end of a long silence I asked
him if he remembered being taken to Castlebar and measured for
clothes, and travelling over to England in the charge of Father
Lavelle, who was going to Birmingham to spend his holidays with his
cousin, a provision-dealer.

I can never forget that shop, the Colonel said; the smell of the
cheese is in my nostrils at this moment. I always hated cheese.

You didn't like to stay the night there. You asked me, Why did you
agree to stay here? I think it was because the people were so common.

I remember nothing of that, but I remember the provision-dealer's
shirt-sleeves clearly; his face is indistinct.

A plump, cheery fellow, who came round the great piles of butter and
cheese and shook hands with Father Lavelle, and was introduced to us,
and begged that we should stay to dinner. Dinner was served in the
back parlour, and was interrupted many times by customers.

I don't remember the dinner, but what I remember very well is that a
number of people came in after dinner, and that a piper was sent for,
and that we were asked to say if he was as good as our Connaught
pipers. They all turned towards us, waiting for us to speak, and I can
remember my embarrassment, and my effort to get at a fair decision,
and wishing to say that Moran was the better piper.

It is curious how one man remembers one thing and another another. The
people coming in, and the piper and the discussion about the piping
have passed completely out of my memory, but I do remember very well
lying down together side by side on flock mattresses in a long
garret-room under a window for which there was no blind, and you
reproaching me again for having consented to stay the night, and I
suppose to your complaint I must have answered, You don't know Oscott.
But perhaps I didn't wish to discourage you. A cab was called in the
morning, and I congratulated myself that there were six miles still
between us and that detestable college, and wished the horse would
fall down and break his leg.

It was on my lips to say My God! you remember Oscott, and yet you're
sending your son to be educated by priests. But quarrelling with my
brother would not save the boy, and I said:

Things must have improved since then. Let us hope the windows in the
corridors have been mended, and that a matron has been engaged to look
after the smaller boys. Do you remember the dormitories, and thirty or
forty boys, and a priest in a room at the end to see that we didn't
speak to each other? All that was thought of was the modesty of the
wooden partition. There were not sufficient bedclothes, we were often
kept awake by the cold, and as for washing--none in winter was
possible, the water in the jug being a solid lump of ice in the
morning; but our ears were pinched by the Prefect because our necks
were dirty. The injustice, the beastliness of that place--is it
possible to forget it?

I remember praying on those cold mornings that I might not be sent to
the Prefect's room to be beaten. Do you remember the order, Go to the
Prefect's room and ask for four or six, and we had to wander down a
long passage, doors all the way on the right and left, till we came to
the last door? If the Prefect wasn't in we had to wait, and when he
came to his room we told him who had sent us to him, and he took out
of a cupboard a stick with a piece of waxed leather on the end of it,
told us to hold out our hands, and we received four or six strokes
delivered with all his strength.

He enjoyed it; men do enjoy cruelty, especially priests. I hope the
food isn't so bad now as it was in the 'sixties.

The food that was given us at Oscott was worse than bad--it was
disgusting, the Colonel answered.

Do you remember the bowl of slop called tea, and the other bowl of
slop called coffee, and the pat of grease called butter? Some stale
bread was handed about in a basket, and that was our breakfast; never
an egg--a bleak meal, succeeded by half an hour's recreation, and then
more lessons. At dinner, do you remember the iridescent beef, purple,
with blue lines in it?

I'm convinced that very often it wasn't beef at all, but the carcass
of some decayed jackass.

Whatever it was, I never touched it, but ate a little bread and drank
a little beer. You couldn't touch the beef nor the cheese. Nor could
my love of cheese enable me to eat it. What was it most like--soap, or
decayed cork? It was like nothing but itself. Forty years have gone by
and I remember it still.

One day in the week there were ribs of beef--

Those I used to eat; but the worst day of all was Thursday, for it was
on that day large dishes of mince came up, I never touched it--did
you?

Never.

Do you remember one morning at breakfast lumps of mince were
discovered in the tea? The Prefect looked into the bowl handed to him,
and acquiesced in the opinion that perhaps no tea or coffee had better
be drunk that morning.

But if the Colonel had forgotten that incident, he remembered the
tarts: sour damson jam poured into crusts as hard as bricks, and these
tarts were alternated with a greasy suet-pudding served with a white
sauce that made it even more disagreeable.

A horrible place! I muttered; and we continued to speak of those
meals, eaten in silence, listening to a boy reading, the Prefect
walking up and down watching us. Was any place ever more detestable
than Oscott? At five o'clock beer was served out--vinegar would have
been better. And the bread!

At seven sloppy tea and coffee, greasy butter, bread that looked as if
it had been thrown about the floor! And then the dormitories!

The Colonel would not, of course, agree with me that any great harm is
done to a boy by giving him over, body and soul, to a priest; but he
remembered that our Castlebar clothes were soon threadbare and in
holes, and our letters home, begging for an order for new clothes,
were disregarded.

I think it must have been that father had lost money at racing, and as
he hadn't paid the school fees, he didn't like to write to the
President. When I left Oscott I used to hear people say they were
cold, but I didn't understand what they meant. The hard life of Oscott
gave us splendid health, which has lasted ever since.

Yes, it seems to have done that; and that's about all. We learnt
nothing.

Nothing whatever; in many respects we unlearnt a great deal. I had
learnt a good deal of French from our governess, but I forgot it all;
yet we were taught French at Oscott.

Taught French! We weren't even taught English.

It was assumed that we knew English.

The English language begins in the Bible, and Catholics don't read the
Bible. Do you remember the Bible stories we were given, written in
very Catholic English?

Yes, I remember, the Colonel answered; and I think it's a great
mistake that the Bible isn't taught in Catholic schools. There is
nothing that I admire more than the Psalms--those great solemn
rhythms.

We used to hear the Gospels read out in Chapel--

The door opened: the parlourmaid had come to tell the Colonel that a
man downstairs would like to speak to him, and he left the room
abruptly.

He never seems free from business, I muttered. Just as the
conversation was beginning to get interesting. Oscott had every chance
of turning out a well-educated boy in him, for he was willing to
learn; but with me it was different. Oscott didn't get a fair chance.
And I sat perplexed, unable to decide whether I could or would not
learn, thinking it probable that my brain developed slowly,
remembering that my mother had told me that father used to say, George
is a chrysalis out of which a moth or butterfly may come. Now, which
am I? Would father have been able to tell if he had lived? Can anybody
tell me? But why should I want anybody to tell me? I am a reasonable
being, and should know whether I am moth or butterfly. But I don't.
Every man has asked himself if he is moth or butterfly, and, receiving
no answer, he begins to wonder at the silence that has so suddenly
gathered round him. Out of the void memories arise, and he wonders if
they have arisen to answer his question. There was a round table in
grandfather's library and it was filled with books--illustrated
editions of _Gulliver's Travels_ and the _Arabian Nights_; and on the
page facing the picture of Gulliver astride on the nipple of a young
Brobdingnagian's breast, I used to read how she undressed Gulliver
for the amusement of her girl-friends, setting him astride on the
nipple of one of her breasts. As she was forty-three feet high,
Gulliver used to lean forward, clasping with both his arms the
prodigious breast, very frightened lest he should fall; and I used to
think that if she held out her apron I should not mind. But Swift
speaks of the smells that these hides exhaled, and disgusted I would
close the book and open the _Arabian Nights_ and read again and again
the story of the two travellers who saw a huge wreath of smoke rise
out of the sea; it quickly shaped itself into a Genie, and, terribly
frightened, the travellers climbed into a high tree and watched him
come ashore and unlock a crystal casket, out of which a beautiful lady
stepped to be enjoyed by the Genie, who fell asleep after his
enjoyment. As soon as the lady saw she was released from his
vigilance, she wandered a little way looking round as if to find
somebody, seeking behind the rocks, looking up into the trees. On
perceiving the travellers, she called to them to come down, and on
their refusal to descend from fear of the Genie, she threatened to
awake him and deliver them over to him. Branch by branch they
descended tremblingly, and when they were by her she invited one to
follow her into a dark part of the wood, telling the other to wait
till she returned. After a little while she returned and retired with
the second, and when she came back she said: I see rings upon your
fingers; each must give me a ring, and your rings added to the
ninety-eight in this handkerchief will make a hundred. I have sworn to
deceive the Genie who keeps me locked in that casket a hundred times.
Even more than the tale of the two travellers, that of the two men who
went by night to a tomb appealed to my imagination, for it was related
that they descended a staircase, spread with the rarest carpets,
through burning perfumes, to a great tapestried saloon, where lamps
were burning as if for a festival. A table was spread with delicate
meats and wines. But the feasters were only two--a young man and
woman, now lying side by side on a couch, dead. As soon as the elder
man catches sight of them he draws off his slipper and slaps the faces
of the dead and spits upon them, to the great horror of his companion,
who seizes him by the arms, asking why he insults the dead. The dead
whom you see lying before you are my son and daughter; whereupon he
begins to tell how his son conceived a fatal passion for his sister.
His passion was unfortunately returned, and, to escape from the world
which holds such love in abhorrence, they retired to this dwelling.
But even here, you see, the vengeance of God has overtaken them.

It had seemed to me that the brother and sister had probably lighted a
pan of charcoal, choosing to die rather than that their love might die
before them; and their love, so reprobate that it could only be
enjoyed in a tomb, appealed to my perverse mind, prone to sympathise
with every revolt against the common law. Each age selects a special
sin to protest against, and in the beginning of the nineteenth century
it was incest that excited the poetical imagination. Byron loved his
half-sister, and Genesis sheltered his Cain. Shelley's poem _Laon and
Cythna_ was not in print when I was a child, but a note in the edition
of Shelley's works that I discovered in my grandfather's library and
took to Oscott College with me informed me that _The Revolt of Islam_
was a revised version of it--revised by Shelley himself at the
instigation of his publisher, who thought that England was not yet
ripe for a poem on the subject of the love of brother and sister. The
title _The Revolt of Islam_ appealed to my imagination more than the
first title, and connected the story in my mind with the story that I
had read in the _Arabian Nights_; and, delighted by the beautiful
names of the lovers, I often allowed my thoughts to wander away during
class-time, wondering if they loved each other as deeply as the
brother and sister that had perished in the tomb, and Marlow--where
the poem was written in the ideal company of his mistress, Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin--was for ever sanctified in my eyes.

I was as much given to dreaming as to games, and determined to indulge
myself to the top of my bent, I would lean over my desk, a Latin
grammar in front of me, my head clasped between my hands, and abandon
myself to my imagination. However cold the morning might be, I could
kick the world of rule away and pass into one in which all I knew of
love was accomplished amid pale yellow, slowly moving tapestries,
within fumes of burning perfume: dim forms of lovers, speaking with
hushed voices, floated before me, and their stories followed them,
woven without effort. I looked forward to the time apportioned out for
the learning of our lessons, for it was only then that I could be sure
of being able to leave Oscott without fear of interruption. It was in
my mind that I found reality--Oscott and its masters were but a
detestable dream. One priest and only one suspected my practice, and
he would walk behind me and lay his hand on my shoulder, or rap my
skull with his knuckles, rousing me so suddenly that I could not
suppress a cry. And then, what agony to look round and find myself in
the cold study with an unlearnt lesson before me, and the certainty in
my heart that when I was called to repeat it I should be sent to the
Prefect for a flogging for my stupidity or for my idleness, or for
both!

One day coming out of the refectory I said to the Prefect, I brought a
volume of Shelley's poems from home with me. I have been reading it
ever since, and have begun to wonder if it is wrong to read his poems,
for he denies the existence of God.

He just asked me to give him the book. The days went by without
hearing any more of the volume. It had been sacrificed for nothing,
and as soon as the Colonel returned I told him how I had sacrificed
my volume of Shelley in the hope of being expelled for introducing an
atheistical work into school.

You see you were in the big division and only rumours of your trouble
used to reach me. I remember, however, the row you got into about
betting; you used to lay the odds.

And once overlaid myself against one horse that had come along in the
betting, and had to send ten shillings to London to back him. The
Prefect gave me the bookmaker's letter and asked me to open it in his
presence.

The prize fight created some little stir.

I remember it came off in the band-room, a sovereign a side, but
before either was beaten the watch came running up the stairs to
announce that the Prefect was going his rounds.

You were always in a row of some kind, always in that study place
learning Latin lines.

Oscott was a vile hole, a den of priests. Every kind of priest. I
remember one, a tall bald-headed fellow about five-and-thirty who kept
me one whole summer afternoon learning and relearning lines that I
knew quite well. Every time I went up to the desk to say them his arm
used to droop about my shoulders, and with some endearing phrase he
would send me back. We were alone and I could hear my fellows playing
cricket outside. I must send you back once more, and when I came up
again with the lines quite perfect his hand nearly slipped into my
trouser pocket. At last the five o'clock bell rang and I was still
there with the lines unlearnt. To be revenged on him for keeping me in
the whole afternoon, I went to confession and mentioned the
circumstance; I was curious to test the secrecy of the confessional. I
was quite innocent as to his intentions, and the result of my
confession was that a few days afterwards we heard he was leaving
Oscott, and a rumour went round the school that he used to ask the
boys to his room and give them cake and wine.

It doesn't follow that--

I know that a Catholic believes that a priest may murder, steal,
fornicate, but he will never betray a secret revealed in the
confessional. But we won't argue it. Do you remember the little
housemaid?

I remember hearing that you had discovered a pretty maid-servant among
the hideous lot that collected in the back benches, and I wondered how
you managed to distinguish her looks, for you could only get sight of
her by glancing over your shoulder.

You were nearly three years young than I was at the time, and had not
reached the age of puberty; myself and a chosen few used to walk
together round the playground, telling each other the adventures that
had befallen us during the vacations. Do you remember Frank ----? He
was one of my pals and liked telling of his adventures among
maid-servants when he went home for the holidays. We could not stand
his introductory chapters, long as Sir Walter Scott's, and used to
cry, Begin with the bubbles.

But what has this story got to do with the pretty housemaid that you
spotted at the back of the chapel?

Only this. An innocent question revealed my ignorance of woman, and,
fearful lest Frank should tell on me, I spoke of Agnes.

Was that her name?

I don't know. The name started up in my mind and it seems to me in
keeping with my memory of her, a low-sized girl, the shoulders
slightly too high, a pointed oval face and demure overshadowed eyes.
No one at Oscott had ever looked at a maid-servant before, and in a
sudden inspiration I said that I would present Agnes with a bouquet.
The project astonished and delighted my companions, and every evening
I waited for her at the foot of the stairs leading to the organ-loft.
It wouldn't be possible to offer her my bouquet till she came alone,
and every day I answered my companions, No; I didn't get a chance last
night. At last my chance came, and, descending the stairs, I offered
the girl my flowers, mentioning that they would look well in the bosom
of her dress. On another occasion I met her in the dormitories, but
she begged me not to speak to her, for if I did she would be sent
away.

Is that all?

It was the only thing I could think of to break the monotony of the
Oscott day; and if I suggest that one of my boon companions may have
yielded to scruples of conscience and betrayed me in confession--

A Catholic is only obliged to tell the sins he commits himself.

By acquiescing in my poor gallantries he may have thought he made
himself responsible for them.

You very likely talked openly yourself, and--

Anything rather than admit that the confessional is used as a means of
government. For what else do you think the sacrament was substituted?

I was many years at Oscott and never had any reason to suspect that an
improper use was made of the confessional.

The secret leaked out; all secrets do in Catholic communities and some
great trouble must have arisen, or I should not have written to
father.

I knew nothing about that.

I wrote the miserable little story to him, adding that if the girl
were sent away my conscience would leave me no peace, and that I
should marry her as soon as I got the opportunity.

I had no idea it was so serious.

It was mother who told me years after that, on receiving my letter,
father ordered one of the grey ponies to be saddled and galloped away
to Claremorris to catch the train. I did not think for a minute that
my letter would bring him all that way, and when one of the priests,
or deacons, or sub-deacons, or bunkers--do you remember the fellows we
used to call the bunkers?

Of course I do; the sons of English tradesmen who were educated at
Oscott, at our expense, for the priesthood.

When one of those cads came up to me in the playground and told me I
was wanted in the visitor's room, my heart sank, and I could hardly
crawl up the Gothic staircase. I was in an awful funk, for I could not
think of father as being anything else but dreadfully angry with me;
whereas he was surprisingly gentle, and listened to my foolish story
without reproving me. I don't know if you remember father's
eyes--clear, blue eyes--they embarrassed me all the while, making me
feel a little hypocrite, for I didn't intend to carry out my threat.
Even in those times I was just as I have ever been, very provident
about my own life, and determined to make the most of it. I was a
little hypocrite, for all the time I was cajoling him, I was thinking
what my chances were of being taken out to Birmingham and given a
dinner at the Queen's Hotel, a meal which I sadly needed. I wish I
could remember his words; the sensation of the scene is present in my
mind, but as soon as I seek his words they elude me. Northcote came
into the room, and I think it became plain to me at once that he had
already been speaking to father, and that the girl was not going to be
dismissed. You remember Northcote--a great-bellied, big, ugly fellow,
whom we used to call the Gorilla. He was almost as hairy, great tufts
starting out of his ears and out of his nostrils; the backs of his
hands were covered, and hair grew thickly between the knuckles. I was
thinking how cleverly I had escaped a thrashing and of the pleasure in
store for me--a long drive with my father in a hansom, and of the
dinner in the coffee-room of the Queen's Hotel, when the Gorilla
startled me out of my reverie. George, he said, has refused to go to
confession. At once I felt my father's eyes grow sterner, and my dream
at that moment seemed a mirage. George, he said, is this true? The
Prefect told me the other day to go to confession, but I had nothing
to confess. He insisted, and when I answered that I'd go to the
confessor but I could tell him nothing, he ordered me to his room for
a flogging. I said I'd like to see the President about that, and I
told Dr Northcote that I had written to you about the housemaid. Our
father agreed with the Gorilla that there are always sins to confess
for him who chooses to look for them, and I remember the Gorilla
reminding me that, probably, I had not examined my conscience closely.
The authorities are all old coaxers when parents are present.

I always liked the Gorilla.

Did you? He asked me if my attention had never wandered at Mass? If I
had never lost my temper? or been disobedient to my master? or lazy?
It was impossible for me to deny that some of these things had
happened, and, feeling that I must be truthful if I were to win my
father over to my side, I said--and the words slipped out quite
easily--But, Dr Northcote, I'm not sure that I believe in confession,
so why should I be obliged to go to confession? The President raised
his shaggy eyebrows. It isn't my fault, and to communicate when in
doubt would be--A very grave look must have come into his face, and a
certain gravity stole into my father's, and then, in answer to another
question, posed with awful deliberation, I remember saying, and in
these very words, But, Dr Northcote, you didn't always believe in
confession yourself. Dr Northcote was a convert to Catholicism; he had
become a priest at his wife's death, and his son was in my class. Our
father turned away from the table and walked towards the window, and I
can still see his plump back in shadow and one side whisker showing
against the light. The Gorilla hesitated, unable to think of an
appropriate answer, and father, as if he divined the priest's
embarrassment, returned from the window. But I could see he had been
laughing.

And did he take you out to Birmingham on that occasion?

I think he did, for I remember a conversation about Shelley's poems
with him. But he couldn't have taken me out to Birmingham and left you
behind.

I don't ever remember driving out to Birmingham with father.

Not on any occasion?

No.

How very odd. If the Queen's Hotel still exists I could find the table
in the coffee-room at which we used to sit. I remember listening in
admiration to father talking to Judge Fitzgerald. All the Fitzgeralds
were there.

The Fitzgeralds left Oscott together, just before I went there. One of
them wrote a book of verses about the bunkers, and there was a
law-suit. I only remember our father once at Oscott, and forget the
occasion; but I can still see him giving an exhibition of billiards
and showing off some strokes.

I don't recollect a billiard-table at Oscott--not in my time. Where
was it?

A top room where I never was before. You say you remember a
conversation with father about Shelley. Did he admire Shelley?

Not much, I think. He didn't like _The Pine Forest by the Sea_, for I
remember his very words, Why do you waste time learning bad verses?
He liked the opening lines of _Queen Mab_, How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother Sleep, and spoke of Byron and quoted some verses
from _Sardanapalus_ which I thought very fine. I remember him saying
to me at the end of a religious argument that out of the many
religious reformers Christ was the only one that had declared himself
to be God and had been accepted as such by his disciples. A very
flimsy proof this seemed to me to be of Christ's divinity, and my
admiration of father's intelligence declined from that moment. My
admiration for him as a kindly human being increased. Our parting was
most affectionate; I don't think that he told me; it must have been
the Prefect that told me I was not returning to Oscott after the long
vacation. I was not to speak, he said, to any of my schoolmates during
the remainder of the term. But rumour was soon busy that I had
successfully defied the whole College, and many were the attempts made
to speak to me, but I shook my head always, smiled and passed on. The
outcast is never as unhappy as the herd imagines him to be, and these
last six weeks of my Oscott life were not disagreeable to me, and the
pleasantest moment of all was when I asked the Prefect on the last day
of the term for his permission to say goodbye to my school-fellows. So
I left Oscott, I said to the Colonel, in flying colours, at least
flying the colours which I wished to fly. A detestable place it was to
me, mentally and physically. You only suffered physical cold, hunger,
and canings, but I suffered in my mind. I couldn't breathe in
Catholicism.

You always hated Christianity, especially in its Catholic form.

Only in its Catholic form.

When you were at Oscott there was no question of your becoming a
Protestant?

My dear Colonel, I answer you as I answered Edward; one doesn't become
a Protestant, one discovers oneself to be a Protestant, and I
discovered in those days that magicians and their sacraments estranged
me from all religious belief, instead of drawing me closer to it.

The Colonel smiled sadly.

We shall get you back one of these days.

When I lose my self, perhaps. I have often wondered at my hatred of
Catholicism, so original, so inherent is it. Sometimes I have wondered
if it may not be an inheritance of some remote ancestor.

Not so very remote, the Colonel said.

Why? Weren't we originally a Catholic family?

No, it was our great-grandfather at the end of the eighteenth century
that changed his religion.

So our great-grandfather became a Catholic. He went to Spain, I know
that, and made a great fortune and married in Spain; but whom did he
marry? A Spaniard?

A Miss O'Kelly.

An Irishwoman, a Catholic of course? And it was she who persuaded him
to change his religion. Theology and sex go together. If there were no
sex there would be no theology.

Her family, the Colonel said, had been in Spain so long that she was
practically a Spaniard.

And grandfather was an Agnostic, mother told me, so there is only one
generation of pure Catholicism behind me. You don't know how happy
you've made me. Your news comes as sweetly as the south wind blowing
over the downs.

     _Note._--My great-grandfather did not become a Catholic. His will
     instructed his executors that he was to be buried in the old
     family burial-ground at Ashbrook. This matter is cleared up
     earlier in this volume.




XVIII


The Colonel stayed with me a few days longer, and when the morning
came for him to go, we bade each other goodbye with _empressement_, a
little more than usual, as if to convince ourselves that we loved each
other as before; but neither was deceived, and I went up to the
drawing-room with a heavy heart.

Miss Gough was waiting there, and she began to read aloud from
yesterday's dictation, but her voice was soon drowned in the tumult of
my thoughts. Of what use for us to see each other if we may only talk
of superficial things? Never more can there be any sympathy of spirit
between us. We are solitary beings who may at most exchange words
about tenants and saw-mills. How horrible! And while talking of things
that do not interest me in the least, there will be always a rancour
in my heart. We shall drift further and further apart; the fissure
will widen into a chasm. We are divided utterly, and sooner or later
he will leave Moore Hall and will go to live abroad. The cessation of
Miss Gough's voice awoke me, and looking up I caught sight of her eyes
fixed upon me reproachfully.

You're not listening.

I beg your pardon; I've been away. Now we'll go on.

But the scene of the story I was dictating was laid in Mayo round the
shores of Lough Cara, and the woods and islands and the people whom I
had known long ago drew my thoughts from the narrative, and before
long they had drifted to a house that my brother and I had built with
some planks high up in a beech-tree. One day a quarrel had arisen
regarding the building of this house, and to get my own way I had
pretended not to believe in his love of me, causing him to burst into
tears. His tears provoked my curiosity, and it was not long before I
began to think that I would like to see him cry again. But to my
surprise and sorrow the gibe did not succeed in producing a single
tear. He seemed indifferent whether I thought he loved me or not.

It was after fifty years had gone by that this long-forgotten episode
floated up out of the depths.

I was as detestable in the beginning as I am in the end, I said, like
one speaking in his sleep; and catching Miss Gough's eyes again, I
laughed a little. I'm absent-minded this afternoon.

You've been working too hard lately, and you didn't go for your walk
yesterday.

You think it would be better for me to go for a long walk than to sit
here dreaming or dictating rubbish? I dare say you're right; I give
you your liberty. She closed her notebook and rose from the table. But
I don't know where to walk.

Why not go to Merrion and call on John Eglinton? You always like
talking to him.

He's at the Library this afternoon.

And there are your cousins at Blackrock.

Yes, I might go to see them.

Then till tomorrow.

She went away leaving me stretched in an armchair by the window
staring at the drooping ash by the wicket, trying to think of some way
of passing the time, but unable to discover any except by going into
the garden and helping the gardener to collect the large box snails
with which the plants were infested. He threw them into a pail of salt
and water, saying, It is fine stuff for them; but I liked to spill a
circle of salt and watch them trying to crawl out of it. Alas! one
does not change--not materially. Once on a time I used to hunt the
laundry cats with dogs, but the Colonel was never cruel. No one
corrected me, no one reproved me; I grew up a wilding; and that
wouldn't matter so much if--The sentence remained unfinished, for at
that moment I remembered the intonation in the Colonel's voice: It
will be a great grief to me if you declare yourself a Protestant. The
words were simple enough, but intonation is more important than words;
it goes deeper, like music, to the very roots of feeling, to the
heart's core.

But if I sit here brooding any longer I shall go mad, and I rushed
upstairs and shaved myself, and buttoned myself into a new suit of
clothes. The apparel oft creates a new man, I said, stepping briskly
over the threshold, hastening my pace down Baggot Street, assuring
myself that meditation is impossible when the pace is more than four
miles an hour. But at the canal bridge it was necessary to stop, not
to watch the boats as is my wont, but to consider which way I should
take, for I had gone down Baggot Street and the Pembroke Road, over
Ballsbridge, and followed the Dodder to Donnybrook so often that my
imagination craved for some new scenery. But there is no other, I
cried, and it was not until the trees of the Botanic Gardens came into
view that I roused a little out of my despondency. I had never asked
for a key, or solicited admission to these gardens, so gloomy did they
seem; but thinking that I might meet some student from Trinity whom I
could watch pursuing knowledge from flower to flower, from tree to
tree, who might even be kind enough to instruct me a little and divert
me, I crossed the tramline and peered through the tall railings into
the dark and dismal thickets. There did not seem to be anything in
these gardens but ilex-trees; the most unsuitable tree to my present
mood, I muttered, and went away in the direction of Blackrock,
thinking of my handsome cousin Fenella and her good-natured innocent
brothers. It seemed to me that I should like to pay them a visit, that
their house would soothe me. One likes certain houses, not because the
people that live in them are especially clever and amusing, but
because one finds it agreeable to be there. But in Mount Merrion
questions would be put to me about the Colonel. Mount Merrion would
bring all the miserable business up again, and I stopped at the corner
of Serpentine Avenue undecided.

If I could only think of something, I said; anything ... provided I
have not done it a hundred times before. I have never followed the
Dodder to the sea! And wondering how it got there, I turned into
Serpentine Avenue. As there was no sign of the river at this side of
the railway, I concluded that it must lie on the other side, for all
rivers reach the sea unless they go underground. The gates of the
level-crossing were closed when I arrived, and a sound of angry voices
reached my ears. A little group of wayfarers, I said, cursing a
gatekeeper in Dublin brogue. Will you come out to Hell ower that. The
divil take you, what are you doing in there? Is it asleep you are? and
so forth, until at last an old sluggard rolled out of his box with a
dream still in his eyes, and, grumbling, opened the gates, receiving
damnations from everybody but me, who was nowise in a hurry.

A passer-by directed me, and I followed a beautiful shady road,
admiring the houses with gardens at the back, until I came to a great
stone bridge, unfortunately a modern one, but built out of large
blocks of fine stone. A black, drain-like river flowed through the
arches, for the Dodder is nowhere an attractive river, not even when
flowing through the woods at Dartry. At the Lansdowne Road there is a
wood and at the end of the wood a pleasant green bank overhung with
hawthorn boughs. But the Dodder is inert and black as a crocodile. The
current moves hardly at all, and my priest, I said, would prefer to
face a couple of miles of Lough Cara on a moonlight night. He would
come out of the Dodder clothed in mud, but out of Lough Cara he would
rise like Leander from the Hellespont, but with no Hero to meet him.

And throwing myself on the green bank, my thoughts began to follow the
priest's moods as he wandered round the thickets of Derrinrush--mood
rising out of mood and melting into mood. The story seemed to be
moving on very smoothly in my imagination, and I know not what chance
association of images or ideas led my thoughts away from it and back
to the evening when the Colonel had left my house when I told him that
he might as well castrate his children as bring them up Catholics. He
had forgiven me my atrocious language, it is true, for the Colonel's
beautiful nature can do more than pardon; he is one of those rare
human beings who can forgive. He is unable to acquire new ideas, the
old are too intimate and intense; family ties are dear to him, and he
is a Catholic because he was taught Catholic prayers when he was a
little child and taken to Carnacun Chapel. His life is set in his
feelings rather than in his ideas, and he expressed himself fully and
perfectly when he said: It will be a great grief to me if you declare
yourself a Protestant, and it seemed to me that I should be guilty of
a dastardly act if I were to bring grief into my brother's life. God
knows, thought I, he has received stabs enough from fortune, as do all
those whose hearts compel them as his did on Carlisle Bridge, six
months ago. It pleased me to remember the scuffle. We had heard a
woman cry out as we returned from a Gaelic League meeting, and looking
back I said: A Jack cuffing his Jill round a cockle stall, one of the
many hundred women that are cuffed nightly in Dublin. Before I could
say a word the Colonel had rushed to her assistance, and a fine old
boxing-match began between the cad and the Colonel at one in the
morning; and if the cad had happened to have some pals about, the
Colonel would certainly have been flung into the Liffey. He did not
think of the danger he was running, only of rescuing some oppressed
woman.

A diabolical act it would be to grieve him mortally in the autumn of
his life, now that he is settled in Moore Hall in the enjoyment of his
first freedom after thirty years of military discipline. I can't do
it. The Colonel did not come into the world, as the saying goes, with
a silver spoon in his mouth, and had to make up his mind before he was
twenty how he was to get a living. There was no time for consideration
as to the direction in which he would like to develop. If he had had a
little money he might have gone to the Bar, and he would have made a
good lawyer; but success at the Bar comes after many years. In those
days the army examination was difficult; he was plucked the first
time, and was sufficiently pooh-poohed at home, very likely by me who
could never pass any examination. He said very little, but his mind
concentrated in a fierce determination to get through, and he passed
high up. Mother began at the bottom of the list trying to find him,
but the housemaid cried out: Why he's here, ma'am, ninth! He was first
out of Sandhurst, went to India and was stationed in the Mauritius,
and fought in the first South African War.

He returned to India, and was not long at home before he had to go out
again to South Africa, where he commanded his regiment through all the
fierce fighting of Colenso and Pieter's Hill. He had to risk his life
again and again, and submit himself to a coil of duties for thirty
years before he had earned enough to support a wife and children, and
it is outrageous that I, who have enjoyed my life always, never
knowing an ache or a want, should dare to intervene and tell him--I
could not repeat the atrocious words again. It seemed to me, as I lay
on the green bank, that I had no right to declare myself a Protestant.
It is bad that the children should see their parents divided in
religion; it would aggravate the evil were their uncle to declare
himself on their mother's side. But I wonder why he married a
Protestant? Because he was compelled by his heart, and did not meanly
stop to consider the value of the sacrifice he was making. That is
why, and I got up from the green bank and walked towards the next
bridge, wondering how it was that I was never able to bask in the sun
like the couples to be seen every fine evening in the Park; rough boys
and girls sitting on the benches, their arms about each other, content
to lie in the warmth of each other's company without uttering a
word--at most, Are you comfy, dear? I'm all right. But I have never
been able to enjoy life without thought, and should not have lain on
that green bank.

On the other side of the bridge there are no sweet hawthorns, only
waste lands, and a ragged path along the water's edge interrupted by
stiles; at the third bridge this path ceases altogether; warehouses
and factories rise up steeply; the Dodder cannot be followed to the
sea by that bank; but a flight of steps exists on the other side, and
these took me down to a black cindery place intersected by canals. It
was amusing to trip across several lock gates and to find oneself
suddenly on the quays. But where was the Dodder? To recross the lock
gates and go up that flight of steps would be tiresome, and I decided
to miss the honour of discovering the mouth of that river, and give my
attention to a great four-master, the hull of the ship standing thirty
feet out of the water, and all the spars and yards and ropes delicate
yet clear upon the grey sky.

But there seemed to be nobody about to whom I could apply for
permission to visit the ship, and my choice lay between continuing my
walk regretfully along the quays or going up the gangway uninvited and
explaining to the first sailor that my intentions were strictly
honest. There must be somebody on board; the ship wouldn't be left
unprotected, and up the gangway I went. But the ship seemed as empty
as the shells that used to lie along the mantelpieces in the 'sixties,
and I walked about for a long time before happening upon anybody. At
last a simple, good-natured Breton sailor appeared whom I had no
difficulty in engaging in conversation. He told me that the ship had
come from Australia with corn and would go away in ballast, first to
Glasgow, and if the wind were favourable they would get to Glasgow in
about eighteen hours. The ship's next destination was San Francisco,
and to get there they would have to double Cape Horn, and I thought of
the sailor ordered aloft to take in sail. However black the night, he
would have to climb into the rigging, and if the ship doubled the Cape
in safety he would be up among the yards furling sail after sail as
she floated through the Golden Gates. At San Francisco they would take
in corn and--

_En dix-huit mois nous serons revenus avec du bl_.

_Et aprs_?

_Alors je reverrai ma patrie et mon fils_, and he took me into a
little closet and showed me his son's photograph. And when I had
admired the young man, he asked me if I would like to go over the
ship, and we walked about together, but there was nothing to see ...
only a number of bonhams.

_Voil le manger des matelots_.

_Pas pour nous, monsieur. C'est le capitaine et les officiers qui
mangent le porc frais_.

_Vous tes breton, mais vous parlez bien franais; peut-tre encore
mieux que le breton_.

_Non pas, monsieur; je suis du Finistre, une des provinces o on
parle breton._

The sailor revived my ardour for the preservation of small languages,
and we talked enthusiastically of the Bretons, the remnant of the race
that had once possessed all France and colonised Britain. The Irish
Celts were a different race, and spoke a language that he would not
understand; but he would understand some Welsh, and the Cornish
language better still--

_La dernire personne qui parlait le Cornouailles fut une vieille
femme, morte il y a cent ans. On sait son nom, mais pour le
moment_....

_Vous ne vous le rappelez pas, monsieur?_

_N'importe. Cela ne vous semble pas drle d'entendre les syllabes
celtiques lorsque vous grimpez sur la vergue du perroquet dix ou douze
mtres au-dessus des mers houleuses du Cap Horn?_

_Non, monsieur, puisque je travaille avec mes compatriotes._

_Bien sr, bien sr; vous tes tous bretons._

And, slipping a shilling into his hand, I pursued my way along the
quays, stopping to admire the cut-stone front of a house in ruins;
its pillared gateway and iron railings seemed to tell that this
indigent riverside had seen better days. Behind it was a little
purlieu overflowing with children, and a few odd trades were ensconced
amid the ruins of warehouses. A little farther on I came upon a
tavern, a resort of sailors. It looked as if some wild scenes might
happen there of an evening, but very likely the crews from the
fishing-smacks only came up to play a game of cards and get a little
tipsy--nowadays the end of an Irishman's adventure. We are supposed to
be a most romantic and adventurous race, and very likely we were
centuries ago; but we are now the smuggest and the most prosaic people
in the world; our spiritual adventures are limited to going to Mass,
and our enjoyment to a race meeting. A mild climate, without an accent
upon it, does not breed adventurers. Quay followed quay. There were
plenty of fishing-smacks in the Liffey, and these interested me till I
came to Carlisle Bridge; and, leaning over the parapet, my thoughts
followed the Liffey beyond Chapelizod. It is between Chapelizod and
Lucan that it begins to gurgle alongside of high hedges through a flat
country enclosed by a line of blue hills about seven or eight miles
distant; after Chapelizod it is a brown and bonny river, that would
have inspired the Celt to write poetry if he had not preferred priests
to the muses. As I said just now, he is supposed to be romantic and
adventurous, but he is the smuggest and most prosaic fellow in the
world. As Edward says, men in Dublin do not burn. The Celt is supposed
to be humorous, but he is merely loquacious. We read of Celtic
glamour, but what is known as Celtic glamour came out of Sussex.
Shelley came to Ireland to redeem the Celt. A mad freak, very much
like mine. All the same, he got some beautiful poetry out of Ireland:

                        The oak
  Expanding its immeasurable arms,
  Embraces the light beech. The pyramids
  Of the tall cedar overarching, frame
  Most solemn domes within, and far below,
  Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky,
  The ash and the acacia floating hang
  Tremulous and pale.

And those lines:

                        A well,
  Dark, gleaming, and of most translucent wave,
  Images all the woven boughs above,
  And each depending leaf, and every speck
  Of azure sky...

are very like Lucan; and there are other passages still more like
Lucan. But unable to capture the elusive lines, my thoughts followed
the river as far as I knew it, as far as Blessington, to Poulaphouca.
_Phuca_ is a fairy in Irish, and no doubt the fairies assembled there
long ago; but they have hidden themselves far away among the hills,
between the source of the Liffey and the Dodder. When O'Grady wrote
the divine Dodder, he must have been thinking of long ago, when the
Dodder roared down from the hills, a great and terrible river,
sweeping the cattle out of the fields, killing even its otters,
wearing through the land a great chasm, now often dry save for a
peevish trickle which, after many weeks of rain, swells into a
harmless flood and falls over the great weir at Tallaght, but only to
run away quickly or collect into pools among great boulders, reaching
Rathfarnham a quiet and demure little river. At Dartry it flows
through mud, but the wood above it is beautiful; not great and noble
as the wood at Pangbourne; Dartry is a small place, no doubt, but the
trees that crowd the banks are tall and shapely, and along one bank
there is a rich growth of cow-parsley and hemlock, and there are
sedges and flags and beds of wild forget-me-nots in the stream itself.
The trees reach over the stream, and there are pleasant spots under
the hawthorns in the meadows where the lovers may sit hand in hand,
and nooks under the high banks where they can lie conscious of each
other and of the soft summer evening. A man should go there with a
girl, for the intrusion of the mere wayfarer is resented. There is a
beautiful bend in the stream near the dye-works, and the trees grow
straight and tall, and out of them the wood-pigeon clatters. Green,
slimy, stenchy at Donnybrook, at Ballsbridge the Dodder reminds one of
a steep, ill-paven street into which many washtubs have been emptied;
and after Ballsbridge, it reaches the sea; as has been said, black and
inert as a crocodile.

If O'Grady had called the Dodder the Union river, he would have
described it better, for the Dodder must have been entirely
dissociated from Dublin till about a hundred years ago. The
aristocracy that inhabited the great squares and streets in the north
side of Dublin could have known very little about this river; but as
soon as the Union became an established fact, Dublin showed a tendency
to move towards the south-east, towards the Dodder. Every other city
in the world moves westward, but we are an odd people, and Dublin is
as odd as ourselves. The building of Merrion Square must have been
undertaken a little before, or very soon after the Union; Stephen's
Green is late eighteenth century; Fitzwilliam Square looks like 1850.
The houses in the Pembroke Road seem a little older, but we cannot
date them earlier than 1820. Within the memory of man, Donnybrook was
a little village lying outside Dublin; today it is only connected
with Dublin by a long, straggling street; and beyond Donnybrook is a
beautifully wooded district through which the Stillorgan Road rises in
gentle ascents, sycamores, beeches, and chestnuts of great height and
size shadowing it mile after mile. On either side of the roadway there
are cut-stone gateways; the smooth drives curve and disappear behind
hollies and cedars, and we often catch sight of the blue hills between
the trees.

At this moment, I said, the transparent leaves are shining like
emeralds set in filigree gold; the fruit has fallen from the branches,
the shucks are broken, boys are picking out the red-brown nuts for
hacking. And the same sun is lighting up the chestnut avenue leading
to the Moat House. Stella's shadow lengthens down her garden walk. She
would like me to startle her solitude with my voice. Why not? And,
while watching her in imagination lifting the pots off the dahlias and
shaking the earwigs out, the thought shot through my heart that I
might not be able to bear the disgrace of Catholicism for the
Colonel's sake, causing me to quail and to sink as if I had been
struck by a knife.

It has begun all over again, I said, and all the evening it will take
me unawares as it did just now. It will return again and again to
conquer me in the end, or at every assault the temptation may be less
vehement. Go home I cannot. Distraction is what I need--company. I'll
go to Stella, and we will walk round the garden together; she will
enjoy showing me her carnations and dahlias, teasing me because I
cannot remember the name of every trivial weed. I suppose it is that
men don't care for flowers as women do; we never come back from the
country our arms filled with flowers. We are interested in dogmas;
they in flowers. A mother never turned her daughter out of doors
because she could not believe in the doctrine of the Atonement. Women
are without a theological sense, thank God! We shall linger by the
moat watching the trout darting to and fro, thinking of nothing but
the trout, and after supper we'll stray into the painting-room and go
over all the canvases, talking of quality, values, and drawing. And
then--

But she may not be at home; she may have gone to Rathfarnham in search
of subjects; she may have gone to Sligo; she spoke last week of going
there to stay with friends. To find the Moat House empty and to have
to come back and spend the evening alone, would be very disappointing,
and I walked up and down the bridge wondering if I should risk it. All
my life long I shall have to bear the brand of Catholicism. I shall
never escape from my promise except by breaking it, and forgetful of
Stella, I followed the pavement, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, lost
in surprise at my own lack of power to keep my promise; Sooner or
later I shall yield to the temptation, so why not at once? But it may
pass away. Stella will be able to advise me better than anybody, and
I fell to thinking how she had been the refuge whither I could run
ever since I had come to Ireland, sure of finding comfort and wise
counsel.

Car!




XIX


She is quite right, I said to myself, as I took a seat under the
apple-tree by the table laid for dinner under the great bough--she is
quite right. I must leave Ireland if I am not to grieve my brother.
And it would be well to spread the news, for as soon as everybody
knows that I'm going, I shall be free to stay as long as I please. AE
will miss me and John Eglinton; Yeats will bear up manfully;
Longworth, too, will miss me, and I shall miss them all.... But are
they my kin? And if not, who are my kin? Steer, Tonks, Sickert,
Dujardin--why enumerate? Ah, here is he who cast his spell over me
from across the seas and keeps me here for some great purpose, else
why am I here?

The warm hour prompted you, AE, to look through the hawthorns.

It was the whiteness of the cloth that caught my eye.

And you were surprised to see the table laid under the apple-tree in
this late season? But the only change is an hour less of light than a
month ago; the evenings are as dry as they were in July; no dew falls;
so I consulted Teresa, who never opposes my wishes--her only virtue.
Here she comes across the sward with lamps; and we shall dine in the
midst of mystery. My fear is that the mystery may be deepened by the
going out of the lamps. Teresa is not very capable, but I keep her for
her amiability and her conversation behind my chair when I dine alone.
Teresa, are you sure you've wound the lamps; you've seen the oil
flowing over the rim? She assured me that she had. You cannot have
seen anything of the kind, I answered. The lamp has not been wound. At
that moment the wicket slammed. Whoever this may be, AE, do you
entertain him. It is you, John Eglinton? Teresa and Moderator Lamps
are incompatible. Next year I shall devise a system of aboreal
illumination.

But I heard today that you're thinking of leaving us.

Who has been tittle-tattling in the Library this afternoon?

I wasn't in the Library this afternoon; so it must have been yesterday
that I overheard some conversation as it passed through the turnstile.

But you aren't thinking of leaving us? AE asked.

Not tomorrow, nor the day after, nor next year; I can't leave till the
end of my lease, and by then you'll have had enough of me; don't you
think so?

You're not really thinking of leaving us?

The only foundation for the rumour is, that I mentioned to a lady the
other day that I didn't look upon Ireland as the end of my earthly
adventure. And she must have told one of her neighbours. Twenty-four
hours are all that is required for news to reach the National Library.
John's face darkened. The National Library should not be spoken of as
a house of gossip, even in joke.

But you'll never find elsewhere a house as suitable to your pictures,
as beautiful a garden to walk in, or friends as appreciative of your
conversation. You'll not find a finer intelligence than Yeats's in
London, or John Eglinton's.

I am certain I shall never find myself among a more agreeable circle
of friends. I am heart-broken, so necessary are you all to me. Each
stands for something.

I should like to hear what AE stands for in your mind. Can you tell
us?

He makes me feel at times that the thither side is not dark but dusk,
and that an invisible hand weaves a thread of destiny through the
daily woof of life. He makes me feel that our friendship was begun in
some anterior existence.

And will be continued--

Perhaps, AE. How conscious he is of his own eternity! I said, turning
to John Eglinton.

Yet you are leaving us.

How insistent he is, John! And yet, for all we know, he may be the
first to leave us. He has certain knowledge of different incarnations.
The first was in India, the second in Persia, his third, of which he
keeps a distinct memory, happened in Egypt. About Babylon I am not so
sure. But AE dislikes irreverence, especially a light treatment of his
ideas, and I did not dare to add that in Heaven he is known as Albar,
but asked him instead, if he were redeemed from the task of earning
his daily bread, would he retire to Bengal and spend the rest of his
life translating the Sacred Books of the East. His answer to this
interesting question we shall never know, for, yielding to the impulse
of a sudden conviction, John Eglinton interjected:

If AE leaves Dublin it will not be for Bengal but for Ross's Point,
formerly haunted by Mananaan Mac Lir and the Dagda, and now the
Palestine of an interesting heresy known as AEtheism.

At the end of our laughter AE said:

Now, will you tell us what idea John Eglinton stands for?

He and you are opposite poles, I answered. You stand for belief, John
Eglinton for unbelief. On one side of me sits the Great Everything,
and on the other the Great Nothing.

And which would you prefer that death should reveal to you? John
Eglinton asked. Nothing or Everything? You don't answer. Admit that
you would just as lief that death discovered Nothing.

It is easy to imagine a return to the darkness out of which we
came--out of which I came; and difficult to imagine my life in the
grey dusk that AE's eyes have revealed to me. But since you deny the
worth of this life--

I do not deny, John Eglinton answered.

Yes, by your abstinence from your prose you deny the value of your
life. He doubts everything, AE--the future of Ireland, the value of
literature, even the value of his own beautiful prose. Watch the frown
coming into his face! I am forgetting--we mustn't speak of a collected
edition of his works lest we spoil for him the taste of that melon.

Who else is coming to dinner? John Eglinton asked.

Conan said he would come, and he will turn up probably in the middle
of dinner, pleading that he missed his train.

Let us hear what idea Conan stands for, said John Eglinton.

An invisible hand introduces a special thread into the woof which we
must follow or perish, and as we stand with girt loins a peal of
laughter often causes us to hesitate.

Laughter behind the veil, said John, and he spoke to me of a poem that
he had received from Conan for publication in _Dana_. He had it in his
pocket, and would be glad if I would say how it struck me. Only two
stanzas, hardly longer than a Limerick. But the poem could not be
found among the bundle of papers he drew from his pocket, and when he
gave up the search definitely, AE said:

I'm going to write the myth of your appearance and evanishment from
Dublin, Moore; the legend of a Phooka who appeared some years ago, and
the young people crowded about him and he smelted them in the fires of
fierce heresies, and petrified them with tales of frigid immoralities,
and anybody who wilted from the heat the Phooka flung from him, and
anybody who was petrified, he broke in twain and flung aside as of no
use, and at last only four stood the test: AEolius, because he was an
artist and was enchanted with the performances of the Phooka; Johannes
also remained, because he was of a contrairy disposition and was only
happy when contrairy or contradicting, and the Phooka gave him the
time of his life. There was Olius, or Oliverius, who was naturally
more ribald than the Phooka, and had nothing to learn in blasphemy
from him, but undertook to complete his education; and there was
Ernestius, who practised Law, and could not be brow-beat; and to these
four the Phooka revealed his true being.

You'll write that little pastoral for the next number of _Dana_, won't
you, AE? for we're short of an article.

When I find the true reason of the Phooka's sudden disappearance, I'll
write it.

You mean that you would like me to tell you the true reason. But is
there a true reason for anything? There are a hundred reasons why I
should not remain in Ireland always. And then, it being impossible for
me to resist AE's eyes, I said: Well, the immediate reason is the
Colonel, who says it will be a great grief to him if I declare myself
a Protestant.

But you aren't thinking of doing any such thing? You can't, said John
Eglinton. As I was about to answer, AE interrupted:

But I never thought of the Colonel as a Catholic. I used to know him
very well some years ago, and I always looked upon him as an Agnostic.

He may have been in his youth, like others; but he is sinking into
Catholicism. The last time he came to Dublin we quarrelled, and I
thought for good, on account of what I said to him about his children.
Don't ask me, AE, to repeat what I said; it would be too painful, and
I wish to forget the words. We shall never be the same friends as we
were once, but we are still friends. I succeeded in persuading him to
stop a few days longer, and during those days, while trying to avoid
all religious questions, we fell to talking of family history, and he
mentioned, accidentally of course, that my family isn't a Catholic
family, that it was my great-grandfather that 'verted--my grandfather
wasn't a Catholic, but my father was, more or less, in his old age. I
assure you the news that there was only one generation of Catholicism
behind me came as sweetly as the south wind blowing over the downs,
and I said at once I should like to declare myself a Protestant. It
was then that he answered that it would be a great grief to him if I
did so. I shouldn't so much mind grieving him in so good a cause if I
hadn't used words that drove him out of the house. My dilemma was most
painful--to bear the shame of being considered a Catholic all my life
or--so I consulted a friend of mine in whom I have great confidence,
and she said: If you can't remain in Ireland without declaring
yourself a Protestant, and wouldn't grieve your brother, you had
better leave Ireland.

But were you in earnest when you told your brother you'd like to
declare yourself a Protestant? John Eglinton asked.

I don't joke on such subjects.

What means did you propose to take? A letter to _The Times_?

I had thought of that and of a lecture, but decided that the first
step to take would be to write to the Archbishop.

But the Archbishop would ask if you believed in a great many things
which you don't believe in.

Everything can be explained. I take it for granted that being a man
of the world, he would not press me to say that I believed in the
resurrection of the body. St Paul didn't believe in it. I can cite you
text after text--

We're not in disagreement with you; but we're thinking whether Dr
Peacock will accept your interpretation of the texts.

You think that the Archbishop would ask me to accept the bodily
resurrection of Christ?

I'm afraid, said John Eglinton, that you'll have to accept both body
and spirit.

I hadn't foreseen these difficulties. AE tried to prove to me that I
should stay in Ireland, and now you are providing me with excellent
reasons for leaving.

It's only contrairy John that's talking, said AE in his most dulcet
tones. You'll never leave us.

Well, I've told you, AE, that I can't leave till the end of my lease.
My dear AE, sufficient for the day, or for the evening, I should have
said. I see Teresa and the gardener coming down the greensward, and
soon the refreshing odour of pea soup will arise through the branches.
Now, the question is, whether we shall eat the melon with salt and
pepper before the soup, or reserve it till the end of dinner and eat
it with sugar. But where's Conan? Teresa, will you kindly walk across
and ask--

The wicket clanged, and we watched the author of most of the great
Limericks coming towards us.

There was a young man of St John's, I cried.

My masterpiece ... it was always popular, he added, dropping his
voice, as Yeats does when he is complimented on _Innisfree_. It was
always popular, and from the first. But you remind me of a tale of
long ago--not the Trinity, though there are bread and wine by you. I
am thinking of some Latin poet--it is Moore that puts the story into
my head--a Latin poet banished to the Pontic seas--Ovid sitting with
his friends.

So you've heard the news?

I have heard no news, none since my parlourmaid burst into my study
with the news that the lamps were lighted in the garden and that the
company were at table; and what better news could I hear than that?

You haven't heard that Moore is leaving us?

Leaving us! I hope his friend Sir Thornley Stoker hasn't discovered
anything very special in Liffey Street. He has been up and down there
many times lately on the trail of a Sheraton sideboard, and Naylor has
been asked to keep it till an appendicitis should turn up. The Chinese
Chippendale mirror over the drawing-room chimney-piece originated in
an unsuccessful operation for cancer; the Aubusson carpet in the back
drawing-room represents a hernia; the Renaissance bronze on the
landing a set of gall-stones; the Ming Cloisonne a floating kidney;
the Buhl cabinet his opinion on an enlarged liver; and Lady Stoker's
jewels a series of small operations performed over a term of years.

We broke into laughter; he is very amusing, AE whispered; and at the
end of our laughter I explained that Sir Thornley was supreme in the
suburbs of art; but as soon as he attempted to storm the citadel, to
buy pictures, he was as helpless as an old housewife.

How many Sir Joshuas and Gainsboroughs have I saved him from!

If he ever sells his collection I suppose it will fetch a great deal
of money.

It never will be sold in his lifetime, John, but at his death there
will be a great auction. The terms of the will are explicit, arranging
not only for his own departure but for the departure of the
curiosities. Wound in an old Florentine brocade, he will be laid in a
second-hand coffin, 1 BC, and driven to Mount Jerome; and on the same
evening the curiosities will leave for England, Naylor, Sir Thornley's
chief agent, accompanying them to Kingstown; and standing at the end
of the pier, two yards of crpe floating from his hat like a gonfalon,
and a Renaissance wand in his hand, his sighs will fill the sails of
the parting ship, without, however, his tears sensibly increasing the
volume of the rising tide, and when the last speck disappears over the
horizon he will fall suddenly forward.

But for what feat of surgery did a grateful patient send him the
second-hand coffin?

Conan continued to pile imagination upon imagination until the
conversation drifted back to the point from which it had started. Had
I really made up my mind to leave Dublin?

My dear Conan, if you'll stop talking Moore will tell you why he
conceives himself to be under an obligation to leave us.

I'm sure I beg pardon. I didn't believe in the possibility of losing
you till you're carried to the woods in Kiltoon, the spot mentioned in
the chapter of _The Lake_ which you read to us last Saturday under
this tree.

It's only this, Conan, that John Eglinton heard in the National
Library--

Well, of course, if it was heard in the National Library--and Conan
went off into a peal of laughter, bringing a dark and perplexed look
into John's eyes.

Well, Conan, if you want to hear why I thought of leaving Ireland, not
today or tomorrow, but eventually, I'll tell you, but I must not be
interrupted again. AE and John Eglinton, who have no Catholic
relations, will have some difficulty in understanding me, but you will
understand, and they will understand, too, when I remind them that at
Tillyra years ago dear Edward insisted on my making my dinner off the
egg instead of the chicken, and on going to Mass on Sunday. He is
interested, and so exclusively, in his own soul that he regards mine,
when I am visiting him, as essential to the upkeep of his. Now, I
can't help thinking that if I remain in Ireland and were to fall
dangerously ill at Tillyra, the spiritual tyranny of years ago might
be revived in a more serious form. His anxiety about his soul would
force him to bring a Catholic priest to my bedside, and if this were
to happen, and I failed to yell out in the holy man's ear when he bent
over me to hear my confession, To hell with the Pope, the rumour would
go forth that I died fortified by the rites of the Holy Catholic
Church.

But you are not leaving us because you think you're going to die at
Tillyra, and that Edward will bring a priest to your bedside?

No, that would be hardly a sufficient reason for leaving my friends;
but I confess that I should like to die in a Protestant country among
my co-religionists.

Moore is thinking of declaring himself a Protestant.

The Colonel has said that it would be a great grief to him if I were
to do so; but you'll excuse me, Conan, if I don't stop to explain, for
I notice that AE hasn't touched his fish, and that Teresa has begun to
despair of being able to attract his attention to the lobster sauce.
AE, I shall be obliged to ask everybody present to cease talking, so
that you may eat your fish. The spirit in you must have acquired a
great command over the flesh for that turbot not to tempt you. It
tastes to me as if it had only just come out of the sea. A capon
follows the turbot, the whole of our dinner; but have no fear, the
bird is one of the finest, weighing nearly five pounds.

What beneficent Providence led it into such excesses of fat? cried
Conan. It neither delved, nor span, nor wasted its tissues in vain
flirtation; a little operation released it from all feminine trouble,
and allowed it to spend its days in attaining a glory to which Moore,
with all his literature, will never attain--the glory of fat capon. At
the end of our laughter, Conan cried: The unlabouring brood of the
coop. You know Yeats's line, The unlabouring brood of the skies? For a
long time I thought that Yeats was referring to the priests, but he
must have been thinking of capons; no, he knows nothing of capons. He
must have been thinking of the stars.

  Oh, songless bird, far sweeter than the rose!
  And virgin as a parish priest, God knows!

Fearing that Conan's jests might scandalise the gardener, and
remembering that there was only white wine on the table, I sent him to
the house to fetch the red. Teresa could remain, for she had told me
she had not been to her duties for many a year, and I had come to look
upon her as one of my sheaves.

A more fragrant bird was never carved, and I beg of you, AE, to eat
the wing that the Gods have given you. He lived and died for us. And
here is the gardener with the wine that comes to me from Bordeaux in
barrels--a pleasant, sound dinner wine. I don't press it upon you as a
vintage wine, but I am told that it is by no means disgraceful. You
see I am dependent upon others, only knowing _vin ordinaire_ from
_Chteau Lafitte_ because of my preference for the former. I warrant
that the innocent nuns up there, now all abed, wondering why the
lights are burning in my garden, are better bibbers than anybody at
this table, except perhaps Conan. All a-row in their cells they lie,
wondering what impiety their neighbour is organising. I suppose you
have all heard the report that I have re-established the worship of
Venus in this garden, bringing flowers to her statue every morning?

Perhaps they think these lamps are an illumination in her honour, AE
suggested.

Causing them to look into their mirrors oftener than the rule allows.
There was a time when I liked to stand at my back window and watch
them following winding walks under beautiful trees, while their
neighbours, the washerwomen, blasphemed over their washtubs. The
contrast between the slum and the convent garden, separated by a
nine-inch wall, used to amuse me; but now I take no further interest
in my nuns, not since they have put up that horrible red-brick
building--an examination hall or music-room--

Spoiling excellent material for kitchen-maids, said Conan.

Be that as it may, the most doleful sounds of harp and violin come
through the window, spoiling my meditations. In Dublin there is no
escape from the religious. If I walk to Carlisle Bridge to take a car
to the Moat House I meet seminarists all along the pavement, groups of
threes and fours; and full-blown priests flaunt past me--rosy-cheeked,
pompous men, danging gold watch-chains across their paunches, and
tipping silk hats over their benign brows--

Their vulpine brows, Conan said.

A black queue stretching right across Dublin, from Drumcondra along
the Merrion Road. The other day a particularly aggressive priest
walked step for step with me as far as Sydney Parade, and it seemed to
me that when I altered my pace he altered his. I was going on to see
John Eglinton, and no sooner had I outstepped the priest than the
great wall of the convent confronted me. I wonder where all the money
comes from?

Out of Purgatory's bank, Conan answered cheerfully; and there is no
fear of them overdrawing their account, for money is always dribbling
in. Nothing thrives in Ireland like a convent, a public-house, and a
race-meeting. Any small house will do for a beginning; a poor-box is
put in the wall, a couple of blind girls are taken in, and so
salubrious is our climate that the nuns find themselves in five years
in a Georgian house situated in the middle of a beautiful park. The
convent whose music distracts your meditations is occupied by Loreto
nuns--a teaching order, where the daughters of Dublin shopkeepers are
sure of acquiring a nice accent in French and English. St Vincent's
Hospital, at the corner, is run by nuns who employ trained nurses to
tend the sick. The eyes of the modern nun may not look under the
bedclothes; the medieval nun had no such scruples. Our neighbourhood
is a little overdone in convents; the north side is still richer. But
let's count what we have around us: two in Leeson Street, one in
Baggot Street and a training college, one in Ballsbridge, two in
Donnybrook, one in Ranelagh; there is a convent at Sandymount, and
then there is John Eglinton's convent at Merrion; there is another in
Booterstown. Stillorgan Road is still free from them; but I hear that
a foreign order is watching the beautiful residences on the right and
left, and as soon as one comes into the market--You have been out
hawking, my dear Moore, and I appeal to you that the hen bird is much
stronger, fiercer, swifter than the--

The tiercel.

The tiercel, of course, for while he was pursuing some quarry at
Blackrock, the larger and the stronger birds, the Sister of Mercy and
the Sister of the Sacred Heart, struck down Mount Annville, Milltown,
and Linden. All the same, the little tiercel has managed to secure
Stillorgan Castle on the adjacent hillside, a home for lunatic
gentlemen, most of them Dublin publicans.

Like my neighbour Cunningham, who only just escaped incarceration.

His was a very tragic story, said John Eglinton. Did you never suspect
him of being a bit queer?

It often seemed odd not to exchange a good morning from doorstep to
doorstep. His old housekeeper was affable enough; she would bid me a
kindly greeting when I returned home after a short absence in the
West, and she must have gossiped with my servants, for some of the
mystery with which he surrounded himself vanished. I certainly did
hear from somebody that his rule was never to have a bite or sup
outside his own house; it must have been my cook who told me, and now
I come to think of it she added, somewhat contemptuously, that he
dined in the middle of the day and went out for his walk at three
o'clock.

As the clock struck he sallied forth, a most laughable and absurd
little man, not more than two inches over five feet; a long, thick
body was set on the shortest possible legs, and he was always dressed
the same, in a yellow overcoat and wide grey trousers not unlike dear
Edward's. It would be an exaggeration to say that Cunningham was one
of the sights of Dublin when he rolled down the pavement for his walk
with a thick stick in his hand, a corpulent cigar between his teeth, a
white flower in his button-hole. He was one of the minor sights of
Dublin as he went away towards the Phoenix Park, a jolly little fellow
to the casual observer, but to me, who saw him every day, his good
humour seemed superficial and to overlie a deep-set melancholy.

The melancholy of the dwarf, Conan said under his breath.

His walk was always up the main road of the Phoenix Park, as far as
Castleknock Gate and back again, and I think his old housekeeper told
Miss Gough that he wouldn't miss his walk for the King of England. You
asked me if I knew him; I never saw anybody more determined not to
make my acquaintance. When we passed each other in the street he
always averted his eyes, and if I had been polite, I should have
imitated him, but I could not keep myself from looking into his
comical eyes turned up at the corners, and wondering at the great roll
of flesh from ear to ear, and at the chins descending step by step
into his bosom. It was from Sir Thornley Stoker that I learned how
determined he was not to make my acquaintance. You can't guess, he
said one day, whom I have let out of the room? Your next-door
neighbour, Cunningham. I begged him to stay to meet you, but it was
impossible to persuade him. He said Oh, no, I won't meet George: and
on Sir Thornley pressing him to give a reason, he refused, urging as
an excuse that I was an enemy of the Church. But I think myself that
he was afraid I would put into print some of the stories that it was
his wont to tell against the priests. He had stories about everybody,
even about me. That very afternoon Sir Thornley could hardly speak for
laughing. If you had only heard him just now telling--But tell me what
it was. I can't tell you. It's the Dublin accent and the Dublin
dialect. It was all about _Evelyn Innes._ You don't know what you've
missed, and he turned over in his chair to laugh again. No, there's no
use my trying to tell it; you should hear Cunningham. But I can't hear
Cunningham; he won't know me. At last, apologising for spoiling the
story, Sir Thornley told me that I must take for granted the racy
description of two workmen who had come to Upper Ely Place to mend the
drains in front of my house. After having dug a hole, they took a seat
at either end, and sat spitting into it from time to time in solemn
silence, until at last one said to the other, Do you know the fellow
that lives in the house forninst us? You don't? Well, I'll tell you
who he is: he's the fellow that wrote _Evelyn Innes_. And who was she?
She was a great opera-singer. And the story is all about the ould hat.
She was lying on a crimson sofa with mother-of pearl legs when the
baronet came into the room, his eyes jumping out of his head and he as
hot as be damned. Without so much as a good morrow, he jumped down on
his knees alongside of her, and the next chapter is in Italy.

The crimson sofa with the mother-of-pearl legs, and the baronet as hot
as be damned, would be about as much of your story as a Dublin workman
would be likely to gather from the book, John Eglinton said.

The touch that _Evelyn Innes_ is all about the old hat is excellent,
Conan added, and then became grave like a dog that licks his lips
after a savoury morsel. And, continuing, I told them how, in the last
three months before his death, we all noticed a great change in
Cunningham; his face turned the colour of lead, and the old
housekeeper often talked to Miss Gough about him, not saying much,
expressing her alarm as old women do, with a shake of the head. One
day she said the master had gone very queer lately, that he would sit
for hours brooding, not saying a word to anybody; and it was about
three weeks after that she rushed into our house distracted, wringing
her hands, speaking incoherently, telling us that, not finding her
master in his bedroom when she took him up his cup of tea, she had
gone to seek him in the closet, and not finding him there, she had
rushed up to the top landing. He was after hanging himself from the
banisters, she wailed, and I sent for the police and for his solicitor
and sat on the stairs till they came. No one will ever know what he
suffered. Didn't I tell Miss Gough that he would sit for hours, and he
not saying a word to any one? He must have been thinking of it all
that time, and little did I understand him when he said--many and
many's the time he said it as he went upstairs to bed: They'll never
get me as long as I've got this right hand on my body.

I don't know if the tragedy transpires in my telling, but what I see
is a retired publican overcome by scruples of conscience, his failing
brain filled with memories of how he had beguiled customers with
stories about the clergy into drinking more than was good for them. A
man of that kind would very soon begin to believe that the allies of
the clergy, the demons, were after him, and that he could only save
himself by giving all his money for Masses for the repose of his soul.
And that is what he did. It all went in Masses, or nearly all; the
relations got a very small part, after threatening to contest the
will. But what interests me is the agony of mind that he must have
suffered week in, week out, repeating it, They'll never get me as long
as I've got this right hand on my body. The phrase must have run in
the old housekeeper's head, and somebody, seeing that his mind was
giving way and fearing lest he might kill himself, may have said to
him: You had better put yourself under restraint. His adviser may have
suggested John of God's, and this advice, though well meant, may,
perhaps, have destroyed what remained of his poor mind. They'll never
get me as long as I've got this right hand on my body. It was with
that phrase he went up to bed one evening and hanged himself next
morning from the banisters with a leather strap. Miss Gough met him
coming home the evening before he killed himself, and she tells me
that she'll never forget the look in his face. Have you ever seen a
maniac, and the cunning look out of the corner of the eyes which says:
Now you think you're going to get the best of me, but you aren't. She
remembers noticing that look in his face as he passed her, his two
hands thrust into the pockets of his short overcoat. He was bringing
home the strap, for the old woman said at the inquest that he had
bought it that evening. I suppose he was hiding it under his overcoat.
I wonder why he waited till early next morning before hanging himself.
Poor little man! That strap was the great romance of his life.

The phrase jarred a little. No one answered, and then, his voice
hardly breaking the silence, John Eglinton spoke of a tragedy that
occurred almost under his own windows, the barred windows of an old
coaching inn, at the end of a little avenue of elm-trees, down at
Merrion, overlooking the great park in which the convent stands. A nun
had been found drowned, whether by her companions or by the gardener
was not related in the newspapers--merely the fact that she had been
found in the pond one morning. It was stated at the inquest that the
nun was a sleep-walker, and the verdict returned was one of accidental
death. The verdict of suicide in a moment of temporary insanity would
not have been agreeable to the nuns, but to me, a teller of tales, it
is more interesting to think that she had gone down in the night to
escape from some thought, some fear, some suffering that could be
endured no longer. She was free to leave the convent; the bars that
restrained her were no iron bars, but they were not less secure for
that. She may have suffered, like Cunningham, from scruples of
conscience, and gone down in despair to the pond.

And while you were dressing yourself to go to the National Library,
she was floating among water-weeds and flowers.

Moore is thinking of Millais's _Ophelia_, said AE.

Yes, and I was thinking of _Evelyn Innes_. The most literary end for
her would be to have drowned herself in the fish-pond.

I'm sorry it didn't occur to you.

It did occur to me many times, and I could see and hear the nuns
coming down in the morning and finding her floating.

A body doesn't float, AE said, till nine days after. He can't shake
himself free from the memory of _Ophelia_.

Conan, who had been left out of the conversation for a long time, was
getting irritated, and he jumped into it as an athlete jumps into the
arena.

Moore is wondering what thought, what fear, what scruple of
conscience may have sent her down to that pond, as if it were not
quite obvious what drove her down there. She was in love with John,
who would not listen to her, and one night, finding that he had put
bars on his window, she walked towards the pond, as Moore would say,
like one overtaken by an irreparable catastrophe.

AE and I laughed. John looked a little puzzled and a little vexed, as
he always does at any allusion to himself. The wicket-gate clanged,
and Teresa came across the greensward, saying, Please, sir, you're
wanted on the telephone, and Conan disappeared quickly in the
darkness.

We all wished--or perhaps it would be more exact if I said that I
wished--to discuss Conan now that he had left us, and, seeking for
some natural transition, I watched a moth buzzing round the globe of
the lamp, and thought of the desire of the moth for the star. Conan
would be able to repeat the poem, but that transition would be too
obvious. It was the moon that gave me one--the yellow sickle rising on
a leaden sky among the arches and chimneys of the convent.

We have heard what Conan thinks of the nuns; now I wonder what the
nuns would think of Conan?

AE spoke of his reckless imagination and his power of perceiving
distant analogies, connecting the capon and the priests with Yeats's
line, The unlabouring brood of the skies; and, better still, the house
of symbols, the antique coffin, and the disconsolate dealer standing
at the end of Kingstown Pier watching the furniture departing under a
smoke pall.

I wonder what he will become?

I was much struck, John Eglinton said, at Meyer's prophecy. Do you
remember it? He said that he had known many young men like Conan, all
very defiant until they were thirty; and every one, after thirty, had
developed into commonplace fathers of families, renowned for all the
virtues.

I wonder will that be the end of Conan?

A deep silence followed, and then, half to myself and half to my
companions, I said:

Do you think he has shaken himself free from Catholic superstitions?

John Eglinton was not sure that he had done this.

Merely telling stories about the avarice of priests is not enough; a
man must think himself out of it, and I'm not sure that Meyer isn't
right. Catholics are Agnostic in youth, quiescent in middle age,
craw-thumpers between fifty and sixty.

Then we began to talk, as all Irishmen do, of what Ireland was, what
she is, and what she is becoming.

There is no becoming in Ireland, I answered; she is always the same--a
great inert mass of superstition.

Home Rule, said AE, will set free a flood of intelligence.

And perhaps the parish priest will drown in this flood.

AE did not think this necessary.

Do you think the flood of intelligence will penetrate into the
convents and release the poor women wasting their lives?

I'm not thinking of nuns, John Eglinton said; those who have gone into
convents had better remain in them; and Home Rule will be of no avail
unless somebody comes with it, like Fox or like Bunyan, bringing the
Bible or writing a book like the _Pilgrim's Progress_--Moore is too
much of a toff.

The Messiah will not wear the appearance that you expect him to wear.
Salvation always comes from an unexpected quarter. It may come from
AE, it may come from me, it may come from you.

John laughed scornfully at the idea that he should bring anybody
anything.

It was against my advice, John, that you named your magazine after the
goddess; you should have called it _The Heretic_.

You are quite right, AE. We want heresy in Ireland, for there can be
no religious thought without heresy. Spain declined as soon as she rid
herself of her heretics, if one can call Mohammedanism a heresy; at
least, it was a competitive religion; the persecution of the
Protestants in France was followed by the expulsion of the Jesuits and
the confiscation of their lands. No country can afford to be without
heretics, and, in view of the tendency of Catholic countries to rid
themselves of their clergy, wouldn't it be a good thing for the Irish
Bishops to send Logue to the Vatican so that he might explain to His
Holiness the necessity of Protestantism? You needn't look further than
Ireland for an apt illustration, holy Father. If, on the passing of
the Home Rule Bill, we are set to work to persecute the Protestant
minority, the terrible fate of exile may be mine. We must look ahead,
holy Father.

Logue may beg His Holiness to withdraw the _Ne Temere_ decree, said
John Eglinton.

I wouldn't advise Logue to be too explicit. The decree can be politely
ignored by the Irish Bishops. When a Catholic girl who is going to
marry a Protestant approaches the priest to learn in what religion her
children shall be brought up, he will answer her: In the religion of
your husband. But my husband is a Protestant. My dear daughter, we do
not know if he'll remain a Protestant; we rely on you to use every
effort to persuade him from the errors of Protestantism, so that your
children may be brought up in our Holy Church. And to the young man
who wishes to marry a Protestant girl the priest will say: Your
children will be brought up in the religion of their mother. But their
mother is a Protestant. We do not know, my dear son, that your wife
will remain a Protestant; if you will do all in your power to bring
her into the one true fold, I am confident that you'll succeed.

The idea is an ingenious one, said John Eglinton, and Teresa came
across the sward to tell me that Mr Osborne, Mr Hughes, Mr Longworth,
Mr Seumas O'Sullivan, Mr Atkinson, and Mr Yeats, were waiting in the
dining-room.

Will you have coffee in the house or out here, sir?

We had better have it in the house. The table has to be cleared. And
Teresa, please place a lamp at the wicket, for if you don't you'll
certainly break my dessert service and hurt yourself. Come, AE, I've
got a cigar for you that I think will please you, and afterwards you
can smoke your pipe.




XX


In what part of London do you think of settling? John Eglinton asked,
as we passed out of the Library.

I haven't given the matter a thought, I answered.

The fireman accosted John in the vestibule, and we waited till the
last stragglers had passed out and the great doors were closed.

Would you care for a walk down the Pembroke Road and back by
Northumberland Road over the canal bridge before going to bed?

Of course I should; I haven't been out all day, but--

You're tired?

No, I'm not tired; and in the hope that he would not speak again of my
departure from Ireland, I fell into his step, a little annoyed with
myself, however, for I had not spoken truthfully when I said: I
haven't given the matter a thought. I had even written to Tonks asking
him to look out for a house for me, and he had found a house that
would suit me in Swan Walk; his letter was in my pocket, and during my
walk with John I could read in my thoughts: You had better come over
and see it at once, for it is one of those houses that do not remain
long without a tenant. I remarked whenever the conversation dropped: I
shall have to warn all my friends in London of my coming, and when
John bade me good night I returned to Ely Place determined to answer
Tonks's letter before going to bed. But something held me back, and
turning from the writing-table I said: Tomorrow morning; and every
morning after breakfast from that day on I was held back whenever I
approached the writing-table with the intention of writing to Tonks.
And it may have been to get the house in Swan Walk behind me that I
wrote to Dujardin, who is always looking forward to seeing me in an
_appartement_ in Paris with five or six rooms and enough wall space
for my pictures, and pleasant armchairs in which we could sit smoking
cigars and discussing _The Source of the Christian River_. A few weeks
later he wrote saying he had discovered the needed _appartement_ and
would I come over at once? My trouble, said I to myself, has been
transferred from London to Paris. I must write to the landlord of
number four, Ely Place, telling him that I intend to give up the house
at the end of the lease. But half-way across the carpet on my way to
the writing-table I was stopped by an inexplicable apathy, and feeling
a little scared went out for a walk and brooded on Rome and
Canterbury.

There are past moments that retain the sensual conviction of a present
moment, and one of these is the September evening of which I am
speaking; a dark evening it was under the trees at the corner of the
Appian Way. I must have come through the Clyde Road, admiring as I
passed the tall pillared porticoes which give the villas a certain
elegance, and the lofty trees, elms, beeches, dense chestnuts, and
dark hollies, amid which the villas stand. In my humour it was a sort
of solace to stop and to remember Auteuil. The rue de Ranelagh exists,
doesn't it? _Elle donne sur la rue de l'Assomption, n'est-ce pas_?
Some such random association of names may have caused me to keep to
the left in the direction of Upper Leeson Street, or it may have been
that I kept on that way because the Tyrrells lived there before they
went to live in Clonskeagh. I am aware of that dark September night at
the corner of the Appian Way as I am of the moment I am now living,
the sky grey above the trees and a sycamore leaf fluttering down from
a great bough to my feet, and myself, yielding to a vague feeling of
apprehension, stepping aside to avoid treading on it, and it was
immediately after the fall of that leaf that temptation rose again,
coming up, as it were, out of my very bowels; yet the temptation was
not of a woman or any part of a woman, but a desire to enter the Irish
Church in the sense of identifying myself with it.

Hitherto my desire had been merely to dissociate myself from a Church
which I deemed shameful, whereas I was now conscious of a desire of
unity with a Church in sympathy with my religious aspirations ... to
some extent. But I had promised the Colonel not to declare myself a
Protestant, meaning thereby that I would not write to the papers on
the subject, nor call Dublin together to hear a lecture on the
incompatibility of Literature and Dogma. But my promise to the
Colonel, I said, keeps me out of St Patrick's every Sunday. For me to
be seen there every Sunday would be equivalent to a declaration of
Protestantism. And to be kept out of my Cathedral is a great
privation, for I should like to go there occasionally and to pray with
the congregation; to pray to whom I know not, but I should like to
pray. A little later I found myself standing before a tall iron gate
peering through the bars, admiring some golden tassels. Golden rod, I
said, and the borders, I am sure, are blue with lobelia. A sudden
scent of honey warned me that arabis was there in plenty, and I walked
on thinking of a dense cushion of pure white flowers till my steps
were again stayed, and this time it was by the sight of--. The tree
seemed like a quince, but the quince does not bear pink and white
blossom, a bell-shapen blossom like a mallow. But neither tree nor
shrub flowers at the end of August, and I walked on in a dream,
awakened by another garden gate over which a syringa had flourished
two months ago. Has heaven a more delectable scent than the
remembrance of a syringa in bloom? I asked, and it was on my way home
from Clonskeagh that I said to myself: Now if I go to London to see
the house that Steer and Tonks have found in Swan Walk, or to Paris to
view the _appartement_ in the Boulevard St Germain that Dujardin has
discovered, I shall not be able to declare my Protestant faith. Why
not? I asked. Why not? And the answer came quickly: for there is
nobody in London or Paris interested in such questions. So that is why
I hesitate to write to my friends to announce my departure from
Dublin, and the source of the lie that I told John on the night he
invited me to walk with him down the Pembroke Road and back to
Northumberland Road over the canal bridge before going to bed. How
little do we know of ourselves! I muttered, and again I walked on,
this time my mind awake and myself not a little frightened, for it
seemed certain that I was prompted by an unworthy motive to declare
myself a Protestant. Can I accept Protestantism wholeheartedly? I
asked, and I remembered John Eglinton's words: The Archbishop will
certainly ask you if you can accept the divinity of our Lord. He will
ask, too, if I can accept the resurrection of the body; and till I
reached Ely Place I did not cease to seek in my memory for the passage
in Corinthians, in which St Paul is at pains to elucidate the doctrine
of the resurrection of the body. The apostle is anxious to convince
his converts and himself. He is troubled by doubts, doubts that my
Archbishop does not share for reasons he has discovered, and his
reasons he will lay before me fully. All will then be well. Hereupon I
walked to the writing-table and wrote:

Your Grace: For the last three years, since I came to live in Ireland,
my thoughts have been directed towards religion, and I have come to
see that Christianity in its purest form is to be found in the
Anglican rather than in the Church of Rome. I am anxious to become a
member of your Church, and shall be glad to hear from your Grace
regarding the steps I am to take.

After addressing the letter I stood for a long time admiring it and
trying to collect my thoughts sufficiently to decide whether I should
take the letter to his Grace's house and drop it into his box myself,
or post it in the pillar. It should come to him through the post, I
said, and after posting it I returned home and slept easier that
night. And after breakfast my thoughts went at once to the Book, and
by midday many spurious passages had been discovered--for instance,
that very commonplace, reeking-of-Bishop passage: Thou art Peter, and
upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not
prevail against it. And I will give unto the keys of the kingdom of
heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in
heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in
heaven,--a passage so obviously needful for the founding of a Church
that the policeman round the corner, if one were to bring him in,
would say, Well, sir, it doesn't look much like the genuine article,
do it? We'd call it fake up at the station. Yes, of course, fake--and
the most blatant fake. It was necessary to have Christ's authority for
an apostolic succession and the right to collect money, to lay down
the law, to judge others--all the things that Christ expressly
declared should not be done; and in my indignation I compared the
ordinary Christians, who accept this piece of ecclesiasticism as
Christ's words, to the artistic people we meet every day who admire
equally Botticelli, Burne-Jones, Corot, Sir Alfred East, Turgenev, and
Mrs Humphry Ward. The common man, I said, makes the same mess of
pottage out of religion as he does out of art.

This sad thought caused me to drop into a long meditation, and I
remembered, on awaking, that the passage from Matthew, the utility of
which the policeman round the corner could not fail to see, had been
improved upon by the Bishop who wrote about one hundred and fifty
years after the Crucifixion. The need for a more explicit text than
the one from Matthew had begun to be felt, and the Bishop supplied,
Whosoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; whosoever sins
ye retain, they are retained. And, so disturbed was I by the
retouching of the text by ecclesiastics that I resolved to compile for
my own use and benefit a list of the authentic sayings, and, calling
Miss Gough, I dictated them to her, adding as a little appendix all
the words that had obviously been inserted by the Fathers; for
instance, Be not angry with thy brother without just cause.

Without just cause degrades Christ. These three words turn him into a
reasonable and commonplace person. It will be interesting, Miss Gough,
to have the Archbishop's opinion upon these texts when I go to the
Palace.

She answered that it would be indeed interesting, and I began to
wonder why Dr Peacock had delayed to answer my letter; my letter was
one that needed an answer by return of post. For his Grace cannot be
without knowledge of the anxiety of mind that religious questions
cause those who are sincerely religious, anxious at all costs to
themselves to arrive at the truth. Miss Gough's explanation was that
his Grace might not be at the Palace, and this seeming to me not
unlikely, for we were in September and the month was a fine one, I
opened my Bible, and turning to the Acts, which is probably the
earliest Christian document, I read: But a certain man named Ananias,
with Sapphira his wife, sold a possession, and kept back part of the
price, his wife also being privy to it, and brought a certain part,
and laid it at the apostles' feet. But Peter said, Ananias, why hath
Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back
part of the price of the land? Whiles it remained, was it not thine
own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? Why hast
thou conceived this thing in thine heart? thou hast not lied unto men,
but unto God. Whether Peter was ever Bishop of Rome is a matter on
which ecclesiastical authorities are undecided, but there can be no
doubt that he was, and is, and ever will be, Parish Priest in the
county of Galway. Stephen was stoned in the streets of Jerusalem, and
Paul standing by, I said, and rushed on to the story of Paul's
conversion on the road to Damascus. It was not, however, until Paul
bade goodbye to his disciples and friends at Ephesus that he won all
my admiration and instinctive sympathy. In this most beautiful
farewell, one of the most moving and touching things in literature,
Paul takes us to his bosom; two thousand years cannot separate us--we
become one with Paul and glorify God in him.

And these noble verses are not Paul's single contribution to the Acts;
he is so evident in these narratives of adventure that it is difficult
to imagine how they came to be attributed to Luke. The narrative of
the shipwreck and the journey to Rome could only have been written by
a man of literary genius, and there are never two at the same time.
The trial at Caesarea is Paul's own rendering of his defence. Of
course it is, and I wondered how any one could have entertained, even
for a moment, the notion that Luke made it up. How did he make it up?
From hearsay? Blind men and deaf knowing nothing of the art of
writing! Luke may have edited Paul's manuscripts, and his recension
may be the farewell at Ephesus, the trial at Caesarea, and the journey
to Rome. But it is certain that Paul's voice, and no other voice, is
heard in these narratives; and it is a voice that is always
distinguishable from every other voice. We do not hear it in the
Epistle to the Hebrews, nor do we hear it in the thirteenth chapter of
1st Corinthians, a chapter which I have no hesitation whatever in
taking from Paul and attributing to a disciple of John's. But I do not
know if any other exegetist has rejected this chapter. Many have
rejected the Epistles to the Ephesians, the Philippians, the first
and second Corinthians, but it seems to me that I hear Paul's voice in
all of these. The Archbishop will no doubt be surprised that I should
admit so much. All will go well if he doesn't press upon me the
Epistle to the Hebrews.

The postman's knock startled me out of my meditation, and Teresa
brought me his Grace's letter on a silver salver; treasured it was for
many years, lost, unfortunately, as were some of Pater's letters.

Dr Peacock began his letter by explaining that he was staying at the
seaside with his family, and there had been some delay at the Palace
in forwarding my letter. He confessed to a great joy on hearing that
my coming to Ireland had been the means of leading me back to Christ;
and he admitted, I think, that there might be many little points which
he would be able to clear up for me, but as he was not returning to
Dublin for some weeks the most natural course, he said, was to send my
letter to my parish priest, who would call upon me.

The words parish priest always seemed to me to savour of Rome, and the
Archbishop's letter slipped from my fingers, and I sat for a long time
thinking of what this Archbishop was like. His name conveyed the idea
of a tall, formal man, and perhaps the interview would have been a
very stiff and formal affair, myself and the Archbishop on either side
of a mahogany table covered with papers and piles of letters held
together by elastic bands. My parish priest, the Reverend Gilbert
Mahaffy, had been my neighbour for a long time; the Rectory was No. 13
Ely Place, one door from the great iron gateway that divides my little
cul-de-sac from Ely Place. He was known as a man of the very kindliest
disposition. I had often heard Gill speak of his work among the poor,
of his effusive enthusiasm and energy. A rare soul, I had often said
as he passed me on his charitable errands, absorbed in his thoughts,
his short legs moving so quickly under the long frock-coat buttoned to
the chin, that he seemed to be running. I could recall the high
shoulders showing straight and pointed, the wide head shaded by the
soft felt hat, the large straight nose, the cheeks and chin covered
with a soft greying beard, and the kindly eyes--Eyes, I said, that
always seem to be on the lookout for somebody's trouble.

Gilbert Mahaffy's appearance had appealed to me, winning me before a
word had been exchanged between us; all the same, I was conscious of a
little resentment. He had never called upon me; he looked the other
way when we passed in the street, treating me exactly like poor
Cunningham. It seemed to me that he should have called upon me when I
came to Dublin first, and not waited for the Archbishop to tell him to
call. However, there it was; he was coming to see me. And taking up
the New Testament once more, I fell to thinking what his literary and
critical qualifications were. A good man he certainly is, but from his
appearance one would hardly credit him with a subtle mind; and a
subtle mind seemed to be necessary ... in my case. We are safe if we
admit that Jesus was God and was sent by his Father into the world to
atone by his death on the Cross for the sins of men. But Jesus in his
own words seems to deny the enormous pretensions that the
ecclesiastics would cast upon him. In Matthew he says, Why does thou
call me good? None is good but God, and no less striking words were
uttered by him on the Cross: My God, why hast thou abandoned me? The
Colonel had once reminded me that Jesus had said, Before Abraham was,
I am, but these Orientals spoke in images, and it is easy to
understand that we all were before Abraham, that is to say, before
Abraham existed in the flesh. But the words, Why dost thou call me
good? None is good but God, seemed to me very difficult to explain
away, and the words spoken on the Cross even more so. Nor is it very
clear that Paul believed in the separate Divinity of Christ. Christ
will disappear in the end to be merged into his Father. A puzzling
view of Christ's Divinity, I said, and sat for a long time looking
into the fire, thinking how pleasant it would be if Mahaffy were here,
we two sitting on either side of the fire, our Bibles on our knees.

It was the next day that my servant told me the Reverend Mr Mahaffy
had called. Retreat is now out of the question, I said. Tomorrow he'll
call again; or perhaps he'll wait for me to return his visit, and for
me to return it will be more polite. But it is impossible to wait till
tomorrow. I must talk the matter out with somebody. Why not with Sir
Thornley? Only he is generally occupied with patients at this hour.

You know, I've been thinking of joining the Church of Ireland for some
time.

So I have heard it said, but I thought it was one of your jokes.

One doesn't choose such subjects for joking; and I showed him the
Archbishop's letter. Now, what is to be done? The Reverend Gilbert
Mahaffy called this afternoon, and he'll call tomorrow if I don't
return his visit. It will be better, I think, to call upon him this
evening and get it over, only I can't think what he'll say to me. Can
you give me any idea?

He'll ask you if you abjure the errors of Rome.

He can't ask that, because I never believed in Rome. Do you think
he'll ask me to say a prayer with him?

Sir Thornley began to laugh, and his laughter shocked me a little, but
I did not get up to leave the room until he said:

Did the Archbishop send you an order for coals and blankets?

I wonder how you, who are a Protestant, and respect your religion--I
wonder what your co-religionists--and without attempting to finish my
sentence I walked out of the room abruptly, and opened the hall-door,
but had to draw back into the hall, for Gilbert Mahaffy was coming
down Hume Street, and, thinking of him in his strenuous, useful life,
I came to be ashamed of the disappointment I had experienced when the
Archbishop had referred my spiritual needs to him instead of
undertaking them himself. No man, I said, is more likely to inspire in
me the faith I am seeking.... After dinner I will call upon him.

My dinner was hardly tasted that evening, so perturbed was I; and I
still can recall the glow behind the houses as I went towards the
gateway.

Is Mr Mahaffy at home?

Yes, sir.

Portentous words, and the study itself portentous in its simplicity. I
had just time to look over the great writing-table covered with
papers--all on parochial business, I said--before he entered. He came
running into the room, his eyes and his hands welcoming me.

I'm so glad to see you.

We have lived near each other for a long time, I answered, and I have
often wished to know you, Mr Mahaffy.

Yes; His Grace asked me to call. Yes-s.

In moments of great mental excitement one notices everything, and Mr
Mahaffy's manner of saying yes-s, trying to turn the word from a
monosyllable to a dissyllable, and his habit of rubbing his hands
after the pronunciation, struck me. And very nervously I began to
explain that I had written to the Archbishop, saying that since I had
come to live in Ireland--

His Grace sent me your letter--yes-s.

You see, Mr Mahaffy, in England one has no opportunity of noticing the
evil influence of the Church of Rome; it wasn't until I came here....
It seemed to me that I had better tell him of my great discovery--the
illiteracy of Rome since the Reformation. I did--without, however,
interesting him very deeply. He is more interested in the theological
side of the question, I said to myself, and sought for a transitional
phrase, but before finding one Mr Mahaffy mentioned Newman, and I told
him that Newman could hardly write English at all, at which he showed
some surprise. The Roman Church relies upon its converts, for after
two or three generations of Catholicism the intelligence dies.

It was plain to me that the conversation was not altogether to his
taste, and, thinking to interest him, I said:

You know, Cardinal Manning was of this opinion. He told a friend of
mine that he was glad he had been brought up a Protestant.

Did he? I didn't know that.

And, my thoughts running on ahead, I began to describe a new Utopia--a
State so well ordered that no one in it was allowed to be a Papist
unless he or she could prove some bodily or mental infirmity, or until
he or she had attained a certain age, which put them beyond the
business of the world--the age of seventy, perhaps, the earliest at
which a conversion would be legal. A sort of spiritual Old Age Pension
Scheme, I said; and a picture rose up before my mind of a crowd of
young and old, all inferior, physically or intellectually, struggling
round the door of a Roman Catholic Church, with papers in their hands,
on the first Friday of every month.

It is quite possible, Mr Moore, that there is more intelligence in
Protestantism than in Catholicism; but the question before us is
hardly one of literature. In the letter to His Grace I understand you
to say that Christianity is to be found in its purest form in the
Anglican Church. We are concerned, really, with spiritual rather than
with aesthetic truths.

You are quite right. Perhaps I was wrong; but a sense of humour does
not preclude sincerity, and many reasons lead one towards spiritual
truth. If I introduced aesthetics into our conversation, it was
because I have spoken to Catholics on this matter, and they have
always, with one exception--a convert--failed to put the case as you
did--that religion really has nothing to do with aesthetics.

The interview had certainly taken an unexpected turn, and an
unfortunate one, and while I was thinking of something to say to Mr
Mahaffy, he asked me suddenly if he were to understand that I accepted
the Divinity of our Lord?

Of course I am aware that you accept the Divinity of our Lord Jesus
Christ in a very literal sense, but is it sure that we do not mean the
same thing in the end? All things tend towards God, and what is
highest in Nature is nearest to God, and certainly Jesus Christ was
the noblest human being in many respects that ever lived.

A cloud had come into his face, and, seeing that it was deepening, I
became more sincere in the sense that I tried to get nearer to the
truth.

I should like to believe as you do, to share your belief.

And you will, he said. You will be with us one of these days if you
aren't with us wholly today, and we talked on religious subjects until
it was time for me to go. Then he asked me to come again; I promised
to do so in a few days, and went away asking myself if it were ever
likely that I should be able to answer truthfully and say Yes, I
believe in the Divinity of Christ as you do. I should have to know
exactly what he meant, and it is doubtful if he would be able to tell
me, for we cannot understand God, and if we cannot understand what God
is, how is it that we speak of the Son of God? St Paul himself had no
conception of the Trinity. If Christ were God, equal to his Father,
how is it that--what are Paul's words?--Christ will disappear in the
end to be merged into his Father? It is all very puzzling.

A few days after I went again to see Mr Mahaffy, and I remember
telling him that I had been questioning myself on the subject of
Christ's Divinity.

You see, Mr Mahaffy, one doesn't know what one believes. None of us
thinks alike, and no man can tell his soul to another. Is it not
sufficient if I say that in my belief there is more Divinity in Christ
than in any other human being?

You say in your letter to the Archbishop that you wished to join the
communion of the Anglican Church, and the belief of that communion is
not so vague as yours, Mr Moore. We believe that Christ is the Son of
God, and came into the world to redeem the world from sin, that he
died on the Cross and rose three days afterwards from the dead,
ascended into Heaven--

Tolstoy didn't believe in the physical resurrection, and it may be
doubted if St Paul believed in it; yet you will not deny that Tolstoy
was a Christian.

He was a Christian, no doubt, but not in the full sense of the word as
we understand it.

Well, St Paul. I take my stand upon Paul, Mr Mahaffy. He seems to have
had very little sense of the Trinity. Paul was a Unitarian. The
passage in which he says that Christ will disappear in the end to be
merged into his Father....

We wrangled about texts for a long time, Mahaffy quoting one, I
quoting another, until it seemed impolite for me to press my point
further; and accepting him as an authority, I bade him good night,
asking him when I might see him again.

Three days afterwards I was again in the Rectory, and we talked for an
hour together and parted on the same terms.

I shall be in tomorrow evening. Will you come to see me?

I promised I would, and all the time I felt that this evening would
not end without his asking me to say a prayer with him, and the
thought of the prayer haunted my mind all the time I was speaking to
him, and when I rose to go the long-expected words came.

Will you say a prayer with me?

He went down upon his knees, and I repeated the Lord's Prayer after
him.

I have been dreading this prayer all the week, and I could hardly
conquer my fear, and at the same time a force behind myself prompted
me to you.

Let me give you a Prayer-book, he said, and I returned home to read it
absorbed in a deep emotion, for the prayer said with Mr Mahaffy had
come out of my heart, and the memory of it continued to burn, shedding
a soft radiance. How happy I am! What a blessed peace this is! My
difficulties have melted away, and it no longer seems to matter to me
whether the world thinks me Catholic or Protestant; I am with Christ.

But the storm of life is never over until it ceases for ever, and
before a week had gone by a copy of an Irish review came to me,
containing a criticism of my book, _The Untilled Field_; himself a
Catholic were the words that upset my mental balance, forcing me into
an uncontrollable rage. Is this shame eternal? I cried. Of what use is
writing? I have been writing all my life that I never had hand, act,
or part--

Very little emotion robs me of words, and, with a great storm raging
within my breast, I walked about the room, conscious that a great
injustice was being done to me. Merely because my father was a Papist
am I to remain one? Despite long protests and practice, not only this
paper calls me a Catholic, but Edward, my most intimate friend, calls
me one. His words are: You are a bad Catholic; but you are a Catholic;
and he persists in those words, though, according to the Catholic
Church, I am not one, never having acquiesced in any of its dogmas. He
continues to reiterate the shameful accusation--shameful to me, at
least. His mind is so stultified in superstitions that he does not
remember that those who do not confess and communicate cease to belong
to the Roman Church. I believe that to be the rule, and if I remind
him of it his face becomes overcast. Any thought of transgression
frightens him; but so paralysed is his mind, that he clings to the
base superstition that if a little water is poured on the head of an
infant in a Catholic Church the child remains a Catholic, just as a
child born of black parents remains a nigger, no matter what country
he is born in or the nationality he elects. Now I wonder if it be
orthodox to hold that a Sacrament confers benefits on the recipient
without some co-operation on the part of the recipient? I suppose that
is Roman Catholic doctrine; even if the recipient protests the
Sacrament overrules his objections. We live in a mad world, my
masters! But I think Edward goes a step further than Catholic doctrine
warrants him to do. He seems to hold that Catholic baptism confers
perpetual Catholicism on the individual. I do his theology a wrong. If
you aren't a Catholic, why don't you become a Protestant? he said at
Tillyra. I corrected him. One doesn't become a Protestant, I said; but
the correction was wasted. His theological knowledge is slight, but he
knows the country--his own phrase, I know the country--and in Ireland
one must be one or the other.

A light seemed to break in my mind suddenly; I remembered that the
welcome the priests had given Edward VII when he came to Ireland had
not pleased the patriotic Gaelic League, and it occurred to me that I
might get a nice revenge for the words himself a Catholic if I were to
write to the _Irish Times_ declaring that I had passed from the Church
of Rome to the Church of Ireland, shocked beyond measure at the lack
of patriotism of the Irish priests. Nothing will annoy them more, and
in this I shall not be writing a lie. Magicians I have called them,
and with good reason. Their magical powers are as great in politics as
in religion, for haven't they persuaded Ireland to accept them as
patriots?

I wrote for an hour, and then went out in search of AE: it is
essential to consult AE on every matter of importance, and the matter
on which I was about to consult him seemed to me of the very highest.
The night was Thursday, and every Thursday night, after finishing the
last pages of _The Homestead_, he goes to the Hermetic Society to
teach till eleven o'clock. But the rooms were not known to me, and I
must have met a member of the Society who directed me to the house in
Dawson Street, a great decaying building let out in rooms, traversed
by dusty passages, intersected by innumerable staircases; and through
this great ramshackle I wandered, losing myself again and again. The
doors were numbered, but the number I sought seemed undiscoverable. At
last, at the end of a short, dusty corridor, I found the number I was
seeking, and on opening the door caught sight of AE among his
disciples. He was sitting at a bare table, teaching, and his disciples
sat on chairs, circle-wise, listening. There was a lamp on the table,
and it lit up his ardent, earnest face, and some of the faces of the
men and women, others were lost in shadows. He bade me welcome, and
continued to teach as if I had not been there. He even appealed to me
on one occasion, but the subject was foreign to me, and it was
impossible to detach my thoughts from the business on which I had come
to speak to him. It seemed as if the disciples would never leave. The
last stragglers clung about him, and I wondered why he did not send
them away; but AE never tries to rid himself of anybody, not even the
most importunate. At last the door closed, and I was free to tell him
that it was impossible for me to bear with this constantly recurring
imputation of Catholicism any longer.

I have written a letter, I said, which should bring it to an end and
for ever. But before publishing it I should like to show it to you; it
may contain things of which you would not approve. The pages were
spread upon the table, and AE began to suggest emendations. The
phrases I had written would wound many people, and AE is instinctively
against wounding anybody. But his emendations seemed to me to destroy
the character of my letter, and I said:

AE, I can't accept your alterations. It has come to me to write this
letter. You see, I am speaking out of a profound conviction.

Then, my dear Moore, if you feel the necessity of speech as much as
that, and the conviction is within you, it is not for me to advise
you. You have been advised already.




VALE




I


It was about the time of the publication of my letter to the _Irish
Times_, mentioned in the last pages of _Salve_, that I received from
the French Consul an invitation to dinner to meet the Secretary of the
Consulate, M. Orange, a young man, a poet, _au moins il a publi un
volume de vers chez Lemerre_. The Maulles, Monsieur et Madame, are
among my pleasantest memories of Dublin, and on the night in question,
when it was time to bid our host and hostess good night, I proposed to
Orange that we should walk back to Dublin together, thinking that
perhaps he might like to talk French poetry with me. As we passed
through the garden-gate he muttered: _voil une soire bien passe_.
He was quite right; we had passed a pleasant evening in pleasant
company. But when he repeated the same words at the same place the
next time we dined at the Maulles', I began to read into them a
hidden meaning: that we were nearer our graves than we had been
earlier in the afternoon; and when he repeated the same words some
weeks afterwards, and in the same place, they took on still another
meaning: that we being men of letters would have done better had we
stayed at home reading books under our lamps. And as we strode along
together I resolved that I would reacquire the habit of reading
without it occurring to me that the temptation is always by the talker
to lay his book aside and go out to look up a friend, especially in
Dublin, where casual visiting is our single pleasure.

And Orange's criticism of life leaving me no peace, I begged Teresa
one evening, after she had removed the cloth, to tell whosoever called
that I was not at home; and when she had put my coffee on the table I
said: The moment has come for me to pick out a book from the shelves.
But which? I knew that a large volume containing Shakespeare's plays
stood on the third shelf and that I should find in it a well of pure
literature undefiled. Alarums, excursions, and the blowing of trumpets
over the field of Agincourt, Kings in full armour rushing about crying
for _destriers_--the French word for what we would call a cob, compact
and thick-set. He charges like a _destrier_ in the Henrys, and after
the charge retires to a hawthorn-tree and neighs a melodious plaint of
graves and worms and epitaphs. But Balzac appealed to me for a moment
and my eyes ran through the titles of the edition printed in 1855, a
prize brought back from Paris some months ago, but never looked into;
treated, alas! like a wife, a sort of matrimonial edition, and only
known to me by a long attempt to read _Csar Birotteau_, an adventure
that had stopped half-way, so cumbersome was the burly Tourainean in
this story, so slow was he to rise, like a cart-horse asleep in the
middle of the road, too heavy to struggle to his hooves in less than a
hundred pages, but getting away at last. His ends are no doubt fine
and thunderous. All the same, Turgenev didn't believe in him, and
glancing down a line of small volumes I said: Turgenev is neither cob
nor dray, but an Arab carrying in every story a lady as romantic as
one of Chopin's ballads, especially the third, and I thought of the
celebrated phrase. Maupassant detained me for a moment and then seemed
to me too much like an intrigue with a housemaid. Goncourt? The
fashion of yesterday and today older than Herodotus. Pater? His
Epicurean? A tide of honeyed words preached by a divine from an ivory
pulpit, well worth re-reading but--

And I returned to my chair frightened, feeling that if I did not learn
to read my life would become a burden to me and to others. Everybody
will fly from me, my friends will melt away. Edward wouldn't open to
me the other night, he preferred his book to my talk, and he continues
to struggle through Ruskin, and John Eglinton toils at _Don Quixote_.
Those fellows can live alone, and AE ... ah, well, AE! And then my
thoughts left me. I read the newspaper, and at a quarter to eleven lit
my candle, hoping that in bed some interesting book would come to
mind. But when Teresa had removed the cloth the next night and the
moment for choosing had come again, I was unable to conquer a
mysterious reluctance. It seemed pleasanter to think about Stevenson
than to read him, and of all, to remember that I had once called him a
young man walking in the Burlington Arcade, the best-dressed young man
that ever walked in the Burlington Arcade, but little else. We writers
know how to get the knife under the other fellow's ribs. I raised my
head to listen: footsteps sounded in the street, and it seemed as if
somebody was coming to see me.... The moment grew tense and relaxed,
and when the footsteps of the wanderer died away in the distance of
Hume Street, I sat limp and miserable, afraid to look round lest
somebody should be crouching in the corner of the distant room.

But I had come home to read, and read I must, and it seemed to me that
what was needed was some long work that would leave a definite
impression upon the mind. There was _Tom Jones_; professors of
literature declare it to be England's finest novel, but I remembered
it merely as a very empty work written in a breezy manner; and there
was Richardson whom I had not read at all; _Clarissa Harlowe_ in how
many volumes of letters? And after these writers came Miss Burney, and
the name of one of her books floated through my mind, the name of
some woman, Emily, Julia--no. There was Sterne's _Sentimental Journey_
still unread, and some one had given me a copy saying that no one
would ever appreciate Sterne more than I.... But my cigar was burning
so fragrantly that Sterne was once again postponed, and I lay back in
the armchair, dozing in the warmth that a huge lump of coal sent out
from the grate, and, my brain stupefied in the heat, I said to myself:
Though I may have lost the habit of reading, I have acquired, perhaps
more than any other human being, another habit, the habit of thinking.
I love my own thoughts; and the past is a wonderful mirror in which I
spend hours watching people and places I have known; dim, shadowy and
far away they seem, and pathetic are the faces, and still more
pathetic is the way everybody follows his little prejudices; however
unreasonable they may be we must follow them. The Colonel said the
other day that he could accept all that his Church teaches;
Transubstantiation, the Immaculate Conception, even the Pope's
indulgences did not trouble him; he found it difficult, however, to
believe in the immortality of his soul. If Death deprives me of my
senses of feeling and seeing, of my intellect, of everything that is
me, how can it be said that I exist? he asked, shielding his face with
his hand from the fire. How can it be said that I, the personality
connoted by the pronoun, exist? We are all Agnostics at heart. And
then it seemed to me that the Colonel and I were engaged in some
argument, not about the immortality of the soul, but about a letter
that I had written to the _Irish Times_ in which he declared that I
had libelled him, and then my father seemed to have come back to this
world again, and, picking up the letter about which my brother and I
were disputing, he declared that he could detect no libel in it but a
great many misspellings and mistakes in grammar, and that I must go
back to Oscott at once. I was there in a trice, face to face with the
headmaster, no other than Sir Thomas More, who was deeply shocked that
any descendant of his should use the language as badly as I had done
in the bundle of papers which he held in his hand....

The thought of undergoing further school-days awoke me suddenly, and
at the same moment the door opened. Good Heavens! Who is it? What is
it?

It was only Teresa bringing in glasses and decanters, and when I had
recovered my senses sufficiently I began to think of the two portraits
of Sir Thomas More brought from Ashbrook. The heavy monkish jowl and
the cocked hat had often awakened a frightened antipathy in me,
setting me thinking that there must be a fine strain of Protestant
blood flowing in the Moores. But which was the one who discovered
himself to be a Protestant? I moved to the writing-table and wrote
asking the Colonel for his name, and a few days after Teresa handed
me an envelope on which I recognised my brother's handwriting, and
making at once for my armchair, I read that Sir Thomas More had
married twice, begetting a son and three daughters by his first wife.
These had remained Papists, and it was not till the second generation
that the change came. John had two sons, both called Thomas. The elder
founded the line of Barnborough, now extinct; but the younger Thomas
discovered himself to be a Protestant, and the Colonel reminded me
that if I decided to throw over Sir Thomas More I should also have to
throw over the honour of having a Protestant clergyman in the family.
The clergyman had three sons, of whom little is known except their
names. Two of them went to live in Essex; the third, another Thomas,
disappeared into Mayo, it is said.

This tradition, the Colonel wrote, finds support in the fact that
there was a Thomas More in Mayo in the seventeenth century who had a
son called George, and this George took part in the Williamite wars in
Ireland, and it appears that he must have conducted himself well at
the Battle of the Boyne, for King William bestowed on him the title of
Vice-Admiral of Connaught, a title which he held twice, a considerable
title still, for its present holder is Lord Lucan. He was buried near
Straid Abbey in Mayo, with this inscription upon his tomb: THIS IS THE
BURIAL PLACE OF CAPTAIN GEORGE MORE AND HIS DESCENDANTS, 1723. His son
obtained a lease of some property known as Legaphouca, and from this
deed we learn that he had two sons, George and John, and that John
married Miss Jane Lynch Athy of Renvyle, a Catholic, and brought her
to live with him at Ashbrook. Of this marriage there were two sons;
one died, and the surviving son, George, seeing that the family
fortunes were dwindling, sailed away to Spain and became a Catholic.

But why doesn't he tell me our great-grandfather's reasons for
preferring Rome to Canterbury? And taking a cigar out of the box, I
lay back in my armchair, and whilst watching the smoke ascend into the
crystals of the chandelier, tarnishing them and diverting my thoughts
from my great-grandfather, I remembered that the whole chandelier must
soon be taken to pieces and cleaned, and that on the night of our
quarrel, or rather the following morning, the Colonel had told me that
our great-grandfather married a Miss Kilkelly, a Spaniard despite her
name, if a hundred years of Spain can turn a Milesian back into a
Spaniard. Wild Geese these Kilkellys were, fled from Ireland after the
siege of Limerick--a handsome woman in a green silk dress, heavily
flounced, her hands on the keys of a spinet, the kind of woman who
would tempt a man to become a Catholic, a merchant interested above
all in his business and only faintly in religious questions. It was
she that did it. And he felt no repugnance in being bedded with a
Papist ... strange.

A little later another explanation emerged as a wreath of smoke curled
upwards into the chandelier. My great-grandfather had changed his
religion before setting out for Spain, knowing well that as a
Protestant he could not trade in a country where the Inquisition was
still a going concern. He became a Catholic as a precautionary
measure, I said, and wrote that very night to the Colonel asking for
the date of our grandfather's conversion. The reply to this question
came a few days afterwards. It was not mentioned in any family paper,
but of one thing he was sure, sexual reasons did not determine it, for
no religious difficulty in connection with his marriage had arisen.
You must remember, he wrote, that our great-grandfather's mother was a
Catholic, and it was probably the mother's influence.

How little these Papists understand religion, I said, and walked about
the room muttering. He could not very well ask me to picture the great
merchant retiring to his room after business hours to read the
Fathers, so he concludes that it was his mother's influence that
effected the conversion. Ary Scheffer's picture of St Augustine and
Monica rose up before my eyes, and I vowed that it was kelp that had
turned my great-grandfather into a Papist. Much better it should have
been kelp than Kempis, I said; much better for me. And it amused me to
think of the ships laden with seaweed coming round the Bay of Biscay
from the Arran Islands to my great-grandfather in Alicante, and the
burnt kelp filling the iron chest (still at Moore Hall), and quickly,
with ducats, and my great-grandfather returning to Ireland, a sort of
mercantile pirate of the Spanish Main. The Colonel's letter told me
that it was with two hundred and fifty thousand pounds he returned, on
the lookout for investments for his money, and for a site whereon to
build the fine Georgian house he had in mind. He would have built it
at Ashbrook if there had been a prospect, but there being none, he
bought Muckloon, a pleasant green hill overlooking Lough Carra; and
the Colonel mentioned that our great-grandfather used to sit on the
steps of Moore Hall, his eyes fixed on the lake. I have travelled far,
he is reported to have said, but have seen nothing as beautiful as
Lough Carra. And he is reported truly, for such simple words are not
invented. The phrase evokes a picture: A morning in early May, and an
elderly man sitting, his eyes fixed on a lake set among low shores,
still as a mirror--a mirror on which somebody has breathed--an elderly
man in a wig and a scarlet coat. It is thus that he is apparelled in
the portrait that hangs in the dining-room, painted when and by whom
there is no record. In it he is a man of thirty, and when he was
thirty he was in Alicante. It is pleasant to have a portrait of one's
ancestor in a wig, and in a vermilion coat with gold lace and buttons,
white lace at the collar and cuffs--probably a Spanish coat of the
period. The face is long, sheeplike, and distinguished--the true Moore
face as it has come down to us. My brother Augustus was the living
image of his great-grandfather--the same long face, the same long,
delicately shaped nose, without, however, the gay eyes, cloudless as a
child's. No face ever told the tale of a happy life more plainly, nor
could it be else, everything having succeeded with him. He seemed to
have run misfortune clean out of sight, but he had made a little too
much running, and was overtaken in the last few years. On awakening
one morning he asked his valet why he had not opened the shutters. The
servant answered that he had opened them. But the room is dark. No,
sir; the room is quite light. Then I am blind! he said.

Who has heard of a more horrible discovery than to have gone blind in
one's sleep? Is it to be wondered that his courage died, and that the
rest of his life was lived between priest and doctor, in terror of
death? for he had become a Catholic. Nor were blindness and fear of
death all his misfortunes. His wife wearied of Moore Hall, and her
sons bored her. Peter was witless; John, the first President of the
Irish Republic, was arrested at Athlone and driven along the roads
with other rebels to Castlebar. He died in prison. George, the eldest
son, a mild, visionary youth, was interested in literature, and was
admired and made much of at Holland House, so the Colonel tells me.
And without wife or child the last years of the blind man at Moore
Hall must have been very sad and lonely. One room was the same as
another to him, and with the disappearance of the lake his thoughts
returned to Ashbrook, and the little Protestant cemetery near Straid
Abbey. He was the last who thought of Ashbrook with affection. My
father did not seem to like to speak of the place; he only went there
to collect rents, and the same unsentimental errand took me to
Ashbrook when I returned from Paris in 1880. Tom Ruttledge and I had
driven through Mayo, visiting all my estates, trying to come to terms
with the tenants, and at Ashbrook a crowd had followed the car up a
boreen, babbling of the disastrous year they had been through: the
potato crop had been a failure; there was no diet in them.

The phrase caught on my ear, and I remember well the two-storeyed
house standing on a bare hillside. The woods had been felled long ago,
all except a few ash-trees left standing in the corner of the field to
shelter the cattle from the wind, and the house, having been inhabited
by peasants for a long time, presented a sad degradation, a sagging
roof, and windows so black that I did not dare to think of the
staircase leading to the drawing-room, in which my great-grandmother
had stitched that pretty piece of tapestry which is now in the
Kensington Museum. Dunne, my tenant, a heavy, surly fellow, whose
manners were not engaging (we heard afterwards he was the leader of a
notable conspiracy against us), asked us to step inside, but fearing
to meet with chickens in the parlour that perhaps still had the
ancient paper on its walls, I pleaded that the day was drawing to a
close, and asked him if he would be kind enough to take me to my
great-grandfather's grave. He turned aside, and the peasants answering
for him said:

Sure we will your honour.

So this is the brook, I thought to myself, and watched the water
trickle through masses of weeds and rushes. We crossed some fields and
came to a ruined chapel, and my peasants pointed to an incised stone
let into the wall, the loneliest grave it seemed to me in all the
world; and drowsing in my armchair, unable to read, the sadness that I
had experienced returned to me, and I felt and saw as I had done
thirty years before. I had thought then of the poor old man who had
built Moore Hall deciding at last that his ashes were to be carried to
Ashbrook. But the Colonel, I said, mentions Straid Abbey as the
burial-place of Captain George Moore and his descendants, and the
little ruined chapel that was shown to me can't be Straid Abbey.

A few days afterwards another letter came from the Colonel replying to
my reproaches that his answers to my questions were vague and
insufficient, and from this letter I learnt that my great-grandfather's
misfortunes did not cease with his death. He had left instructions in
his will that he wished to be buried with his ancestors in the little
Protestant cemetery near Straid Abbey. The Colonel had discovered it
half a mile down the road, after having searched Straid Abbey vainly for
the tomb of Captain George Moore, and his letter told me how he had had
some difficulty in pushing his way through a mass of briars and hemlock
and in finding the inscription among the ruins of the church; but he had
found it.

So it was there that my great-grandfather had wished to be buried, but
he was buried at Ashbrook in a Catholic chapel. By mistake, the
Colonel says in his letter. By mistake! I cried. Any breach of faith
were better than that he should be laid with his Protestant forebears.
The Irish Spaniard, Catholic, back, belly, and sides, would not have
hesitated to ignore her husband's instructions. She must have come
from London, for George the historian, an Agnostic like his master
Gibbon, would have buried his father as the will directed, if he had
not been overcome by his mother, who, of course, would like to conceal
the fact that she had married a man of such certain Protestantism that
at the last he had chosen to be buried in a Protestant cemetery.[3] I
should like to know who was at this funeral, and if the historian
came over from London to attend it or remained gadding about Holland
House, or courting Louisa Browne, whom he afterwards married in spite
of the fact that it was her uncle or her brother who secured the
conviction of John Moore, the historian's brother. That marriage would
have added another grief to the old merchant's many griefs.

         [Footnote 3: Mr Dennis Gwynn begins his biography of my
         friend Edward Martyn with the statement that Mr George Moore
         comes from the same good old Catholic stock. Mr Gwynn is
         himself a Catholic and, no doubt, it pleases him to attribute
         any small talent I may have to an imaginary Catholic
         ancestor, Catholics not having produced a book worth reading
         since the Reformation.]

A portrait of Louisa hangs in the dining-room, and she appears in it
as a voluptuous young woman wrapped in gauze, and by her hangs the
portrait of her uncle, Lord Altamont, a copy of the portrait by
Reynolds in Westport House. Both are indifferent works, but there is a
good picture in the dining-room at Moore Hall, a portrait of my
grandfather painted in 1836, certainly not earlier, and therefore not
a Raeburn. Nor is it a Catterson Smith, who was painting at that time
in Dublin, for his thick, heavy touch is nowhere visible in
grandfather's portrait. The drawing is sure, almost unconscious,
revealing an old man with white hair growing scantily about a high
forehead, and though no books are in the background, we divine a
library and a life sheltered from every misfortune. Who could have
painted the portrait? Wilkie, perhaps. He was painting about that
time. But there are few life-size portraits by Wilkie, and in none
that I have seen is the drawing so thoughtful, nor does he show much
interest in character except in this portrait. He seems to have said
in it all that my grandfather tells us about himself in his preface to
the _French Revolution_. A very remarkable portrait, no doubt, and for
a long time I sat struggling with an idea that would not come into a
phrase: that the picture and the preface might be compared to the
music and words, opera and libretto, something like that. But it would
not come, and I got up and took the preface out of the drawer.


PREFACE TO MY HISTORICAL MEMOIRS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, TO BE
PUBLISHED AFTER MY DEATH.

_August_ 20, 1837.

I, this day, complete my sixty-fourth year. I have for some time been
engaged in a history of the _French Revolution_. I early in life began
collecting books on this subject, and they now fill up an entire side
of my very pretty library in this beautiful place. They are most of
them bad in style, and worse in spirit and sentiment. There are few of
them which I could endure reading were it not for the task I have laid
down for myself. This task has the effect of giving interest to the
most wretched productions. Any book which offers me a choice of a new
fact, or the solution of any difficulty attached to old facts,
interests me, and I find amusement in examining it. Amusement and the
banishment of what the French call _ennui_ are my principal objects.
Beautiful as this place is, and much as I love it, I confess I have
not always been able to exclude _ennui_ from its precincts. There are
hours in which I have not been able to keep it away; general vague
reading, without any specific object, afforded me no protection
against it, but since I have sat down to my task I scarcely have known
what it is. I have a rough copy carried on nearly to the present time.
To every written page I have left a blank one, in which I put down any
new facts or reflections or news. I wish to go on for some time longer
in this manner. But my age, as mentioned at the head of this preface,
admonishes me there is no time to be lost if I wish the public ever to
have an insight into my history. My rough copy with alternate blank
pages it is impossible for any one to make anything of, and it is not
till after my death I wish my history to appear, not in the form in
which my rough copy exhibits it.

I have several times published, but never with any success, so that I
am tired of publication in my lifetime. Besides, as I foresee my
history will be pretty voluminous, I do not like the trouble of
superintending the proofs. As I am a man of fortune, I leave by my
will five hundred pounds to defray the expenses of publication. As the
publication is in this manner ordered and appointed by me in my
testamentary deposition, no one who survives me will be answerable for
anything it contains. I foresee many things I say will give offence,
but my objects are truth and my country. As amusement was my great
object in undertaking this task, it may be said I have already gained
my end in never knowing _ennui_ since I began it. But having written a
history of the French Revolution, impregnated with all the feelings
and sentiments of an Englishman, and written in a style, I hope,
purely and thoroughly English, I am ambitious it should be read after
me. I have had no celebrity in my life. But a prospect of this
posthumous fame pleases me at this moment. I may say with Erasmus:
_Illud certe praesagio, de meis lucubrationibus, qualescumque sunt,
candidius, judicaturam posteritatem_, though I cannot add with him:
_Tametsi nec de meo seculo queri possum._ Having missed the applause,
and even notice, of my age, I ought, perhaps, to be indifferent about
the opinions of those that follow; their applause, should I ever gain
it, will not reach me when the grave has closed over me. This is true;
but we are so made that while we are living we think with pleasure
that we shall not be forgotten after our deaths. The nature of this
feeling is beautifully expressed by Fielding in a passage which Gibbon
has transcribed in the account of his own life. What adds to my wish
that my history should be read after my death is that I am convinced
no account of the great event of the French Revolution in all its
parts will be fair and impartial coming from a Frenchman, none
certainly will do justice to my country. I am anxious to have the
merits of the Duke of Wellington duly appreciated as having done more
in war than any captain that ever existed. He entered on the contest
with more disadvantages on his side, as will be explained in the
history. He had greater difficulties to encounter, and arrived at more
glorious results. Though not a Frenchman, I am perfectly acquainted
with the French language, and there are few Frenchmen better informed
with respect to the history, literature, and what are called the
statistics of France than I am, so that I conceive myself perfectly
well qualified, as much as any Frenchman, for the task I have
undertaken. In this improved copy which I am now transcribing, I break
the history into chapters, with a view to the grouping of the facts of
which it consists. It is this which I call grouping that distinguishes
the task of the historian from that of the annotist, and there is no
point of greater importance in a history than the manner in which this
grouping is executed. The deficiencies of some celebrated historians
in this particular may be noticed....

How abruptly it breaks off! Some pages must have been mislaid! and I
sought among the litter in the drawer, and finding none, returned to
my armchair full of regret that grandfather had not written a
biography instead of a history, for such sincerity, such simplicity,
such humility, are qualities that are rarely met with except in
masterpieces. Some writers, it is true, have adopted humility as a
literary artifice, but grandfather is not aware that he is humble; his
prose dreams and unfolds like clouds going by. In speaking of Moore
Hall I might have said that it stood on a pleasant green hill, with
woods following the winding lake, and attributed the melancholy of the
people to their mountains, but my grandfather merely says, In this
beautiful place, and the reader's imagination is free to remember the
place that has seemed to him the most beautiful. Grandfather is able
to accept his own failure without attributing it to circumstances,
writing that if his history should gain the applause of those that
come after him, it would not matter to him, the grave having closed
over him. But we are so made that while we live we think with pleasure
that we shall not be forgotten after our death. This feeling, he adds
modestly, has been beautifully transcribed in Gibbon's account of his
own life. For this modesty and for many other reasons I love my
grandfather, and like to think of his life flowing on uneventfully for
three or four more years in the pretty library, and then his ashes
being carried to Kiltoome, where the applause of the world can never
reach him.... But by what right do I publish his preface without his
history, perhaps perturbing his rest, for we are not sure that the
dead cannot hear us. The Colonel, who has inherited his grandfather's
taste for history, should edit the French Revolution. He began reading
it, and finding it entertaining, he gave me the preface, remarking
that our grandfather had managed to escape notice even in his own
house, which was indeed the case. Our mother used to say that when his
wife opened the door of his library to consult him, or to make
pretence of consulting him regarding the management of his property,
he would answer, My dear Louisa, all that you do is right, and on
these words the old man would drop back into his meditations.

One's first memory is generally of one's mother, but my grandmother
was the first human being that came into my consciousness, a crumpled
lady of sixty-five, who introduced me to gingerbread nuts, which,
however, she did not allow me to eat. And this incident may have
impressed her upon my mind; but now I come to think of it my second
memory is of her. She fell one day as she was coming downstairs, and I
remember William Mullowney and Joseph Applely carrying her to her
room, and from that day onward she lived in two rooms in the charge of
nurses, carried out on fine days in a sort of sedan chair. And not
only my first and second memories, but my third is of her. I remember
my father sitting at a small table writing letters by the bed on which
his mother lay. He never spoke of her afterwards. And to me it seems
strange not to speak of those we love, but that was my father's way.
He never spoke of his mother or his brother Augustus, whom he loved
next to his mother, and when I asked him about what books my
grandfather had written, he answered, Some histories, leaving me in
doubt if he had ever read one of them. But he must have looked into
the huge manuscript, for five hundred pounds were left for its
publication, and he should have edited it. But my father did not
appreciate the old gentleman who wrote histories in the room
overlooking the lake; he liked his mother, and all the charming
letters that he wrote from school were sent to her, and it was to her,
and not to his father, that he sent his Latin and English verses, for
between sixteen and seventeen he seems to have had literary ambitions.
But as soon as he went to Cambridge he became interested in horses,
hounds, and a lady whom he met at Bath. All this the Colonel will
write excellently well in his life of our father, for he seems to
understand our father's character, though he hardly knew him, and
shows a surprising appreciation of the antagonism which arose between
mother and son as soon as the son had left school. Our father had
inherited his character from her (perhaps that is why he loved her),
an obstinate, impetuous character, and he had also inherited from her
a taste for letter-writing which followed him through life to the very
end, and the letters that mother and son exchanged about the debts the
son incurred at Cambridge and about the lady that he wished to marry
are very violent, and every quarrel was followed by a violent
reconciliation. A time of great storm and stress rolled on until he
felt that another quarrel with his mother would be more than he could
bear, so he went away to Russia, journeying through the Caucasus,
getting to Asia Minor, how, I know not, meditating on the nothingness
of things and on suicide as a respite from the torture of existence.
His diary breaks off suddenly, to be taken up again two years after;
all we know of these two years is that they were spent in the company
of a man and his wife ... no doubt the lady he met at Bath, who
married soon after my father's flight, and travelled with her husband
in the East.

The gentlemen of 1830 all had Byronic adventures, I said, and fell to
thinking of the illegitimate daughter that was born to him. My mother
told my sister that she had seen the lady; my father had pointed her
out, saying, She is my daughter. She married and died childless, an
old woman, not very long ago, and it seems a pity, and rather harsh,
that we should never have met, for it is quite probable that I might
have liked her better than my legitimate relation. There can be no
doubt that we should have been great friends, and I pondered the charm
of an illegitimate relation, especially a sister, and my father whom I
did not recognise in the avowal he is reported to have made to his
wife. A reticent man he was, especially reticent about the dead,
loquacious only about his journey to the East.... It was probably the
part of his life that was most real to him.

After dinner Joseph Applely always brought up tea to the summer room,
and my father drank a large cup sitting by a round rosewood table, on
which stood a Moderator lamp; and that he did not eat bread and butter
or cake with his tea never ceased altogether to surprise me. After tea
my mother read a novel in an armchair, and as soon as my toys ceased
to interest me I clambered on my father's knee and begged him to tell
me stories about the desert and the oases where the caravan had rested
on its journey from Palestine to Egypt. My father had been obliged to
go to Egypt to get permission to measure the Dead Sea and to survey
the coasts, and I listened round-eyed to the tale of how the guides,
discovering that the Christian dogs were chalking out the way along
the passages inside the Pyramid, threatened to extinguish the torches.
His voyage down the Nile was a great delight to me, and between the
age of six and seven I was quite familiar with the Blue Nile and the
White Nile, and had many times mourned the death of a monkey. The poor
little fellow tumbled out of the tree, and putting his hand to his
side looked up so plaintively that my father declared that for nothing
in the world would he shoot another monkey. The story that I liked
best was the bringing of the boat from Joppa on the backs of mules to
the Dead Sea, and not satisfied with knowing the story myself, I
wished everybody else to hear it, and very often embarrassed my father
by insisting that he should tell his visitors that the mules could
only totter a few hundred yards, so heavy was the boat, and then had
to be changed, and that he had let down eighteen hundred feet of line
without touching bottom, the water being so dense that the lead would
not sink any farther. And I took care that he should not skip the
account of the storm that had arisen and the great fright of the Arabs
at the waves; or the explanation that on any other sea except the Dead
Sea the boat would certainly have been wrecked. But the best story of
all was of a man whom he met walking about some world-renowned ruins
with a hammer in his hand. Standing before a statue he would say,
You've had that nose on your face for many thousand years, in one
second you'll have it no longer. Whack! and away went the nose. No
sooner had he finished the tale than he had perforce to tell the story
of the merchant who used to go out at nightfall to seek European
travellers, and if he saw one who looked as if he had money to spend,
he would approach him and whisper in his ear that he if came up a
by-street with him he would show him a real Khorassan blade. The
celebrated smithies of Damascus had been removed to Khorassan, and the
Khorassan blades were being imitated for the European market, and one
day the merchant related that he was no longer put to the expense of
having new ones made. He had agents in Paris and London, and whenever
these imitation swords came into the market they were purchased for
small sums and sent out again to be sold after nightfall for large
prices. If you can let me have one of these blades, my father
answered, I should like to take it home. No, said the crafty Persian,
I have none left, but I have a real Khorassan blade which I should
very much like to sell you.

Khorassan or imitation I know not, but many swords, scimitars, and
daggers were brought back, and Arab bridles looking like instruments
of torture; and these were kept in a great press in my nursery, which
I was forbidden to open. But a child cannot be gainsaid on his
birthday, and my dearest wish was gratified when I was dressed as a
Turk, and rode about the estate flourishing a Khorassan blade above
the head of my pony. The success of the ride encouraged me to pursue
my inquiries into Eastern costumes and customs, and my father's
diaries were examined--not the text, that was too difficult for a
child, but the camels with which the text was embellished. His eyes
were keen, and with a lead pencil, hard and sharp enough to have won
all Ruskin's admiration, he followed the long, shaggy, birdlike necks,
the tufted and callous hides, and the mobile lips of these bored
ruminants, the nonconformists of the four-footed world. The Arab horse
never seems to have once tempted his pencil; and it is difficult to
find a reason, for he must have had some wonderful horses. He used to
tell me of a journey from Jerusalem to Jeddo in a single day; the
horse was very tired at the end of it, but he pricked up his ears and
began to trot as soon as he caught sight of the town.

The only portrait of a horse that he ever attempted was a large
water-colour of Anonymous--a very painstaking piece of work, of which
he was a little ashamed, I think, preferring to turn the conversation
from the drawing to the race itself. The horse was going very well
when he turned a shoe. I wanted him to say that the horse would have
won had it not been for the accident, but I could not get him to say
that, and remember going to Joseph Applely, a taciturn, clandestine
little man whom there is no necessity to describe here, for he is
described in _Esther Waters_ under the name of John Randal, to find
out the truth--whether Anonymous would have won the Liverpool if he
had not turned a shoe. He had done some riding himself, and was
disposed to be critical, and he thought--well, it is difficult to
remember exactly his criticism of my father's riding, for he had a
habit of dropping his voice and muttering to himself in his
shirt-collar, mumbling and turning suddenly to his press, that
wonderful press in which all things could be found. It was out of that
press that _Esther Waters_ came, out of the stable-yard and out of my
own heart.

Oscott College had demonstrated, to the satisfaction of my unhappy
parent, that it was impossible to teach me to write a clean,
intelligible letter, and in despair he allowed me to apply myself to
the study of life. At Moore Hall there was no life except the life of
the stable-yard, and to it I went with the same appetite with which I
went to the life of the studio afterwards; if I had remained at Moore
Hall I certainly should have ridden many steeplechases, and perhaps
succeeded in doing what my father had failed to do. A pretty
indulgence it would be for me now, sitting here, surrounded by
Impressionist pictures, to look back upon the day at Liverpool when
the flag fell and we raced for the bit of hard ground, numbers of us
coming down at the first fence, myself, however, escaping a fall, and
then away off into the country ... three miles, over how many fences?
And then the jump into the racecourse and the three-quarters of a mile
over hurdles. A pretty memory all that long way would have been for a
man who has written a line of books, and I should certainly have had
some such memory to play with if my father could have restrained
himself from asking the electors of Mayo to send him to Parliament to
ride for Repeal of the Union. They answered that they would; the
horses were sold, and my dream of doing on Slievecarn what my father
had hoped to do on Anonymous died in South Kensington, where we had
taken a small house at the corner of Alfred Place, opposite South
Kensington Station, a pleasant suburb then, thinly populated.

The Exhibition Road was building, and it was at the corner of
Prince's Gardens that we met Jim Browne, the painter of the
_Crucifixion_ that hangs in Carnacun Chapel, in the roof high above
the altar. I can remember him painting in the breakfast-room, and Tom
Kelly coming to stand for the figure of Christ. The angels on either
side of the cross Jim had painted no doubt out of his head; I had
often wondered how he had been able to paint them, and the great
picture that my father used to describe to me in the summer room, the
great picture entitled the _Death of an Indian Chief_, a tribe of
Indians reining up their horses at the edge of the precipice over
which the horse bearing the dead chieftain springs madly into space.
The day we met him in the Exhibition Road Jim told my father that he
and his sisters were living in Prince's Gardens; he invited us to come
and see his pictures on the following Sunday, and during the
intervening days I could neither think nor speak of anything but Jim
Browne, asking my father all the while why Jim was not the greatest
painter in the world since he had painted a tribe of Indians; how many
pictures? fifty, sixty, a hundred? He did not think they were so many.
Twenty, thirty, forty? And if he could paint so many, why will not the
Academy hang his pictures? Are the pictures he paints now not as good
as the _Death of an Indian Chief?_ My father suggested that Jim did
not finish his pictures sufficiently for the Academy, and tried to
explain to me that Jim's drawing was defective. But it was difficult
for me then to understand that a man might paint a tribe of Indians
reining up their horses at the edge of a precipice and yet not be able
to draw, and in bed at night I lay awake thinking, waiting for the day
to come.

Father, where is Prince's Gardens? Is it the first turning or the
second? Do you think you will be able to persuade Jim Browne to use
models? And if he does, will the Academy accept his picture in May?




II


Myself, an elderly man, lying in an armchair listening to the fire, is
a far better symbol of reverie than the young girl that a painter
would place on a stone bench under the sunlit trees; myself trying to
remember if it were on our way back from Prince's Gardens or a few
days afterwards that I begged money from my father to buy drawing
materials, remembering everything but the dates-that a pencil was
never out of my hand, and that as soon as family criticism was
exhausted, professional criticism was called in. Jim was invited to
dinner. But a bad cold kept me in bed, terrified lest my drawings
should be forgotten. As he descended the staircase, voices reached me,
and when the front door closed I listened, expecting somebody to come
up to tell me what Jim had said. But nobody came, and when I went
shyly to my mother next morning her news was bad; after dinner my
sketches had been shown to him, but he did not seem to think much of
them, and on my pressing my mother to tell me more I dragged the truth
from her that he considered girls riding bicycles showing a great deal
of stocking a low form of art.

He only likes Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Rubens, my father said, and
he invited me to come to the National Gallery, and I followed him from
masterpiece to masterpiece, humble and contrite, but resolute in my
persuasions that he must come with me to Drury Lane and buy some
plaster casts. He seemed to look upon the money thus expended as
wasted, and when he came to the bedroom that I had converted into a
studio he glanced round the walls shocked at my crude attempts to draw
the Venus de Milo, the Discobolus, and some busts. He did not refuse
to send me to the Kensington School of Art, but he sent my brother
with me, and this jarred a little, for I looked upon my wish to learn
drawing as a thing peculiar to myself, and my brother was so subaltern
to me and seemed so utterly unlikely to understand a work of art that
I looked pityingly over his shoulder until one day the thought glided
into my mind that his drawing was as good as mine, if not better. And
if that were so, what hope was there for me to become an artist, an
exhibitor in the Royal Academy? an exhibitor of pictures like Jim's
Julius Caesar overturning the altars of the Druids? For even if I did
learn to draw and to stipple, it did not seem to me that I should ever
be able to imagine figures in all positions as Jim did, and I
despaired.

Youth is a very unhappy time, Art and sex driving us mad, and our
parents looking upon us with stupid unconscious eyes. My father must
have been ashamed of his queer, erratic son, and could have
entertained little hope that eventually I would drift into a
respectable and commonplace end. We all want our children to be
respectable, though we may not wish to be respectable ourselves, and
as he walked to the House of Commons, a short, thick-set man with a
long, determined mouth set in a fixed expression, his hands moving in
little gestures to his thoughts, he must have often asked himself what
new caprice would awaken in me. Would I tell him that I had decided to
take up literature or music as a profession? There was no knowing
which would be my next choice, and either was equally ridiculous, for
in me at that time there was as little idea of a tune as there was of
a sentence. It was impossible for me to grasp the different parts of
speech or the use of the full stop, to say nothing of the erudite
colon. As he turned me over in his mind he must have remembered his
own brilliant school-days, coming sadly to the conclusion that I must
go into the Army, if he could get me into the Army, that very
sympathetic asylum for booby sons. So that our soldiers may not be
altogether too booby, the War Office has decreed a certain amount of
ordinary spelling and arithmetic and history to be essential, and to
get such as I through examinations there are specialists. Somebody
must have exalted Jurles above all men, for my father came home one
evening with the news that Jurles had pushed men through who other
tutors had said would never be able to pass any examination, and would
never get their livings except with the labour of their hands. The
record of this thaumaturgist was seventeen hundred and fifty-three,
and my father reflected that if there were miracles that even Jurles
could not perform, he would at least redeem Alfred Place from the
annoyance of seeing me trick-riding on a bicycle up and down the
street. And Jurles would also save me from the Egertons, and daughters
of a small tradesman living in Hammersmith, whither some other
wastrels and myself were wont to go to sup on Sundays. Alma and Kate
were on the stage, and photographs of Alma in tights and Kate in short
skirts were left about the house, and disgraceful letters turned up in
the blotting-book in the drawing-room; he was a man of action rather
than words, and putting a season-ticket into my hand he bade me away
to Jurles's in the Marylebone Road, to one of the little houses lying
back from the main road.

As I passed up the strip of garden under the aspens I often caught
sight of Jurles's old withered face blotted against the bow window,
and very often met his wife, a tall and not ill-looking woman about
thirty; she seemed to be always going up and down the pathway, and at
that time almost anything was enough to waken an erotic suggestion,
and I began to wonder if she kept trysts with any of the young men
sitting on either side of the long mahogany tables bent over their
books and slates. It seemed to me that there was warrant for the
supposition, for as soon as old Jurles finished a lesson he went to
the window and stood there, his bald head presenting an irresistible
attraction for flies, a dangerous attraction, for Jurles was quick
with his hands. It is probable that Mrs Jurles's trysts were with the
butcher, baker and grocer, for besides the half-dozen young men who
arrived at ten o'clock every morning, Jurles took in several boarders,
and there were never less than ten men sitting down to the midday
meal, among them Dick Jurles. We all respected old Jurles, a distant,
reserved gentleman and knowledgeable beyond the limits of his craft,
but we laughed at Dick for his long red whiskers and moustaches, and
his vulgar and familiar manners. We used to charge him in private, on
what foundation I know not, probably none, with being a money-lender's
tout, and no one cared to take a lesson from him, feeling him to be a
fake, one who had acquired just enough education to overlook our sums
or to construe a Latin text with us, feeling that if he were to ask a
question we might place him in a quandary. The seventeen hundred and
fifty-three young men that Messrs Jurles had passed into the Army owed
their success to the diligence of his brother and to the solemn Swiss
who taught modern languages in the back room. Out of it he came every
hour, a red handkerchief hanging out of his tail pocket: I will trable
you now, and, my chair tilted, I used to watch him, wondering the
while what kind of death each one of his pupils would meet on the
battle-field, worried by the thought that my lot might be to die in
defence of my country, or be wounded in her defence, which was worse
still. It seemed to me that myself was my country, but having no
alternative to propose to my father I accepted the Army. All
professions were equally repugnant to me; I could not see myself as a
doctor or as a barrister, or anything except perhaps a gentleman
rider. I did not dare to tell my father that I would not go into the
Army; it did not occur to me to say to him: You went to the East for
five years, and when you returned home did little else but ride
steeplechases. In many little ways I lacked courage and preferred
procrastination to truth. I could not be put into the Army unless I
passed the examination, and I realised that to miss passing no more
was necessary than to read the _Sportsman_ under the table, and spend
most of the afternoon at the tobacconists's round the corner--an
affable man with a long flowing moustache like Dick Jurles's, and some
knowledge of betting, enough to have a book on the big races, laying
the odds in shillings with his customers, cabbies from the rank; and
while he teased out the half-ounces of shag we discussed the weights,
the speed, and the stamina of the horses; we laid the odds and took
them, and at the end of the half-year I had won five or six pounds.
One day Lord Charlemont mentioned a horse as certain to win the
Derby--Pretender, wasn't it? The tobacconist bet in shillings,
half-crowns, and dollars, but he would take me round to the
public-house and introduce me to the great bookmaker who came there to
meet his customers on Thursdays and Fridays. Pretender won, and the
Monday after the race the great bookie invited me behind the urinal
and took ten five-pound notes out of his pocket, fifty pounds, a sum
of money that enabled me to eat, drink, and smoke on terms of equality
with Colville and Belfort, two young men who were fast becoming my
friends--Belfort, a handsome, high-class, little fellow, bright brows
and brown hair, a high-bridged nose, the mouth a little pinched, the
chin a little too forward, sharp teeth, a pale complexion, and a high
voice. He was going into the cavalry, and lived with his mother and
sister at the top of the Albert Road, and as I lived at the bottom of
the Exhibition Road it made very little difference whether I took
Exhibition Road or Albert Road; there was a short cut at the end round
by some cottages with thatched roofs, which have long ago disappeared.
We made friends in this walk, and he asked me to dine with him, and we
went to the theatre; later he introduced me to his mother and sister,
and a very distinct picture these two women have left upon my mind:
the mother frail, reserved, and dignified, with fair hair, about to
turn grey, parted in the middle and brushed on either side of her thin
temples. She must have worn a long gold chain, and she was always in
black. The daughter had her brother's high-bridged nose, and her
manner was showy--the opposite of her mother's--and I liked to find
them sitting on either side of the fireplace after dinner. Now
Colville was quite different from Belfort, a south Saxon if ever there
was one, his ancestors having been on the land probably since Hengist
and Horsa came; a man of medium height, of good trim figure and
military bearing, for his thoughts were always on the Army, and his
talk was of tunics and of buttons and epaulets, and very proud he was
of his great military moustache which he stroked pensively with his
little crabbed hand. He was often at Truefitt's getting his hair
shampooed and cut closely about his small well-turned head and narrow
temples, and from Truefitt's he often walked to his tailor's; he had
thirty-six pairs of trousers when I first knew him, and his charm was
his cheerful disposition and his somewhat empty but merry laugh.

He was the first man I had ever met who kept a woman, but that was a
secret, and Belfort used to wonder how he did it on five hundred a
year; he told us that he gave Minnie Granville three, reserving two
for himself, and if he ran short he returned to Buckingham and lived
free of cost till his next quarter's allowance allowed him to return
to the clandestine little home in St John's Wood. We envied him his
lady, and on fine afternoons used to leave the confectioner's shop
where we had luncheon and go forth to St John's Wood for an hour
before returning to Jurles, and the two of us would loiter, admiring
the greensward shelving down to the canal's edge, wondering if Minnie
Granville were true to Colville; we wished Colville well, but we
remembered that if she remained faithful to him she would never become
a celebrated light-o'-love, and we should be deprived of the honour of
having known her in her early days. We had heard that Mabel Grey lived
in Lodge Road, and turned into it wondering which house was hers, and,
not daring to inquire, we searched South Bank and North Bank, and,
talking of her ponies, we gazed at the pretty balconies, hoping to
catch a sight of her or her great rival, Baby Thornhill. Everybody
knew these two ladies by sight, for photographs of Baby Thornhill and
Mabel Grey were everywhere, in every album; and many other beautiful
women were famous. Lizzie Western, the sheep, as she was called--a
tall woman with gold hair and a long mild face--and Kate Cook, too,
was as famous perhaps as any, Mabel Grey always excepted; Kitty Carew,
Margaret Gilray, and Sally Giles her cousin, lived in South Bank, and
were often on their balconies tending their birds, giving their
canaries and finches seed and water; a favourite bird was a mule
goldfinch and canary, a green-brown bird that would take seed from his
mistress's pretty tongue. Belfort brought opera-glasses one day, and
that day we were happy boys; the pony carriage was at the door. We
shall see them get into it if we wait. Belfort wanted to get back to
Jurles; and I should not have been able to persuade him to remain if
the ponies had not presented a peculiar attraction--fiery chestnut
mares, foaming at the bits, and swishing their long tails, a dangerous
pair for ladies' hands to drive through crowded streets; and the
longer they were kept waiting the more restive they became, rearing
over against the little groom, or striking out with their hind legs.
And as soon as the ladies stepped into the carriage, before Sally was
seated, they bounded forward, overthrowing the groom and what disaster
might not have happened if we had not rushed forward to their heads it
is impossible to say.

The ponies have not been sufficiently exercised, that is all, Miss
Gilray, and I begged Belfort to soothe Miss Giles, who was very much
frightened. It would have been splendid to offer to drive the ponies
into Regent's Park and bring back Spark and Twinkle chastened, but
Belfort said that we must be getting back to Jurles, and we
regretfully bade them goodbye. It seemed to us the merest politeness
to call next day to inquire, and we were received by the cousins,
platonically, of course. But even boys get their chances, and the idea
came to Sally Giles to invite Belfort and me to supper, and to come to
Jurles's herself with the invitation, stopping the ponies before
Jurles's establishment and sending her little groom up the pathway
with the note. I was at the window, and how my heart beat at the sight
of him! Wearing the livery of his mistress proudly, he stopped Mrs
Jurles, who was coming down the pathway at that moment with her white
Pomeranian dog, and after a talk with her, old Jurles called me aside
and began his lecture: he could no longer consent to waste my father's
money, and felt constrained to inform him of the company I kept. But,
Mr Jurles, the ponies were kicking, my father would never have spoken
to me again if I had not gone to their heads, and Miss Giles was so
frightened. Old Jurles seemed to accept my excuse as valid, and,
although it was quite out of the question that such ladies should send
their grooms with notes to his front door, still the incident might be
overlooked were it not that I showed no disposition to learn anything
since I came. He reminded me that he had frequently to take the
_Sportsman_ out of my hand. I was glad to hear from him that there was
no chance of my passing for the Army, but I wished him to withhold
this opinion from my father; and after some debate he promised me that
I should have another chance. You must mend your ways, he added. But
it was only by reading the _Sportsman_ under the table that I could
escape from the horrid red tunic with buttons down the front, and the
belt, and if I were caught with it again Jurles would write to my
father, and every day I expected to see him coming toward me with
threatening brow, and to hear him say, I have received a very bad
account of you from Jurles. There was some justification for my fears,
for he wore a troubled look, and I caught him in whispered talk with
my mother frequently; they ceased talking or spoke of indifferent
things suddenly, and one night after dinner I heard him say that he
was going to Ireland by the Mail. The reason of this sudden departure
was not mentioned, and my mother was so often agitated that her
fluttered voice caused me no alarm; my father's sudden return from the
front door to give me a sovereign did not awaken a suspicion; it
seemed, however, to strike my mother's imagination, and a few days
later a wire came from her brother summoning us to Moore Hall.

Something dreadful must have happened! she kept repeating to herself,
and her talk was full of allusions to a letter she had received from
my father. At last she confided to me that he had written to her
saying if she did not get a wire from him on a certain day she was to
come at once. We got the morning papers coming off the boat, and there
was nothing about him in them, but the absence of news was not enough
to reassure her, and I felt there was something on her mind of which
she did not dare to speak. She does not appear again in my memory till
we arrived at Balla. Her brother was waiting outside the gate, and I
saw him take her aside and heard him say: Mary, prepare for the worst;
George is dead.

We climbed on the car--Joe and my mother on one side, the driver sat
on the dicky, and I remember his back showing all the way against a
grey sky and my mother wrapped in a brown shawl. Joe Blake is not so
distinct to me, only his yellow mackintosh. Every now and again I
heard the wail of my mother's voice, and I sobbed too, thinking of my
father whom I should never speak to again. At the same time I was
conscious, and this was a source of great grief to me, that my life
had taken a new and unexpected turn. In the midst of my grief I could
not help remembering that my father's death had redeemed me from the
Army, from Jurles, and that I should now be able to live as I pleased.
That I should think of myself at such a moment shocked me, and I
remember how frightened I was at my own selfish wickedness, and a
voice that I could not restrain, for it was the voice of the soul,
asked me all the way to Moore Hall if I could get my father back would
I bring him back and give up painting and return to Jurles? I tried
hard to assure myself that I was capable of this sacrifice, but
without much success, and I tried to grieve like my mother. But I
could not.

We never grieve for anybody, parent or friend, as we should like to
grieve, and are always shocked by our absent-mindedness; at one
moment weeping for the dead, at another talking of indifferent things
or asking casual questions as to how the dead man died. And we only
remember certain moments. At will I can see myself and Joseph Applely
in my father's bedroom standing together by the great bureau at which
he wrote, and in which he kept his letters, and I remember how my eyes
wandered from Joseph to the empty bed. He had been removed to the next
room, or perhaps he had died in the marriage bed; however this may be,
Joseph Applely told me that when he came to call the master, he was
lying on his back breathing heavily, and thinking that it would be
better not to disturb him he had gone away; closing the door quietly,
and when he returned an hour later the master was lying just as he had
left him, only he could catch no sound of breathing. So much do I
remember precisely, and somewhat less precisely, that Joseph Applely
told me he had sent for the doctor. A dim thought hangs about in my
memory that the doctor was in the neighbourhood; be this as it may,
the reason assigned for death was apoplexy. Two, three, or four days
went by and I remember nothing till somebody came into the summer room
to tell my mother that if she wished to see him again she must come at
once, for they were about to put him into his coffin, and catching me
by the hand, she said, We must say a prayer together.

The dead man lay on the very bed in which I was born, his face covered
with a handkerchief, and as my mother was about to lift it from his
face the person who had brought us thither warned her from the other
side of the white dimity curtains not to do so. He is changed, she
said.

I don't care, my mother cried, and snatched away the handkerchief,
revealing to me the face all changed. And it is this changed face that
lives unchanged in my memory, and three moments of the next day: the
moment when Lord John Browne bade me goodbye on the way from Carnacun
(the body had been brought there for High Mass and was being carried
back to Kiltoome, a cold March wind was blowing over the fields, and
he feared the journey round the lake); the moment when Father Lavelle
called upon the people to hoist him on to the tomb for him to speak
his panegyric; and the moment when the mason's mallets were heard
closing the vault where the dead man would remain with his ancestors,
one would like to say for centuries, but nothing endures in this
world, not even our graves. I cannot remember who spoke after Lavelle,
and afterwards the multitude began to disperse through the woods and
along the shores of the lake, a great many lingering on the old stone
bridge to admire the view. Of course I was very principal, and as I
passed up the road I felt many eyes fixed upon me, and conjectured
that they were all wondering how much of my father's talent I had
inherited, and if I would take up the running at the point where he
had dropped out of the race. Among the hundreds of unknown there was
here and there a known face; our carpenters, sawyers, gardeners, and
stablemen--all our servants from Derrinanny and Ballyholly, the
villages beyond the domain over the hill along the lake's edge. And of
course, I did not escape the inquisitive gaze of the men that used to
row me about the islands when Lough Carra was my adventure, and they
were probably thinking what I would do for them when I came to live in
Moore Hall; and after these men were other faces known to me, but not
so well known, the beaters whom I had seen rousing the woodcock out of
the covers of Derrinrush, and it seems that when I turned from the
Dark Road and walked up the lawn some of the old tenants spoke to me.
I have some recollection of being spoken to at the sundial, and I
think their questioning eyes reminded me that the house on the hill
was mine, and they who spoke to me and those who did not dare to speak
were mine to do with as I pleased. Until the 'seventies Ireland was
feudal, and we looked upon our tenants as animals that lived in hovels
round the bogs, whence they came twice a year with their rents; and I
can remember that once when my father was his own agent, a great
concourse of strange fellows came to Moore Hall in tall hats and
knee-breeches, jabbering to each other in Irish. An old man here and
there could speak a little English, and I remember one of them saying:
Sure, they're only mountaineymen, yer honour, and have no English; but
they have the goicks, he added with unction. And out of the tall hats
came rolls of bank-notes, so dirty that my father grumbled, telling
the tenant that he must bring cleaner notes; and afraid lest he should
be sent off on a long trudge to the bank, the old fellow thrust the
notes into my father's hand and began jabbering again. He's asking for
his docket, yer honour, the interpreter explained. My father's clerk
wrote out a receipt, and the old fellow went away, leaving me laughing
at him, and the interpreter repeating: Sure, he's a mountaineyman, yer
honour. And if they failed to pay their rents, the cabins they had
built with their own hands were thrown down, for there was no pity for
a man who failed to pay his rent. And if we thought that bullocks
would pay us better we ridded our lands of them; cleaned our lands of
tenants, is an expression I once heard, and I remember how they used
to go away by train from Claremorris in great batches bawling like
animals. There is no denying that we looked upon our tenants as
animals, and they looked on us as kings; in all the old stories the
landlord is a king. The men took off their hats to us and the women
rushed out of their cabins dropping curtsies to us until the
'seventies. Their cry, Long life to yer honour, rings still in my
ears; and the seignioral rights flourished in Mayo and Galway in those
days, and soon after my father's funeral I saw the last of this
custom: a middle-aged woman and her daughter and a small grey ass
laden with two creels of young chickens were waiting at my door, the
woman curtsying, the girl drawing her shawl about her face shyly. She
was not an ugly girl, but I had been to Lodge Road and had seen Jim
Browne's pictures.

Everything was beginning for me, and everything was declining for my
mother. She would have liked to linger by her husband's grave a little
while, but I gave her no peace, urging the fact upon her that sooner
or later we should have to go back to London. Why delay, mother? We
cannot spend our lives here going to Kiltoome with flowers. An
atrocious boy as I relate him, but an engaging manner transforms
reality as a mist or a ray of light transforms a landscape, and my
mother died believing me to have been the best of sons, though I never
sacrificed my convenience to hers. It will be admitted that that is
the end we should all strive for. But the means? Ah, the means! An
ancient saw this of ends and means which it will be well to leave to
others to disentangle.

Awaking from a long reverie, I asked myself where I had left off, like
an absent-minded old woman telling a child a story. At the part where
every day spent in Moore Hall after my father's death was like a great
lump of lead on my shoulders. My mother's grief increased day by day;
and if her health were to break down we might be kept at Moore Hall
for months. It was important to get her back to London, and I think it
must have been in the train that she heard the Army had never appealed
to me; I had only consented to accept the Army because I had nothing
else to propose to my father; it was painting that interested me, and
a studio was sought as soon as I arrived in London. My aspiration did
not reach as high as a private studio; the naked was my desire, and a
drawing-class would provide me with that. No examination was required
at Limerston Street. Barthe, a Frenchman, ran the little show, of
which Whistler was the attraction, and as soon as the model rested I
picked my way through the easels and stood at the edge of the crowd
that had collected round the famous artist. His drawings on
brown-paper slips seemed to me to be very empty and casual, altogether
lacking in that attitude of mind which interested me so much in
Rossetti. His jokes were disagreeable to me; he did not seem to take
art seriously, but I must have disguised my feelings very well, for he
asked me to come to see him; any Sunday morning, he said, I should
find him at 96 Cheyne Walk. The very next Sunday I went there, but
there were few pictures in the studio, and I was left to look upon the
melancholy portrait of his mother which he had just completed, and
gathering nothing from it I turned to another picture, a girl in a
white dress dreaming by the chimney-piece, her almost Rossetti-like
face reflected in the mirror. Swinburne had translated her languor
into verses; these were printed round the frame; and while I read
them Whistler discoursed to his friends on the beauty of Oriental art,
and his praise sent me to the Japanese screen, but I could discover no
correct drawing in it, and begged one of the visitors to tell me how
faces represented by two or three lines and a couple of dots could be
considered to be well drawn. He gave me a hurried explanation, and
returned to Whistler, who laughed boisterously whilst rattling iced
drinks from glass to glass; and I think that I despised and hated him
when he capped my somewhat foolish enthusiasm for the pre-Raphaelite
painters with a comic anecdote.

I left his house irritated, and somewhat ostentatiously neglected him
at the class, allying myself openly and defiantly to the next
celebrity, for our class boasted of another, Oliver Madox Brown, son
of the great Ford Madox Brown, a boy that came from Fitzroy Square,
bringing with him such a reputation for genius that he paid no
attention whatever to Whistler-a strange boy, stranger even than I: a
long fat body buttoned in an old overcoat reaching to his knees, odd
enough when upright, but odder still when crouching on the ground in
front of his drawing-board, his right hand sketching rapidly, his left
throwing black locks of hair from his face, of which little was seen
but the great hooked nose. I could not keep him out of my thoughts,
for he seemed to me even more unfortunate than myself, less likely to
win a woman's love. At last my passion to know him overcame me, and I
dared to speak to him. He engaged immediately in conversation just as
if he wished to become my friend, and agreed to walk back to South
Kensington with me. I remember the care with which I picked my words
during this walk, and my object being to win him it seemed to me to be
perfectly safe to ask if he were in the life-room in the Academy. My
surprise was great when he answered that he had no time to spare for
the Academy, all his mornings being employed upon his six-foot canvas,
the _Deformed Transformed_, and wondering how he managed to give
visible shape to an idea so essentially literary, I asked if he could
explain his composition to me. He said that he would prefer to show me
his picture, and I promised to call at Fitzroy Square, but delayed
going there from day to day lest too much desire to see him and his
picture might wean him from the willingness he had shown for my
acquaintance; and it was not till he asked me why I had not been to
see him that I summoned sufficient courage to take the tram to Gower
Street. Before me on the doorstep was a handsome middle-aged man,
somewhat thick-set, with greying hair and beard, who said to me, You
have come to see Oliver, haven't you? divining one of Oliver's friends
in me.

We met at the class in the Fulham Road, and he asked me to come and
see his picture. And you are Oliver's father? I added, the great
painter. For I recognised Oliver in the handsome and kindly eyes.
Yes, yes, and he turned on the landing to ask me if I would care to
come into his studio before going to see Oliver. Does he, then, think
so much of Oliver that he puts him before his own pictures? I asked
myself whilst he pulled the easels forward and showed me his pictures.
If I may make a remark, I said aloud.

Pray do, he said.

Your hands always seem a little heavy, but perhaps that is your style,
as long necks are Rossetti's.

He laughed in his beard, and we ascended that great sloping staircase.
He paints in the morning, said the adoring father, and writes in the
evening when he doesn't go to the class. A volume of poems was
mentioned, and I asked if the manuscript had gone to the publisher.
Oliver hesitates about sending it. Swinburne and Rossetti are
publishing poetry, and all the literature of the pre-Raphaelite
movement has hitherto gone into verse. He drawled on, telling me that
Oliver had finished a prose romance of about three hundred and fifty
pages and was about to begin another, and a volume of short stories
was mentioned. I ventured an inquiry, and the great painter quoted
from his advice to his son: Oliver, don't waste your time on short
stories. You have your six-foot canvas in the morning and your novels
and poems in the evening.

I was too overwhelmed to give any answer, and Oliver paid no heed to
his fond parent's admonishment. He seemed to take it for granted that
he was not like other men, and I understood that having heard himself
so often spoken of as a genius he had accepted the fact of his genius
as he had come to accept the fact that he could speak and hear and
walk. But I, who had been brought up in the belief that I was very
stupid, was astonished at my extraordinary good fortune in having met
Oliver and won his good opinion. After all, come what may, this
wonderful father and still more wonderful son had thought me worth
speaking to for a while, and then, remembering that Oliver was writing
a novel, I begged him to read me some of it if he weren't too busy. He
hesitated and might have been tempted if his father had not reminded
him that luncheon would be ready in a few minutes. Father and son were
condescending enough to ask me to stay to lunch, but I did not dare to
say yes, and descended the stairs regretting my shyness. On the
doorstep, while trying to summon up courage to say, On second thoughts
I'll come back to lunch, I besought Oliver to bring his manuscript
down to the class and read it to us during the rests. He promised to
do so, and the following day when Mary Lewis left the pose and wrapped
herself in a shawl (a shapely little girl she was, Whistler's model;
she used to go over and talk to him during the rests), Oliver began to
read, and Mary sat like one entranced, her shawl slipping from her,
and I remember her listening at last quite naked. And when the quarter
of an hour had gone by we begged Oliver to go on reading, forgetful of
Whistler, who sat in a corner looking as cross as an armful of cats.
At last, M. Barthe was obliged to intervene, and Mary resumed the
pose.

_Aprs tout, je ne veux pas que mon atelier devienne un cours de
littrature_, he muttered.

But we were thinking of the story, and begged Oliver to take up the
reading again at the end of the sitting, and Whistler went away in
high dudgeon, for Mary stopped behind to hear how the story ended. And
a few months later we crowded together, forgetful of the model,
telling how typhoid had robbed England of a great genius; and after
Oliver's death my interest in the class declined.




III


Our advancements are broken or delayed by unexpected returnings to our
beginnings, and my story is that a young man whom I had known at
Jurles's asked me to visit him for the hunting season, and that I met
a man at his house who had a horse running at Croydon but was without
a jockey. So it was natural to me to propose myself, and rely on
Joseph Applely's promptitude to send me my father's racing breeches
and boots, which he did; and the farce was gone through of taking them
down to Croydon, though the owner had written saying that he intended,
or half intended, to scratch the horse, his warning serving no
purpose, for we are all mummers, and life being but a mumming, it was
pleasant to think of myself taking all the jumps, the water-jump
especially, in front of the stand. But to do this it was necessary to
go down prepared, the breeches and boots in a brown-paper parcel under
my arm, the parcel helping me to realise myself as a steeplechase
jockey. No doubt that with some luck I should have got the horse round
the course as well as another, but the owner having scratched the
horse, and the day being wet and the Ring a couple of inches deep in
mud, the result of that Croydon meeting was for me a severe cold that
prevented me from taking my driving-lesson from Ward, one of the great
coachmen of that time, a lesson that I sorely needed, for I had
engaged to drive a coach down to Epsom.

All the same, on four lessons this feat was accomplished, the horses
meeting with no serious accident, and, encouraged by my luck, a few
weeks afterwards the same party was invited by me to a great gala
dinner at Richmond, and while the coach was being led over several
hillocks through the furze bushes on to the dusty road, for in the
darkness we had wandered into Wandsworth Common, one of my guests
said to me: You mustn't think of giving up driving; your luck will
never desert you. But four horses galloping on Wandsworth Common in
the middle of the night! Margaret Gilray whispered to her cousin,
Sally Giles. I wish we were safely at home.

These excursions passed the summer away, and in August Sally and
Margaret were bidden goodbye. Belfort's brother, who was going to be
married and wished to make a splash before doing so, had hired a lodge
in Ross-shire. He had invited his brother, and his brother had been
allowed to invite me; a great event this was, and hours were spent at
the tailors' considering different patterns; at the hosiers' turning
over scarves, neckties, and shirts of many descriptions, frilled and
plain; and when my mother said that I could not have both a
dressing-case costing fifty pounds and a pair of guns, I decided to
have the dressing-case and to send to Moore Hall for my father's
muzzle-loaders, and though forty years have gone by, I can still smile
at the astonishment that the guns inspired in the Ross-shire
shooting-lodge. And when it was noticed that the locks were noiseless,
Captain H----, who had been told off as my companion on the morrow,
was soon interested in them, and spent most of the evening with a
toothbrush trying to clean them, succeeding at last in producing a
faint clicking, but not enough to convince him that he would be safe
while shooting with me. It were better, he thought, to lend me one of
his guns, and the breech-loader, the first that I held in my hands,
was held fairly straight, and my bag was numerous for a boy of my
appearance and conversation. Captain H---- had begun to feel that if
by chance my bag were the bigger, he would be wickedly chaffed, and
this misfortune might have happened to him if the boots that had won
my fancy in the Sloane Street shop-window had not begun to break up,
the pretty clasps and buckles being unable to resist the tough
Ross-shire heather.

I can't think how you ever came by such boots. Where did you get them?
They are as wonderful as your guns! How do you contrive to hit off the
extraordinary?

And I told him that it was not until the last moment, between six and
seven in the evening, that I remembered I had forgotten to order any
shooting boots. My feet, you see, being as small as a woman's, the
ready-made shooting boots in the Brompton Road were too large for me;
all the shops were shutting, I was getting frantic when I saw a line
of boots in a shop-window in Sloane Street marked Ladies' Boots for
the Highlands! They'll fit me, I said to myself. You see they do,
only--

I shall have to take you round tomorrow to the local cobbler.

The noiseless locks, the ladies' boots, and the admission that I was
always in love supplied the Ross-shire shooting-lodge with matter for
humorous conversation, and as I sat before my fire in Ely Place I
heard my nickname, Mr Perpetual. To be ridiculous has always been _ma
petite luxe_, but can any one be said to be ridiculous if he knows
that he is ridiculous? Not very well. It is the pompous that are truly
ridiculous. A random thought carried me out of Ely Place across the
years to Lodge Road, and I can see myself and the company and the
room: a round table on which are beef and salad, Cheshire cheese and
beer, the supper provided by the fair cousins. Canaries are shrilling
in their cages, and the bow-window is hung with rep curtains, and the
sofa, too, is rep. There is wax fruit on the sideboard, and Sally and
Margaret wear the tight bum-revealing dresses that succeeded the pious
crinoline. Side-whiskers have not disappeared altogether; Belfort and
myself, Humphries and Norton--two cavalry officers--are shaved only to
mid-cheek. Incident after incident rises up and floats away like
cigarette smoke, one incident retaining my attention a little longer
than the others--the evening that Belfort refused to smoke one of my
cigars, saying that he preferred to smoke one of his own manillas. He
lighted one, and it was just beginning to draw when, impertinently, I
tore it out of his teeth and flung it into the fire. A joke it had
seemed to me, but he rushed for the poker and would have brained me
with it if I had not slipped round the table and seized Colville's
sword and, unsheathing it in a moment, warded off the blow aimed at my
head, and seeing another coming, it occurred to me that the best way
to save myself would be to run Belfort through, and he would have
received a thrust that might have done for him if one of the cavalry
officers had not armed himself with a chair. The sword sank in the
upholstery, and by that time Belfort had recovered his temper, and a
few minutes after he was smoking one of my cigars in token of
reconciliation. One of the cavalry officers asleep on the sofa is
another memory that Time has not rubbed away, and Margaret coming to
sit on my knees, perhaps because she had been warned not to inflame Mr
Perpetual. Her dressmaker had brought home a beautiful blue tea-gown
that evening; she was wearing it for the first time, and its folds of
corded silk floated over my knees. The very weight and shape of her
are remembered, and our inquietude whether the officer was shamming
sleep or was asleep. The tea-gown had seemed to me the very painting
robe that I needed, for art was never altogether out of my mind, and I
had been thinking for some time of Saturn sitting in the shady sadness
of a vale as a subject for a picture that my poor dead Oliver would
have liked to paint. It would have been of no avail to offer it to Jim
Browne, for he could not draw from Nature. A few months later I
discovered another which he would have carried out if he had lived:
the Witch of Atlas calls to Hermaphroditus, and I could see his wings
catching the fainting airs bearing the boat up the shadowy stream to
the austral waters beyond the fabulous Thamondacona, without, however,
being able to arrange the figures so that they filled the canvas--the
sinuous back of the witch, her arm upon the helm, looking up at
Hermaphroditus; and one day Jim Browne was implored to say what was
wrong with the composition.

Give me your palette and go upstairs and dress yourself. Take off that
ridiculous garment, he added, thereby humiliating me, for Margaret
Gilray's tea-gown had seemed an excellent painting robe, an advance on
the smock which Jim wore in his own studio. But it would be henceforth
discarded, for Jim was now my mentor, my hero, my boon companion. It
was my pride to be seen in Piccadilly with this fine Victorian
gentleman whom I recall best on a wintry day; he never wore an
overcoat, but buttoned his braided coat tightly about him and swung a
big stick. Long flaxen locks fell thick over the collar, and his
pegtops blew about in the wind; he was known to everybody as
Piccadilly Jim or Piccadilly Browne, I have forgotten which. We met
everybody between Hyde Park Corner and St James's Street, and Jim
saluted his acquaintances with a How are you? never a How do you do?
He very rarely stopped to speak to any, but strode on quickly,
mentioning the name of the passer-by, and I could but try to fix in my
memory the appearance of the notable, regretting that Jim did not
stop, that I had not been introduced. He liked to quiz me, and
sometimes there was plenty of reason for mockery, and sometimes there
was none, but in either case he quizzed me, turning some simple phrase
into ridicule, as when I mentioned, regretfully--perhaps it was the
note of regret in my voice that caused him to laugh at me--that my
hair was yellower than his. How he used to drag out the word yellow,
making me feel dreadfully ashamed of myself, until at last summoning
up courage, I asked him if there was anything foolish in what I had
said, and to my surprise he answered no. Then why had he been laughing
at me all this while? and I listened to Jim again, for he was now
asking, out of politeness--he always decided these questions--whether
it would be more amusing to dine at the St James's or at Kettners' or
at the Caf de la Rgence. It did not matter which. In whichever he
might choose I could learn his taste in food, and my hope was that
with practice I might acquire it; his taste in everything seemed
essential, especially in women, and to make myself more perfectly
acquainted with it, I drew his attention to the ladies dining at the
distant tables, never daring, however, to hazard an opinion unless one
seemed to realise all the ideals of beauty set forth in his pictures,
and if he deigned to approve of any woman's face and figure at
Cremorne Gardens or in the Argyle Rooms, I used to mark her down for
future study. My mistakes were numerous, and I was ashamed if he
caught me talking to a woman whom he did not admire, and very proud
if my choice met his approval, as it happened to do one day in the
Park. I had stopped to speak to Kitty Carew, letting his walk on in
front, and on overtaking him half-way down the pathway, he said: Yes,
indeed, a very pretty woman. You were in luck, George, when you picked
her up.

Jim's satellite I was, but given to wandering out of my orbit. There
were other companions whom Jim looked upon contemptuously--the
Maitlands--and Jim's contempt was shared by my gaunt Irish servant,
William Mullowney, who used to enrage me when he came into the
drawing-room with his Sor, Mr Dhurty Maitland has called to see you.
It was quite true that Sydenham presented a somewhat neglected
appearance, but however just William's criticism might be, he could
not be allowed to speak to me of my friends with contempt. This
Derrinanny savage must be sent back to Moore Hall, I said. But a
moment's indignation does not add much to my story; I must tell how I
made Sydenham's acquaintance.

When we arrived from Mayo we had gone to live in Thurloe Square, in
the house of a very genteel lady who did not let lodgings but who
might be persuaded, so the house agent had said, to let us have her
drawing-room floor and some bedrooms for five or six guineas a week.
She often asked me into her parlour and talked to me about her
connections and the neighbourhood, and, seeing I was at a loose end
without companions, inspired by some connection of ideas, she said one
day she would introduce me to the Maitland boys, the sons of a retired
stipendiary magistrate from Athlone. The mother was a wonderful
pianist, the boys were all clever, the three younger sons had a room
to themselves at the bottom of the house where they painted scenery,
wrote verses, and composed music. William and Dick, the two elder
brothers, had taken the Lyceum Theatre, and were going to produce
_Chilperic_, a comic opera by Herv. She tapped at the window and
Sydenham came in, and his news was that a letter had arrived that
morning from Herv. He was coming over to play the title-rle himself.
Everything is relative, and at that moment of my life it was very
wonderful for me to go to the Maitlands' house and to hear the scores
of _Chilperic_ played by Sydenham and his mother. We received boxes
and stalls from the Maitlands, and after a run of nearly six months,
_Chilperic_ was taken off to make way for the composer's later opera,
_Le Petit Faust_. But it did not please as much as its predecessor,
and the theatre had to be closed. Dick had, however, managed to escape
bankruptcy; half a success guarantees that another door shall be
opened to the retiring manager, and in the 'seventies, a few months
after my father's death, he brought over the entire company from Les
Folies Dramatiques to play in French, _Chilperic, L'Oeil Crev, Le
Canard  Trois Becs_, and possibly _Le Petit Faust._ He sent me seats
whenever I asked him, and I used to sit in the stalls learning all the
little choruses and couplets night after night, admiring Paola Marie,
a pretty and plump brunette, who sang enchantingly as she tripped
across the stage, and Blanche d'Antigny, a tall fair woman who played
the part of a young shepherd. She wore a white sheepskin about her
loins, and looked as if she had walked out of Jim's pictures. I learnt
from Dick that she was a great light-o'-love, sharing the Kingdom of
Desire with Hortense Schneider and Lonie Leblanc.

It was well to sit in the stalls as Dick's guest, and it would have
been wonderful to accompany him through the stage door on to the
stage, and be introduced to the French actresses to whom he spoke in
French every night. But I could not speak French, and I vowed to learn
the language of these women, who disappeared suddenly like the
swallows, leaving me meditating what lives they lived in Paris, until
Dick's new theatrical venture, a translation of Offenbach's
_Brigands_, put them out of my head. For he had collected in the Globe
Theatre the most beautiful women in London to form the corps of the
_gendarmerie_ that always arrived an hour too late to arrest the
brigands; and one of the attractions of the piece was Mademoiselle
d'Anka, a beautiful Hungarian, who sang Offenbach's little ditties
bewitchingly, and a song that Arthur Sullivan had written for her,
_Looking Back._ Madame Debreux, a pretty brunette whom Dick had
brought over, for he loved her, was in the cast, and Nelly Bromley,
who was loved by the Duke of Beaufort, was in it too. A lovelier
garland was never wreathed, and there was no lovelier flower in it
than Marie de Grey, who never kissed any one except for her pleasure,
and yet managed to live at the rate of three or four thousand a year.
There was a woman who wore a green dress in the second act; her nose
was too large, but her thighs were beautiful; and there was a pretty,
tall, fair woman, whom I ran across in Covent Garden on her way to the
theatre, and whom I took to lunch. She would have loved me if my heart
had not been engaged elsewhere, but, as usual, I abandoned the prey
for the shadow. And the shadow was the stately Annie Temple, who dared
not listen to my courtship for dread of the rage of her fierce cavalry
officer, a stupid fellow who snarled at me once so threateningly at
the stage door that Annie must fain refuse me her photograph. Dot
Robins's mother sold me one for a sovereign, and from it I painted
many portraits. Jim painted one from memory, mentioning again and
again while he painted it that Annie was as tall as Mademoiselle
d'Anka, whose acquaintance he had made on her arrival in London,
before the theatre opened. It was he who introduced me to her, and he
was glad now that I was able to get free seats at the Globe, and
disappointed that Dick would not allow me to bring him behind the
scenes. I should have liked to chaperon him, but it was a feather in
my cap to leave him sitting in his box and skip away to the
dressing-rooms, and when I returned we would lay our heads together
trying to discover which was the handsomer woman, Annie Temple or
Marie de Grey. Annie, in his opinion, was the finer woman, being as
big, in fact, as Alice Harford, and he confided to me then and there
that he used to meet Alice in a most romantic nook at the end of a
little paved alley off the Fulham Road. He believed her to be in
keeping and unfaithful only with him; all the same, she proposed one
night at Cremorne to meet me at the nook; and delighted with my
success, I could not refrain from telling Jim all about it, just to
take him down a peg. But the result of this indiscretion was that
Alice did not come to the nook at the time appointed, and I walked
down the paved alley meditating that once again I had missed the prey
for the shadow. And, as if my punishment were not enough, Jim
continued to talk of her beauty, telling that her legs were shapelier
than Mademoiselle d'Anka's; they did not go in at the knee, and this
great beauty, or this great fault, formed the theme of many
conversations in the studio in Prince's Gardens; Boucher's women did
not go in at the knee, but Rubens's did, and laying his palette aside,
Jim would throw himself on the sofa and tell me for the hundredth time
that the only women worth loving were tall women with abundant bosom
and flaxen hair, the only women that men with a sense of the beautiful
could admire.

But long before this my guardian, Lord Sligo, wrote Jim a letter which
brought him round to Alfred Place, and sitting on the edge of the
table he read it to my mother, saying that if she agreed with Sligo's
strictures, there would be nothing for him to do but to refuse to see
George any more, and if she didn't agree with Sligo, the best thing
would be to write to him saying that she thought Sligo was mistaken.
Foreseeing that Lord Sligo would read any such letter from her as
Please mind your own business, my mother hesitated, but I insisted,
feeling that Jim's friendship was necessary to me. All the same, Lord
Sligo's letter was not without avail. It stimulated Jim to moralise,
and when I called in the afternoon to ask him if he would come up to
Piccadilly to dine somewhere, and go on to the Argyle Rooms, he would
read me a long lecture on the dangers of women.

The strong and healthy man refrains from women, and when I asked him
if he always refrained from them himself he said he refrained as long
as he could, and advocated a strong and energetic life to me. He said
he would like to see me shoulder a gun and go away; not to Scotland to
shoot grouse, but to Africa. Every young man should go forth and lead
a natural life. Abyssinia was often mentioned, and to discover the
source of the Nile was held up to me as an ambition suitable to my
health and my fortunes. I should come back a far finer man than I went
out. Alice Harford and Annie Temple were probably given to us so that
we might resist their seductions, which were very trivial to a man who
had got anything in him. And if Abbyssinia and the source of the Nile
appeared too slight an adventure, there remained the Sahara and the
Mountains of the Moon and Timbuctoo, where no European had been, but
which a determined man might reach, and in his imagination Jim would
roam through the great equatorial forests, filled, he said, with
cities, relics of a civilisation that had passed away, now inhabitated
only by lions, and to encourage me to accept an African adventure he
would pull out a picture of a troop of elephants plunging through some
reeds into a river while a gorilla disported himself on the branches
of a dead tree. This led us to consider the exploits of Du Chaillu,
who had shot the first gorilla. The animal had approached thumping his
breasts with his fists, and the sound that he produced was that of a
big drum. Du Chaillu had, however, knelt unmoved, saying to himself,
Not yet. The gorilla approached another ten steps, and Du Chaillu
said, Not yet; and again the gorilla approached, and Du Chaillu said,
Fire! and the gorilla rolled over dead at Du Chaillu's feet after
twisting the rifle as if it were a bit of wire. Jim admired such nerve
as this, and it recalled to him an excellent shot he had made years
ago when he was staying at Moore Hall. He had said he would like to
shoot a marten, and had taken a rifle with him; martens were rare even
at that time, but he had caught sight of one at the end of a branch,
and had shot it, and the incident had inspired him to think that he
would like to wait for a lion in the moonlight at the foot of a tree.
A moment like that is worth living for! And exalted by the thought he
would seize his palette and paint Cain amid the rocks by the sea under
a darkening sky, his arm thrown about his sleeping sister, a spear
within his right arm; and as if the terrific lion stealing down upon
him were not sufficient terror, Jim would sketch a lioness and her
whelps in the background. As all the beasts in the picture were
roaring, Jim roared in accompaniment, while whirling a mass of
vermilion and white upon his palette; and then, uttering a deep growl,
he would rush forward and a red tongue would appear; and when he had
mixed emerald green with white he would advance some paces, cat-like,
and then, snarling, would leap forward, and a moment after a great
green eye started out of the darkness.

He retreated to watch the effect of his work, and in the frenzy of
creation, soliloquised, explaining to himself, and to me, the reason
why his pictures were refused by the Academy. The art that the
Academicians catered for was a meanly realistic art, and for them to
accept his picture of Cain defending his wife from wild beasts, the
lion's mane would have to be painted from the bearskin rug, every hair
put in; and the dove that Jim's memory of Alice Harford had rescued
from Cupid and which she clasped to her bosom, would have to be
studied from a dead pigeon sent round from the poulterer's.

Alice's great blonde body was finely conceived, and the movement of
her shoulders bending over the eager boy was well enough, somewhat
rudimentary, but better in a way than the frigid sophistications that
pass for art in Burlington House. If he had nothing else he had the
sense of the noble and the beautiful, but was he speaking the whole
truth when he said that the Academicians would hang the picture if
every feather were imitated from real feathers? Did he believe it to
be as well painted as the Correggio in the National Gallery? Was the
modelling of that shoulder altogether faultless? Was it not emptier
than the Correggio? Was not the Correggio more real? At that moment it
became clear to me that the feet were not as beautiful as those in the
bright picture of the Italian master, and that Jim could not make them
as beautiful, for he had not learned to draw and to paint from Nature.
If he had gone to the Academy schools and subjected his genius to
discipline, he might have been the great painter of modern times; but
I could not see Jim attending the Academy schools, drawing patiently
from the model, working out the shadows with a stump. My thoughts must
have stopped there if they ever got quite so far; and now the
explanation of the enigma seems to me that Jim was one born before due
time and out of due place, in Mayo in 1830. For his talent to have
ripened fully he should have been born in Venice in 1660. His
mentality was of that period, and his appearance coincided with his
talent--splendid shoulders, fine head upreared, an over-modelled brow,
a short aquiline nose, proud nostrils, long languid hands. But why
enumerate? A portrait by Van Dyck.

Get out of my way, he cried, and squeezing out the best part of a tube
of raw umber on his palette and breaking it with a little black, he
whisked in the lion's tail, and with another brush sought out the
yellow ochre and the Naples yellow, and Cain's wife received such a
dower of tresses that I was thrilled. It was my sense of the
voluptuous and romantic that drew me to Jim and his pictures, and I
remember him crossing the room one day and seeking among the canvases
and returning with a small one, six feet by four, in which a brown
satyr overtook a nymph at the corner of a wood. My eyes dilated and I
licked my lips.

The best thing you have ever painted in your life, Jim. Why do you
turn it away to the wall?

He murmured something about his sisters who sometimes came into the
room unexpectedly, and throwing himself on the sofa melted into
another of those long soliloquies very dear to me at that time--a flow
of talk of Michael Angelo, Rubens, and Raphael; and mixed with his
remembrances of the pictures he had seen in Italy were remembrances
of pictures and statues that he had modelled and painted himself, the
colossal statue of Caractacus that he had exhibited in London when he
was seventeen, and the great picture of the Battle of Arbela, forty
feet wide by twenty feet high, containing several life-size elephants.
At that time he had painted and modelled in the same studio, leaving
the picture for the statue and the statue for the picture, and, my
admiration roused, I begged him to tell me where were these pictures
and this statue; but without answering my question he broke into a
criticism of Ary Scheffer's picture of the Devil offering Christ the
Kingdom of Earth if he would cast himself down and worship him. Christ
raises his hand and the gesture portrays the famous words, Thou shalt
not tempt the Lord thy God, while the Devil points downward.

The two men are speaking at the same time.

And in your picture, Jim?

Christ listens while the Devil offers him the earth, he answered, and
he did not speak again for a long time so that I might better
appreciate his genius. An intense moment of appreciation was when he
said that no gallery in the world afforded so many beautiful pictures
to his sight as did a dirty ceiling. He had only to half close his
eyes to see Last Judgments finer than Michael Angelo's, and if he
closed his eyes a little he could rediscover his Battle of Arbela.

The lost picture, I said. But, Jim, the satyr overturning the nymph;
is he visible in the ceiling above your head?

Jim laughed.

Perhaps not in his ceiling, but in the ceiling above the little sofa
at Alice Harford's.

These lapses of humour jarred a little, and I was glad when he lowered
his eyes from the ceiling and remained quite still considering the
picture of the nymph and the satyr, and I thrilled again when he said,
That picture has all the beauties of Raphael and other beauties
besides. In youth one likes exaggeration, and in response to my cry
for Art Jim said: If you want to learn painting you must go to France.

His words were like All ashore; the vessel moves away, but so slowly
that one does not feel it is moving, and three weeks after my arrival
in Paris I wrote to Jim from the Htel Voltaire, Quai Voltaire, asking
him if he would come over and stay with me; I had a room which I did
not use and he was welcome to it. But he wrote saying that he could
not come over to Paris at present; and I was very much hurt by his
ironical thanks for the room which I could not use. But it is the room
that one does not use one offers a friend, not one's own bedroom, I
said, and continued to consider his rude letter, wondering what had
provoked it, without being able to discover any reason. Some months
later he wrote again, this time in French, and to prove to _mes
camarades d'atelier_ that it was possible for an Englishman to write
French I took the letter out of my pocket, and while they scanned it,
picking out the English locutions, it struck me that if Jim was
mistaken about his French he might well be mistaken about his
pictures. And to convince myself of their worth I described the
compositions to Julian--_Julius Caesar Overturning the Altar of the
Druids_, _The Bridal of Triermain_, _Cain Shielding his Wife from Wild
Beasts_--and Julian listened indulgently over many cups of coffee. He
was becoming my intimate friend, allowing me to take him out to dinner
and to treat him to the theatre; I was a little personage in his
circle when a tall young man came into the studio late one
afternoon--Lewis Welden Hawkins it was--and as we went with him to the
caf to drink a bowl of punch (the custom of the studio was that every
new-comer should stand a bowl of punch), he turned and spoke to me in
English, asking me, after a few remarks, if we had not met in Jim
Browne's studio.

The name of Jim Browne carried me back to Prince's Gardens and to the
moment when Jim introduced me to a tall young man whom I did not
altogether like, so contemptuous was he of Jim's genius, and of me
when I invited him to come forward and tell me what he thought of
_Cain Shielding his Wife from Wild Beasts_. He was Jim's cousin, and
therefore in a roundabout way my cousin; he had come over to London
with a young Frenchwoman whom he called Louise, and I remembered Jim
saying: I hope you have turned out something, meaning that he hoped
that Lewis had painted a picture, for he had left the Navy to study
painting; but the young man had answered, I don't know if I have
turned out anything, but I have turned up a good deal, an answer which
displeased me. There was no time to remember any more. We had arrived
at the caf; the conversation had become general, and the first thing
that was borne in upon me was that Lewis spoke French like a
Frenchman; his thoughts moved in the language, which was not
extraordinary, since he was born in Brussels, and when we returned to
the studio the whole studio gathered about his easel and admired his
audacity, for he had sketched in the model and the entire
background--the stove that kept the model warm, the screen behind
which he dressed and undressed, and the yellow curtain which sheltered
him from draughts. The elders, Renouf and Boutet de Monvel, saw
through Lewis's facility; to them it was merely _du chic_, Ignorance
giving itself airs, but to me who could not express myself at all, and
who spent a whole week stuttering and stammering through a wretched
drawing, the hour's work on Lewis's canvas was almost as wonderful as
one of Jim's pictures.

His manners were winning and easy; he crossed the studio with a
deference proper in a new-comer, and seating himself in front of my
drawing he advised me. And at five o'clock, when the studio closed, we
went away together in a carriage, for he wanted to show me his studio,
which was far away behind the Gare du Nord, too far to walk; moreover
he was in a hurry. But he seemed to forget his hurry when we reached
the Place Maubeuge, remembering suddenly that he had to see Louise,
who lived in the Rue Maubeuge. And it being always pleasant to see a
woman, I was disappointed when the concierge said that Madame was not
at home. But another friend of his lived up the street. She was not at
home either, so he scribbled a note in the concierge's lodge, and
bethought himself of another. She too was out; _mais si monsieur veut
monter ... la bonne est en haute_. No, he was in a hurry. He scribbled
another note; we dashed into the cab again. But he must speak with--We
jumped out, and in the middle of a low-ceilinged room he engaged in
conversation with a lady who came from her bedroom somewhat flurried
in a peignoir. She spoke to me in English, but as soon as she turned
to Lewis she dropped into French, which she seemed to speak very well,
for I noticed that instead of saying _Vous avez tort_, as I should
have said, she said _Je vous donne tort_, a phrase which I did not
know and kept chewing all the way to his studio, while he confided to
me that he was now living with an English girl who had come over with
a theatrical company to Brussels. He was expecting her to call for
him, so there was female society to look forward to, and the carriage
drew up at the door of the house in which he was living.

You won't have to go up many stairs. I am on the _entresol_, he said.
His studio was a large room with a great fireplace, in which he had
hung an iron pot on a chain. The fireplace had cost seven hundred and
fifty francs; seven hundred and fifty francs represented no actual sum
of money to me; it was a pitiful thing to have to turn francs into
pounds and to have to ask if any cooking was done in the pot, for of
course I should have known that the pot and chain were decorative
effect, as were the Turkish lamps and draperies, as indeed everything
in the room was, including Lewis himself, especially when he took a
fiddle from the wall and began playing.

Stradella's _Chant d'glise_--do you know it?

Alas! I didn't, and after hearing it my wonderment increased, for
Lewis said that he did not know a note of music, but had met a vagrant
once and had picked up some knowledge of the fiddle in half an hour.
He soon wearied of the fiddle, and going to a small organ he strummed
snatches of Verdi's _Requiem_, till a young girl entered the room out
of breath.

Lewis!

She stopped suddenly on seeing me, and turning his head he introduced
me to a beautiful girl, and one in the bloom of her first beauty, a
tall girl of seventeen or eighteen, with brown eyes and fair hair. She
had come to fetch Lewis to dinner, and it occurred to me that she
might be disappointed at finding me with Lewis. But he assured me they
would be glad of my company if I didn't mind dining at Alphonsine's.
Not the least. But who was Alphonsine? An old light-o'-love, he said,
who gathered all her friends around her _table d'hte_, at three
francs and a half. His supercilious style delighted me, and he left me
talking to Alice while he crossed the street to order some coals at
the _charbonnerie_, and he looked such a fine fellow, as he stepped
from one paving-stone to the other, that Alice could not restrain her
admiration.

What a toff he is!

A toff he was, not a tailor's toff, but one of Nature's toffs, a tall,
thin young man and yet powerful, his long arms could no doubt deal a
swinging blow on occasions, and in a race his long legs would have
carried him past many a competitor. His shoulders were ample, and his
small face was not spoilt by a broken nose. He must have told me how
his nose was broken; I have forgotten; but in my memory of him it
contrasts happily with the soft violet eyes, giving character to the
face--a face which absorbed and interested me all the evening, my eyes
returning to him again and again as he leaned across the table telling
stories in fluent French, delighting everybody, the men as well as the
women, assembled under the awning.

What is he saying? Alice asked me. I could not tell her, alas! He
thinks he is such a fine man that all he would have to do would be to
strip himself naked and walk into a woman's room for her to fall down
and adore him.

I begged her to tell me about Marie Pellegrin.

You admire her, don't you? Well, she'll cost you a thousand francs;
but if you were a _voyou_--

What's a _voyou_?

A cad--you could have her for nothing.

And if she is rich why does she come here? Are all the women here
worth a thousand francs?

Alice laughed scornfully and broke off the conversation, and applied
herself to trying to understand what Lewis was saying.

I wonder why she came here. She must have left the Grand Duke.

What Grand Duke?

All dukes are the same. Do hold your tongue.

Lewis told me afterwards that Marie had been to Russia and had had
hundreds of thousands of francs from the Grand Duke, but she liked
_les voyous du quartier_ better, and returned to them when she was
bored. She had just come back from Russia and was spending her
earnings in the Rue Breda, and, intoxicated with the romance of the
story, I begged of Lewis to tell me more about her. But he had told me
all he knew, and Alice sat very much annoyed, for she was just as
pretty a girl as Marie Pellegrin, and if she had had the luck to be
introduced to Grand Dukes she would know how to put her money to
better use.

We were in a victoria, for Lewis had proposed an excursion to Bullier,
and a train of cabs crossed Paris, over the bridge down the Rue du Bac
and round the Luxembourg. But I cannot write with the same insight and
sympathy of the Bal Bullier as I did of the lyse Montmartre, in the
story entitled _The End of Marie Pellegrin_. I am a Montmartre kin,
and Bullier, unhallowed by memories, rises up a mere externality, a
crowd pushing through the tables and chairs set under trees, sweating
waiters doing their best, and the band under cover, a sort of
exaggerated shed into which one walked from the garden. I never danced
at Bullier, and it matters little to me that the finest can-can
dancers assembled there; polkas and waltzes were looked upon as a kind
of waste of time, but the moment the band struck up a quadrille, a
crowd formed in dense rings, and the merits of the kickers were
discussed as eagerly as the toreadors in Madrid and Seville. The
grisettes of the quarter advanced kicking furiously, and about one in
the morning the company separated through the Latin Quarter, the
Montmartrians returning by themselves, for nothing was more rare than
for a Montmartrian to bring a grisette back with him, the girls being
with one accord faithful to their quarter.

Lewis and Alice dropped me at the Htel de Russie, going on themselves
to the Rue St Denis, somewhere between the Boulevard Sebastopol and
the Gare du Nord, I think. My last words to him were, You'll be sure
to be at the studio tomorrow, for I was anxious that Julian should see
my cousin's picture, and I can see myself still bringing him round to
Lewis's easel. An instinctive fellow Julian was, divining at once a
useful ally in Lewis, and, to make sure of him, Julian proposed a few
weeks later that we--Lewis, myself, Julian, Renouf, Boutet de Monvel,
and a few others--should take the first boat next Sunday morning to
Bas Meudon. The landscape painters, he said, would find some pretty
motives along the banks of the Seine; the others could go for a walk,
and I remember that Renouf and Boutet de Monvel went off together, and
returned an hour later saying that they had found nothing that tempted
them. Whereas Lewis had been immediately struck by the picturesque
ascension of the staircase leading up from the river to the village.
Was it jealousy that stayed them from admiring his facility? I asked
myself, for they did not seem to admire the picture that Lewis had
nearly completed on a panel; bestowing only a casual glance at it,
they began to talk about breakfast; but Lewis could not be persuaded
to lay aside his palette overflowing with bitumen and cadmium yellow;
he continued to add bits of drawing, and I to admire the perspective
and to wonder how he did it; Alice watched him from under her
sunshade, and Julian caught my serious attention when he said: All
that facility will go for nothing if he doesn't come to work at the
studio. We found the others waiting for us at the door of the
restaurant, very impatient, and to my delight our table was laid under
a trellis, and the green leaves and the white table appealed to my
imagination and the cutlets and the omelettes linger in my memory, and
the races that we ran in the evening when the bats came out, Lewis
beating me a little in one race, for his legs were longer, but only
just beating me, whereupon one whose name I cannot recall challenged
me to race him for a bottle of champagne, and Lewis whispered, Take
him on; you'll run away from him. And to my surprise Lewis's judgment
turned out right; my competitor gave up after a few yards, we drank
his champagne, and the boat took us back to Paris, all a little
conscious that the last lights of a happy day were dying--a day that I
felt I should never forget. We shall be thinking of this day when we
are old men, I said to Lewis, and was ashamed for a moment of my
emotion. He had not heard, he was talking to Alice. The night gathered
about the green banks of the Seine, and the dim poplars struck through
the last bar of light which seemed as if it could not die; the month
being June, it lingered between grey clouds till the boat had passed
under the first bridge....

And then, bridge after bridge, the landing, the separations, each one
returning to his bed, his mind filled with remembrances of blue air,
and flowing water, and swaying trees. Did Alice return with Lewis? I
think so. She was certainly with us a few weeks later, for Lewis had
caught sight of a picturesque corner, and was full of scorn of Renouf
and Boutet de Monvel who had missed it, and we three returned to Bas
Meudon for Lewis to paint it. But the Seine was so sunny the morning
we arrived that a swim suggested itself to Lewis, and a boat was
hired, and a boatman rowed us to the near side of an island. Alice,
who could not swim at all, remained in the shallows with me, who could
swim only a little, and splashing about together we watched Lewis
disporting himself in mid-stream, breasting the current, head
upreared, turning over on his side and rushing through the water like
some great fish. We admired him until he passed behind the island; and
then Alice would have me teach her to swim. We were getting on nicely
when, in sport, I threatened to duck her. She screamed to me to let
her go, and as soon as I lost hold of her she went under, coming up
unconscious, though she had not been under the water for more than a
few seconds. The boatmen came to my assistance quickly, and Lewis came
swimming by, and together we got her into the boat. Good God, Lewis,
try to bring her to, I cried, falling on my knees beside her, terribly
frightened, for Lewis was so angry with me that I could not doubt that
he would pitch me into the river if he failed to revive her. At last
she opened her eyes, and after a tender scene between her and Lewis,
we rowed back to the inn, where her beauty inspired much
commiseration.

A day has been wasted, Lewis said, for his mind was fixed upon the
corner he had selected, and he went away next morning without me, the
boat not being large enough to hold two painters. You don't want to
paint. You had better remain and talk to Alice. But it was impossible
to persuade Alice out of her bed, and feeling, I suppose, that I was
as negligible a quantity in love as in art she invited me, after some
hesitation, into her room; and we used to gossip there every morning
when Lewis went away to paint until gossip busied itself with us, and
one day he told us that he was returning to Paris next day. We could
see that something had gone wrong, and at last we got the truth out of
him. People at the inn had begun to notice that I went into Alice's
room as soon as he went out painting. Alice lost her temper quickly; I
protested, and Lewis said: Of course I know she wouldn't have anything
to do with you; all the same, I don't wish to pass for a cuckold. A
very rude answer I felt this to be, but held my tongue, and we
returned to Paris next day, all three rather angry and disappointed,
and Lewis discouraged for his picture had not turned out well; it had,
indeed, turned out so badly that landscape painting was not mentioned
again that summer. And it was not until the fall that he began to
speak of Cernay, a beautiful country celebrated among painters, not
more than fifty or sixty kilometres from Paris. His suggestion was
that we might go there for a week, and I consented, for I wanted to
see the inn whose walls had been decorated by every painter that had
stayed there--by every man of talent--for this inn-keeper would not
hand over his walls to be daubed by me and my like. And wondering if
Lewis were trying to fool me, or if it were really true that Cernay
was a relic of the Middle Ages that had escaped civilisation, I asked
him if he proposed to pay his bill with a picture, and if the
inn-keeper would accept poems from me in exchange for what I owed him.
You see now I have told you the truth, he said as soon as we entered
the inn, and I looked round the rooms seeing every subject that had
ever been treated dashed here and there: seascapes, horses ploughing,
battle-pieces, ravens, parrots, ladies in their shifts amid pillows,
swine on the hillside, and herds of cattle winding through fields, a
birchen wood showing aloft on a hillside which Lewis said was worth
all the other pictures put together, and he mentioned the name of the
painter of a large flowerpiece, and we should have admired his peonies
longer if the inn-keeper had not been at our heels waiting for us to
choose our rooms. It may have been for reasons of economy that we
elected to sleep in the same room. It may have been that the
inn-keeper had only one room to offer us. For good or evil reasons we
slept in the same room, of that I am sure, for I was awakened in the
middle of the night by Lewis trying to find matches to light a candle.
He was going into the backyard. A dog began to bark, and Alice sat up
quaking, beseeching me to go to Lewis's help and save him from being
devoured. It seemed to me that I had better waken the inn-keeper, and,
while I was standing in the middle of the floor wondering what had
better be done, Lewis returned. The dog had rushed at him, but
fortunately was on a chain.

But, Lewis, if you had been within reach, or if the chain had snapped!

And the depth of her passion may be judged from the discussion that
arose between her and me as to what one would do if one had to eat
something incredibly nasty. Alice's point was that it mattered a great
deal from whence the nastiness came; if it came from Lewis she would
sooner eat a pound than a pinch if it came from me, and she woke up
Lewis to ask him if he would not return her the compliment, and was
very angry when he said that a crap was the same all the world over,
and he would prefer to swallow a pinch rather than a pound, no matter
who owned it.

We certainly pigged it together, pigs no doubt, but aspiring pigs, who
went out in the morning to the borders of the lake to paint, Lewis
able to get down a large willow-tree in the foreground, retaining some
parts of the view, rejecting others, myself quite uninterested in
trying to arrange the lake as Corot might have arranged it, but unable
to express myself, fumbling with the beautiful outline of the shore,
which I could not fit into the canvas, till Alice, who had not risen
so early as we, came to meet us and joined in Lewis's criticism of my
abortive drawings, giggling under her parasol and echoing Lewis's
opinions.

Of course there must be a willow-tree and a man in a boat to make a
picture. Give me your charcoal, and he began to recompose, bringing
the edge of the wood into my canvas. Don't you see?

No, Lewis, I don't see; the edge of the wood doesn't come into my
vision.

It should come in to make a picture; and he strove hard vulgarising
what I had done, and doing this so successfully that in the end he had
to hand me back my pencil, saying he was sorry, that perhaps it was
better the way I had it. Alice did not think so, and we strolled over
to admire Lewis's work, which captured all her admiration. I think
that is how Corot would have seen it, he said, and we watched the
slate-coloured lake amid its autumn tints and sedges, and returned to
Paris a few days afterwards without a picture, to continue--

Good heavens! it is twelve o'clock, and I have been sitting here
dreaming since ten! And my eyes went to the large fat volume on the
table, not one line of which I had read.




IV


As soon as Teresa had removed the tablecloth my eyes went to a bulky
volume, _The Brothers Karamasov_, and, determined to break the back of
the story, I threw myself into an armchair, saying: If I read fifty
pages every evening I shall soon get through it. And I read on and on
through the fifty pages that my conscience had stipulated for, and
might have read to a hundred if the endless corridors down which I had
been wandering and the great halls through which I had passed had not
suddenly seemed to dissolve into vapour. A talent, I said, that
appeals to the young men of today. The pigmy admires the giant,
however loosely his frame may be put together, and our young writers
lift their pale etiolated faces to Dostoievsky. We've had enough of
art, is their cry, give us Nature, and this book fulfils all their
aspirations. It is impersonal and vague as Nature, I said, returning
to the consideration of the book, finding myself obliged to admit that
I could detect a dribble of outline in Aloysha, as much as may be
detected in the ikons on the walls. A man of genius without doubt, on
a different plane from our miserable writers of fiction, but inferior
to his own countrymen, to one at least, Turgenev, and on the whole
inferior to Balzac. Some rough spots there may be in Balzac, some
rocks, but rocks are better than marsh, and my thoughts went to the
philosophical studies, to _Louis Lambert_, _Seraphita_, _Jesus Christ
in Flanders._ These books affected me times past, but to read them
again would be to run the risk of a great disillusion. So why read
them? As I took a cigar from the box my thought returned to Paris, and
I remembered that in about a year I had begun to pine for London, for
the English language, English food, for my mother's house in Alfred
Place. Close by it I had rented a studio, in Cromwell Mews, and
Millais used to come to see me there, and Jim of course came and
talked to me of his compositions; but his influence was a declining
one, for in London Lewis was always by me in spirit controlling me,
exciting in me a desire to be loved for myself, prompting the
conviction that for a young man to go to Cremorne Gardens or the
Argyle Rooms, armed with a couple of sovereigns, was merely to procure
for himself a sensual gratification hardly on a higher level than that
which schoolboys indulge in. But if he go there with only a few cab
fares in his pocket he will be obliged to reconsider himself
physically, and those negligences in dress which were the despair of
his parents will vanish, his boots will begin to improve in shape and
quality, a pin will appear in his necktie, or maybe he will wear his
scarf in a ring, his shoulders will take a finer turn, and his head
will be upreared above them proudly. And if he would be loved for
himself he must cultivate an interesting attitude of mind, he must be
able to slough himself at will (his outer skin, I should have said),
and take part in wider humanity, in dreams, hopes, aspirations and
ideals not strictly his own, only his through sympathy with the lives
of others.

The only one who knew me in the days of the Cremorne and Argyle Rooms
is dear Edward, and it always interests me to hear him say that I
began myself out of nothing, developing from the mere sponge to the
vertebrate and upward. I should have liked another simile, for Nature
has never interested me as much as Art, perhaps I should never have
paid any attention to Nature if it hadn't been for Art. I would have
preferred Edward to have said that I was at once the sculptor and the
block of marble of my own destiny, and that every failure to win a
mistress in the Cremorne Gardens was a chipping away of the vague
material that concealed the statue. But the simile would perhaps not
have been so correct, for to say that a man is at once the sculptor
and the block of marble means that he is a conscious artist, and I was
not that in those days; I worked unconsciously. Yes, Edward is right;
I developed upward from the sponge, returning to Paris about eighteen
months later a sort of minor Lewis, having not only imbibed a good
deal of his mind, but even fashioned myself so closely to his likeness
that Julian, who caught sight of me on the boulevard soon after my
return, thought for a moment that I was Lewis.

On arriving at the Gare du Nord, the first thing to do was to find
Lewis, for without him the evening would never wear away; but the
concierge told me that Monsieur Hawkins had left, and that he did not
know his present address.... Julian took his coffee every evening at
the Caf Vivienne, but never came before eight; I waited till half
past, and then bethought myself of Alphonsine's. Monsieur Hawkins and
Madame Alice had not dined there for some weeks. Alphonsine did not
know their address; the dinner seemed worse than usual, and the
chatter of the women more tedious. At last somebody said that she
thought Marie Pellegrin knew Madame Alice's address, but Marie was not
at Alphonsine's that evening.... She came in, however, a little later,
and told me that Madame Alice was living in the Rue Duphot, No 14, an
_appartement au rez-de-chausse_, and away I went. Madame was at home,
but she had a gentleman dining with her.

Monsieur Hawkins.

Yes, the servant answered timidly, and I burst in.

Lewis was glad to see me, and Alice welcomed me with hard empty
laughter. Was she glad to see me back again? Or did she fear that
painting would distract Lewis's attention from her? However this may
be, she welcomed me, and was certainly pleased at my admiration of the
fine suite of apartments that I found her in. Yes, I have been going
ahead, she said, leading me through the windows into a strip of garden
where tall trees were trained up a high wall. She liked my question,
Who is the fellow who pays for all this? and I heard the name of
Phillipar for the first time, a great name it was then in the Parisian
financial world. After going bankrupt for a dozen millions or more, he
bought an island in the Mediterranean, and it was he or one of his
associates that kept Alice, never coming to see her oftener than once
a week, and then only in the afternoon.

So when you hear the servant whisper, _Monsieur est ici_, you'll just
skip round to the caf and wait.

And I shall find Lewis there, I added.

The remark did not please him, for he was trying to carry off the life
he was leading with great airs; and when I went to him a few days
after, seriously alarmed for his artistic future, saying that I had
heard in the studio that he had not been there for months, he answered
that I had a fixed income, but he had only four hundred francs a month
from his mother, and it was not easy to abstract Julian's fees, one
hundred francs a month, from four. He had counted upon selling the
landscape which we were looking at--a flowering glade in the woods of
Ville d'Avray; but the customer had been called away to South America
suddenly. He would come back, but in the meantime.... The picture was
not finished; he would like to have done some more to it, but he was
so hard up he could not afford the train fare; and my heart melting at
the thought of so much genius wasted for the sake of a train fare, I
went away with him to Ville d'Avray, and we found motives and painters
in the woods, and strayed under flowering boughs, and returned with
two pictures in time for dinner in the Rue Duphot, and a great deal of
art talk that was continued during and after dinner till Alice said:

You two have been away all day in the woods, and have no doubt had a
very pleasant time, but where do I come in? you come back here merely
to talk painting, and she flounced out of the room, leaving us
wondering at her ill temper and how long she would remain away. She
appeared in the doorway ten minutes after, and turning on her heel,
said, I don't know what you two are going to do; I am going to the
Bois. And you, Lewis, what are you going to do? I asked, and as Lewis
did not dare tell her that he would prefer to spend the evening
lounging in her drawing-room, we had to accompany her to the Cascade
and sit with her in the caf till midnight watching the celebrated
courtesans arriving and departing in their carriages. So-and-so is now
with So-and-so; he gives her a hundred thousand francs a year _et
elle le trompe tout le temps avec le petit chose_. She was interested
in these details, and not unnaturally, for she was now very nearly in
the front rank, and to keep her there we had to take her out every
evening. If we did not go to a theatre we went to a music-hall; the
Folies Bergres was coming into fashion at that time, and we were
often there till it was time to go to the Mabile. A tedious place of
amusement the Mabile always was to my thinking, and the dinner that
had cost over eighty francs, and the box at the Folies Bergres which
had broken into a second hundred-franc note, did not cause me as many
pangs of conscience as the five-franc entrance-fee. Ladies entered the
Mabile free, and Alice sometimes paid for Lewis, but very often before
she had time to slip five francs into his hand some friends engaged
her in conversation, and then he would beseech me to lend him the
money, and it angered me to see him fling the coin down with the air
of _un grand seigneur_. Half an hour is the longest time that anybody
remains in the garden, and as we walked round the estrade in silence,
I often thought of my poor Ballintubber tenants.

I wonder how much longer Alice intends to keep me waiting?

Sometimes she joined us, sometimes she went away with her aristocratic
connections, and as we walked home Lewis would rail against her,
swearing that he would never see her again, turning a deaf ear to my
pleading. Now it amused me to plead for her, and to soothe him I
agreed that she should not have left his arm as abruptly as she had
done; but her position was a difficult one, torn between love and
necessity. He would answer that he wasn't going to be made a fool of
before all Paris, and it delighted me to see him put on the grand air,
though if I had been Alice's _amant de coeur_ I should like to have
been treated frankly as a ponce, one that has to make way for the
_mich qui happe le pot_, as in Villon's ballade. To be an _amant de
coeur_ as Lewis was, _en cachette_, would have filled me with shame,
my instinct being always to be ashamed of nothing but to be ashamed,
and it was from the day that Lewis confessed himself ashamed of the
rle he was playing that he lost caste in my eyes. I began to catch
myself wondering how it was that he did not scruple about wasting all
his life with Alice; he seemed to have abandoned painting altogether,
and it was with some unwillingness that I followed them one night to a
masked ball dressed in the fantastic costume of Valentine in _Le Petit
Faust_. Was it at Perren's I met _la belle Hollandaise_? I think it
was at Perren's, the great _cours de danse_, where on week-days young
girls from the Faubourg St Germain learnt their first steps, and on
Sunday nights all the _demi-mondaines_ assembled--Lonie Leblanc, Cora
Pearl, Blanche d'Antigny, Margaret Byron, Hortense Schneider, Julia
Baron, and how many others? It was at Perren's that I met her, and
not at the commoner _bal_ in the Rue Vivienne; she was sitting by Cora
Pearl watching me, attracted no doubt at first by the red and yellow
tights that I wore, and recognising in her eyes a quiet look of
invitation, I summoned up all my courage and crossed the ballroom to
inquire if she would dance with me; which she did, passing into my
arms with a delightful motion, making me feel her presence without any
vulgar thrusting of her body upon me. The music ceased, and she said:
You're with friends? Then my heart misgave me, and I answered: Would
you like to be introduced? She said she would, and it was plain that
Alice was jealous of my new friend; like myself, she believed that it
could not be me, but Lewis, that she sought; but as soon as she was
assured that this was not so, her attitude toward _la belle
Hollandaise_ became friendlier, and we four at the close of the _bal_
drove to a fashionable restaurant, and afterward to the Rue Duphot,
Alice proposing a grand bivouac, for she did not care to sleep in her
bed while her guests slept upon the floor. But we would not accept her
bed; and my heart again misgave me, thinking that the evening, like
many an evening before, would prove platonic ... for me. As if reading
my thought _la belle Hollandaise_ asked me at what moment in the
evening I had begun to love her.

When you kissed me.

But I haven't kissed you at all yet, she said. Wait a little while.
And leaning her cheek against mine, she whispered strange
incomprehensible things in a low, quiet voice that drove me mad, her
eyes, curious and enigmatic, fixed on me, her pointed face lifted to
mine, her chin enticing, and her soft brown hair brushing my cheek. I
can recall the sweet moment when she drew her bracelets from her
wrists. But cannot call to mind any part of her undressing, only that
she was always beside me, curled serpent-like, a serpent of old Nile,
for a woman can coil like one, and during the night I often cried out
in terror, awakening Lewis and Alice, who lay asleep in the rich
imperial bed.... She must have kissed me in the morning and gone to
Alice's bathroom and dressed and done her hair, but I remember none of
these things, only that we once stood before a large picture by Diaz
in her house in the Avenue Victor Hugo. In those days I prefaced my
love affairs with a copy of _Mademoiselle de Maupin_; I held one in my
hand with a famous passage marked for her to read, and can still hear
her telling me that she had been offered three hundred thousand francs
to go to Russia. But if you go I shall never see you again. I don't
know whether I shall go or not. I don't know what's going to happen to
me, were the last words of _la belle Hollandaise_, the last words she
addressed to me, and if I relate the incident of our meeting it is
because we never forget her who reveals sensuality to us. She is now
as old as the fair helm-maker, but on that memorable night Alice and
Lewis seemed perfunctory lovers. A few evenings later he offered Alice
to me, for they had outlived their love for each other, and were now
seeking to maintain it in excess and orgy. Her face wore an odd smile
when he proposed her to me, so the thought may have come to her rather
than to him, the instinct of every woman being to turn to him who has
witnessed her love as soon as she wearies of her lover. So if she had
begun to weary of her lover about this time, we may acquit her of any
deep plan to involve me in a quarrel with my cousin when on my coming
to invite her out to dinner, she answered that she would dine with me,
but she was not yet dressed and I should have to wait in the
drawing-room till she had had her bath, unless indeed I did not mind
following her into the _cabinet de toilette_--a proposal gladly
accepted, for I did not doubt that I should discover in her a more
beautiful model than any that had posed in Julian's studio, even if
her breasts were too large for a nymph's. On stepping out of her bath
she dried herself in many picturesque attitudes whilst we talked of
her perfections, the length of her leg from the ankle to the knee, and
the spring of her hips. But of love not a word was spoken, for I was
not certain that Lewis might not have hidden himself behind a curtain
between the tester and the ceiling unbeknown to her.

She would not believe me at first, he said three months later, after
telling me that he had left Alice for good; she would not believe me
at first, and all she could find to say to persuade me to remain was:
You couldn't leave such a pretty pair of breasts! Soon after, I heard
from him that the rupture was confirmed by Alice herself, who had
passed him in her carriage in the _Champs lyses_. She had looked the
other way, and there was such scorn in her face that he had vowed he
would prove to her that in losing her he had not lost everything. A
few days after, he introduced me to a pretty blonde Swede, a woman who
was well thought of, but with hardly a tithe of Alice's reputation. I
never heard from Lewis why he left her, but one day a carriage drew up
by the pavement on which I was walking. The glass was let down, and
the Swede told me that she had been obliged to send Lewis away because
she found a _voiture de remise indispensable_.

_Les voitures de remise et les amants de coeur sont la ruine des
femmes_, she said; _comme combinaison, c'est aux pommes_. And the
wisdom of this second-rate light-o'-love, begotten no doubt of many
experiences, called my thoughts back to Alice, who, since she had
thrown out her _amant de coeur_, was rapidly becoming one of the
celebrated _demi-mondaines_ in Paris. Whilst she went up in the world
Lewis sank lower, attaching himself to women who could barely afford
him three hundred francs a month, the price of a grisette in the
Quartier Latin; the occasional bank-note that his mother used to send
him she could afford no longer; his sister was a great expense, and he
came to me one day to tell me that he had decided to earn his own
living.

Vanderkirko, you know whom I mean, he said, has a small china factory,
and he has agreed to take me as an apprentice. I am going to live with
him in the Avenue d'Italie _prs de la barrire_.

But you'll see nobody. You'll be exiled.

I am weary of the life I have been leading; and you'll come and see me
sometimes, though it is a long way off.

I'll come every Sunday, I answered, and a few Sundays later I found
him and Vanderkirko building a wall.

So you've come at last! and he took me into the house and showed me
some of his first attempts at painting china, and interested me in the
manufacture, in _la cuisson au petit et au grand feu_.

Vanderkirko was an ex-Communist, and Lewis told me how a door had
opened at the last moment when the Government troops were at his
heels. He had rushed through it, and through the house, and he was now
married _et trs rang_, and that was why he had refused my invitation
to dine and to go to Constant's afterwards. Lewis advised me that the
restaurants in the quarter _n'taient pas trop fameux_, but we could
get some simple food _au coin de la rue de la Gaiet_, and afterwards
at Constant's he would introduce me to some very dangerous criminals,
and he talked to me of the thieves he knew and the robberies they
planned and were planning; he talked to me about their mistresses,
exciting my imagination, for their nicknames were odd and picturesque.
If he be not the lover of a great _demi-mondaine_, he likes to live
among thieves and ponces, I thought; one extreme or the other of
society for him. A somewhat unreal person. But, why is one person more
unreal than another? I asked myself, deciding that a man without a
point of view always conveys the impression of unreality. The long
street that we used to walk up together rose in my vision, and Lewis
growing more confidential from lamp-post to lamp-post, telling me that
it was not idleness, as I supposed, that had kept him out of Julian's
studio, nor was it because he had no money to pay the fees--Julian
would have let him work for nothing--but he could not accept favours
from Julian. The tone of his voice in which he said this surprised me,
and then becoming still more confidential, he said that he could not
go to Julian's studio because his sister was Julian's mistress. I
don't know why I should have been so surprised, but I was surprised
that such a thing should have happened and that he should have told
me; and, very much concerned, I begged of him to tell me how it had
all come about. Apparently in the simplest way. He had introduced her
to Julian, and--my memory has dropped a stitch, something and
something. He had called at her hotel, and the concierge had told him
that Madame had gone away to the country, and the next time they met
he asked her where she had been; she answered that she had been to the
country with Julian. But you didn't come back that night. Where did
you sleep? With Fatty, she had answered coolly. He did not think it
right, and he did not think it wrong, that his sister should live as
it pleased her; he was always _un peu veule de nature_, without a
point of view; and returning from the coal-box, for the fire had sunk
very low, I picked up the thread of my thoughts again. He had told me
that it was on account of debts he had given up work at the studio,
and I remembered that he had confessed to owing Renouf one hundred
francs; Julian had lent him fifty, he had had a bit off Chadwick, he
had borrowed from Julian's _bonne_, and it was this last debt that had
convinced him that sooner or later he would have to earn his own
living. And my heart warmed once more toward this handsome fellow who
could take the rough with the smooth, and was as light-hearted in the
Avenue d'Italie as in the Rue Duphot, and I praised him to Julian as
we drank our coffee at the corner table, until one night, after
listening in silence, Julian asked if it had not occurred to me that
in losing Lewis Art had suffered a great loss. Lewis's defection from
the studio had never struck me in quite so serious a light before, and
I asked Julian if he thought that a great genius was being wasted at
the Barrire d'Italie. As if he did not hear me, Julian said that
casual loans of money were no use, and that it would be better for me
not to see Lewis any more unless I could do something definite for
him.

Why shouldn't you invite him to live with you for a year, eighteen
months?--two years will be sufficient.

But I live in the Htel de Russie.

The proper thing for you to do is to take an _appartement_ give him a
room and let him be certain of his breakfast and his dinner, and pay
for his washing. His mother will send him a little pocket-money, and
he can work at my studio.

But the studio fees?

Of course I couldn't take your money.

Julian had caught me, and feeling that I lacked courage to say No, and
bear the blame of allowing a great genius to wither unknown down by
the Barrire d'Italie, I wrote to Lewis telling him of Julian's
proposal to me, and next day he came up to thank me and to assure me
that he would try to justify the confidence that we placed in him. He
did not give me time to consider the wisdom of the sacrifice I was
making, and very wisely, but set out at once to find an _appartement_
that would suit us, coming next day to me with the joyful tidings that
he had seen one in the Passage des Panoramas in the Galerie Feydeau.
But I don't think I could live in the Passage des Panoramas, and I
begged him to look out for another _appartement_.

But this one is on the first floor, he urged; we shan't have to go up
many stairs, and we shall only have to run round the galleries to
Julian's studio. That will save us getting up half an hour earlier in
the morning and walking through the wet streets. We shall never see
the sky nor feel the wind blowing, and I looked up at the glass
roofing through which trickled a dim sordid twilight. The sky and wind
are well enough out of doors, he said, but once we are within doors
the more we are within the better. I have seen other _appartements_,
but nothing as suitable to our convenience. You are going to work,
aren't you? And if you are, nothing else matters.

It was with such specious argument that I was inveigled into my
prison, and more or less feebly I agreed to forgo light and air for
eighteen months or two years.




V


The fire was now burning brightly, and I recalled my memories one by
one till the three months we had spent in the studio became visible.

The first week my drawing was no worse than Lewis's; indeed, it was
rather better, but the second week he had outstripped me, and whatever
talent I had, the long hours in the studio wore it away rapidly, and
one day, horrified at the black thing in front of me, I laid down my
pencil: saying to myself, I will never take up pencil or brush again,
and slunk away out of the studio home to the Galerie Feydeau to the
room above the umbrella shop, to my bed, my _armoire  glace_, my
half-dozen chairs; and on that bed under its green curtains I lay all
night weeping, saying to myself: My life is ended and done. There is
no hope for me. All I wanted was Art, and Art has been taken from me.
_Je suis fichu, fichu, bien fichu_, I repeated, and the steps of the
occasional passer-by echoed mournfully under the glass roofing.

The Galerie Feydeau had never seemed a cheerful place to live in; it
was now as hateful to me as a prison, and Lewis was my gaoler. He went
away every morning at eight o'clock, and I met him at breakfast in the
little restaurant at the end of the Galerie Feydeau. After breakfast
he returned to the studio, and I was free to wander about the streets
or to sit in my room reading Shelley. He came home about five, and we
went for a walk, and he told me what was happening in the studio.
Everything that happened seemed to be for his greater honour and
glory. He had won the medal and the hundred francs that Julian offered
every month for the best drawing--an innovation this was to attract
custom--and a little spree had to be given to commemorate his triumph.
He organised the spree very well; of course it was my money that paid
for it; and the best part of the studio came to the Galerie Feydeau
one evening, and we sang and smoked and drank punch and played the
piano. Lewis played the violin, and Julian, drawing his chair up to
mine, told me that in ten years hence Lewis would be _hors concours_
in the Salon, and living in a great hotel in the Champs lyses
painting pictures at thirty thousand francs apiece. _Les grandes
tartines_ we used to call the pictures that went to the Salon, or _les
grandes machines_: I am forgetting my studio slang. Julian had a
difficult part to play. If he were to depreciate Lewis's talent I
might throw up the sponge and go away; he thought it safer to assure
me that my sacrifices were not made in vain; but man is such a selfish
and jealous animal that it had begun to seem to me I would prefer a
great failure for Lewis to a great success. Not a great failure, I
said to myself; for if he fail I shall never get rid of him. There
will be no escape from the Galerie Feydeau for me, so I must hope for
his success. He will leave me when he begins to make money. When will
that be? and the cruel thought crossed my mind that he was laughing at
me all the while, looking upon me as the springboard wherefrom he
would jump into a great Salon success. It seemed to me that I could
see us both in the years ahead--myself humble and obscure, he great
and glorious, looking down upon me somewhat kindly, as the lion looks
upon the mouse that has gnawed the cords that bound him. I think I was
as unhappy in the Galerie Feydeau as I had been in Oscott College. I
seemed to have lost everybody in the world except the one person I
wished to lose, Lewis. I was a stranger in the studio, where I went
seldom, for every one there knew of my failure; even the models I
feared to invite to my rooms lest they should tell tales afterwards.
At last the thought came of my sister's school friend, and at her home
I met people who knew nothing of Julian and L'cole des Beaux-Arts,
and at a public dinner I was introduced to John O'Leary and his
Parisian circle, and all these people were interested in me on account
of my father. One can always pick one's way into Society, and three
months later I was moving in American and English Society about the
Place Wagram and the Boulevard Malesherbes, returning home in the
early morning, awaking Lewis frequently to describe the party to him,
awaking him one morning to tell him that a lady whose boots I was
buttoning in the vestibule had leaned over me and whispered that I
could go to the very top button ... if I liked. A very pretty answer
it had seemed to Lewis, and it was clear that he was affected by it,
though he resisted for a long time my efforts to persuade him to allow
me to introduce him to my friends. I had intended only an outing, an
exhibition of my cousin, after which he was to return to his kennel.
But I had interrupted his life, and fatally; invitations came to him
from every side; he accepted them all, and we started to learn the
Boston before the _armoire  glace_. He learnt it quicker than I did,
and when he returned from Barbizon, whither he had gone to meet the
wife of an American millionaire, I told him I could live no longer in
the Galerie Feydeau and was going away to Boulogne to meet some people
whom I had met at Madame Ratazzi's, into whose circle I had happily
not introduced him, and wishing to take him down a peg I mentioned
that I had acted with her in _La Dame aux Camlias_. He flew into a
violent rage. I was going away with swagger friends to enjoy myself,
careless whether he ate or starved. He was right from this point of
view. I was breaking my promise to him. But is there anybody who would
be able to say he would not have broken his in the same circumstances?
None! It was at once a shameful and a natural act; he was my friend;
it was shameful, it was horrible, but there are shameful and horrible
things in other lives beside mine. His presence had become
unendurable. But why excuse myself further? Let the facts speak for
themselves and let me be judged by them. They have already been
published in _The Confessions of a Young Man_, but I wonder now if I
told in that book enough of the surprise that I experienced on finding
him still in the _appartement_ in the Galerie Feydeau when I returned
from Boulogne? He should have moved out of my rooms after the quarrel,
but instead of that he had converted the sitting-room into a workshop,
and his designs for lace curtains occupied one entire wall. He'll go
tomorrow, of course, I said, but he did not go on the morrow or the
day after, and at the end of the week he was still there, and annoying
me by whistling as he worked on his design. At last, unable to bear it
any longer, I opened the door of my bedroom and begged him to cease,
and it is to this day a marvel to me how he restrained himself from
strangling me. He looked as if he were going to rush at me, and on the
threshold of my room indulged in the most fearful vituperation and
abuse, to which I felt it would be wiser not to attempt an answer, for
his arms were long and his fists were heavy; he was always talking
about striking out, and it is foolish to engage in a combat when one
knows one is going to get the worst of it, so I just let him shout on
until he retired to his lace curtains, and I resolved to give notice.

He can't stay after quarter-day.

But the quarter was a long way off, and every day I met him in the
Passage des Panoramas among my friends, flowing away in a new ulster
past the jet ornaments and the fans; a splendid fellow he certainly
was with his broken nose and his grand eyes, and the ulster suited him
so well that I began to regret a quarrel which prevented me from
asking him questions about it. He came and went as he pleased,
passing me on the staircase and in the rooms, his splendid
indifference compelling the conclusion that however lacking in
character a reconciliation would prove me to be, I could no longer
forego one, and after many hesitations I called after him and begged
that he would allow bygones to be bygones. I think that he said this
was impossible; he must have been counting on my weakness; however
this may be, he played with me very prettily, forcing me to plead,
practically to ask his forgiveness, and when we were friends again he
related that he was looking out for a studio, and in the effusion of
reconciliation I very foolishly asked him to tell me if he should
happen upon an _appartement_ that he thought would suit me, for live
another quarter in the Galerie Feydeau I couldn't. He promised that he
would not fail to keep his eyes open, and a few days after he
mentioned that he had seen a charming _appartement_ in the Rue de la
Tour des Dames--the very thing that would suit me. As there was not
nearly enough furniture in the Galerie Feydeau to fill it, he entered
into negotiations with an upholsterer, and dazzled me with a scheme of
decoration which would cost very little to carry out, and which would
give me as pretty an _appartement_ as any in Paris. He was kind enough
to relieve me of all the details of _un dmnagement_, and what could
I do in return but invite him to stay with me until he had painted a
picture?

We had a friend at that time who painted little naked women very badly
and sold them very well, and it occurred to Lewis that if Falro could
sell his pictures there was no reason why he should not, so he
borrowed a hundred francs from me to hire a model, and painted a
nymph; but though better drawn than Falro's nymphs, she went the
round, from picture-dealer to picture-dealer, never finding a
purchaser, which did not matter much, for Lewis began at this time to
please a rich widow who lived in Rue Jean Goujon. She was not,
however, very generous, refusing always _de le mettre dans ses
meubles_, and he continued to live with me, wearing my hats and
neckties, borrowing small sums of money, and what was still more
annoying, beginning to cultivate a taste for literature, daring even
to seek literary advice and help from Bernard de Lopez, a Parisian
despite his name--Parisian in this much, that he had written a hundred
French plays, all in collaboration with the great men of letters of
his time, including Dumas, Banville, and Gautier.

I had picked him up in the Htel de Russie very soon after my arrival
in Paris. He dined there every Monday, an old habit (the origin of
this habit he never told me, or I have forgotten)--a strange habit, it
seemed, for anything less literary than the Htel de Russie ... for
the matter of that anything less literary than Bernard de Lopez's
appearance it is impossible to imagine: two piggy little eyes set on
either side of a large, well-shaped nose; two little stunted legs that
toddled quickly forward to meet me, and two little warm, fat hands
that often held mine too long for comfort. So small a man never had
before so large a head, a great bald head with a ring of hair round
it, and his chin was difficult to discover under his moustaches; roll
after roll of flesh descended into his bosom, and, by God! I can still
see in my thoughts his little brown eyes watching me just like a pig,
suspiciously, though why he should have been suspicious of me I cannot
say, unless, indeed, he suspected that I doubted the existence of the
plays he said he had written in collaboration, a thing which I
frequently did, unjustly, for he was telling the truth. He had
collaborated with Gautier, Dumas, and Banville, and having assured
myself of this by the _brochures_, I began to think that he could not
have been always so trite and commonplace.

Men decline like the day, and he was in the evening of his life when I
met him, garrulous about the days gone by, and in the Caf Madrid,
whither I invited him to come with me after dinner at the Htel de
Russie, he told me that Scribe had always said he would like to
rewrite _La Dame Blanche_. Rewrite a piece that has been acted a
thousand times, Lopez would gurgle, and then he told me about _la
scne  faire_. The morning he had brought Dumas the manuscript of _Le
Fils de la Nuit_ he had said to him: _Nous aurons des larmes_. He used
to speak about a writer called Saint-George, whose rooms were always
heavily scented, and scent gave the little man _des maux de tte_.
There was another man whose name I cannot recall, with whom he had
written many plays, and who had an engagement book like a doctor or a
dentist, _qui ne l'empche pas d'avoir beaucoup d'esprit_. It pleases
me to recall Lopez's very words: they bring back the 'seventies to me,
and my own thoughts of the 'seventies and the intellectual atmosphere
in which these men lived, going about their business with comedies and
plays in their heads--an appointment at ten to consider the first act
of a vaudeville; after breakfast another appointment, perhaps at the
other end of Paris, to discover a plot for a drama; a talk about an
opera in the caf at five, and perhaps somebody would call in the
evening--no--not in the evening, for they wrote on into the night,
tumbling into bed at three or four in the morning.

Of the wonderful 'seventies Lopez was _le dernier rejeton_; and
talking about _Le Fils de la Nuit_, the first play that had ever run
two hundred nights, we strolled back to his lodging in the Place
Pigalle--a large room on the second floor overlooking the Place with a
_cabinet de toilette_. And as time went on I learnt some facts about
him. He had been married, and received from his wife the few thousand
francs a year on which he lived, and the Empire bed with chairs and a
toilet-table to match must have come from her; he would not have
thought of buying them, and still less the two portraits by Angelica
Kauffmann on either side of the fireplace. A man who had outlived his
day! a superficial phrase, for none can say when a man has outlived
his day. He had not outlived his when the managers ceased to produce
his plays, for he drew my attention to literature, and it is pleasant
to me to remember the day that I hurried down to Galignani's to buy a
play, for one evening while we talked in the Caf Madrid it had
occurred to me that with a little arrangement Lewis and Alice would
supply me with the subject of a comedy. But never having read a play I
did not know how one looked upon paper. Congreve, Wycherley, Farquhar,
and Vanbrugh (Leigh Hunt's edition) were my first dramatic authors,
and my first comedy, in imitation of these writers, was composed and
written and copied out and read to Bernard de Lopez within six weeks
of its inception. His criticism of it was, I thought at first we were
going to have a very strong play, a man that marries his mistress to
his friend, and I understood at once that the subject had been
frittered away in endless dialogue after the manner of my exemplars,
and it was as likely as not in the hope of getting all this dialogue
acted that I returned to England, remaining there some time, writing a
long comedy which Lopez did not like. Drama was abandoned for poetry,
and Lopez encouraged me to tell him of my poems, advising me as we
ascended the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette or the Rue des Martyrs to
choose subjects that would astonish the British public by their
originality--for instance, if instead of inditing a sonnet to my
mistress's eyebrows I were to tell the passion of a toad for a rose.

Not that, of course not that, but poems on violent subjects.

A young man's love for a beautiful corpse, I interjected.

He introduced French poetry to me, and through him I read a great deal
that I might not have heard of, and wrote a great deal that I might
never have written; and it was to him that I brought my first copy of
my first book, _Flowers of Passion_, together with an article that had
appeared in _The World_, entitled, A Bestial Bard. The article began:
The author of these poems should be whipped at the cart's tail, while
the book is being burnt in the market-place by the common hangman. It
filled the greater part of a column, and the note struck by Edmund
Yates was taken up by other critics, and, much impressed by the
violence of their language, Lopez said: They seem to have exhausted
the vocabulary of abuse upon you, and he began to sound me regarding
the possibility of an English and a French author writing a play
together for the English stage. Martin Luther seemed to us a character
that would suit Irving, then at the height of his fame.

But shall we present both sides of the question impartially like
Goethe? Or shall we write as ardent Protestants?

As ardent Protestants, I answered. Lopez acquiesced, and one day when
I called to discuss a certain scene between Catherine Bora and Luther
with my collaborator, I came upon Lewis reading a sonnet to him.
Always thrusting himself into my life! are words that will let the
reader into the secret of my annoyance. He rose abashed, and the sight
of Lewis abashed was a novel one. Lopez continued to explain:

_Mon cher monsieur, ce n'est pas pour vous contrarier, mais 'd'o
suintent d'tranges pleurs' est un vers de sept; suintent n'a que deux
syllabes._

_C'est ma mauvaise prononciation flamande_, Lewis said, and he bundled
up his papers, adding: You have come to talk Martin Luther, so I'll
leave you.

But what right does he come interrupting you?

He only came to show me a sonnet.

But what the devil does he want to write sonnets for? Isn't it enough
that he should paint bad pictures?

He merely came to inquire out the prosody of a certain line, Lopez
answered, and he tried to calm me.

No, there's no use, Lopez. I can't fix my thoughts. Perhaps after
dinner. What do you say to the Rat Mort?

He raised no objection to the Rat Mort, but the moment we entered the
caf he rushed up to a dishevelled and wild-eyed fellow. I thought I
had lost him. Let me introduce you, he said, to Villiers de l'Isle
Adam. Lewis was forgotten in the excitement of dining with a real man
of letters, in the pleasure of confiding to Villiers the scene that I
had come to talk to Lopez about.

It is to Martin Luther himself, I said, whom she has never seen, that
she confesses in a wood her love of Martin Luther.

I must introduce you to Mallarm, said Villiers, and he wrote a note
on the edge of the table. You'll find him at home on Tuesday evenings.

Mallarm spoke to me of Manet, and he must have spoken to Manet about
me, for one night in the Nouvelle Athnes Manet asked me if the
conversation distracted my attention from my proofs. Come and see me
in my studio in the Rue d'Amsterdam. And not very many evenings later
Mends was introduced to me between one and two in the morning. He
asked me to the Rue Mansard, where he lived with Mademoiselle Holms,
whereupon, before I had time to realise the fact, I was launched on
Parisian literary and artistic society, and six months afterwards
Manet said to me, There is no Frenchman in England who occupies the
position you do in Paris. Perhaps there isn't, I answered
mechanically, my thoughts turning to Lewis, who was certainly going
down in the world. I should have done better to have left him in the
Mont Rouge to get his living as a workman, for he'll never be able to
scrape together any sort of living as a painter, and my spirits rose
mountains high against him. An old man from the sea, I said, whom I
cannot shake off.

But the courage to fling him into the street was lacking, and I
continued to bear with him day after day, hoping that he would leave
me of his own accord. He was well enough in Julian's studio or in the
Beaux-Arts or in English and American society, but he would seem
shallow and superficial in the Nouvelle Athnes, and I always avoided
taking him there; but one night he asked me to tell him where I was
dining, and I had to tell him at the Nouvelle Athnes. He pleaded to
be allowed to accompany me, and I will admit to some vanity on my
part; or was it curiosity that prompted me to introduce him to Degas,
who very graciously invited us to sit at his table and talked to us of
his art, addressing himself as often to Lewis as he did to me. He
opened his whole mind to us, beguiled by Lewis's excellent listening,
until the waiter brought him a dish of almonds and raisins. Then a
lull came, and Lewis said, leaning across the table:

I think, Monsieur Degas, you will agree with me that, more than any
other artist among us, Jules Lefebre sums up all the qualities that an
artist should possess.

My heart misgave me, and Degas's laughter did not console me, nor his
words whispered in my ear as he left:

_Votre ami est trs fort.... Il m'a fait monter l'chelle comme
personne._ And a few days afterwards in the Rue Pigalle he said:

_Comment va votre ami? Ah! celui-l est d'une force._

_Mais, cher ami, le pauvre garon n'a jamais su se dgager--_

_Pas du tout; il est trs fort._

_Son esprit n'a jamais su dpasser certaines bornes ... la Rue
Bonaparte._

But no explanation pleased Degas as much as his own: _Il m'a tir les
vers du nez ... et comme personne._ I resisted this explanation till,
feeling that I was beginning to show myself in a stupid light, I
accepted it outwardly, though convinced inly that Lewis had been
guilty of the unpardonable sin--lack of comprehension. He must go and
at once, and as soon as I returned home I begged him to leave me. At
the end of the month, when my mother sends me my money, he answered,
and my heart sank at the thought of having him with me so long. I
think I must have answered, For God's sake go! and a few days
afterwards the concierge mentioned to my great surprise that Monsieur
Hawkins had left, and had paid her the few francs he owed her. A good
trait on his part, I thought, and my heart softened toward him
suddenly, and continued soft until a lady told me that Monsieur
Hawkins had been to see her and had borrowed a hundred francs from
her.

I didn't dare refuse, she said, but I thought it rather mean of him to
come to ask me for the money.

We sat looking at each other, the lady thinking no doubt that I should
not have told Lewis I was her lover, and myself thinking that I had at
length caught Lewis in deliberate blackmail; and, going round to the
studio in which he had settled himself, I said, before looking round
the walls to admire the sketches:

I have just come from Miss ----, and she tells me you borrowed a
hundred francs from her.

If I did, you borrowed from Alice Howard, my mistress, he answered.

I had forgotten, and sat dumbfounded. But why had I borrowed this
money? I never wanted for money. Perhaps to put Alice to the test, or
to get back some of my own, for she had borrowed often from me, and
finding her in affluent circumstances.... She asked me some days after
to repay her, and I gave her the money that was in my pockets--a
hundred francs; the other hundred I forgot all about till one evening
at Alphonsine's I saw her rise up from her place and walk toward me, a
vindictive look round her mouth and eyes.

Have you come, she said, to pay me the money that you owe me?

To admit that I had borrowed money from Alice at Alphonsine's was
impossible; lies happen very seldom in my life, but they have
happened, and this was an occasion when a lie was necessary. But I
lied badly from lack of habit, and Lewis had heard from the women
there that I had not stood up to Alice; and now to pass off the matter
on which I had come to speak to him, I asked him how I should have
answered Alice.

You should have answered her ironically: _Toi, tu m'as prt de
l'argent? O a? Quand tu venais me trouver  l'htel de toutes les
Russies et que tu pleurais pour un djeuner? Quand tu n'avais pas deux
mtres d'indienne  te coller sur les fesses? Non, mais vrai: y
avait-il une maquerelle rue de Provence qui voulait de ta peau? Tu dis
que tu m'as prt de l'argent? C'est-il quand ton tlier te reprenait
ta cl tous les matins, ou quand tu demandais aux michs cinquante
centimes pour aller aux chiottes_?

Splendid! I cried.

_Faut pas se laisser marcher sur le pied, dis. Je ne lui aurais par
parl autrement._

You have _l'esprit prime-sautier_, but any wit I have is _l'esprit de
l'escalier ... et de la dernire marche_.

_Je ne lui aurais pas parl autrement_.

Patter always excites my admiration; we get back to origins--to the
monkey. And looking round the studio the number of sketches that I saw
everywhere in oil and water-colour put the thought into my mind that
Lewis must have discovered a patron and was living as comfortably as
he had ever done with me. So all my sacrifices were in vain, I said to
myself, and aloud to him: You are doing a great deal of work. I have
discovered a patron, he answered, and he told me of an old man living
in a barred house in a distant suburb who never opened his door except
to a certain ring--an old man in gold-rimmed spectacles who would buy
any drawing that Lewis brought him at a price: thirty francs for a
flower in a vase, for an apple, a pear, for a street corner, for a
head sketched in ten minutes. He is your banker? I said. Yes; it's
just like cashing a cheque. And I left the studio hoping that the old
man who looked at Lewis's drawings through gold-rimmed spectacles
would live for many a year. His death would certainly bring back Lewis
to me asking for fifty, for a hundred francs; and if I could not lend
him so much he would ask for twenty, and if I could not manage twenty
he would ask for ten, and if I could not manage ten he would ask for
five, perhaps coming down to the price of his omnibus home. But the
old man continued in the flesh, and weeks and months passed away
without my seeing or hearing from Lewis. Years must have gone by
before we met at Barbizon, whither he had gone intent upon investing
all his savings on a Salon picture.

An old graveyard full of the lush of June had taken his fancy, and
after many sketches he was still certain that he had hit on a good
subject for a picture. A critic pointed out that two children looking
at a gravestone would balance the composition; another said that a
yellow cat coming from the cottages along the wall would complete it.
Both were right; all that now remained for Lewis to do was to paint
the picture. But he lacked touch, and his picture would have remained
very tinny if Stott of Oldham had not arrived at Barbizon suddenly.

You mustn't rub the paint like that. See here; and taking the brush
from Lewis's hand he mixed a tone and drew the brush slowly from right
to left. Almost at once the paint began to look less like tin, and
Lewis said, I think I understand, and he was able to imitate Scott
sufficiently well to produce a picture which Bouguereau said would
attract attention in the Salon if the title were changed to _Les Deux
Orphelins._

_L'Amour renat de ses Cendres_ is not a title that will appeal to the
general public.

Lewis tried to explain that what he meant was that the love of the
parents is born again in their children; but he allowed Bouguereau's
good sense to prevail, and the picture drew from Albert Wolf an
enthusiastic notice of nearly half a column in the _Figaro_, after
which it became the fashion to go to the Salon to see _Les Deux
Orphelins_ and Monsieur Hawkins, _un jeune peintre anglais de beaucoup
de talent_, for Lewis could not separate himself from his picture,
and every day he grew bolder, receiving his friends in front of it and
explaining to them, and to all and sundry, the second title, _L'Amour
renat de ses Cendres_. His conduct was not very dignified, but he had
been waiting so long for recognition of his talent that he could not
restrain himself. He sold _Les Orphelins_ for ten thousand francs, and
next year the Salon was filled with imitations of it, and there was a
moment when it seemed that Julian's prophesy was about to come true.
The hotel in the Champs lyses was being sought for when Lewis's
first patron, the old man to whom he had sold his sketches for
twenty-five or thirty francs apiece, died suddenly; and for nearly two
years Welden Hawkinses were being knocked down at the Htel de Vente
for fifty and a hundred francs apiece.

Fifteen hundred or two thousand pictures thrown upon the market was no
doubt a misfortune, I said as I stirred the fire, but if Lewis had
been a man of healthy talent he would have painted other pictures. But
his talent was the talent of _un dtraqu_, and a recollection of a
naked man looking at a naked woman through a mask was remembered. The
hereditary taint was always there, I said, and I began to turn over in
my mind all that Lewis had told me about his father. My father left
mamma some three or four years after their marriage. I think I was
twenty before I ever saw him. I was given an address of a
lodging-house in St James's, and found my father in a small back room,
sitting on a bed playing the flute. Oh, is that you, Lewis? Just a
moment. Lewis had heard from his mother many stories of his father's
eccentricities, and he had an opportunity of verifying these in St
James's Street, for when the elder Hawkins laid aside his flute and
engaged in perfunctory conversation with his son he allowed a fly to
crawl over his face. Every moment Lewis expected his father to brush
the insect away. It had been round one eye several times, and had
descended the nose, and was about to go up the eye once again when
Lewis, who could contain himself no longer, cried out:

Father, that fly!

Pray don't disturb it, I like the sensation.

My thoughts passed from Lewis to Jim, and I sat for a long time asking
myself if Jim would have succeeded better than Lewis if he had gone to
Paris in the 'fifties. He had more talent than Lewis, but his talent
seemed still less capable of cultivation. There is a lot of talent in
Ireland, but whether any of it is capable of cultivation is a question
one can ponder for days, and my thoughts breaking away suddenly I
remembered how, soon after my return from Ireland when I had settled
in Cecil Street in the Strand, and was trying to make my living by
writing for the papers, the desire to see Jim again in the old studio
in Prince's Gardens had come upon me, and I had gone away one night
in a cab to Kensington; but the appearance of the footman who opened
the door surprised me, and I asked myself if Jim had sold some
pictures, or had let the house. He had sold the house, and any letters
that came from him were sent to Arthur's Club, where I could obtain
news of him. The porter told me that any letter would be forwarded,
but I wanted to see Jim that very night, and addressing myself to the
secretary of the club, who happened to be passing through the hall at
that moment, I begged of him to authorise the porter to give me Mr
Browne's address, which he did: and I went away in a cab certain that
the end of the drive would bring me face to face with my old boon
companion. The cab turned out of Baker Street and we were soon in Park
Road driving between Regent's Park and a high wall with doors let into
it. Before one of these the hansom stopped and I saw a two-storeyed
house standing in the midst of a square plot. A maid-servant took me
up a paved pathway, mentioning that Mr Browne was on the drawing-room
floor, and I found him waiting expectant in his smock, a palette and a
sheaf of brushes in his left hand, the thumb of his right hand in his
leather belt.

My dear Jim, I've been to Prince's Gardens.

We've sold the house and Pinkie and Ada have gone to live with friends
and relations.

There was a feeling in the room that nobody had called to see him for
many a month, and I noticed that a good deal of colour had died out of
the thick locks of flaxen hair and that his throat was wrinkled.

And all your pictures, Jim?

Your mother was kind enough to hang them up in Alfred Place when we
left Prince's Gardens, and when she left the house at the end of her
lease the pictures were taken away.

And you didn't make any inquiries?

Well, you see, I haven't room for many canvases.

The moment had come when I must show some interest in his pictures,
and turning from the one on the easel I picked one out of the rows,
hoping that the design might inspire a few words of praise.

You must have painted a dozen or twenty times upon it. I don't know
how you can work over such a surface, a thick coagulated scum. Why
don't you scrape? Manet always scrapes before painting, and he never
loses the freshness; his paint is like cream after twenty repaintings.

Jim did not know anything about Manet, nor did he care to hear about
Monet, Sisley, Renoir, the Nouvelle Athnes and its litterati. He knew
nothing of Banville's versification and had not read Goncourt's
novels, so I told him that Catulle had thought well of my French
sonnet, for having written a drama on the subject of Luther it was
necessary to write a French dedicatory sonnet, and I recited it to
Jim to revenge myself upon him for his having told me that he knew
French as well as English.

My landlady's daughter, he said, pointing to a small portrait on the
wall, and some time afterwards a young girl was heard singing on the
stairs. There she is. Shall I ask her in?

I begged of him to do so, and a somewhat pretty girl with round eyes
and a vivacious voice, came into the room and chattered with us; but
her interest in the fact that Jim was my cousin was a little
high-pitched, and it was obvious that she took no interest in his
pictures, or indeed in any pictures; and it was a relief when she
turned to Jim to ask him if he was staying to dinner.

Let us go out together and dine somewhere, I said.

Yes, ask him out to dinner. It will do him good. He hasn't been beyond
the garden for weeks.

Yes, Jim; we will go up town and dine together.

I have no money.

But father will lend you any money you want. It will go down in the
... you can settle with father when you like.

She left the room and Jim spoke of the people in whose house he was
lodging, a dancing master and his wife, and he gave me a mildly
sarcastic account of Mrs ---- coming up to see him in the morning to
tell him that he might have the use of the parlour for ten shillings
extra; my ears retain his voice still saying something about coals and
gas not being included, and what tickled his fancy was the way the old
lady used to linger about the drawing-room trying to draw the
conversation on to his sisters, where was Miss Ada living now, and was
Miss Pinkie still living with Lord Shaftesbury? He continued talking,
moving the canvases about, and I was willing to appreciate the designs
if he would only say that he would come out to dinner. At last he
said:

You see, I haven't been to my tailor's for a long time, and my
wardrobe is in a ragged and stained condition. I dare say they'll be
able to find some cold beef or cold mutton or a sausage or two in the
larder. You don't mind?

Of course I did not mind. It was for a talk about old times that I had
come, and after the cold meats we returned to the drawing-room. Jim
showed me all his latest designs and we discussed them together,
mingling our memories of the women we had known. The names of Alice
Harford, Annie Temple, and Mademoiselle d'Anka came into the
conversation; I told him about Alice Howard, hoping he would ask me if
she were as big as Alice Harford, and then, determined to rouse him, I
said the great love affair of my life was a small, thin woman. Still
he did not answer.

If a woman be sensual--

Beauty is better than bumping, he answered with a laugh, and it seemed
that we were to have one of our erstwhile conversations about Art and
that Jim would draw forth a canvas and say, This has all the beauties
of Raphael and other beauties besides; but he seemed to have lost
nearly all his interest in painting, allowing me, however, to search
round the room and discover behind the sofa a new version of _Cain
Shielding his Wife from Wild Beasts_, and I spoke of the design and
the conception and the movement of the man about to hurl a spear at a
great lion approaching from behind a rock. He took up his palette but
forgot to roar like a lion, and when he laid it aside he did not sing
_Il balen_ or _A che la morte_, nor did he tell me that Pinkie had a
more beautiful voice than Jenny Lind, and when we walked across the
garden and he bade me goodbye at the gate, I felt that he had worn out
himself as well as his clothes--his hopes, his talent, his enthusiasm
for life, all were gone, an echo remained, an echo which I did not try
to reawaken. I never saw him again; he was for me but an occasional
thought, until one day I found myself sitting next a showily dressed
woman at luncheon, the daughter of Jim's landlady, and it was from her
I learnt that Jim had died about two years back in Park Road. She said
he had become quite a hermit in the later years of his life, never
leaving the house except for a stroll round the garden.

Painting always, I said.

A perplexed look came into her face which I attributed to the fact
that she did not know whether the pictures were works of art or
nothing at all, and I asked myself suddenly what Jim's death might
have been, for a man so individual as Jim should die an individual
death. But my imagination did not succeed in conjuring up any worthy
death for him. Perhaps Turgenev might have failed too, though indeed
Jim's death is very like a Turgenev death, only a little more
wonderful. Nature often invents better than we, better even than
Turgenev, who would have seen that Jim must be killed by a lion; but
even Turgenev could not have seen how this could be managed without
sending him out to Africa to hunt lions, which would be an invention
only one degree more stupid than the supposition that the keeper had
left one of the lion's cages open in the Zoological Gardens, and that
the animal had escaped and climbed over the wall of Park Road, killing
Jim, after tearing a hole through a large canvas of _Cain Shielding
his Wife from Wild Beasts_, behind which the painter had hidden
himself. Turgenev would not have thought of a snow lion, but Nature
did, and one day when the snow was lying several feet deep round the
house, she inspired Jim to make good his theory that a lion always
lies with one paw tucked under him, never with the fore-paws stretched
out like Landseer's lions in Trafalgar Square. He had always been
saying that this was so, but his landlord and landlady did not wish
him to start sculpture in the house. But now there was snow at the
very door, and he began to pile it up, and when all the snow in the
garden was exhausted the neighbours sent their snow in wheelbarrows
and he continued to pile up hundredweight upon hundredweight until his
lion assumed almost Egyptian proportions, rising above the surrounding
walls, attracting the eyes of the hansom-cabmen who drew up their
horses to admire and to suggest that the lion should be sent to the
British Museum. Perhaps the Governor might have a refrigerator built
for him, was a remark, which caused some amusement to the dancing
master, his wife and daughter, and to Jim. But it was not thought
worth while writing to the Governor of the Museum on the subject. The
suggestion, Why don't you 'ave him photographed? coming next day from
the top of an omnibus seemed more practical, and the maid-servant was
asked to run round to the photographer, and the evening was spent
counting the number of copies that would be required; each neighbour
who had sent his snow must get one, and before bedtime it was noticed
that the brightness of the stars predicted a fine day. But during the
night clouds gathered, and in the morning the garden was enveloped in
a white mist. A messenger came from the photographer to say he could
do nothing that day, and the following day he failed to keep his
appointment, and in a drizzle of rain Jim set to work to patch up his
melting masterpiece. The next day the photographer arrived and got
what he hoped would prove a very good impression; but everybody wanted
a half-plate; and Jim worked on among the wet snow, Florence begging
of him to put on an overcoat and a stronger pair of boots. But he
tramped about in shoes, and next day he was crouching over the fire,
and when the doctor heard the story of the lion he threw up his hands.

How a man of his age could be foolish enough to risk his life for such
nonsense! And you tell me he always goes out without an overcoat? I'll
call tomorrow and give him oxygen if required.

The thaw continued during the night, and Jim and his lion dissolved
together. My first friend, I muttered, the springboard from whence I
jumped into life and Art. And going to my Monet, I asked myself if Jim
would have been able to discern better than AE the beauty of the
evanescent willows rising out of and vanishing into the mist. He was a
clever man, and knew a great deal more than anybody gave him credit
for knowing. He talked nonsense about his own genius, but he knew he
was talking nonsense, and his nonsense helped him to disguise his
failure from himself for a moment. He should have been born in Venice
about the year 1680; his talent would have come to fruition in those
years, and Van Dyck would have painted his portrait. Just then the
servant opened the door to ask me if I were at home to Mr Hugh Lane.

Yes.

And a moment after there came into the room a tall, thin young man,
talking so fast that I gathered with difficulty that there must be a
great many pictures in Irish country houses which he would like to
exhibit in Dublin.

If anybody cares for pictures, I contrived to interject, and he sat
twisting and untwisting his legs, linking and unlinking his hands, his
talk beginning to bore me a little, for I could not detect any
aestheticism in him, only a nervous desire to run a show. Your
brother, I said, called here a few days ago to prepare me for your
visit. He said that you were going to revive Irish painting. I came
here to revive the Irish language; it existed once upon a time, but
Irish painting--

Lane interrupted me, admitting that the men who had painted in Ireland
at the end of the eighteenth century were merely reflections of Sir
Joshua and Romney.

But your brother--

Without noticing my interruption he continued telling me that, for the
last fortnight, he had been travelling through Ireland, visiting all
the country houses, and had obtained promises from many people to lend
their pictures.

Now, your name among the list of patrons at the exhibition--But why
are you giving yourself all this trouble? What is your object?

Well, you see, I am Lady Gregory's nephew, and must be doing something
for Ireland.

Striking a blow, I said.

A bewildered look, quickly repressed, however, revealed to me that he
did not understand my remark. You don't speak with a brogue. Your
brother said you didn't. How is that?

He produced his little hysterical laugh, and without stopping to
explain why it was that he had no brogue, looked round the room in
search of pictures worth borrowing, and having decided upon two, a
portrait of Rachel by Couture and a small Constable, he said he hoped
I would try to influence Sir Thornley Stoker in his favour; he would
like to print Sir Thornley's name among the patrons of the forthcoming
exhibition, an exhibition designed for the advancement of Art In
Ireland. I gave Lane my promise that he should be invited to the
palace, our nickname for Sir Thornley's house, so full was it of
beautiful things. But Sir Thornley could not be persuaded, and my
affection for him was strained to the uttermost by his persistent
speaking of Lane as a London picture-dealer who had come to Ireland to
see what he could pick up.

Or perhaps he's on the lookout for a post in the Museum.

I have told you, Sir Thornley, that he is Lady Gregory's nephew, and
would like to do something for Ireland. That should be sufficient. He
growled and muttered that Lane might tell us he was a great expert,
but what proof had we of it? And the old doctor grew as grumpy as if I
had been speaking of a bone-setter. My dear Thornley, we do not learn
anything that we did not know before; and I sketched out the
life-history of a chef who before discovering his vocation had
wandered from one trade to another, trying all, until one night in the
kitchen two ducks were roasting before the fire, the gravy running out
of their back-sides, and deeply moved, he had stood immersed in a
great joy.

But what has that got to do with Lane?

Lane is Lady Gregory's nephew.

You have told me that before; you have said that before.

Of course, if you interrupt me. I was going to tell you that Lady
Gregory told me herself that the family had thought of all kinds of
professions suitable for Hugh, but his heart was not in any of them,
and they were beginning to feel a little anxious, when one day, as
they were sitting down to lunch--

Was there a duck for luncheon?

No. He caught sight of the fold of Lady Gregory's dress, a tailor-made
from Paris; it is always a pleasure to a woman to hear her gown
admired; but there was a seriousness in Hugh's appreciation of the
hang of the skirt, and a studied regard in his eyes which caused her a
moment's perplexity, and when they rose from table he stood watching
her as she crossed the room. Of course, the skirt fitted rather
nicely, but.... In the same afternoon she had occasion to go to her
bedroom, and to her surprise found her wardrobe open and Hugh trying
on her skirts before the glass. Hugh! Doesn't it seem to you, Aunt
Augusta, that this skirt is a little too full? During the evening he
spoke of some premises in Conduit Street; but tailoring was only a
passing thought, and the next thing they heard of Hugh was that he had
gone into Colnaghi's shop to learn the business of picture-dealing.

Nature is always unexpected, Thornley, bounding about like a monkey,
and it may be that Lane sprang from tailor-mades right into Salvator
Rosa, and up again to Giorgione and Titian. But if I had to choose
Lane as the hero of a novel or play, I should proceed more regularly,
a transition would be necessary, a little shop in St James's, down
some court long ago swept away by an enterprising builder. In my novel
there certainly would be a little shop with a window full of old fans
and bits of silver, just the kind of shop that you would hang about
every afternoon when you came back from the hospital, and I should
place Lane in a little den out of which he would come to show you
some paste--old paste. I have it, Thornley; cameos and old paste would
be the steps whereby Lane mounted from tailor-mades to Salvator Rosa
and then on to--whom did I say, Thornley?

Giorgione, the old doctor muttered, laughing in his beard. Two years
is long enough. I was five years walking the hospitals.

It was long enough for Lane. When he left Colnaghi's shop and took a
lodging in Bury Street, he was able to buy and sell pictures so
successfully that in two years he had put together, I think he told
me, ten thousand pounds.

Yet you say he is not a dealer; and the old doctor continued to growl
by the fireside.

He is a collector who weeds out his collection. Let us call him a
weeder; and let us never speak of the lavatory but of the cloak-room
or the toilet-room. And let us avoid the word lodger, for he is
extinct, or, like the phoenix, he has risen from his ashes and become
a paying-guest. Petticoat-bodice is taboo; and bodice--even
bodice--one of the beautifullest words in the language, has yielded to
the detestable corsage; and the journalist speaks of a woman as
_petite_, thinking that _petite_ suggests refinement. Naked is a word
that nobody of taste would think of using--unclothed or undraped; no
reasonable man or woman would object to meeting this sentence in a
novel: I would give all my worldly wealth to see Venus walk undraped
from her bath; the novelist might even write: I would give all my
worldly wealth to see Elizabeth Hawkins walk undraped from her bath;
but if he were to write: I would give all my worldly wealth to see
Elizabeth Hawkins walk naked from her bath, he would be dubbed a very
gross writer by the newspapers, though it is difficult to say how
morality gains by the substitution of unclothed or undraped for naked,
and easy to see that literature dies in these substitutions. Who would
ever think of asking a lady for the bill-of-fare? Even in the
second-class restaurants the word bill-of-fare has been dropped, we
read now the menu. So you see, Lane is quite in the fashion when he
calls himself a collector. If you would only meet him you would be
converted, not to euphuisms, but to Lane. He has got such pretty ways.
When you ask him if he is going to sell a picture he will say: Don't
talk to me about selling; I can't bear to part with my pictures. One
of these days I shall have a house and shall want pictures; and
immediately the conversation will slide away, and you'll find yourself
listening to a long tale of a collection of pictures which he intends
to present at cost price to some provincial gallery. He is all for
Art, and you, who have been talking Art and buying beautiful things
all your life, now repudiate the one man who comes to Ireland to
revive the art of painting.

It never existed in Ireland.

Never mind. It will be revived all the same.

He's a dealer. He has made, according to you, ten thousand pounds in
two years, and a dealer never will miss the chance of picking up
something, and you'll find that he will pick up something.

There's no use talking any more. I've spent a very pleasant evening.
Good night, Thornley, good night.

Well, you'll see, were his last words, and he was very sarcastic when
it became known that Lane had bought a large Lancret from Sir Algernon
Coote at the close of the exhibition, and whenever I went in to smoke
a cigar with him he referred to this deal with extraordinary
bitterness. I could not see what ground of complaint he had against
Lane. Sir Algernon Coote, I often said, was glad to get seven or eight
hundred, perhaps a thousand for his picture. What concern is it of
yours the price the picture fetches afterwards? He growled in his
armchair, averring that Lane had no right to ask Sir Algernon Coote to
lend him a picture and then to buy it from him. A most extraordinary
proposition, I said. If nobody is to make a profit, there can be no
buying or selling. Yourself made a profit upon your sale of Wedgwood.

Sir Thornley did not think that this was quite the same thing, and I
said, Pooh, pooh.

We had just begun to forget Lane when we heard that he had run across
a Tiepolo at Ostend, and had picked up another picture in Antwerp, and
for these pictures and Sir Algernon Coote's Lancret he had been paid
seventeen thousand pounds by Durand Ruel. He had not taken it all out
in cash; Lane's genius lies in swopping. It is a bold man that dares
to swop with Durand Ruel, but Lane dares everything, and he got
Manet's portrait of Mademoiselle Gonzales probably cheaper than a
private buyer could have gotten it, on the plea that it was going into
a permanent exhibition. It came over with a number of Impressionist
pictures, lent by different people--Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley,
Berthe Morisot--all the Impressionist school.

And for what object? Sir Thornley cried.

To found a Gallery of Modern Art. Again I set myself to explain Lane
to Sir Thornley, without arriving at any results whatever. He would
not, or he could not, understand that though it is Lane's instinct to
make money it is also his instinct to spend the money that he makes
upon Art. Nobody that I have ever met, Thornley, desires Art as purely
as Lane. I have known many people who make money out of Art, but it is
generally spent on motor-cars, women, cooks, and valets. But Lane
spends hardly anything upon himself. His whole life is absorbed in
Art, and he would not be able to gratify his passion if he did not
make money. Why will you not be reconciled to him? Why will you not
accept him for what he is? I said again and again. But he remained
grumpy, doggedly refusing to become a member of the committee,
consenting, however, to visit the exhibition, not being able to resist
my descriptions of the portrait of Mademoiselle Gonzales, the
_Itinerant Musician_, and the other pictures.

A wonderful exhibition it was, organised by Lane, who rushed about
Dublin from one end to the other, begging of everybody to come to his
exhibition, gathering up the ladies into groups, giving them all
something to do, telling one that she must collect subscriptions to
buy a certain picture, another one that she must play the piano for
him; another would oblige him by playing, or trying to play, it did
not matter which, a violin solo, the _Kreutzer Sonata_, or anything
else she liked. He discovered a young gentleman who sang comic songs
very well; for the sake of Art he was asked to sing. Anybody who could
write at all was asked to write letters to the papers. Everybody in
Dublin was swept into the exhibition, and as soon as the receipts
began to decline Lane was again devising some new method whereby they
might be revived. So far I had resisted him, and he came one evening
to ask me to write an article.

No, ten thousand times no.

Lane laughed, and suggested a lecture.

I am the only one in Dublin who knew Manet, Monet, Sisley, Renoir,
Pissarro--I knew them all at the Nouvelle Athnes. Lane, you tempt me.

When will you be able to give the lecture?

A terror came upon me, and I stuttered, When? One has to speak for an
hour, an hour and ten minutes, an hour and fifteen minutes. That would
make two fortnightly articles at the very least. Oh, Lane!

I'll begin to advertise the lecture tomorrow. You'll have four days to
prepare it.

Four days!

And Lane, who is always in a hurry, bade me good night abruptly.




VI


It is to Mr Lane's extraordinary enthusiasm, energy, and love of Art
that we owe the pleasure of this beautiful collection of pictures,
and, that it may not be but a passing pleasure, it is his proposal to
collect funds for the purchase of these pictures, and to found a
Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin. A few days before the Exhibition
opened he came to ask for an article about these pictures but it
seemed to me that all I had to say about pictures in the form of
articles I had already said; and I did not dare to accept his proposal
to deliver a lecture on French Art until it occurred to me that being
probably the only person in Dublin who had known the painters whose
works hang on the wall, I might, without being thought too
presumptuous, come here--I will not say to discuss French Art--I
prefer to say to talk about Manet, Degas, Renoir, Pissaro, Monet, and
Sisley, and in doing so to discuss French Art indirectly. But before
beginning to talk of these great men I must tell how I came to know
them, else you will be at a loss to understand why they consented to
know me.

When my mother offered me my choice of Oxford or Cambridge, I told her
that I had decided to go to Paris. My dear boy, your education--you
learned nothing at school. That is why, my dear mother, I intend to
devote myself entirely to my own education, and I think it can be
better conducted by myself than by a professor. You are taking William
with you? my mother asked. I answered that I had arranged that he
should accompany me. My mother was soothed, for a valet means
conformity to certain conventions. But the young man who sets out on
artistic adventure must try to separate himself from all conventions,
whether of politics, society, or creed, and my valet did not remain
with me for more than six or eight months; for, like Lord Byron's, his
continual sighing after beef, beer, and a wife, his incapacity for
learning a single word of a foreign language--the beds he couldn't
sleep on, and the wines he couldn't drink--I forget how the sentence
closes in the letter (addressed, perhaps, to Mr Murray)--obliged me to
send William Malowney back to England. But too much love of living was
not the sole cause of William's dismissal. I had begun to feel that he
stood between me and myself; I wished above all things to be myself,
and to be myself I should have to live the outer as well as the inner
life of the Quarter. Myself was the goal I was making for, and to
reach it I felt that I must put off the appearance of a gentleman, a
change that my William resented; and being unwilling to reduce him to
the servitude of brushing French trousers and hats, I gave him the
sack. He died in Brompton Consumption Hospital.

In the Middle Ages young men went in search of the Grail; today the
caf is the quest of a young man in search of artistic education. But
the cafs about the Odon and the Luxembourg Gardens did not
correspond to my need, I wearied of noisy students, the Latin Quarter
seemed to me a little out of fashion; eventually I migrated to
Montmartre, and continued my search along the Boulevard Extrieur. One
evening I discovered my caf on the Place Pigalle, La Nouvelle
Athnes! Who named it the Nouvelle Athnes I cannot say; some ancient
_cafetier_ who foresaw the future glory of his house; for it was La
Nouvelle Athnes before the Impressionists, the Parnassians, and the
Realists came to spend their evenings on the Place Pigalle. Or was it
the burly proprietor, associated always in my mind with a certain
excellent _rble de livre_? The name sounds as if it were invented
on purpose. You wouldn't have thought it was a new Athens if you had
seen it in the 'seventies, still less if you saw it today, though it
still stretches up the acclivity into the Place Pigalle opposite the
fountain, the last house of a block of buildings. In my day it was a
caf of _rats_, literary and pictorial. Duranty, one of the original
Realists, a contemporary of Flaubert, turned in to stay with us for an
hour or so every night; a quiet, elderly man who knew that he had
failed, and whom failure had saddened. Alexis Card, and Hennique came
in later. At the time I am speaking of Zola had ceased to go to the
caf, he spent his evenings with his wife; but his disciples--all
except Maupassant and Huysmans (I do not remember ever having seen
them there)--collected every midnight about the marble tables, lured
to the Nouvelle Athnes by their love of Art. One generation of
_littrateurs_ associates itself with painting, the next with music.
The aim and triumph of the Realist were to force the pen to compete
with the painter's brush, and the engraver's needle in the
description, let us say, of a mean street, just as the desire of a
symbolistic writer was to describe the vague but intense sensations of
music so accurately that the reader would guess the piece he had
selected for description, though it were not named in the text. We all
entertained doubts regarding the validity of the Art we practised, and
envied the Art of the painter, deeming it superior to literature; and
it is hardly an exaggeration to say that we used to weary a little of
conversation among ourselves, just as dogs weary of their own society,
and I think there was a feeling of relief among us all when the
painters came in. We raised ourselves up to welcome them--Manet,
Degas, Renoir, Pissaro, Monet, and Sisley; they were our masters. A
partition rising a few feet or more over the hats of the men sitting
at the four marble tables separated the glass front from the main body
of the caf; two tables in the right-hand corner were reserved for
Manet and Degas, and it is pleasant to remember my longing to be
received into that circle, and my longing to speak to Manet, whom I
had begun to recognise as the great new force in painting. But evening
after evening went by without my daring to speak to him, nor did he
speak to me, until one evening--thrice happy evening!--as I sat
thinking of him, pretending to be busy correcting proofs. He asked me
if the conversation of the caf did not distract my attention, and I
answered: No, but you do, so like are you to your painting. It seems
to me that we became friends at once, for I was invited to his studio
in the Rue d'Amsterdam, where his greatest works were painted--all the
works that are Manet and nothing but Manet, the real Manet, the
Parisian Manet. But before speaking of his painting some description
of his personality is essential to an understanding of Manet. It is
often said that the personality of the artist concerns us not, and in
the case of bad Art it is certainly true, for bad Art reveals no
personality, bad Art is bad because it is anonymous. The work of the
great artist is himself, and, being one of the greatest painters that
ever lived, Manet's Art was all Manet; one cannot think of Manet's
painting without thinking of the man himself. The last time I saw
Monet was at dinner in the Cafe Royal, and, after talking of many
things, suddenly, without any transition, Monet said, speaking out of
a dream: How like Manet was to his painting! and I answered delighted,
for it is always exciting to talk about Manet: Yes, how like! That
blond, amusing face, the clear eyes that saw simply, truly, and
quickly. And having said so much, my thoughts went back to the time
when the glass door of the cafe grated upon the sanded floor, and
Manet entered. Though by birth and by education essentially Parisian,
there was something in his appearance and manner of speaking that
often suggested an Englishman. Perhaps it was his dress--his clean-cut
clothes and figure. That figure! Those square shoulders that swaggered
as he went across the room, and the thin waist; the face, the beard,
and the nose, satyr-like shall I say? No, for I would evoke an idea of
beauty of line united to that of intellectual expression--frank words,
frank passion in his convictions, loyal and simple phrases, clear as
well-water, sometimes a little hard, sometimes as they flowed away
bitter, but at the fountain-head sweet and full of light.

A man is often well told in an anecdote, and I remember a young man
whom Manet thought well of, bringing his sister with him to the studio
in the Rue Amsterdam--not an ill-looking girl, no better and no worse
than another, a little commonplace, that was all. Manet was affable
and charming; he showed his pictures, he talked volubly, but next day
when the young man arrived and asked Manet what he thought of his
sister, Manet said, extending his arm (the gesture was habitual to
him): The last girl in the world I should have thought was your
sister. The young man protested, saying Manet had seen his sister
dressed to her disadvantage--she was wearing a thick woollen dress,
for there was snow on the ground. Manet shook his head. I haven't to
look twice; I'm in the habit of judging things.

These were his words, or very nearly, and they seem to me to throw a
light upon Manet's painting. He saw quickly and clearly, and stated
what he saw candidly, almost innocently. It was not well mannered
perhaps to speak to a brother of his sister in those terms, but we
have not come here to discuss good manners, for what are manners but
the conventions that obtain at a certain moment, and among a certain
class? Well-mannered people do not think sincerely, their minds are
full of evasions and subterfuges. Well-mannered people constantly feel
that they would not like to think like this or that they would not
like to think like that, and whosoever feels he would not like to
think out to the end every thought that may come into his mind should
turn from Parnassus. In his search for new formulas, new moulds, all
the old values must be swept aside. The artist must arrive at a new
estimate of things; all must go into the melting-pot in the hope that
out of the pot may emerge a new consummation of himself. For this end
he must keep himself free from all creed, from all dogma, from all
opinion, remembering that as he accepts the opinions of others he
loses his talent, all his feelings and his ideas must be his own, for
Art is a personal rethinking of life from end to end, and for this
reason the artist is always eccentric. He is almost unaware of your
moral codes, he laughs at them when he thinks of them, which is
rarely, and he is unashamed as a little child. The word unashamed
perhaps explains Manet's art better than any other. It is essentially
unashamed, and in speaking of him one must never be afraid to repeat
the word unashamed. Manet was born in what is known as refined
society; he was a rich man; in dress and appearance he was an
aristocrat; but to be aristocratic in Art one must avoid the
aristocracy, and Manet was obliged for the sake of his genius to spend
his evenings in the caf of the Nouvelle Athnes, for there he found
artists, lacking in talent, perhaps, but long haired, shabbily
dressed, outcasts by choice and conviction, and from them he could get
that which the artist needs more than all else--appreciation. He
needed the _rapin_ as the fixed star needs the planet, and the faith
of the _rapin_ is worth more to the artist than the bosom of the
hostess, though she thrives in the Champs lyses. The _rapin_ helped
Manet to live, for in the years I knew him he never sold a picture,
and you will ask yourselves and wonder how it was that in a city like
Paris great pictures should remain unsold. I will tell you. In many
ways Paris is more like the rest of the world than we think for; the
moneyed man in Paris, like the moneyed man in London, admires pictures
in proportion as they resemble other pictures, but the _rapin_ likes
pictures in proportion as they differ from other pictures.

After Manet's death his friends made some little stir; there was a
sale, and then the prices sank again, sank almost to nothing, and it
seemed as if the world would never appreciate Manet. There was a time,
fifteen or sixteen years ago, when Manet's pictures could have been
bought for twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty pounds apiece, and I
remember saying to Albert Wolff, some years after Manet's death: How
is it that Degas and Whistler and Monet have come into their
inheritance, but there is no sign of recognition of Manet's Art? Wolff
answered: The time will never come when people will care for Manet's
painting; and I left Tortoni's asking myself if the most beautiful
painting the world had ever seen was destined to remain the most
unpopular. That was fifteen years ago, and it took fifteen years for
the light of Manet's genius to reach Ireland.

I have been asked which of the two pictures hanging in this room it
would be better to buy for the Gallery of Modern Art, the _Itinerant
Musician_ or the portrait of Mademoiselle Gonzales. Mr Lane himself
put this question to me, and I answered: I am afraid whichever you
choose you will regret you had not chosen the other. The picture of
the _Itinerant Musician_ is a Spanish Manet, it was painted after
Manet had seen Goya, but it is a Manet as much as the portrait of
Mademoiselle Gonzales; to any one who knows Manet's work it possesses
all the qualities which we associate with Manet. All the same, there
is a veil between us and Manet in the Spanish picture. The veil is
very thin, but there is a veil; the larger picture is Manet and Goya,
but the portrait is Manet and nothing but Manet. And the portrait is
an article of faith, for it says: Be not ashamed of anything but to be
ashamed. There are Manets that I like more, but the portrait of
Mademoiselle Gonzales is what Dublin needs. Salvation comes like a
thief in the night, and it may be that Mademoiselle Gonzales will be
purchased; if so, it will perhaps help to bring about the crisis we
are longing for--that spiritual crisis when men shall begin once more
to think out life for themselves, when men shall return to Nature
naked and unashamed.

The glass door of the caf grates upon the sand again, and Degas
enters, a round-shouldered man in a suit of pepper-and-salt. Now there
is nothing very trenchantly French about him, except the large
necktie. His eyes are small, his words sharp, ironical, cynical. Degas
and Manet are the leaders of the Impressionistic school, and their
friendship has been jarred but once, when Degas came to the Rue
Amsterdam and sat with his back to the pictures, saying that his eyes
were too weak to look at them. If your eyes are too weak you shouldn't
have come to see me, Manet answered. Manet is an instinct, Degas an
intellectuality, and he believes with Edgar Poe that one becomes
original by saying, I will not do a certain thing because it has been
done before.

So the day came when Degas had to put _Semiramis_ aside for a ballet
girl; the ballet girl had not been painted before; it was Degas who
introduced her and the acrobat and the _repasseuse_ into art. And
remembering that portraits lacked intimacy, he designed Manet
sprawling on a sofa indifferent to his wife's music, thinking of the
painting he had done that morning, or of the painting he was going to
do the next morning. If Leonardo had lived in the nineteenth century,
I said, he might have painted like that; and I wandered on through the
Louvre thinking of the twain as intellectuals, till Rembrandt's
portrait of his wife absorbed me as no other picture had ever done,
and perhaps as no other picture will ever do again. The spell that it
laid upon me was conclusive; when I approached the eyes faded into
brown shadow, but when I withdrew they began to tell the story of a
soul--of one who seems conscious of her weakness, of her sex, and the
burden of her own special lot--she is Rembrandt's wife, a servant, a
satellite, a watcher. The mouth is no more than a little shadow, but
what wistful tenderness there is in it! and the colour of the face is
white, faintly tinted with bitumen, and in the cheeks some rose madder
shows through the yellow. She wears a fur jacket; grey pearls hang in
her ears; there is a brooch upon her breast, and a hand at the bottom
of the picture passing out of the frame, and the hand reminds us, as
the chin does, of the old story that God took a little clay, etc., for
the chin and hand and arm are moulded without display of knowledge as
Nature moulds.

The _Mona Lisa_, celebrated in literature, hanging a few feet away,
seems factitious when compared with this portrait; her hesitating
smile which held my youth in a little tether has come to seem to me
but a grimace, and the pale mountains no more mysterious than a globe
or map seems at a distance, a sort of riddle, an acrostic, a poetical
decoction, a ballade, a rondel, a villanelle, or ballade with double
burden, a sestina or chant royal. The _Mona Lisa_, being literature in
intention rather than painting, has drawn round her many poets, and we
must forgive her many mediocre verses for the sake of a prose passage
that our generation had by heart. The _Mona Lisa_ and Degas's _Leon
de Danse_ are thoughtful pictures painted with the brains rather than
with the temperaments; and we ask sooner or later, but assuredly we
ask, of what worth are Degas's descriptions of washerwomen and dancers
and racehorses compared with that fallen flower, that Aubusson carpet,
above all, the footstool? and if any one of Degas's pictures is bought
for this gallery I hope it will be one of these early pictures, the
red-headed girl, for instance, an unfinished sketch, exhibited some
time ago at Knightsbridge, the property, I believe, of Durand Ruel.

In the days of the Nouvelle Athnes we used to repeat Degas's
witticisms, how he once said to Whistler, Whistler, if you were not a
genius you would be the most ridiculous man in Paris. Leonardo made
roads, Degas makes witticisms. I remember his answer when I confided
to him one day that I did not care for Daumier--the beautiful _Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza_ that hangs on the wall I had not then seen;
that is my apology, an insufficient one, I admit. Degas answered, If
you were to show Raphael a Daumier he would admire it, but if you were
to show him a Cabanel he would say with a sigh: That is my fault--an
excellent quip. But we should not attach the same importance to a quip
as to a confession. Manet said to me: I tried to write, but I
couldn't; and we must esteem these words as an artist's brag; I am a
painter, and only a painter. Degas could not boast that he was a
painter and only a painter, for he often wearied of painting; he
turned to modelling, and he abandoned modelling for the excitement of
collecting pictures--not for himself but for the Louvre. I've got it,
he said to me in the Rue Maubeuge, and he was surprised when I asked
him what he had got; great egotists always take it for granted that
every one is thinking of what they are doing. Why, the _Jupiter_, of
course the _Jupiter_, and he took me to see the picture--a Jupiter
with beetling brows, and a thunderbolt in his hand. He had hung a pear
next to it, a speckled pear on six inches of canvas, one that used to
hang in Manet's studio, and guessing he was about to be delivered of a
quip, I waited. You notice the pear? Yes, I said. I hung it next to
the _Jupiter_ to show that a well-painted pear could overthrow a God.
There is a picture by Mr Sargent in this room--one of his fashionable
women. She is dressed to receive visitors, and is about to spring from
her chair; the usual words, How do you do, Mary, are upon her crimson
lips, and the usual hysterical lights are in her eyes, and her arms
are like bananas as usual. There is in this portrait the same
factitious surface-life that informs all his pictures, and,
recognising fashionable gowns and drawing-room vivacities as the
fundamental Sargent, Degas described him as _Le chef de rayon de la
peinture. Le chef de rayon_ is the young man behind the counter who
says, I think, madam, that this piece of mauve silk would suit your
daughter admirably, ten yards at least will be required. If your
daughter will step upstairs, I will take her measure. _Vous pouvez me
confier votre fille; soyez sre que je ne voudrais rien faire qui pt
nuire  mon commerce_.

Any one, Degas said once to me, can have talent when he is
five-and-twenty; it is more difficult to have talent when you are
fifty. I remember the Salon in which Bastien Lepage exhibited his
_Potato Harvest_, and we all admired it till Degas said, The
Bouguereau of the modern movement. Then every one understood that
Bastien Lepage's talent was not an original but a derivative talent,
and when Roll, another painter of the same time, exhibited his
enormous picture entitled _Work_, containing fifty figures, Degas
said, One doesn't make a crowd with fifty figures, one makes a crowd
with five. Quips, merely quips, and there were far too many quips in
Degas's life; and I include in my list of quips a great number of
ballet girls and racehorses. His butcher's corpulent wife standing
before a tin tub was much talked about in our cafe, until Monet
returned after a long absence in the country, bringing with him twenty
or thirty canvases, a row of poplars seen in perspective against a
grey sky, or a view of the Seine with a bridge cutting the picture in
equal halves, or a cottage shrouded in snow with some low hills.
Pissarro admired these, of course, but his preference ran to Sisley,
who, he said, was more of a poet; and should a Sisley come later into
this collection, my hope is that it will be a picture I saw years ago
in the galleries of George Pettit: the bare wall of a cottage, a
frozen pond, and some poplar-trees showing against the first film of
light, a vision so exquisite that Constable's art seems in comparison
coarse and clumsy.

Monet's art is colder, more external, and those who like to trace
individual qualities back to race influence may, if they will,
attribute the exquisite reverie which distinguishes Sisley's pictures
to his northern blood.

Monet began by imitating Manet, and Manet ended by imitating Monet.
They were great friends. Manet painted Monet and Madame Monet in their
garden, and Monet painted Manet and Madame Manet in the same garden;
they exchanged pictures, but after a quarrel each returned the other
his picture. Monet's picture of Manet and his wife I never saw, but
Manet's picture of Monet and Madame Monet belongs to a very wealthy
merchant, a Monsieur Pellerin, who has the finest collection of Manets
and Czannes in the world. Czanne exhibited with the Impressionists,
but I do not remember having seen him in the Nouvelle Athnes or heard
his name mentioned by Manet or Degas. Alexis told us once that he had
breakfast with him that morning at the _Moulin de la Galette_, and
that Czanne had arrived in jack-boots covered with mud and had spent
thirty francs on the meal, which was an unusual feat in those days and
in those districts. Alexis was struck by the resemblance of Czanne to
his pictures. A peasant come straight out of _The Reapers_, he said; I
thought of Manet, and we congratulated ourselves on the advancement of
our taste, forgetful that the next generation may speak of Czanne's
portraits as the art of the trowel rather than of the brush. The word
masonry must have been in Zola's mind when he exalted Czanne in
_L'Oeuvre_, and at the dinner given to celebrate the publication of
the book declared him to be a greater painter than Manet. Both came
from Aix; both had talent; and both were denied the exquisite vision
and handicraft of Sisley and Verlaine.

Within the Impressionist movement were two women, Mary Casatt, who
derived her art from Degas, and Berthe Morisot, who derived hers from
Manet. Berthe Morisot married Manet's brother, and there can be little
doubt that she would have married Manet if Manet had not been married
already. I remember him saying to me once: My sister-in-law wouldn't
have been noticed without me; she carried my art across her fan.
Berthe is dead, and her pictures are very expensive and
picture-dealers do not make presents, but Mary Casatt is alive, she is
a rich woman, and I take this opportunity of suggesting that she
should be asked to give a picture. After an absence of many years I
went to see her and found her blind, but talkative as of yore, and we
talked of all the people we had known, till at the end of breakfast
she said, There is one we haven't spoken about, perhaps the greatest
of all. I said, You mean Renoir? And she reproached me with having
been always a little indifferent to his art. I don't think that this
is true, or if it be true, it is only true in a way. I know of nothing
that I would sooner hang in my drawing-room than one of Renoir's
bathers, or a portrait of a child in grey fur dressed to be taken to
the Bois by her mother. Some of his portraits of children are the most
beautiful I know--they are white and flower-like, and therefore very
unlike the stunted, leering little monkeys that Sir Joshua Reynolds
persuaded us to accept as representative of tall and beautiful English
children. I think it was at the end of the 'sixties that Renoir
painted the celebrated picture of the woman looking into the canary
cage--a wonderful picture, but so unlike his later work that it may be
doubted if anybody would recognise it as being by the man who painted
the bathers. By the bathers I mean all the plump girls whom he painted
on green banks under trees, their fat so permeated with light that
they seem like luminous flowers; yet they are flesh, and full-blooded
flesh that would bleed. It may be that Manet never painted naked flesh
so realistically. His art is less casual, less modern, less actual,
than Renoir's. It came out of a different tradition, and upon it is
the birthmark of easy circumstances and the culture thereof; whereas
Renoir was a Parisian workman; he began life in a factory painting
flowers, and his talent was not sufficient to redeem his art from the
taint of an inherited vulgarity. Whistler would have cried for an
umbrella to hide himself under were he asked to consider _The
Umbrellas_.

The man I see when my thoughts return to the Nouvelle Athnes is a
tall, lean man with red in his ragged hair and beard, and his voice
has a ring in it. If Renoir had not been an aesthete he wold have been
a Socialist orator. Some of his denunciations are quoted in
_Confessions of a Young Man_, and here is an anecdote that a few may
think instructive. Money suddenly began to accumulate at his bank, and
he bethought himself of a stock of wine and cigars, a carriage,
several suits of clothes, or a flat in the quarter of the Champs
lyses with a mistress in it. But turning from these legitimate
issues, he went to Venice to study Tintoretto, and on his return to
Paris he laboured in a school of art until it became plain to him that
his studies, instead of decreasing, were increasing the distance
between himself and Tintoretto. I remember his embittered, vehement
voice in the Nouvelle Athnes, and I caught a glimpse of his home life
on the day that I went to Montmartre to breakfast with him, and
finding him, to my surprise, living in the same terrace as Paul
Alexis, I asked: Shall we see Alexis after breakfast? He would waste
the whole of my afternoon, Renoir muttered, sitting here smoking
cigars and sipping cognac; and I must get on with my picture. Marie,
as soon as we have finished, bring in the asparagus, and get your
clothes off, for I shall want you in the studio when we have had our
coffee.

The evenings that Pissarro did not come to the Nouvelle Athnes were
so rare that I cannot think of the Nouvelle Athnes without seeing him
in the far corner on the right, listening to Manet and Degas,
approving of all they said. I remember his pictures, many of them, as
well as his white beard and hair, and nose of the race of Abraham. He
figures in _Confessions of a Young Man_, and turning to this youthful
book I find an appreciation of him, and, as I think today as I thought
then, I will quote it. Speaking of a group of girls gathering apples
in a garden, I wrote: Sad greys and violets, beautifully harmonised
with figures that seem to move as in a dream on the thither side of
life, in a world of quiet colour and perfect resignation. But the
apples will never fall from the branches, the baskets of the stooping
girls will never be filled, for the orchard is one that life has not
for giving, that the painter has set in an eternal dream of violet and
grey, an apple orchard with peasants gathering the spare fruit of the
mildew collected on a planet's surface. The picture in the present
exhibition represents Pissarro in his first period, when he followed
Corot; I hope Dublin will acquire it. And having said this much, my
thoughts return to the last time I spoke with this dear old man, so
like himself and his race. It was at Rouen about six years ago,
whither he had gone to paint the Cathedral. For Monet having painted
the Cathedral, why not he likewise? Why not, indeed? for he always
followed somebody's dream. But though his wanderings were many and
sudden, he never quite lost his individuality, not even when he
painted yachts after the manner of Signac.

Who had invented Impressionism? was asked when he died, and attempts
were made to trace Monet back to Turner. Monet, it was said, had been
to England, and in England he must have seen Turner, and it was
impossible to see Turner without being influenced by Turner. Yes!
Monet was in England many times, and he painted in England, and one
day we went together to an Exhibition of Old Masters in Burlington
House, and there we saw a picture for which many thousands of pounds
had just been paid, and Monet said, Is that brown thing your great
Turner? It is true, the picture we were looking at was not much more
interesting than brown paper, and I told him that Turner had painted
other pictures that he would like better, _The Frosty Morning_, and he
said he had seen it, remarking that Turner had painted that morning
with his eyes open. Whistler likes _Calais Pier_ better than _The
Frosty Morning_, for it was more like his own painting, and no very
special discernment is required to understand that Turner and
Constable could not have influenced painters whose desire was to
dispense altogether with shadow. Whether, by doing so, they failed
sometimes to differentiate between a picture and a strip of wallpaper
is a question that does not come within the scope of the present
inquiry. Mr Lane is asking us to consider if a collection of
Impressionist pictures would benefit Dublin, and it seems to me
certain that Manet, Monet, Sisley, and Renoir are more likely to draw
our thoughts to the beauty of this world than a collection of Italian
pictures gathered from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.




VII


As soon as the applause died away, Yeats who had lately returned to us
from the States with a paunch, a huge stride, and an immense fur
overcoat, rose to speak. We were surprised at the change in his
appearance, and could hardly believe our ears when, instead of talking
to us as he used to do about the old stories come down from generation
to generation he began to thunder like Ben Tillett against the middle
classes, stamping his feet, working himself into a great temper, and
all because the middle classes did not dip their hands into their
pockets and give Lane the money he wanted for his exhibition. When he
spoke the words, the middle classes, one would have thought that he
was speaking against a personal foe, and we looked round asking each
other with our eyes where on earth our Willie Yeats had picked up the
strange belief that none but titled and carriage-folk could appreciate
pictures. And we asked ourselves why our Willie Yeats should feel
himself called upon to denounce his own class; millers and shipowners
on one side, and on the other a portrait-painter of distinction; and
we laughed, remembering AE's story, that one day whilst Yeats was
crooning over his fire Yeats had said that if he had his rights he
would be Duke of Ormonde. AE's answer was: I am afraid, Willie, you
are overlooking your father--a detestable remark to make to a poet in
search of an ancestry; and the addition: We both belong to the
lower-middle classes, was in equally bad taste. AE knew that there
were spoons in the Yeats family bearing the Butler crest, just as
there are portraits in my family of Sir Thomas More, and he should
have remembered that certain passages in _The Countess Cathleen_ are
clearly derivative from the spoons. He should have remembered that all
the romantic poets have sought illustrious ancestry, and rightly,
since romantic poetry is concerned only with nobles and castles,
gonfalons and oriflammes. Villiers de l'Isle Adam believed firmly in
his descent, and appeared on all public occasions with the Order of
Malta pinned upon his coat; and Victor Hugo, too, had inquired out his
ancestry in all the archives of Spain and France before sitting down
to write _Hernani_ ... and with good reason, for with the
disappearance of gonfalons and donjons it may be doubted if--My
meditation was interrupted by Yeats's voice.

We have sacrificed our lives for Art; but you, what have you done?

What sacrifices have you made? he asked, and everybody began to search
his memory for the sacrifices that Yeats had made, asking himself in
what prison Yeats had languished, what rags he had worn, what broken
victuals he had eaten. As far as anybody could remember, he had always
lived very comfortably, sitting down invariably to regular meals, and
the old green cloak that was in keeping with his profession of
romantic poet he had exchanged for the magnificent fur coat which
distracted our attention from what he was saying, so opulently did it
cover the back of the chair out of which he had risen. But, quite
forgetful of the coat behind him, he continued to denounce the middle
classes, throwing his arms into the air, shouting at us, and we
thinking not at all of what he was saying, but of a story that had
been floating about Dublin for some time. A visitor had come back from
Coole telling how he had discovered the poet lying on a sofa in a
shady corner, a plate of strawberries on his knee, and three or four
adoring ladies serving him with cream and sugar, and how the poet,
after wiping his hands on a napkin, had consented to recite some
verses, and the verses he recited were these:

  I said, A line will take us hours maybe,
  Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought
  Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
  Better go down upon your marrow-bones
  And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
  Like an old pauper in all kinds of weather;
  For to articulate sweet sounds together
  Is to work harder than all these and yet
  Be thought an idler by the noisy set
  Of bankers, schoolmasters and clergymen,
  The martyrs call the world.

The poet advanced a step or two nearer to the edge of the platform,
and stamping his foot he asked again what the middle classes had done
for Art, and in a towering rage (the phrase is no mere figure of
speech, for he raised himself up to tremendous height) he called upon
the ladies and gentlemen that had come to hear my lecture to put their
hands in their pockets and give guineas to the stewards who were
waiting at the doors to receive them, or, better still, to write large
cheques. By virtue of our subscriptions we should cease to belong to
the middle classes, and having held out this hope to us he retired to
his chair and fell back overcome into the middle of the great fur
coat, and remained silent until the end of the debate.

As soon as it was over criticism began, not of my lecture, but of
Yeats's speech, and on Saturday night all my friends turned in to
discuss his contention that the middle classes had never done anything
for Art. AE pointed out that the aristocracy had given England no
great poet except Byron, whom many people did not look upon as a poet
at all, and though Shelley's poetry was unquestionable, he could
hardly be considered as belonging to the aristocracy, his father being
no more than a Sussex baronet. All the other poets, it was urged, came
from the middle classes, not only the poets, but the painters, the
musicians, and the sculptors. Yeats's attack upon the middle classes,
somebody cried, is the most absurd that was ever made; the aristocracy
have Byron, and the peasants have Burns, all the others belong to us.
Somebody chimed in: Not even the landowners have produced a poet, and
he was answered that Landor was a considerable landed proprietor. But
he was the only one. Not a single painter came out of the aristocracy.
Lord Carlyle's name was mentioned; everybody laughed, and I said that
the distinction of the classes was purely an arbitrary one. It was
agreed that if riches can poison inspiration, poverty is a stimulant,
and then leaning out of his corner AE remarked that Willie Yeats's
best poems were written when he was a poor boy in Sligo, a remark that
fanned the flame of discussion, and the difficult question was
broached why Yeats had ceased to write poetry. All his best poems, AE
said, were written before he went to London. Apart from the genius
which he brought into the world, it was Sligo that had given his
poetry a turn of its own. Everybody knew some of his verses by heart,
and we took pleasure in listening to them again. The calves basking on
the hillside were mentioned, the colleen going to church. But,
somebody cried out suddenly, he took his colleen to London and put
paint upon her cheeks and dye upon her hair, and sent her up
Piccadilly. Another critic added that the last time he saw her she was
wearing a fine hat and feathers. Supplied by Arthur Symons, cried
another. As sterile a little wanton as ever I set eyes upon, who lives
in remembrance of her beauty, saying nothing, exclaimed still another
critic. And the silences that Yeats's colleen had observed these many
years were regretted, somewhat hypocritically I think, for, as AE
says, a literary movement consists of five or six people who live in
the same town and hate each other cordially. But, if we were not
really sorry that Yeats's inspiration was declining, we were quite
genuinely interested to discover the cause of it. AE was certain that
he would have written volume after volume if he had never sought a
style, if he had been content to write simply; and all his utterances
on the subject of style were repeated.

He came this afternoon into the National Library, John Eglinton said,
breaking silence, and he told me he was collecting his writings for a
complete edition, a library edition in ten or twelve volumes.

But he is only thirty-seven.

He said his day was over, John Eglinton answered ... and in speaking
of the style of his last essay, he said: Ah, that style! I made it
myself. And then another, Longworth I think it was, said that he
failed to understand how anybody could speak of a style apart from
some definite work already written by him in that style. A style does
not exist in one's head, it exists upon paper, and Yeats has no style,
neither bad nor good, for he writes no more. AE thought that Yeats had
discovered a style, and a very fine style indeed, and compared it to a
suit of livery which a man buys before he engages a servant; the
livery is made of the best cloth, the gold lace is the very finest,
the cockade can be seen from one side of the street to the other, but
when the footman comes he is always too tall or too thin or too fat,
so the livery is never worn.

Excellent! cried Gogarty, and the livery hangs in a press upstairs,
becoming gradually moth-eaten.

AE regretted the variants: he knew them all and preferred the earlier
text in every case, and when literary criticism was over we turned to
the poet's own life to discover why it was that he sang no more songs
for us. We had often heard him say that his poems had arisen out of
one great passion, and this interesting avowal raised the no less
interesting question--which produces the finer fruit, the gratified or
the ungratified passion. It was clearly my turn to speak, and I told
how Wesendonck had built a pavilion at the end of his garden so that
Wagner might compose the _Valkyrie_, and how at the end of every day
when Wagner had finished his work, Mathilde's wont was to visit him,
her visits inspiring by degrees a great passion, which, out of loyalty
to Wesendonck, they resisted until the fatal day when he read her the
poem of _Tristan and Isolde_. After the reading they had stood looking
at each other, as Tristan and Isolde stand looking at each other in
the opera. Later Minna, Wagner's wife, intercepted a letter which she
took to Madame Wesendonck, and the interview between the two women was
so violent that Wagner had to send his wife to Dresden. The first
letter of the many that he wrote to Mathilde Wesendonck tells the
miserable dawning of the day he withdrew from Switzerland to meditate
on suicide and his setting of some verses of the well beloved. Regret
nothing, he writes from Venice, I beseech you, regret nothing. Your
kisses were the crown of my life, my recompense for many years of
suffering. Regret nothing, I beseech you, regret nothing. Minna had no
doubt as to Richard's guilt nor have we, but the translator of the
letters, Mr Ashton Ellis, and others, have preferred to regard this
passion as ungratified, and it is evident that they think that the
truth is not worth seeking since the drama and the music and the
letters cannot now be affected thereby. For better or worse you have
the music, you have the drama, you have the correspondence. What can
it matter whether an act purely physical happened, or failed to
happen? Everything, I answer, for thereof I learn whether Wagner wrote
out of a realised or an unrealised desire. As we sat round the fire I
broke silence. Love, I said, that has _not_ been born again in the
flesh crumbles like peat ash. Yeats's love for Maud Gonne, said AE,
has lasted for many years and will continue, and I know that it has
always been a pure love.

A detestable phrase, AE, for it implies that every gratified love must
be impure. And from that day onward I continued to meditate the main
secret of Yeats's life, until one day we happened to meet at
Broadstone Station. We were going to the West; we breakfasted together
in the train, and after breakfast the conversation took many turns,
and we talked of her whom he had loved always, the passionate ideal of
his life, and why this ideal had never become a reality to him as
Mathilde had become to Richard. Was it really so? was my pressing
question, and he answered me:

I was very young at the time and was satisfied with.... My memory
fails me, or perhaps the phrase was never finished. The words I supply
the spirit of sense, are merely conjectural.

Yes, I understand, the common mistake of a boy; and I was sorry for
Yeats and for his inspiration which did not seem to have survived his
youth, because it had arisen out of an ungratified desire; and I fell
to thinking that hyacinths grown in a vase only bloom for a season.
But if it had been otherwise? On such questions one may meditate a
long while, and it was not until the train ran into Westport that I
remembered my prediction when Symons had shown me _Rosa Alchemica._
His inspiration, I had said, is at an end, for he talks about how he
is going to write, and I told Symons that I had noticed all through my
life that a man may tell the subject of his poem and write it, but if
he tells how he is going to write his poem he will never write it.
Mallarm projected hundreds of poems, and, like Yeats, Mallarm was
always talking about style. The word style never came into Mallarm's
conversation, but, like Yeats, his belief was that the poet should
have a language of his own. Every other art, I remember him saying,
has a special language--sculpture, music, painting; why shouldn't the
poet have his? He set himself to the task of inventing a language, but
it was such a difficult one that it left him very little time for
writing; and so we have but twenty sonnets and _L'Aprs-midi d'un
Faune_ written in it. _Son oeuvre_ calls to mind a _bibelot_, a carven
nick-nack, wrought ivory, or jade, or bronze, and like bronze it will
acquire a patina. His phrases will never grow old, for they tell us
nothing; the secret meaning is so deeply embedded that generations
will try to puzzle through them; and in the volume entitled _The Wind
among the Reeds_ Yeats has written poems so difficult that even the
adepts could not disentangle the sense; and since _The Wind among the
Reeds_ he has written a sonnet that clearly referred to a house. But
to what house? AE inclined to the opinion that it referred to the
House of Lords, but the poet, being written to from Ely Place, replied
that the subject of his sonnet was Coole Park. Mallarm could not be
darker than this. But whereas to write a language apart was Mallarm's
sole aestheticism and one which he never abandoned after the
publication of _L'Aprs-midi d'un Faune_, Yeats advocated two
languages, one which he employs himself, another which he would use if
he could, but being unable to use it he counsels its use to others,
and has put up a sign-post: This way to Parnassus. It is amusing to
think of Mallarm and Yeats together; they would have got on famously
until Yeats began to tell Mallarm that the poet would learn the
language he required in Le Berry. Mallarm was a subtle mind, and he
would have thought the idea ingenious that a language is like a spring
which rises in the highlands, trickles into a rivulet and flows into a
river, and needs no filter until the river has passed through a town;
he would have listened to these theories with interest, but Yeats
would not have been able to persuade him to set out for Le Berry, and
the journey would have been useless if he had, for Mallarm had no ear
for folk, less than Yeats himself, who has only half an ear; an
exquisite ear for the beauty of folk imagination, and very little for
folk idiom. Are not the ways of Nature strange? for he loves folk
idiom as none has ever loved it, and few have had better opportunities
of learning it than he along his uncle's wharves in Sligo Town and
among the slopes of Ben Bulben, whither he went daily, interested in
birds and beasts and the stories that the folk tell. As pretty a
nosegay as ever was gathered he tied on those slopes; there is no
prettier book of literature than _Celtic Twilight_, and one of the
tales, _The Last Gleeman_, must have put into Yeats's mind the idea
that he has followed ever since, that the Irish people write very well
when they are not trying to write that worn-out and defaced idiom
which educated people speak and write, and which is known as English.
And it is Yeats's belief that those among us who refuse to write it
are forced back upon artificial speech which they create, and which is
often very beautiful; the beauty of Pater's or Morris's cannot be
denied, but their speech, Yeats would say, lacks naturalness; it is
not living speech, that is how he would phrase it, and his thoughts
would go back to Michael Moran, the last of the Gleemen, who, he
thinks, was more fortunate than the two great writers mentioned, for
Michael wrote (it would be more correct to say he composed, for it is
doubtful if he knew how to write) living speech--i.e. a speech that
has never been printed. Yeats' whole aestheticism is expressed in
these words: A speech that has never been printed. Yeats's whole
aestheticism is expressed in these words: A speech that has never been
printed, and the peasant is the only one who can give us speech that
has not appeared in print. But peasant speech limits the range of our
ideas. A pure benefit, Yeats would say; we must purify ourselves in
ignorance. But peasant speech is only adapted to dialogue. To this
objection he might answer with Landor that Shakespeare and the best
parts of Homer were written in dialogue, and it would be heartless to
reply: But not the best part of your own works, Yeats. Your mind is as
subtle as a Brahmin's, woven along and across with ideas, and you
cannot catch the idiom as it flows off the lips. You are like Moses,
who may not enter the Promised Land. He would not care to answer: Even
if what you say be true, you must admit that I have led some others
thither. I beg pardon, there; and he would fold himself up like a
pelican and dream of his disciples. His dream was always of disciples;
even when I met him in the Cheshire Cheese he was looking for
disciples; he sought in vain till he met Lady Gregory. And a great day
it was for Ireland when she came over to Tillyra, and met, whom do you
think? Yeats, of course. Here I must break off my narrative to give a
more explicit account of Lady Gregory than the reader will find in
_Ave_.

Lady Gregory is a Persse, and the Persses are an ancient Galway
family; the best-known branch is the Moyaude branch, for it was at
Moyaude that Burton Persse bred and hunted the Galway Blazers for over
thirty years ... till his death. Moyaude has passed away, but
Roxborough continues, never having indulged in either horses or
hounds, a worthy but undistinguished family in love, in war, or in
politics, never having indulged in anything except a taste for Bible
reading in the cottages. A staunch Protestant family, if nothing else,
the Roxborough Persses certainly are. Mrs Persse and her two elder
daughters were ardent soul-gatherers in the days gone by, but Lady
Gregory did not join them in their missionary work, holding always to
the belief that there was great danger in persuading any one to leave
the religion learnt in childhood, for we could never be sure that
another would find a place in the heart. In saying as much she wins
our hearts, but our intelligence warns us against the seduction, and
we remember that we may not acquiesce in what we believe to be error.
The ignorant and numbed mind cannot be acceptable to God, so do we
think, and take our stand with Mrs Persse and the elder sisters. We
are glad, however, though we are not sure that our gladness on such a
point is not a sign of weakness, still we are glad that Sir William
chose Augusta rather than one of her elder sisters, either of whom
would certainly have fired up in the carriage when Sir William, on his
way to Coole, suggested to his bride that she should refrain from
pointing out to his tenants what she believed to be a different
teaching of the Bible from that which they received from the parish
priest. He would probably say: You have made no converts--(we have
forgotten Mrs Shaw Taylor's Christian name, but Agnes will serve our
purpose as well as another)--you have made no converts, Agnes, but you
have shaken the faith of thousands. The ground at Roxborough has been
cleared for the sowing, but Kiltartan can wait. _Which Path Should
Agnes Have Followed_? is clearly the title of a six-shilling novel
which I pass on to my contemporaries; meanwhile I have pleasure in
stating here, for my statement is implicated in an artistic movement,
the Abbey Theatre, that the Gospels were never read by Lady Gregory
round Kiltartan. I should like to fill in a page or two about her
married life, but though we know our neighbours very well in one
direction, in another there is nothing that we know less than our
neighbours, and Lady Gregory has never been for me a very real person.
I imagine her without a mother, or father, or sisters, or brothers,
_sans attache_. It is difficult to believe, but it is nevertheless
true, that fearing a too flagrant mistake, I had to ask a friend the
other day if I were right in supposing that Mrs Shaw Taylor was Lady
Gregory's sister, an absurd question truly, for Mrs Shaw Taylor's
house (I have forgotten its name) is within a mile of Tillyra, and I
must have been there many times. We may cultivate our memories in one
direction, but by so doing we curtail them in another, and documentary
evidence jars my style. I like to write of Lady Gregory from the
evening that Edward drove me over to Coole, the night of the
dinner-party. There is in the first part of this book a portrait of
her as I saw her that night, a slim young woman of medium height and
slight figure; her hair, parted in the middle, was brushed in wide
bands about a brow which even at that time was intellectual. The
phrase previously used, if my memory does not deceive me, was high and
cultured; I think I said that she wore a high-school air, and the
phrase expresses the idea she conveyed to me--an air of mixed timidity
and restrained anxiety. On the whole it was pleasant to pass from her
to Sir William, who was more at his ease, more natural. He spoke to me
affably about a Velasquez in the National Gallery, which was not a
Velasquez; it is now set down as a Zurbaran, but the last attribution
does not convince me any more than the first. He wore the Lord
Palmerston air; it was the air of that generation, but he did not wear
it nearly so well as my father.

These two men were of the same generation and their interests were the
same; both were travelled men; Sir William's travels were not so
original as my father's, and the racehorses that he kept were not so
fast, and his politics were not so definite; he was more of an
opportunist than my father, more careful and cautious, and therefore
less interesting. Galway has not produced so many interesting man as
Mayo; its pastures are richer, but its men are thinner in intellect.
But if we are considering Lady Gregory's rise in the world, we must
admit that she owes a great deal to her husband. He took her to
London, and she enjoyed at least one season in a tall house in the
little enclosure known as St George's Place; and there met a number of
eminent men whose books and conversation were in harmony with her
conception of life, still somewhat formal. One afternoon Lecky the
historian left her drawing-room as I entered it, and I remember the
look of pleasure on her face when she mentioned the name of her
visitor, and her pleasure did not end with Lecky, for a few minutes
afterwards Edwin Arnold, the poet of _The Light of Asia_, was
announced. She would have liked to have had him all to herself, and I
think that she thought my conversation a little ill advised when I
spoke to Sir Edwin of a book lately published on the subject of
Buddhism, and asked him what book was the best to read on this
subject. He did not answer my question directly, but very soon he was
telling Lady Gregory that he had just received a letter from India
from a distinguished Buddhist who had read _The Light of Asia_ and
could find no fault in it; the Buddhist doctrine as related by him had
been related faultlessly. And with this little anecdote Sir Edwin
thought my question sufficiently answered. The conversation turned on
the coloured races, and I remember Sir Edwin's words. The world will
not be perfect, he said, until we get the black notes into the gamut.
A pretty bit of Telegraphese which pleased Lady Gregory; and when Sir
Edwin rose to go she produced a fan and asked him to write his name
upon one of the sticks. But she did not ask me to write my name,
though at that time I had written not only _A Modern Lover_, but also
_A Mummer's Wife_, and I left the house feeling for the first time
that the world I lived in was not so profound as I had imagined it to
be. If I remember the circumstances quite rightly, Sir William came
into the room just as I was leaving it, and she showed him the fan; he
looked a little distressed at her want of tact, and it was some years
afterward that I heard, and not without surprise, that she had shown
some literary ability in the editing of his _Memoirs_. The publication
of these _Memoirs_ was a great day for Roxborough, but not such a
great day for Ireland as the day she drove over to Tillyra.

I was not present at the time, but from Edward's account of the
meeting she seems to have recognised her need in Yeats at once,
foreseeing dimly, of course, but foreseeing that he would help her out
of conventions and prejudices, and give her wings to soar in the free
air of ideas and instincts. She was manifestly captured by his genius,
and seemed to dread that the inspiration the hills of Sligo had
nourished might wither in the Temple where he used to spend long
months with his friend Arthur Symons. He had finished all his best
work at the time, the work whereby he will live; _The Countess
Cathleen_ had not long been written, and he was dreaming the poem of
_The Shadowy Waters_, and where could he dream it more fortunately
than by the lake at Coole? The wild swans gather there, and every
summer he returned to Coole to write _The Shadowy Waters_, writing
under her tutelage and she serving him as amanuensis, collecting the
different versions, etc.

Thus much of the literary history of this time has already been
written, but what has not been written, or only hinted at, is the
interdependence of these two minds. It was he, no doubt, who suggested
to her the writing of the Cuchulain legends. It must have been so, for
he had long been dreaming an epic poem to be called _Cuchulain_; but
feeling himself unable for so long a task he entrusted it to Lady
Gregory, and led her from cabin to cabin in search of a style, and
they returned to Coole ruminating the beautiful language of the
peasants and the masterpiece quickening in it, Yeats a little sad, but
by no means envious toward Lady Gregory, and sad, if at all, that his
own stories in the volume entitled _The Secret Rose_ were not written
in living speech. It is pleasant to think that, as he opened the park
gates for her to pass through, the thought glided into his mind that
perhaps in some subsequent edition she might help him with the
translation. But the moment was for the consideration of a difficulty
that had arisen suddenly. The legends of Cuchulain are written in a
very remote language, bearing little likeness to the modern Irish
which Lady Gregory had learnt in common with everybody connected with
the Irish Literary Movement, Yeats and myself excepted. A dictionary
of the ancient language exists, and it is easy to look out a word; but
a knowledge of Early or Middle Irish is only obtained gradually after
years of study; Lady Gregory confesses herself in her preface to be no
scholar, and that she pieced together her text from various French and
German translations. This method recommends itself to Yeats, who says
in his preface that by collating the various versions of the same tale
and taking the best bits out of each the stories are now told
perfectly for the first time, a singular view for a critic of Yeats's
understanding to hold, a strange theory to advocate, the strangest, we
do not hesitate to say, that has ever been put forward by so
distinguished a poet and critic as Yeats. He was a severer critic the
day that he threw out Edward's play with so much indignity in Tillyra.
He was then a monk of literature, an inquisitor, a Torquemada, but in
this preface he bows to Lady Gregory's taste as if she were the
tale-teller that the world had been waiting for, one whose art
exceeded that of Balzac or Turgenev, for neither would have claimed
the right to refashion the old legends in accordance with his own
taste or the taste of his neighbourhood. I left out a good deal, Lady
Gregory writes in her preface, I thought you would not care about. The
you refers to the people of Kiltartan, to whom Lady Gregory dedicates
her book. It seems to me that Balzac and Turgenev would have taken a
different view as to the duty of a modern writer to the old legends;
both would have said: It is never justifiable to alter a legend; it
has come down to us because it contains some precious message, and the
message the legend carries will be lost or worsened if the story be
altered or mutilated or deformed. And who am I, Balzac would have
said, that I should alter a message that has come down from a far-off
time, a message often enfolded in the tale so secretly that it is all
things to all men? My province, he would have continued, is not to
alter the story, but to interpret it, and we have not to listen very
intently to hear him say: Not only I may, I must interpret. There can
be little doubt that Yeats is often injudicious in his noble preface,
and he exposes Lady Gregory to criticism when he depreciates the
translation from which Lady Gregory said she worked. She might have
written: Which I quote, for she follows Kuno Meyer's translation of
_The Wooing of Emer_ sentence by sentence, and it is our puzzle to
discover how Kuno Meyer's English is worthless when he signs it and
beautiful when Lady Gregory quotes it. A clear case of literary
transubstantiation, I said, speaking of the miracle to a friend who
happened to be a Roman Catholic, and she gave me the definition of the
catechism: the substance is the same, but the accident is different.
Or it may have been: the incident is the same and the substance is
different; one cannot always be sure that one remembers theology
correctly. A little examination, however, of Lady Gregory's text
enabled us to dismiss the theological aspect as untenable. Here and
there we find she has altered the words; Kuno Meyer's title is _The
Wooing of Emer;_ Lady Gregory has changed it to _The Courting of Emer_
(she is writing living speech); and if Kuno Meyer wrote that Emer
received Cuchulain in her bower, Lady Gregory, for the same reason,
would certainly change it to: she asked him into her parlour. The word
lawn in the sentence: and as the young girls were sitting together on
their bench on the lawn they heard coming toward them a clattering of
hooves, the creaking of a chariot, the grating of wheels, belongs to
Lady Gregory; of that I am so sure that it would be needless for me to
refer to Kuno Meyer's version of the legend.

No light diadem of praise Yeats sets on Lady Gregory's brow when he
says that she has discovered a speech, beautiful as that of Morris,
and a living speech into the bargain. He continues, that as she moved
among her people she learnt to love the beautiful speech of those who
think in Irish, and to understand that it is as true a dialect of
English as the dialect that Burns wrote in. But when we look into the
beautiful speech that Lady Gregory learnt as she moved among her
people, we find that it consists of no more than a dozen turns of
speech, dropped into pages of English so ordinary, that redeemed from
these phrases it might appear in any newspaper without attracting
attention. And she does not seem to have inquired if the phrases she
uses are merely local or part of the English language; she writes
again and again a phrase which we find in _The Burial of Sir John
Moore_, evidently under the impression that she is writing something
extremely Irish:

  That the foe and the stranger should tread o'er his head,
    And we far away on the billow.

It would seem that in the opinion of many the line: And we far away on
the billow, marks the poem as having been written by an Irishman, a
careless criticism, for it is certain that the turn of speech referred
to is to be found in Shakespeare, in Milton, in Morris, even in
Dickens. It is heard in England in everyday speech, though not so
often as it is heard in Ireland, but it is heard, and it was a mistake
on Lady Gregory's part to accept it as characteristically Irish. And
her mistake shows how very little thought she gave to the question of
idiomatic speech. She writes: he, himself, instead of omitting the
parasitical he as she might very well have done. The omission would
have suggested Ireland without any violation to the English language;
and her attitude toward the verb to be is quite unconsidered and
commonplace. She does not seem to have realised that in Ireland the
verb to be is used to imply continuous action; and it seems to me very
important to have noticed that Irish English and Provincial English
preserve a distinction that has disappeared from English as spoken in
polite society and taught at Oxford and Cambridge. Everybody in
Ireland and a great many among the English middle classes still say: I
shall be seeing So-and-so tonight and will tell him, etc., and
everybody in Ireland and a great number among the English middle
classes still say: Will you be having your letters sent on, which is
surely richer English than: Will you have your letters sent on? My
parlourmaid always says: Will you be dressing for dinner tonight? and:
Will you be wearing your silk hat tonight? thereby distinguishing
between a simple and a continuous future action. It is our
parlourmaids and their likes that carry on these subtleties of tense,
a much more important point than the aspiration of the letter h. I
have heard of something called Extension Lectures at Oxford and
Cambridge, but, without having the least notion of what is meant by
extension lectures, I would suggest that some of the yeomen of
Oxfordshire should be sent for to teach the professors, learned, no
doubt, in the Latin and Greek languages, but who have no English.

But the efforts of the uneducated to teach the educated would be made
in vain; the English language is perishing and it is natural that it
should perish with the race; race and grammatical sense go together.
The English have striven--and done a great deal in the world; the
English are a tired race, and their weariness betrays itself in the
language, and the most decadent of all are the educated classes. We
say in Ireland: I am just after feeding the birds, and this is a
richer phrase, faintly different from: I have just fed the birds. All
these delicate shades have dropped out of modern English; they still
exist in the language, but they are no longer used, they are slightly
archaic today, or provincial; and the source wherefrom the language is
refreshed--rural English--is being destroyed by Board-schools. God
help the writer who puts pen to paper in fifty years' time, for all
that will be left of the language will be a dry shank-bone that has
been lying a long while on the dust-heap of empire.

The difference between rural and urban speech should have been studied
by Lady Gregory, but we fear she has not given a thought to it; she
was just content to pepper her page with a few idiomatic turns of
speech which she very often does not use correctly. It is what I
think, said Ferogain, that it is the fire of Conaire, the High King,
and I would be glad he not to be there tonight, for it would be a pity
if harm would come on him or his life be shortened, for he is a branch
in its blossom. To my ear--and I come from the same country as Lady
Gregory--this is not living speech. What the Galway, and I may add the
Mayo, peasant would say is: And it's glad I'd be if he wasn't there
tonight. We read on and at the end of about ten lines we come upon:
What use will it be I to speak to him? And then her pen fills up
another page before she thinks it necessary to drop in: A welcome
before you, a pretty phrase which may be idiom, though I have never
heard it in either Mayo or Galway. We turn the leaves and catch sight
of: And it's you have what all the men of Ulster are wanting in. If we
continued a little further it is quite possible we should come upon:
And they do be saying, and: It is what I think, but we should not meet
anywhere in the book an attempt to make, to mould, or to fashion a
language out of the idiom of the Galway peasant, and it is astonished
I am altogether that Yeats could have brought himself to compare this
patchwork to the beautiful speech of Morris or of Burns, and to speak
of the manuscripts that were consulted, for Lady Gregory says herself
in her preface that she cannot read the manuscripts, but has
translated from the French and German versions of the stories. And it
is mighty hard to know how he could have reconciled himself to the
adaptation of barbaric tales to the drawing-room. He must have often
said to himself: She wouldn't bowdlerise the Bible in the interests of
the drawing-room. And the constant repetition of a phrase like: And it
wasn't a chair they gave him but a stool, and it not in the corner,
must have ended by boring him, for no one is so easily bored by the
repetition of a phrase as Yeats; it must have been that phrase that
drove him out of Coole and sent him off again in pursuit of the
golden-haired Isolde, whom, perhaps, the poet missed or found in
Brittany or in Passy.

And it was on one of those journeys that he discovered Synge, a man of
such rough and uncultivated aspect that he looked as if he had come
out of Derrinrush. He was not a peasant as Yeats first supposed, but
came, like all great writers, from the middle classes; his mother had
a house in Kingstown which he avoided as much as possible, and it was
in the Rue d'Arras that Yeats found him, _dans une chambre meuble_ on
the fifth floor. He was on his way back to Ireland, and might stay at
Kingstown for a while, till his next quarter's allowance came in (he
had but sixty pounds a year), but as soon as he got it he would be
away to the West, to the Arran Islands. Yeats gasped; and it was the
romance of living half one's life in the Latin Quarter and the other
half in the Arran Islands that captured Yeats's imagination. He must
have lent a willing ear to Synge's tale of an unpublished manuscript,
a book which he had written about the Arran Islands; but his interest
in it doubtless flagged when Synge told him that it was not written in
peasant speech. Synge must have answered: But peasant speech in Arran
is Irish. Yeats remembered with regret that this was so, for he would
have preferred Anglo-Irish; and he listened to Synge telling him that
he had some colloquial knowledge of the Irish language. He had had to
pick up a little Irish; life in Arran would be impossible without
Irish, and Yeats awoke from his meditation.

This strange Irishman was a solitary, who only cared to talk with
peasants, and was interested in things rather than ideas. In the Rue
d'Arras it must have been Yeats that did all the admiration, and Synge
must have been a little bored, but quite willing that Yeats should
discover in him a man of genius, a strange experience for Synge, who,
however convinced he was inly of his own genius, must have wondered
how Yeats had divined it, for Yeats had not pretended to feel any
interest in the articles on French writers that Synge had sent round
to the English Press, adding thereby sometimes a few pounds to his
income, but only sometimes, for these articles were so trite that they
were seldom accepted; John Eglinton confesses once a year that he
could not stomach the article that Synge sent to him for publication
in _Dana_; and they were so incorrectly written that Best, who knew
Synge in the Rue d'Arras, tells that he used to go over them, for
Synge could not write correctly at that time. Only one out of three
was accepted, and the one that came to _Dana_ no doubt came with all
the edges worn by continual transmission through the post. It is Best
that should write about Synge, for he helped him to furnish his room
in the Rue d'Arras; Synge was very helpless in the actual affairs of
life; he could not go out and buy furniture; Best had to go with him,
and they brought home a mattress and some chairs and a bed on a
barrow, and then returned to fetch the rest. There was a fiddle
hanging on the wall of the garret in the Rue d'Arras, but as Synge
never played it, Best began to wonder if Synge could play, and as if
suspecting Best of disbelief in his music, Synge took it down one
evening and drew the bow across the strings in a way that convinced
Best, who played the fiddle himself; and, as if satisfied, he returned
the fiddle to its nail, saying that he only played it in the Arran
Islands in the evenings when the peasants wanted to dance. They have
no ear for music, he said, and do not recognise a melody. What!
exclaimed Best. Only as they recognise the cry of a bird or animal,
not as a musician. Only the beat of the jig enters their ears, Best
replied in a voice tinged with melancholy.

In Yeats's imagination, playing the fiddle to the Arran Islanders, and
reciting poems to them, are one and the same thing, and he recognised
instantly in Synge the Gleeman that was in himself, but had remained,
and would remain for ever, unrealised; and his imagination caught fire
at the conjunction of the Rue d'Arras and the Arran Islands. And
whosoever has followed this narrative so far can see Yeats leaning
forward in Synge's chair, getting more and more interested in him at
every moment, his literary passions rising till they carried him to
his feet and set him walking about the dusty carpet from the window to
the table at which Synge worked, crying: Come to Ireland and write
folk-plays for me. A play about Arran.

But the play I've shown you--

Is of no account. The language will help you to know your own people.

And, better than any description, this dialogue represents the meeting
of Yeats and Synge in the Rue d'Arras, Synge's large impassive face
into which hardly any light of expression ever came, listening to
Yeats with a look of perplexity moving over its immobility, and
Yeats's passion, purely literary, steadily mounting. You must come
back and perfect yourself in the language; you must live among the
people again, he reports himself to have said. You must come to
Ireland. A theatre is building in Dublin for the production of
folk-plays, or soon will be building; and he told Synge how Miss
Horniman, a lady of literary tastes and ample income, had decided to
give to Dublin what no other city in an English-speaking country
possessed--a subventioned theatre. Write me an Arran play. We will
open the theatre with it; and he began to speak of Synge's immediate
return to Arran. I should die, Synge is reported to have answered. Not
before you have written the masterpiece, Yeats answered, and he
continued day after day to subjugate Synge's mind, till one Saturday
evening, after a talk lasting till long past midnight, Synge declared
his adherence to the new creed of living speech.

When a man's mind is made up, his feet must set out on the way, Yeats
replied. Synge acquiesced, and when he had received two little cheques
which were due to him for articles, he folded his luggage according to
promise, and a few days after presented himself at the Nassau Hotel,
and was introduced to Lady Gregory, who encouraged him to confide in
her; and he told her the story of his health, and she very kindly took
his part against Yeats, who was all for Arran, not for the middle
island, for there only Irish is spoken. And the dialect is what we
want. That may be, Mr Yeats, but Mr Synge may not be able to stand the
climate in the autumn. And she turned to Synge, who told her that the
best time would be a little later, when the people would be out
digging in their potato fields. Lady Gregory agreed that this was so,
and after some demur Yeats yielded, as he always does to Lady Gregory,
and the three were of one mind that the mild climate of Wicklow was
suitable to Synge's health, and also to the study of living speech,
for the tinkers met in Wicklow in the autumn, Yeats cried. You mustn't
miss the gathering. And a few days later Synge wrote that he had been
fortunate enough to fall in with a band of tinkers. He had heard a
tall, lean man cry after a screaming girl: Black Hell to your sowl!
you've followed me so far, you'll follow me to the end! And driving
their shaggy ponies and lean horses up a hillside, the tinkers made
for their annual assemblage, exchanging their wives and arranging the
roads they were to take, the signs to be left at the cross roads, the
fairs they were to attend, and the meeting-places for the following
year. But this was not all the good news. Synge had gained the
good-will of a certain tinker and his wife, and was learning their
life and language as they strolled along the lanes, cadging and
stealing as they went, squatting at eventide on the side of a dry
ditch. Like a hare in a gap he listened, and when he had mastered
every turn of their speech he left the tinker and turned into the
hills, spending some weeks with a cottager, joining a little later
another group of tinkers accompanied by a servant-girl who had
suddenly wearied of scrubbing and mangling, boiling for pigs, cooking,
and working dough, and making beds in the evening. It would be better,
she had thought, to lie under the hedgerow; and in telling me of this
girl, Synge seemed to be telling me his own story. He, too, disliked
the regular life of his mother's house, and preferred to wander with
the tinkers, and when tired of them to lie abed smoking with a
peasant, and awake amid the smells of shag and potato-skins in the
sieve in the corner of the room. In answer to an inquiry how the day
passed in the cottage, he told me that after breakfast he scrambled
over a low wall out of which grew a single hawthorn, and looked round
for a place where he might loosen his strap, and when that job was
done he kept on walking ahead thinking out the dialogue of his plays,
modifying it at every stile after a gossip with some herdsman or
pig-jobber, whomever he might meet, returning through the cold spring
evening, when the stars shine brightly through the naked trees,
licking his lips, appreciating the fine flavour of some drunkard's
oath or blasphemy.

Yeats was at this time in the hands of the Fays and a Committee, and
the performances of the National Theatre were given in different
halls; and when Synge came up from the country to read _Riders to the
Sea_ to the company, Yeats, who did not wish to have any
misunderstanding on the subject, cried: Sophocles! across the table,
and, fearing that he was not impressive enough, he said: No,
Aeschylus! And that same afternoon he said to me in Grafton Street: I
would I were as sure of your future and of my own as I am of Synge's.
Irishmen, he said, had written well before Synge, but they had written
well by casting off Ireland; but Synge was the first man that Ireland
had inspired; and I asked if he were going to find his fortune in
Ireland, his literary fortune, for _The Well of the Saints_ had very
nearly emptied the Abbey Theatre. We were but twenty in the stalls:
the Yeats family, Sarah Purser, William Bailey, John Eglinton, AE,
Longworth, and dear Edward, who supported the Abbey Theatre, though he
was averse from peasant plays. All this sneering at Catholic practices
is utterly distasteful to me, he said to me. I can hear the whining
voice of the proselytiser through it all. I never will go against my
opinions, and when I hear the Sacred Name I assure you--You mean the
name of God, Edward, don't you? I never like to mention it. The Sacred
Name is enough. But if you are speaking French you say Mon Dieu at
every sentence. If it isn't wrong in one language, how can it be wrong
in another? A smile trickled across Edward's face, round and large and
russet as a ripe pumpkin, and he muttered: _Mon ami Moore, mon ami
Moore_.

He was in the Abbey the first night of the _Playboy_, and on my return
from Paris he told me that though the noise was great, he had heard
enough blasphemy to keep him out of the theatre thenceforth, and next
morning he had read in the papers that Ireland had been exhibited in a
shameful light as an immoral country. And oddly enough, the scene of
the immorality is your own native town, George. He told me that the
hooting had begun about the middle of the third act at the words: If
all the women of Mayo were standing before me, and they in their--He
shrank from completing the sentence, and muttered something about the
evocation of a disgusting spectacle.

I agree with you, Edward, that shift evokes a picture of blay calico;
but the delightful underwear of Madame--

Now, George.

And then, amused at his own folly, which he can no more overcome than
anybody else, he began to laugh, shaking like a jelly, puffing
solemnly all the while at his churchwarden.

The indignation was so great that I thought sometimes the pit was
going to break in. Lower the bloody curtain, and give us something we
bloody well want, a crowded pit kept on shouting. And looking at
Edward I imagined I could see him in the stalls near the stage,
turning round in terror, his face growing purpler and purpler. All the
same, he said, though the pain that Synge's irreverent remarks caused
me is very great, I disapprove altogether of interrupting a
performance. But Yeats shouldn't have called in the police. A
Nationalist should never call for the police.

But, Edward, supposing a housebreaker forces his way in here or into
Tillyra?

He said that that was different, and after wasting some time in
discussion regarding the liberty of speech and the rights of property,
he asked me if I had read the play, and I told him that on reading
about the tumult in the Abbey Theatre I had telegraphed from Paris for
a copy, and that the first lines convinced me that Ireland had at last
begotten a masterpiece--the first lines of Pegeen Mike's letter to Mr
Michael O'Flaherty, general dealer, in Castlebar, for six yards of
stuff for to make a yellow gown, a pair of boots with lengthy heels on
them and brassy eyes, a hat as suited for a wedding day, a fine-tooth
comb. Never was there such a picture of peasant life in a few lines;
and at every sentence my admiration increased. At the end of the act I
cried out: A masterpiece! a masterpiece! Of course, they felt
insulted. The girls coming in with presents for the young stranger
pleased me, but a cold wind of doubt seemed to blow over the pages
when the father came on the stage, a bloody bandage about his head,
and--Edward--you're asleep!

No, I'm listening.

So clearly did I see disaster in that bloody bandage that I could
hardly read through the third act. But you see nothing in the play.

Yes, I do, only it's a little thing. Shawn Keogh is a very good
character, and the Widow Quinn is not bad either.

But the language, Edward?

You have made up your mind that this play is a masterpiece, but I am
not going to give in to you.

But the style, Edward?

It isn't English. I like the Irish language and the English language,
but I don't like the mixture; and then puffing at his pipe for a few
seconds he said: I like the intellectual drama.

The conversation turned upon Ibsen, and we talked pleasantly until
one in the morning, and then bidding him good night I returned to Ely
Place, delighted at my own perspicacity, for there could be no doubt
that it was the bloody bandage that caused the row in the Abbey
Theatre. The language is beautiful, but--I had admitted to Edward that
I had only glanced through the third act, and Edward had answered: If
you had read the whole of it you might be of my opinion. It wasn't
likely that Edward and I should agree about the _Playboy_, but it
might well be that I was judging it hurriedly, and it would have been
wiser, I reflected, to have read the play through before attempting to
explain why the humour of the audience had changed suddenly, and I
resolved to read the play next morning. But my dislike of reading is
so great that I overlooked it, and when Yeats came to see me, instead
of the praise which he had come to hear, and which he was craving for,
he heard some rather vain dissertations and only half-hearted praise.
Again my impulsiveness was my ruin. The play would have been
understood if it had been read carefully, and the evening would have
been one of exaltation, whereas it went by mournfully, Yeats in the
chimney-corner listening to suggestions that would preserve the comedy
note. He went away depressed, saying, however, that it would be as
well that I should write to Synge about his play, since I liked the
greater part. But he did not think that Synge would make any
alterations. And the letter I sent to Synge was superficial. I hope he
destroyed it. He was glad that his play had pleased me, but he could
not alter the third act. It had been written again and again--thirteen
times. That is all I remember of his letter, interesting on account of
the circumstances in which it was written and the rarity of Synge's
correspondence. It is a pity his letter was destroyed and no copy
kept; our letters would illuminate the page that I am now writing,
exhibiting us both in our weakness and our strength--Synge in his
strength, for if the play had been altered we should have all been
disgraced, and it was Yeats's courage that saved us in Dublin. He did
not argue, he piled affirmation upon affirmation, and he succeeded in
the end ... but we will not anticipate.

But if Dublin would not listen to the _Playboy_, Dublin read the text;
edition after edition was published, and we talked the _Playboy_ round
our firesides. How we talked! Week after week, month after month, the
Abbey Theatre declining all the while, till at last the brothers Fay
rose in revolt against Yeats's management, accusing him of hindering
the dramatic movement by producing no plays except those written by
his intimate friends. Yeats repelled the accusation by offering to
submit those that he had rejected to the judgment of Professor
Tyrrell, a quite unnecessary concession on the part of Yeats, for
Willie Fay is but an amusing Irish comedian, and it was presumptuous
for him and his brother to set themselves against a poet. They
resigned, and one night Yeats came to me with the grave news that the
Fays had seceded.

I feel I must talk to somebody he said, flinging himself into a chair.

AE is the only man who can distribute courage, but Yeats and AE were
no longer friends, and I was but a poor purveyor. It is true that I
told him, and without hesitation, that the secession of the Fays was a
blessing in disguise, and that now he was master in his own house the
Abbey Theatre would begin to flourish, and it would have been well if
I had confined myself to pleasant prophesying; but very few can resist
the temptation to give good advice. One thing, Yeats, I have always
had in mind, but never liked to tell you; it is that the way you come
down the steps from the stage and stride up the stalls and alight by
Lady Gregory irritates the audience, and if you will allow me to be
perfectly frank, I will tell you that she is a little too imposing,
too suggestive of Corinne or Madame de Stal. Corinne and Madame de
Stal were one and the same person, weren't they? But you don't know,
Yeats, do you? And so I went on pulling the cord, letting down volumes
of water upon poor Yeats, who crouched and shivered. The water, always
cold, was at times very icy, for instance when I said that his dreams
of reviving Jonson's _Volpone_ must be abandoned. If you aren't very
careful, Yeats, the Academic idea will overgrow the folk.

And Yeats went away overwhelmed, and I saw no more of him for many
months, not until it became known that Synge's persistent ill health
had at last brought him to a private hospital, where he lay waiting an
operation. He lives by the surgeon's knife. Yeats said to me, and I
welcomed his advice to save myself from the anguish of going to see a
man dying of cancer. And while Synge perished slowly, Gogarty
recovered in the same hospital after an operation for appendicitis.
One man's scale drops while another goes up. As I write this line I
can see Synge, whom I shall never see again with my physical eyes,
sitting thick and straight in my armchair, his large, uncouth head,
and flat, ashen-coloured face with two brown eyes looking at me, not
unsympathetically. A thick, stubbly growth of hair starts out of a
strip of forehead like black twigs out of the head of a broom. I see a
ragged moustache, and he sits bolt upright in my chair, his legs
crossed, his great country shoe spreading over the carpet. The
conversation about us is of literature, but he looks as bored as Jack
Yeats does in the National Gallery.... Synge and Jack Yeats are like
each other in this, neither takes the slightest interest in anything
except life, and in their own deductions from life; educated men, both
of them, but without aesthetics, and Yeats's stories that Synge read
the classics and was a close student of Racine is a piece of Yeats's
own academic mind. Synge did not read Racine oftener than Jack Yeats
looks at Titian, and no conclusion should be drawn from the fact that
among his scraps of verse are to be found translations from Villon
and Marot; they are merely exercises in versification; he was curious
to see if Anglo-Irish idiom could be used in poetry. Villon wrote
largely in the slang of his time, therefore Villon was selected; and
whosoever reads Villon dips into Marot and reads _Une Ballade  Double
Refrain_. And that is all, for, despite his beautiful name, Marot is
an insipid poet. I am sorry that Yeats fell into the mistake of
attributing much reading to Synge; he has little love of character and
could not keep himself from putting rouge on Synge's face and touching
up his eyebrows. He showed greater discrimination when he said: You
will never know as much about French poetry as Arthur Symons. Come to
Ireland and write plays for me. And for his great instinct we must
forgive him his little sins of reason. He very rightly speaks of Synge
as a solitary, and it is interesting to speculate what made him a
solitary. Was it the sense that death was lurking round the corner
always, and the sense that he possessed no social gifts, that helped
to drive him out into the Arran Islands where he knew nobody, and to
the Latin Quarter behind the Luxembourg Gardens where nobody knew him?
A man soon perceives if he is interested in others and if others are
interested in him, and if he contribute nothing and gets nothing, he
will slink away as Synge did.

It seemed a cruel fate that decreed that Synge must die before his
play could be revived in Dublin, but his fate was cruel from the
beginning. Yeats tells me that these lines were found among his
papers: I am five-and-twenty today; I wonder will the five-and-twenty
years before me be as unhappy as those I have passed through. He
received Yeats's belief in his genius, and that was all he got from
life. He wrote but little, but that little was his own: _Mon verre
n'est pas grand, mais je bois dans mon verre_. His last strength he
reserved for _Deirdre_, working at the play whenever he could,
determined to finish it before he died. But he wrote slowly, and the
disease moved quickly from cell to cell, and before the last writing
was accomplished Synge laid aside the pen and resigned himself to
death. It is curious that he should have met his old friend Best on
his way to the hospital. Best tells these things significantly. He
asked Synge if he were going in for an operation. Synge answered no;
and when Best called to see him in the hospital, he found Synge
clinging to a little hope, though he knew there was none, saying that
people often get better when nobody expected them to get better; and
he seemed to experience some disappointment when Best did not answer
promptly that that was so.

He used to speak of _Deirdre_ as his last disappointment; but another
waited him. An hour before he died he asked the nurse to wheel his bed
into a room whence he could see the Wicklow mountains, the hills where
he used to go for long solitary walks, and he was wheeled into the
room, but the mountains could not be seen from the windows; to see
them it was necessary to stand up, and Synge could not stand or sit up
in his bed, so his last wish remained ungratified, and he died with
tears in his eyes.




VIII


Synge's death seems to have done him a great deal of good; he was not
cold in his grave when his plays began to sell like hot cakes and a
complete edition of his writings was contemplated, comprising the
plays and his Wicklow Sketches and The Blasket Islands; the newspaper
articles that he had written upon the French poets were sought for and
discovered, and, what was still more important, Yeats decreed a
revival of the _Playboy_ at the Abbey. We were all agog and prayed
that the play would be allowed to pass without protest; it seemed very
likely that this would be permitted, for Synge's success had sobered
Dublin, especially its journalists. A sad thing it is for a journalist
to find the play that he has described as contemptible, as an insult
to Ireland, accepted by all the world as a masterpiece, and the
newspaper that smells like a musty sacristy held its peace, or only
sent one poor little voice to utter a faint squeak in the gallery from
time to time. The play was the same, the text was the same, the cast
was the same with one exception. The part of the Playboy was entrusted
to Fred O'Donovan, and thereby hangs a tale that I should like to
tell.

Synge had written the play knowing that the part of Christy Mahon was
going to be played by Willie Fay, a little man five feet three or
four; allusions to his size had crept into the text, and Willie Fay,
who is a true artist, had exhibited Christy Mahon in the conditions of
a wayfarer who had been wandering for at least a fortnight, sleeping
in a barn when he could find an open door, and a dry ditch when he
could not find a barn, and if Willie Fay had been a broad-shouldered,
stalwart, fine young fellow, he might have carried the illusion so far
as to send some whiffs of Christy across the footlights. But his
diminutive appearance, and the very qualities which made him so
admirable an exponent of the part of Michael O'Dowd in _The Well of
the Saints_ were against him in the _Playboy_. An actor's
stock-in-trade is his personality, and Fay's personality is of the
crab-apple kind, and it was necessary that the story that Christy had
to tell should be told with an engaging simplicity; the audience must
sympathise with the son whom the father persecuted because he would
not marry an old woman; the audience must see the father raise the
scythe, and poor Christie the loy, to defend himself. The father is
cloven by the loy, but that is an accident. I did not see Willie Fay
in the part, but it is easy to imagine how his reading would alienate
the sympathy of the audience. He might point to certain passages which
would support his reading; no doubt he could; but these are not the
passages that should be brought into light. It just comes to this,
that no man living can play the two parts, the Playboy and the blind
man in _The Well of the Saints_, any more than any man can play Hamlet
and Othello satisfactorily. A different personality is required, and
Fred O'Donovan is a well-favoured young man whom any girl would like
for his appearance, and he told the story of how he had killed his
father, simply, almost innocently, as an unfortunate accident that had
happened to him, and Pegeen Mike pitied him. He was no doubt
occasionally against the words, but that was unavoidable; the part
cannot be played any other way. A few phrases were dropped out here
and there; in the second act the bandage was no longer blood-stained,
and in the third, when Christy went out to kill his father for the
second time, the father came in on all fours; this kept the comedy
note, which was in danger of being lost, for Pegeen Mike is very angry
with Christy in the third act, believing him to be a mere
braggart--the weak spot in the play, but it passes rapidly; and it was
interesting to speak about it to Miss Maire O'Neill, who played Pegeen
Mike out of a very clear vision of the character and with all the
finish of a true artist.

However we look at it, I said, it is difficult to see how Pegeen Mike
could have brought the peat from the fire to burn her lover's feet,
and three minutes after rush to the door to watch him leaving her for
ever; going away with his father back to their own countryside. Miss
O'Neill said she didn't think she could speak the words so that the
audience would understand that her anger against Christy was
simulated. Well, imperfection is often a zest, I answered, and left
the theatre thinking that Fate had allowed Synge to accomplish very
little; two one-act plays, purely tentative, a three-act play upon an
old theme, _The Tinker's Wedding_, and a dramatic version of the
legend of _Deirdre_, which it would have been well for me to have read
before writing this page, for the printed page alone is veracious; our
ears, however quick, cannot take in the whole of a play. But the book
is not on the table, nor in the house, nor at the bookseller's round
the corner, and it is well that it isn't, for it is pleasant sometimes
to believe that one's ears are trustworthy, and, amid my aural
experiences, I have none more agreeable than the music of the dialogue
about Naisi's grave, though memory recalls but one tiny phrase: Death
is a poor untidy thing. The writing of _Deirdre_ in peasant speech was
Yeats's idea; and the text bears witness that when Synge had written
an act he began to feel that peasant speech is unsuited to tragedy.
Only the second and third acts are of much account, only these are
finished, and to finish the first act Synge would have had to redeem
it from peasant speech, ridiculous and out of place at the court of
Kings, though the Kings be but shepherd Kings.[4] There is less idiom
in the second act than in the first, and none at all in the third; and
when I mentioned these things to Yeats he told me that Synge had begun
to weary of the limitations of peasant speech.... It is difficult to
imagine Synge writing about the middle classes and their tea-parties,
or the upper classes and their motor-cars, and we may exercise our
wits trying to discover the turn his talent would have taken, but it
is more practical to tell how Lady Gregory came to the rescue of the
Abbey Theatre and saved it after the secession of the Fays.

         [Footnote 4: Yeats should not have forgotten that Kiltartan
         was not spoken when Deirdre prophesied.]

She could write easily and well, and had shown aptitude for writing
rural anecdotes in dialogue, and it is an open secret that she was
Yeats's collaborator in the _Pot of Broth_ and in _Cathleen ni
Houlihan_; and feeling that the fate of the movement depended upon
her, she undertook the great responsibility of keeping the theatre
open with her pen, writing play after play, three or four a year,
writing in the space of ten years something like thirty plays. And is
there one among us who would undertake such a job of work and
accomplish it as well as Lady Gregory? The plays that flowed from her
pen so rapidly are not of equal merit, nor is there any one that
compares with the _Playboy_, but all are meritorious, all are
conceived and written in the same style. She is herself, in her little
plays, a Galway woman telling rural anecdotes that amuse her woman's
mind, and telling them gracefully, never trying to philosophise, to
explain, but just content to pick her little flower, to place it in a
vase for our amusement, and go on to another flower. _The Rising of
the Moon_ is a very pretty bit of artless dramatic writing, with a
fine folk flavour, hardly written, told as the people would tell it by
their firesides. _Hyacinth Halvey_ has been played all over the world
with success; and one must not look too scornfully at success; a
certain measure is necessary in a theatre. _Spreading the News_ is
even more natural than _The Rising of the Moon_; it is just the gossip
of a village thrown easily into dramatic form. Nobody could have done
Lady Gregory's plays as well as she did them herself, and _The
Workhouse Ward_ must not be forgotten, a trifle somewhat sentimental,
but just what was wanted to carry on the Abbey Theatre, which, for a
moment, could do very well without the grim humours of Synge. We must
get it into our heads that the Abbey Theatre would have come to naught
but for Lady Gregory's talent for rolling up little anecdotes into
one-act plays. She has written three-act plays, but her art and her
humour and her strength rarely carry her beyond a one-act. The best of
her three-act plays is probably _The Image_, in which she sets a whole
village prattling; the characters go on talking about very little,
yet always talking pleasantly, and we go away pleasantly amused and
pleasantly weary. The telling of _The Jackdaw_ is a little confused,
but whosoever writes thirty plays in ten years will sometimes be
sprightly, sometimes confused, sometimes languid, and will sometimes
choose subjects that cannot very well be written. She has told that
she wrote plays in the first instance because she believed it to be
her duty to write for the Abbey Theatre, and afterwards, no doubt,
took an interest in the writing for its own sake, and in this her
story nowise differs from many another's, chance playing in our lives
a greater part than we would care to admit. She never would have
written a play if she had not met Yeats, nor would Synge, who is now
looked upon as an artist as great as Donatello or Benvenuto Cellini,
and perhaps I should not have gone to Ireland if I had not met Yeats;
and if I had not gone to Ireland I should not have written _The Lake_
or _The Untilled Field_, or the book I am now writing.

So all the Irish movement rose out of Yeats and returns to Yeats. He
wrote beautiful lyrics and narrative poems from twenty till
five-and-thirty, and then he began to feel that his mission was to
give a literature to Ireland that should be neither Hebrew, nor Greek,
nor French, nor German, nor English--a literature that should be like
herself, that should wear her own face and speak with her own voice,
and this he could do only in a theatre. We have all wanted repertory
theatres and art theatres and literary theatres, but these words are
vain words and mean nothing. Yeats knew exactly what he wanted; he
wanted a folk theatre, for if Ireland were ever to produce any
literature he knew that it would have to begin in folk, and he has his
reward. Ireland speaks for the first time in literature in the Abbey
Theatre.




IX


But my thoughts have begun to wander from Synge and Lady Gregory and
Yeats to all the critics who have complained that in this book,
instead of creating types of character like Esther Waters or Dick
Lennox, I have wasted my time describing my friends, mere
portrait-painting. But was not Dick Lennox Dick Maitland? And in
writing _Esther Waters_ did I not think of one heroic woman? We all
have models, and if we copy the model intelligently, a type emerges.
In writing _Patience_, Gilbert thought he was copying Oscar Wilde,
whereas he was drawing Willie Yeats out of the womb of Time; and when
Flaubert wrote _Bouvard and Pecuchet_ he thought he was creating, but
he was really performing the same kind offices for Plunkett and Gill,
giving them names much more significant than the names they are known
by in Ireland, but doing no more. A letter from Plunkett regretting
that a broken leg prevented him from being present at the great dinner
at the Shelbourne Hotel has been alluded to, and he was whirled
rapidly before the reader's eyes as he repaired on an outside car to
an agricultural meeting with Yeats, but no portrait of him has
appeared, and the reader has not heard how we became acquainted. It
was dear Edward who brought the meeting about, overriding Plunkett,
who is a timid man, and fears to meet any one with a sense of humour;
he dreads laughter as a cat dreads cold water. But Edward insisted.
You are both public men and you cannot avoid knowing each other sooner
or later, and now is the moment for you both to take the plunge.

And one evening at the end of a long summer's day a lean man of medium
height, courteous and dignified, clearly of the Protestant ascendancy,
came forward through the dusk of a drawing-room--the lamps had just
been lighted--to thank me for having accepted his invitation to
dinner. I liked his well-designed oval face, his scanty beard, and his
eyes pleasantly grey and pleasantly perplexed. A long, straight,
well-formed nose divided the face, and a broad strip of forehead lay
underneath the brown stubbly crop of hair that covered a small round
skull. The arrival of a guest obliged him to turn away, but before
doing so he shook hands with me a second time, and in this
supplementary handshake it seemed to me that that something which is
genuine in him had passed into his hand. What is in the mind
transpires in the hand; and this is quite natural, and it is still
more natural that what is not in the mind should not transpire in the
hand. There is no grip in Gill's hand; one remembers its colour and
its dangle, that is all; and his manner, though pleasing, is flimsy;
not that Plunkett's manners are hard and disagreeable; on the
contrary, they are rather soft and affable. But there is something
pathetic in him which strikes one at first in the brow, in the grey
eyes under it, and all over the flat face marked with a prominent
nose, and in the hesitancy of his speech, which straggles with his
beard, and his exclamation: Er--er--er, without which he cannot speak
half a dozen words.

So much did I see of Plunkett in the red twilight, with glimpses
through it of silken gowns, of shoulders and arms, all effaced, a dim
background. One felt on entering his room that his dinner was not a
sexual one. Everybody seemed anxious to speak on what is known as
serious subjects, but restrained himself out of deference to the
gowns. But as soon as sex had retired cigars were lighted and
important matters were on the verge of discussion. Plunkett was
visibly relieved, and with brightening face he began to talk. He
talked rapidly, he broke down, now he lost the thread and sought for
it: Er--er--er, the uneconomic man in his economic holding,
er--er--er, is a danger to the State, and the economic man in his
uneconomic holding, er--er--er, is probably a greater danger, and to
relieve the producer of the cost of distribution is the object of the
Co-operative movement. It seemed to me that we could have discovered
what he was saying in any sixpenny text-book, but Plunkett was so
interested that it is not likely he perceived he was boring the
company and me.

Plunkett, I said to myself, is one of those men whose genius is in
practical work, and who, in order to obtain foundation for his work,
seeks blindly for first principles; as soon as we get to practical
work he will talk quite differently. And I looked forward to
questioning him on matters about which I had definite information. But
as I was about to speak, a pallid parliamentarian, whose name I have
forgotten, weary like myself of the economic man and the uneconomic
holding, turned to me to get news of O'Brien, whose headquarters were
in the County of Mayo, thinking that as I came from that part of the
country, I should be able to tell him something regarding the chances
of an anti-grazing movement. It so happened that I had had that
morning a long talk with my agent about Mayo, and forgetful for the
moment of my intention to question Plunkett about the egg industry,
overborne by a desire to escape from platitudes, I began to repeat all
I had heard, saying I could vouch for the facts, my agent being an old
friend on whose veracity and accuracy of observation I could depend.
The parliamentarian leaned forward anxious to get the truth from me,
and whatever information might be picked up on the way, to pad his
speeches for the next session; and perhaps what I was saying, by force
of contrast with Plunkett's generalities, attracted the attention of
those present, and as they leaned forward interested to hear some
facts the humour of the situation began to tickle me. The absent
O'Brien had become the centre of interest, and a cloud of melancholy
appeared in Plunkett's face, his mechanical smile broke down, he
seemed troubled and irritated. Then, I thought, it is really true that
he delights in his talk of the economic man and the uneconomic
holding--er--er--er, and _vice versa_; and I began to doubt if Nature
in her endless discrepancies had really created such a discrepancy as
I had imagined: a practical man unable to get to practical work before
drinking platitudes from a sixpenny text-book. By this time my
knowledge of O'Brien's movement was exhausted, and I should have been
pleased to change the subject, but the parliamentarian was insistent,
and had it not been for the intervention of Plunkett I should not have
been able to rid myself of him. But Plunkett, unable to endure rivalry
with O'Brien for another moment, turned to the pallid parliamentarian,
saying that in two or three years his co-operative followers would be
masters of all local assemblies, and he spoke in such a way as to lead
the gentleman to understand that enough had been said about O'Brien.

At last my chance seemed to have come to get a word with Plunkett
regarding the details of his scheme for the regeneration of Ireland. I
was at that time interested in a Co-operative Egg Society, which had
been started at Plunkett's instigation by my brother, who had
discovered, after a little experience, that more extended business
arrangements were necessary if the profits were to cover the expenses;
and knowing more of this matter than I did about O'Brien's
anti-grazing movement I moved up toward Plunkett, anxious to hear his
opinion and to try and induce him to modify the measures he was taking
for spreading these societies all over the country. At the mention of
the blessed word co-operation Plunkett's face brightened, and he began
to discuss the subject, but in general terms, more, it seemed to me,
for the edification of the parliamentarian than for any practical
purpose. As I knew from my brother all about the general theory and
only wanted to study its application, I returned to the details again
and again, going into figures, showing how the system could not be
carried out exactly as Plunkett had dreamed it, and having some
experience about the conveying of eggs from Pulborough to London (they
arrived nearly always broken; true that the South Coast Railway paid
for the breakage without murmuring; all the same it was annoying to
have one's eggs broken), I tried to learn from him if more reliance
could be placed upon Irish railways.

One cannot discuss, I remember him saying, the fate of the individual
egg.

But, Plunkett, your whole system rests on the individual egg, a fact
which he could not contravene and so he became melancholy again.
Nothing, I said to myself, bores him so much as detail. He loves
dreaming, like every other Irishman; and we did not see each other for
many a month until we met in Gill's rooms in Clare Street, or in the
offices of the _Daily Express_, after the Boer War had driven me out
of England. The _Daily Express_ had been bought by Plunkett, or it had
come into Plunkett's control, and Gill had been appointed editor, and
feeling, I suppose, that it was necessary to redeem the _Express_ from
its sectarian tone, Gill dared one day to write of Dr Walsh as the
Archbishop of Dublin, causing a great uproar among the subscribers. An
attack on the Great Southern Railway caused the withdrawal of a great
advertisement; but nothing mattered so long as Plunkett and Gill
succeeded in convincing Gerald Balfour that what Ireland needed was a
new State Department of Agriculture and Art. Like all dreamers,
Plunkett is an inveigling fellow, and he inveigled Gerald Balfour, and
Gerald Balfour inveigled his brother, and his brother inveigled the
ministry, and the end of all this inveigling was a grant of one
hundred and seventy thousand a year to found a Department of
Agriculture and Art in Ireland. But the inveigler had been inveigled;
Gill's ambition stretched beyond mere agriculture; how Art was
gathered into the scheme I do not know, probably as a mere makeweight;
the mission of the Department was the reformation of Ireland, and,
from end to end, the very task that Flaubert's heroes ... but it would
be well to tell my readers who were the heroes of this not very
well-known book.

Bouvard and Pecuchet were two little city clerks, who became
acquainted in a way that seemed marvellous to both of them. It was
their wont to seek a certain bench after dinner, and to spend what
remained of their dinner-hour watching the passers-by. One day they
took off their hats to mop their brows: Bouvard looked into
Pecuchet's, Pecuchet looked into Bouvard's, both were amazed by the
coincidence; they had gotten their hats from the same hatter! A great
friendship arose out of this circumstance, the twain meeting every
day, delighting more and more in each other's company; and when
Bouvard inherits considerable wealth he renounces his clerkship and
invites Pecuchet to come to live with him. The first thing to do is to
get a fine _appartement_, but life in a flat becomes monotonous; they
must perforce do something to relieve the tedium of an unmeasured
idleness; market gardening strikes their imagination, for a reason
which I have forgotten, and having read the best books on the subject
of vegetable growing they buy some land, but only to discover after
considerable loss of money that the vegetables grown by their
neighbours, ignorant peasants, are far better than theirs and cheaper.
It is thirty years since I read _Bouvard and Pecuchet_, but nobody
forgets the story of the melon. Bouvard and Pecuchet had learnt all
the material facts about the growing of melons from books, and one
would have thought that that was enough, but no; the melon is one of
the most immoral of vegetables, and if great care be not taken it will
contract incestuous alliances with uncles and aunts, sisters and
brothers; and Bouvard and Pecuchet were not sufficiently concerned
with the morals of their pet. They were content to watch it growing
day after day bigger and bigger, exceeding the size of all melons;
prodigious, gigantic, brobdingnagian, were the adjectives they
murmured. At last the day came to cut the wonderful fruit. It was
splendid on the table; it had all the qualities that a melon should
have, all but one--it was uneatable. Bouvard spat his mouthful into
the grate; Pecuchet spat his, I think, out of the window.

Bouvard and Pecuchet turn from agriculture to Druidic remains, and
Pecuchet feels that his life would be incomplete without a love
adventure. The serving-maid seems to him suitable to his enterprise;
and having assurances of her purity from her, emboldened, he follows
her into the wood-shed. A painful disease is the strange ending of
this romance, and as soon as Pecuchet is restored to health the twain
are inspired to write a tragedy. But having no knowledge of dramatic
construction they send to Paris for books on the subject, and in these
books they read of the faults that the critics have discovered in
Shakespeare and Molire and Racine and other famous writers, and they
resolve to avoid these faults. Pecuchet wanders from tragedy to
Biblical criticism, and no one forgets the scene between him and
Monsieur le Cur under a dripping umbrella. Biblical criticism is
succeeded by another folly, and then by another; I do not remember the
book in detail, but the best-established theories are always being
overturned by the simplest fact.

This great book was described as an extravaganza by the critics of the
time, and it was said that Flaubert's admiration of human stupidity
was so great that he piled absurdity upon absurdity, exceeding the
modesty of Nature; but nothing is so immodest as Nature, and when she
picked up the theme suggested by Flaubert and developed it, human
stupidity gave forth flowers that would have delighted and saddened
him, saddened him, for it is difficult to imagine him writing his book
if he had lived to watch the Department at work in Ireland. He would
have turned away regretfully saying: I have been anticipated; Plunkett
and Gill have transferred my dreams into real life; and he would have
admitted that some of their experiments equalled those that he had in
mind--for instance, the calf that the Department sent to the Cork
Exhibition as an example of the new method of rearing calves.

Bouvard and Pecuchet (we will drop the Plunkett and Gill) invited all
the Munster farmers to view the animal, and they had been impressed by
its appearance, a fine happy beast it seemed to be; but very soon it
began to droop, causing a good deal of anxiety, and the news of its
death was brought one evening to the Imperial Hotel where Bouvard and
Pecuchet were lodging. After a hurried consultation Pecuchet looked at
his watch. We have several hours before us to find a similar calf.
But, Pecuchet, do you think that we are justified, er--er--er, in
replacing a dead calf by a healthy one? At this question Pecuchet
flamed a little. The honour of the Department is at stake, he said; we
must think of the Department. The Department, er--er--er, is judged by
its results. Again a light flamed into Pecuchet's eyes, and though he
did not say it, it was clear that he looked upon the Department as
something existing of and through itself which could not be judged by
its mere works. There has been some foul play. Our enemies, he
muttered, and sent a telegram to the expert of the Department to come
down at once. A post mortem was ordered, but no new fact was
discovered, and the advice of the vet was that the new method should
be abandoned and the second calf be fed upon milk and linseed meal,
and upon this natural diet it prospered exceedingly.

Bouvard and Pecuchet's experiments were not limited to teaching the
finest herdsmen in the world how to raise cattle; it was necessary
that they should spread themselves over the entire range of human
activities in order to get rid of the one hundred and seventy thousand
a year that the Department was receiving from the State. A good many
hundred pounds were lost in a shoe factory in Ballina, but what are a
few hundred pounds when one is dealing with one hundred and seventy
thousand a year? And there were moments of sad perplexity in the lives
of our reformers. A gleam came into Pecuchet's eyes. Have you thought
of anything? said Bouvard, and Pecuchet answered that it had just
occurred to him it would be a great advantage to Ireland and to the
Department if a method could be discovered of turning peat into coal.
These experiments will be costly, Pecuchet. How much do you think we
can spend? Pecuchet was full of hope, but the factory turned out so
complete and sudden a failure that it had to be closed at once. Oyster
beds were laid in Galway and given in charge of a young man who had
read all that that had ever been written on the subject of oyster
culture. The Colonel told me that he met him at a tennis party, and
the charming young man, who was a great social advantage to the
neighbourhood, explained to the Colonel that Portuguese oysters could
only live three or four days in the creek; Whitstables could endure
our waters a little longer. The French oyster, he said, is the
shortest lived of all.

I thought, said the Colonel, that the object of the Department was to
cultivate rather than to destroy oysters.

We are only experimenting; we must have facts, he answered, and next
day on their way to the creek the Colonel said: There must be a drain
hereabouts, and pointing to one flowing over the oyster beds, he
added: I think this accounts for a great deal of the mortality in
which you are experimenting. A gloom came into the young man's face
and he promised to write up a report for the Department.

I think it was the fishing interests of Galway that next attracted the
attention of Bouvard and Pecuchet. The fishermen were in sad need of
piers, and the Department undertook the construction of some two or
three, but a very few spring tides cast them hither and thither; some
of them can still be reached at low tide, some show a few rocks out in
the bay, and these are much appreciated by gannets in the breeding
season.

Bouvard felt the disappearance of the piers deeply, and so did
Pecuchet, but they found consolation in the thought that
experimentation is the source of all knowledge, and one day Bouvard
said to Pecuchet: Our staff is miserably underpaid. You are quite
right, Bouvard, you are a rich man and can do without a salary, but
for the honour of the Department it seems to me that I should be
placed on a level with the Under-Secretary; we must never forget that
ours is a great State Department.

And the twain fell to thinking how some more money might be expended
for the good of Ireland. The establishment of a bacon factory was
considered, and the advantage lectures on the minding of pigs would be
to the inhabitants of the west of Ireland. The egg and poultry
industry might be greatly benefited by a little knowledge. Lecturers
were sought and found, and they departed to instruct, and capons were
imported from Surrey to improve the strains, and there was great
lamentation at the end of the hatching season. Some wonderful letters
reached the Department, strangely worded letters from which I have
room for only one sentence: Sorra cock was among the cocks you sent
us. Pecuchet rang the bell, but the poultry expert was out at the
time, and a deputation was waiting in the ante-room. After listening
to all the evidence on the subject of cooking he agreed that the
culinary utensils at the disposal of the peasant were antiquated and
it was arranged that ladies should be sent out; one arrived at
Ballinrobe, and the peasants learnt from her how to make meringues.
But meringues were a little beyond the reach of the peasants' bill of
fare, and after a long correspondence with the Department the
lecturers were ordered to substitute _macaroni au gratin_, and I
remember a girl coming back from Ballinrobe bringing the dish with
her, and her enthusiasm about it was the same as Bouvard's and
Pecuchet's over the melon, and its success was the same as the
melon's; one of the family spat it into the grate, another spat it out
of the window. The Department had forgotten that Catholics do not like
cheese.

Undeterred by such incidents as these, the wheels of the Department
grind on and on, reproducing all the events of Flaubert's book in
every detail, but sooner or later Nature outstrips the human
imagination, and Flaubert would have thrown up his arms in significant
gesture if he were alive to hear the story of how Bouvard and Pecuchet
decided one day to improve the breed of asses in Ireland.

The ass is an animal much used in Ireland by the peasant, Bouvard
began; Pecuchet acquiesced, and during the course of the evening it
was agreed that it would be a great advantage to the country if the
Irish ass were improved. Books on the subject of the ass were sent for
to London, and it was discovered that the Spanish asses were the
finest of all, and Bouvard said to Pecuchet: We must import sires.
Pecuchet hesitated, and with his usual instinct for compromise
suggested Shetland ponies. Bouvard was of opinion that the Shetland
pony was too small for the friendly ass, but Pecuchet said that there
were in Kerry asses of a sufficient size, and a breed of small mules
would be of great use in the mountainy districts. Bouvard pointed out
that mules were sterile; Pecuchet referred Bouvard to _The
Reminiscences of a Veterinary Surgeon_; and he read in this book that
mules had been seen with foals. There was no case, however, of these
foals having bred in their turn, so the mule must be said to be
sterile in the second generation for certain. The mule is, moreover, a
vicious animal, and Bouvard passed the book back to Pecuchet, and for
one reason or another it was decided that the Department would be well
advised to leave the mule alone and direct all its attention to the
improvement of the ass.

What do you think, Pecuchet, of the Scotch ass?

Our importations from Scotland have been considerable lately.

You would like something Continental, Pecuchet. The Spanish ass, you
will see, is highly recommended; but the sires are expensive; two
hundred pounds are paid for the tall ass standing over fourteen hands
high, and able to cover a sixteen-hands mare; and we should have to
import at least fifty sires to affect visibly the Irish strain. You
see that would be ten thousand pounds, and we could hardly risk so
large an outlay. You will notice that the Egyptian ass is described as
being smaller than the Spanish, altogether a lighter animal, and we
could buy Egyptian sires for a hundred apiece; they run from
seventy-five to a hundred pounds. We might get them cheaper still by
taking a large number.

Pecuchet was in favour of a small commission that would take evidence
regarding not only the Egyptian, but the Barbary and the Arabian ass,
but this commission Bouvard pointed out would be a delay and an
expense, and an order was sent to Alexandria to purchase asses. The
Department of Agriculture in Ireland was anxious to buy sire asses,
sure foal-getters, and the selection was confided to--whom? The
archives of the Department would have to be searched for the name of
the agent, a useless labour, for no blame attaches to him; his
selection was approved by everybody, and the herd was much admired as
it trotted and cantered through the morning sunlight on the way to the
docks, beautiful little animals, alert as flies, shaking their ears
and whisking their long, well-furnished tails, a sight to behold, as
docile as they were beautiful, until they reached the gangway. But as
soon as they were asked to step on board every one was equally
determined to stay in his own country, and much pressure had to be
used, and some accidents happened; but human energy prevailed; the
asses were all shipped in the end, and it was thought that no untoward
incident could happen, so admirable were the arrangements for their
reception. Every ass had a stall to himself, and to make sure that
there could be no mutual biting and kicking each one was barred in his
stall. And it was this very bar that proved the undoing of Bouvard and
Pecuchet's great experiment. The temper of the asses had already been
tried, and they were not roused to such a stubbornness by the bar that
they preferred to die rather than to stale without stretching
themselves, and when the steamer put into Malta only seven were able
to proceed down the gangway. The telegram that brought the news of the
loss of ten asses set Bouvard and Pecuchet pondering.

Sea-sickness, I suppose, said Pecuchet.

It may have been home-sickness, Bouvard replied. Be that as it may,
the seven must be landed at Marseilles, and a telegram with these
instructions was sent to Malta. It reached there in time, but the boat
was delayed by the breaking of a screw, and the grooms, unsuspicious
of the reluctance of the ass to stale, again dropped the bars on their
hind quarters, with the result that one after another those grand
asses burst their bladders, only one arriving at Marseilles, a forlorn
and decrepit scarecrow ass that would not as much as look at the
pretty white and black and brown asses that had come up from Kerry. He
chased them with bared teeth out of his field. Pecuchet thought that a
chestnut ass might tempt him, but the colour is rare among asses, and
after a long search the task of finding one was given up as hopeless,
the expert declaring that it was doubtful if even a chestnut ass would
revive any of the fervour of old Nile in him: a gaunt, taciturn,
solitary animal, that moved away from human and ass kind, a vicious
unkempt brute that had once turned on Pecuchet; but he had sat on the
fence in time; a silent animal by day, and noisy at midnight, when
Bouvard sat considering his book for Ireland. On the table by his side
lay the _Different Methods of Famous Authors_, and learning from it
that Byron wrote late at night and drank soda-water, Bouvard
determined that he, too, would sit up late and drink soda-water, but
strange to relate, though his health declined, his book did not
progress. His mind was teeming with ideas, but he found it very
difficult to disentangle them, and adopted a new method of work.
Balzac used to go to sleep early in the evening, and wake up at twelve
and write all night and all day, drinking black coffee, but a very few
days proved to Bouvard that his health was not equal to the strain,
and he resolved to adopt another method. It was also stated in the
_Different Methods of Great Authors_ that Dumas was often glad to call
in a collaborator, and this seemed an excellent idea, for what
concerned Bouvard were not his rhythms, but his ideas. Others could
put his ideas into rhythms, and the help of all kinds of people was
evoked. We used to hear a great deal about Bond, a German economist,
and Coyne, a gentleman engaged in the Department, was entrusted with
the task of gathering statistics. Memoranda of all kinds were piled
up; a commission sent to Denmark to report on the working of Danish
dairies came back with the information that the dairies in Denmark
were kept remarkably clean. The Commission was accompanied by a
priest, and he returned much shocked, as well he might be, for he had
found no organised religion whatever in Denmark. One day a chapter
was sent round and everybody was asked to mark what he thought should
be omitted and to add what he thought should be included. Dear Edward
did not think that Bouvard had gone far enough in his praise of the
Gaelic, and Pecuchet, whom we met going out to luncheon, declined to
give any opinion on the subject of Bouvard's book.

I will not speak on the subject. (Then, I said to myself, there is a
subject on which Pecuchet is not willing to advise, and with interest
heightening I listened to Pecuchet.) I have told Bouvard, he said,
that he cannot be at once the saviour and the critic of Irish society.
If you must write a book, Bouvard, I have said, write what your own
eyes have seen and your ears have heard. It would be better if he
didn't write the book at all, he added, but if he must write one let
him write a book out of himself. But if he persists in his philosophy
he will harm the Department. Pecuchet threw up his arms, and I said to
Edward: There is a certain good fellowship in Pecuchet; he would save
his old pal from his vanity, the vanity of a book which he hopes will
prove him to be far-seeing--_i.e._ the deep thinker, the brooding sage
of Foxrock. And so long as breath remains in my body I will avouch
that Pecuchet was firm in his determination not to have anything to do
with Bouvard's book. He threw up his hands when I came to him with the
news that Bouvard had tired of coffee and unseemly hours, and had sent
his manuscript to Rolleston, who had turned up his shirt-sleeves and
thrown it into a tub, and had sent it home carefully starched and
ironed. The book got a good many reviews--the Fool's Hour it was, for
the Catholic Celt let a great screech out of him and demanded that the
redeemer should be put in the pillory.

My friend, John Redmond, will set up a Nationalist candidate against
him for South Dublin; he will be beaten at the polls, wailed Pecuchet.
And very soon after the defeat predicted by Pecuchet the Nationalist
members began to remind the Government that Bouvard remained at the
head of the Department, though it had always been understood that the
Vice-President of the Department should be a member of the House of
Commons. The Nationalists yelped singly and in concert, and so loud
grew the pack that Pecuchet could restrain Bouvard no longer, and he
went down to Galway to try his luck. A nice kind of luck he'll meet
there, Pecuchet said, and when Bouvard returned from Galway
crestfallen, Pecuchet determined to speak out. He was not unmindful of
past favours, but the kindest thing he could do would be to remind
Bouvard that his clinging to office was undignified.

Not only undignified, he said to me one day, but a very selfish course
which I never should have suspected. Our common child is the
Department, he muttered savagely in his beard as we leaned over Baggot
Street Bridge, and as the boat rose up in the lock he added: And he
has no thought for it, only for himself. The words, an unworthy
parent, rose up in my mind, but I repressed them, and applied myself
to encouraging Pecuchet to unfold his soul to me.

So long as the Department, he said, is represented in Parliament it
takes its place with the Admiralty, the Foreign Office, and the other
Departments of State, but unrepresented in Parliament it sinks at
once--

I understand. It sinks to the level of the Board of Charitable
Bequests, to the Intermediate Board, or to any of the other Irish
boards on which it was your wont to pour your wrath when you were a
Nationalist and a Plan of Campaigner.

Our joint efforts created the Department, and if he were to retire now
like a man instead of clinging on and embarrassing the Government--So
he is embarrassing the Government, I interjected. But without noticing
my interruption Pecuchet continued: If he were to retire, I say, now,
like a man, the Liberal Government, the Conservative Government, any
Government worthy of its name, would seize the first opportunity to
pick Bouvard out as a distinguished Irishman, who, irrespective of
party or of creed, should be allowed to serve his country. It seemed
rather shabby of Pecuchet to round like this on his old pal, but not
feeling sure that I should act any better in like circumstances, I
said: The Government asked Bouvard to stay on, and it was to oblige
the Government--But the Government did not promise to keep him on
indefinitely; if it did, the Department, as you have yourself
admitted, would sink to the level of the Board of Charitable Bequests.
He should resign, and not wait to be kicked out.

But he is engaged on a pamphlet on the economic man and the uneconomic
holding, and the uneconomic man and the economic holding, and is
convinced that his work should be published during his Presidency. He
sits up till four in the morning. He has reverted to the Balzac
method.

Why doesn't he send for Rolleston? If not for Rolleston, why not
Hanson? If not Hanson, why not Father Finlay? If not Father Finlay,
why not Bond?

Bond is in Munich, I answered.

Weeks and months went by, and we were never sure that the morrow would
not see Bouvard flung out of Merrion Street; he did not behave with
much dignity during these months, complaining on every occasion and to
everybody he met that the Government was treating him very badly, and
darkly hinting that Roosevelt had asked him to go to America, and
apply his system to the United States; and that if the Government were
to go much further he might be induced to accept Roosevelt's offer.
But the Roosevelt intrigue, though it found much support in _The
Homestead_, failed to impress anybody, and suddenly it began to be
rumoured that Bouvard was locking himself in, and we were
disappointed when about two o'clock the newsboys were shouting:
Resignation of Misther Bouvard, and we all began to wonder who would
take his place in Merrion Street, a beautiful street that had been
bought up by the Department, and was about to be pulled down to make
way for public offices, and mayhap the destruction of Merrion Street
was Bouvard's real claim to immortality.

In Flaubert's book Bouvard and Pecuchet become copying clerks again,
but Nature was not satisfied with this end. She divided our Bouvard
from our Pecuchet. Bouvard returned to _The Homestead_ dejected,
overwhelmed, downcast, believing his spirit to be irreparably broken,
but he found consolation in AE's hope-inspiring eyes, in Anderson's
manliness and courage, fortitude and perseverance, and the prodigal
was led to a chair.

Far happier, said Anderson, than the miserable Pecuchet, who never
will get free from the toothed wheel of the great State machine that
has caught him up; round and round he will go like a rabbit in the
wheel of a bicycle.

AE looked at Anderson, who had never used an image before, and he took
up the strain.

You have come back, he said, to a particular and a definite purpose,
to individual effort, to economics. Bouvard raised his eyes.

We have not been idle, Anderson said, progress has been made; and he
picked up a map from the table and pointed to five-and-twenty more
creameries.

The co-operative movement, AE said, has continued; the farmers are
with us.

That is good, said Bouvard.

Whereas with all its thousands the Department is effecting nothing. A
cloud came into Bouvard's face, for he hoped one day to return to the
Department, and seeing through that cloud AE said: No, Bouvard, no,
never hope to return again to that dreadful place where all is vain
tumult and salary.

I hear, said Anderson, that Pecuchet is making arrangements to bring
the School of Art under the management of the Department; he believes
that by co-ordination--

I have heard nothing else but co-ordination since I left you; it has
been dinned into my ears night, noon, and morning, how one must
delegate all detail to subordinates, and then, how by the powers of
co-ordination--

Yes, Anderson added, the man who is to take your place comes with a
system of the reafforestation of Ireland, and Pecuchet agrees with him
that by compromise--

The last we heard of Pecuchet, AE said, was from George Moore, who
met him at the Continental Hotel in Paris one bright May morning, and
Pecuchet took him for a drive, telling him that he had an appointment
with the Minister of Agriculture. The appointment, however, was missed
that morning, or perhaps it was delegated to the following morning; be
that as it may, George Moore describes how they went for a drive
together, stopping at all the book-shops, Pecuchet springing out and
coming back with parcels of books all relating to horse-breeding.

He has spoken to me about the Normandy sires, said Bouvard.

George Moore said he was after Normandy sires, and went to Chantilly
to view them next day.

And it seemed from Bouvard's face that he could hear the braying of
the vicious scarecrow ass that awaited him on his return to Foxrock.




X


I cannot think that any two men ever bore names more appropriate to
their characters than Bouvard and Pecuchet, not even Don Quixote and
Sancho Panza. Are not the vanity and kindliness and stupidity of
Bouvard set forth in the two heavy syllables? And do not the three
little snappy syllables represent with equal clearness Pecuchet's
narrow intellect ... and cunning on occasions? Again, the dissyllable
Bouvard evokes indistinct outlines, pale, perplexed eyes, and a vague
and somewhat neglected appearance, whereas we naturally associate
Pecuchet with a neat necktie, a pointed beard, and catchwords rather
than ideas. Bouvard has tried to think out one or two questions, but
Pecuchet was content from his early youth with words. He began with
Nationalism, and when he met Bouvard he picked up Co-operation--the
word; and when he got into the Department he discovered Delegation;
and Heaven only knows how the word Co-ordination got into his head;
but it stuck there, and he could not get it out of his talk, bothering
us all with it. But nothing lasts for ever, and when he wearied of
Co-ordination he happened to meet the word Compromise; and this word
must have been a great event in his life, for it revealed to him the
Pecuchet of his dreams, the statesman which he always believed to be
latent in him, and which more fortunate circumstances would have
realised. It was a great treat to hear him on the subject of
statesmanship the day that Sir Anthony MacDonnell found himself forced
to resign. I led him round Merrion Square and Fitzwilliam Square, over
many bridges, through Herbert Street, round again, and on again; and
on leaving him I should have rushed to the scrivener's, but could not
resist the temptation to run up the steps of Plunkett House to tell AE
all about it, regretting all the while that my weakness would cost me
many admirable pages. I shall never be able to improvise it all again.
My memory is wonderful, I admit, but Pecuchet's slumberous phrases,
tall, bent weeds, and matted grasses, with the snapping of an
occasional aphorism, a dead branch, should be dictated at once and to
the nearest scrivener. I am paying dearly for the pleasure of your
company.

I can see you, AE answered, his imagination enabling him to see us in
our walk, and his wit putting just the right words into his mouth--I
can see you stopping at the pavement's edge asking Pecuchet to repeat
one of the dead branch aphorisms; I can see you hanging on his words
with a sort of literary affection; and I could listen to you for a
good deal longer, but I am due tonight at the Hermetic Society, and
must get home. Won't you walk a little way with me?

The proposal that we should walk a little way together reminded me
that the old bicycle that had carried Bouvard's ideas all over Ireland
so valiantly was now enjoying a well-earned rest in some outhouse or
garden shed. AE would not like to sell it for scrap-iron or to buy
another; or it may be that he thinks bicycle riding unsuited to a fat
man. He has fattened. A great roll of flesh rises to his ears, and his
interests have gone so much into practical things that we think the AE
of other days is dead. We are mistaken, the AE of our deepest
affection is not dead, but sleeping; an unexpected word tells us that
he has not changed at all. Relieve him, we say to ourselves, of his
work at _The Homestead_, loose him among the mountains, and in a few
weeks he will be hearing the fairy bells again. And happy at heart,
though sorry to part with him, I returned home to a lonely meal,
hoping to find courage about eight to do some reading.

A lecture was stirring in me at that time--a lecture showing that it
is impossible to form any idea of the author of the plays. We can see
Virgil, I said to myself, Dante, and Balzac, but Shakespeare is an
abstraction, and as invisible as Jehovah. We know that somebody must
have written the plays; but of one thing only are we sure--that Sidney
Lee is always wrong. But I will think no more, I will read. I took
down the dreaded volume, and a smile began to trickle round my lips as
a picture of the dusty room at the end of many dusty corridors rose up
before me, with AE sitting at a small table teaching that there is an
essential oneness in all the different revelations that Eternity has
vouchsafed to mankind.

I returned to my chair, and, falling into it, listened, hearing his
voice getting calmer every minute, solemn and awe-inspiring when he
commended toleration to the Hermetics. You need not be, he said, too
disdainful of the essential worshippers of lacchus-Iesus, better known
in Dublin under the name of Christ.... He, too, was a God. There were
moments when it seemed to me that I could hear his voice refuting
Colum, who had ventured to remind him of Diocletian. It was not for
its Christianity that the ancient creed had persecuted the new, but
for its intolerance and profanity.

There never was anybody like him, I said, and my thoughts melted into
a long meditation, from which I awoke, saying: His conversion, or
whatever it was, gave him such an iron grip on himself that, when
Indian mysticism flourished in No 3, Upper Ely Place, he submitted his
genius to the directors of the movement, asking them if they would
prefer his contributions to the _Theosophical Review_ in verse or in
prose. The directors answered: In verse, and AE wrote _Homeward
Songs._ But even these would not have strayed beyond the pages of the
review if his friend, Weekes, had not insisted that the further
publication of these poems would bring comfort and peace to many, and
it appears that these poems consoled the beautiful Duchess of Leinster
in her passing as no other poems could have done. AE could have been a
painter if he had wished it; but a man's whole life is seldom long
enough for him to acquire the craft of the painter; and, setting life
above craftsmanship, he had denied himself the touch that separates
the artist from the amateur, and he had done well. Accomplishment
estranges from the comprehension of the many, and for the first time
in the world's history we get a man stopped midway by a scruple of
conscience or love of his kindred--which? If he had devoted all his
days to art, his Thursday evenings at the Hermetic Society would have
had to be abandoned, and the editing of _The Homestead_ too. He could
not be a painter and write eight or nine columns of notes and a couple
of articles on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday. A man must have a
terrible hold on himself to pursue the routine of _The Homestead_ week
after week without hope of reward, and it is this uncanny hold that he
has on himself that makes him seem different from other men, for
though in many ways more human than any of us, he wears the air of one
that has lived before and will live again. How shall I word it? A
demonic air, using the word in the Goethian sense, a Lohengrin come to
fight the battle of others. One day he announced to us that he was
going to publish the verses of his disciples, with a preface by
himself, and we muttered among ourselves: Our beloved AE is going to
stumble. But the volume was received by the English press as a
complete vindication of Celtic genius. Contrairy John answered all the
effusive articles that appeared with one sentence: The English have so
completely lost all standard of poetic excellence that any one can
impose upon them. A very materialistic explanation which we were loath
to accept, preferring to attribute the success of the volume to the
demonic power that AE inherits from the great theosophical days when
he sat up in bed with his legs tucked under his nightshirt.

He was offered some hundreds of pounds by Lord Dunsany to found a
review, but he had not time to edit it, and proposed the task to John
Eglinton. Contrairy John wanted to see life steadily, and to see it
whole; and Yeats came along with a sneer, and said: I hear, Lord
Dunsany, that you are going to supply groundsel for AE's canaries. The
sneer brought the project to naught, and Yeats went away laughing,
putting the south of Ireland above the north and the east and the
west, saying that Munster was always Ireland's literary portion. The
first harpers of Ireland and the first story-tellers were Munstermen,
and his own writers came to him from Munster. He had gotten nothing
from Dublin. Murray and Ray and Robinson had all begun by writing for
the _Cork Examiner_ and the _Constitutional_. And AE may search the
columns of _Sinn Fein_ for ever and ever without finding, I said, a
blackbird or thrush, skylark or nightingale.

The portentous critic giggled a little in his stride down the incline
of Rathmines Avenue, and was moved to change the conversation from
_Sinn Fein_, that journal having spoken of him disrespectfully since
he had accepted a pension from the English Government. Griffith, the
editor of _Sinn Fein_, or Ourselves Alone, had butted him severely in
several paragraphs--butted him is the word, for in appearance and
mentality Griffith may be compared to a ram. He butts against England
every week with admirable perseverance, and while he butts, he allows
all the poets of Rathmines to carol.

A pretty banner, I said as we crossed the bridge, for _Sinn Fein_
would be a tree full of small singing birds carolling sonnets and
rondeaux, ballades and villanelles, with a butting-ram underneath, and
this for device: Believe that England doesn't exist, and it won't.

Yes, there is an element of Christian Science in our friend Griffith,
Yeats answered, and we crossed the bridge.

You don't think that AE will ever discover any one in _Sinn Fein_
comparable to Synge?

Yeats threw up his hands.

It would be better, he said, if all his little folk went back to their
desks.

When this remark was repeated to AE, he said: Colum was earning
seventy-eight pounds a year when he was at his desk at the Railway
Clearing House, and now he is earning four or five pounds a week. So
Willie says that I shall never find anything that will compare with
Synge. Well, we shall see.

And every Thursday evening the columns of _Sin Fein_ were searched,
and every lilt considered, and every accent noted; but the days and
the weeks went by without a new peep-o-peep, sweet, sweet, until the
day that James Stephens began to trill; and recognising at once a new
songster, AE put on his hat and went away with his cage, discovering
him in a lawyer's office. A great head and two soft brown eyes looked
at him over a typewriter, and an alert and intelligent voice asked him
whom he wanted to see. AE said that he was looking for James Stephens,
a poet, and the typist answered: I am he.

And next Sunday evening he was admitted to the circle, and we were
impressed by his wit and whimsicality of mind, but we thought AE
exaggerated the talents of the young man. True that all his
discoveries had come to something, but it was clear to us that he was
anxious to put this new man alongside of Synge, and this we could not
consent to do. He was a little distressed at our apathy, our
unwillingness, our short-sightedness, for he was certain that James
Stephens was a new note in Irish poetry. Our visions were not as clear
as his. I was conscious of little more than harsh versification, and
crude courage in the choice of subjects. Contrairy John was confused
and round about, and at the end of many an argument found himself
defending the very principles that he had started out to controvert.
It was clear, however, that he did not think more of James Stephens
than we ourselves. Yeats was the blindest of us all, and it was with
ill grace that he consented to hear AE read the poems, giving his
opinion casually; and when AE spoke of the advantage the publication
of a volume would be to Stephens, he answered: For me, the aesthetical
question; for you, my dear friend, the philanthropic. AE was hurt, but
not discouraged; and to interest us he told us stories from the life
of the new poet, who was a truer vagrant than ever Synge had been.
Synge had fifty pounds a year; but Stephens, a poor boy without
education or a penny, had wandered all over Ireland, and would have
lost his life in Belfast from hunger had it not been for a charitable
apple-woman. AE was delighted at the thought of the material that his
pet would have to draw upon later on when he turned from verse to
prose, for AE divined that this would be so.

James Stephens has enough poetry in him, he said to me, to be a great
prose-writer.

But when he left the apple-woman? I answered, always curious.

AE could not tell me how Stephens had picked up his education, or had
learnt typewriting and shorthand and got employment in a lawyer's
office at five-and-twenty shillings a week--well enough for a girl who
has a home, but a bare sufficiency for a man whose head is full of
dreams and who has a wife and child to support. His life must have
been very hard to bear, without the solitude of a room in which to
write his poems or intellectual comradeship, until he met AE, a friend
always ready to listen to him, to be enthusiastic about his literary
projects. What a door was opened to him when he met AE! Of what help
AE was to him in his first prose composition (no one can help another
with poetry) none knows but Stephens himself; AE forgets what he
gives, but it is difficult for me to believe that Stephens did not
benefit enormously, as much as I did myself. How much that was I
cannot tell, for AE was always helping me directly or indirectly.
Shall I ever forget the day when, after three weeks' torture trying to
write the second chapter of _Ave_, I went down to Plunkett House to
see if he could help me out of my difficulty?

I am waiting for proofs, and am free for an hour. If you like we will
walk round Merrion Square, and you can tell me all about it.

We turned to the east and walked along the north side, and it was
opposite the National Gallery that he told me my second chapter must
be in Victoria Street; and after a little argument, to which he
listened very gently, he led me as a mother leads a child. I saw the
error of my ways, and said: Goodbye; I see it all. Goodbye.

As well as anything I can think of, this anecdote shows how we run to
our good friend in time of need, and never run in vain; but now I find
myself in a difficulty out of which he will not be able to help me. He
is not satisfied with his portrait, and complains that I have
represented him in _Ave_ and _Salve_ as a blameless hero of a young
girl's novel.

Why have you found no fault with me? If you wish to create human
beings you must discover their faults.

Wherefore I am put to discovering a stain upon his character. I cannot
accuse him of theft, and he never speaks of his love affairs; he may
be a pure man; be that as it may, it is not for me to cast the first
stone at him; lying and blackmail--of what use to make charges that no
one will believe? If he will not sin, why should he object to my white
flower in his button-hole? And feeling that humanity was on the whole
very difficult and tiresome, I fell to thinking.... But of what I
cannot tell; I only know I was awakened suddenly by a memory of a
young painter in London, one who brought imagination and wit and
epigram and laughter into our midst, and when he left us we rarely
failed to ponder on the unmerited good fortune of his wife, for to
live with him always seemed to us an unreasonable share of human
happiness. But one day I made the acquaintance of this woman whom I
had only known faintly during her married life, and heard from her
that her husband did not speak to her at dinner, but propped a book up
against a glass and read; and after dinner sat in his chair composing,
and often went up to bed forgetting to bid her goodnight. If she
reproached him, he assured her there was no other woman in the world
he loved as much as her; but being a man of genius his mind was away
among his works. But what proof have I, she said, that he is a man of
genius? Of course, if I were certain, it would be different.... All
the same, it is a little trying, she added. And her case is the case
of every woman who marries a man of genius. A trying tribe,
especially at meal-times; ideas and food being apparently
irreconcilable. I have often regretted that our good friend did not
leave some of his ideas on the landing with his hat and coat, for it
is distressing to hear a man say that he could not tell the difference
between halibut and turbot when you have just apologised to him for an
unaccountable mistake on the part of your cook. This painful incident
once happened in Ely Place; and I reflected, duly, that if he were
indifferent to my food he might show scant courtesy to the food that
his wife provided--excellent I am sure it is--but a man of ideas
cannot be catered for by friend or wife. I followed him in imagination
all the way up the long Rathmines Road, and saw him picking a little
from his plate, and then, becoming forgetful, his eyes would rove into
dark corners. (His definition of ideas are formless spiritual
essences, and the room in 17 Rathgar Avenue is full of them, economic,
pictorial, and poetic.) I have it at last! A blemish, and one is
enough for my portrait; a little irregularity of feature will satisfy
my sitter; in the eyes of the world absent-mindedness is a blemish.
But if it be none in his wife's eyes then there is no blemish, and I
remembered that he chose her for her intelligence, and it is no mean
one. She had abandoned papistry before he met her, and had written
some beautiful phrases in her pages of the _Theosophical Review_; and
these won his heart. A very gracious presence and personality, too
distinct to seem invidious to her husband's genius, or to deem it an
injustice to herself that he should be beloved by all. But in his
indifference to money we may seek and find cause for complaint. It is
possible that in the eyes of women who have not succeeded in marrying
men of genius he should apply his talents to increasing his income,
for the common belief is that a man's life is not his exclusive
possession to dispose of as pleases his good will, but a sort of
family banking account on which his wife and children may draw checks.
This is not AE's view. He has often said to me, I came into the world
without money or possessions, and have done very well without either.
Why shouldn't my children do the same? His life is in his ideas as
much as Christ's, and I will avouch that his wife has never tried to
come between him and his ideas. As much cannot be said for Mary, whom
Christ had to reprove for trying to dissuade him from his mission,
which he did on many occasions.... But again I am hoeing and raking,
shovelling up merits instead of picking out the small but necessary
fault. If I dig deeper perhaps my search will be rewarded. He gives
his wife all the money she asks for, but she does not know what money
he has in the bank. AE does not know himself, and feeling that AE was
about to be born into my text, a real man rather than an ideal one, my
heart rose, and I said: It is not long ago since he told me that he
had given a man who had asked him for a contribution a long screed for
which he could have had thirty pounds from a certain magazine. In
giving his screed for nothing he acted as all the great dispensers of
ideas have done, and the many will find fault with him, for though
they would like to have prophets and poets they would like them
domesticated, each one bringing home to a little house in the suburbs
a reel of office chit-chat to unwind for his wife's pleasure, the poet
on one side of the hearth, the wife on the other, the cat between
them. Jane and Minna would listen attentively, but Violet's thoughts
would stray and she would find herself very soon with Cuchulain,
Caolte, and Finn, and picking up from the table her beautiful book of
fairy tales, I read them until I was awakened by a knocking at my
front door. The servants had gone to bed. Who could this be? AE
perhaps. It was John Eglinton.

Are you sure you aren't busy? If you are, don't hesitate--

I was sitting by the fire thinking.

I am loath to disturb a thinking man; and he stopped half-way between
the armchair and the door.

I assure you I had come to the end of my thinking.

On what subject?

One that you know very well--AE. Among my portraits he is the least
living, and that is a pity. He does not silhouette as Yeats does or as
dear Edward. Edward's round head and bluff shoulders and big thighs
and long feet correspond with his blunt mind. And Yeats's solemn
height and hieratic appearance authorise the literary dogmas that he
pronounces every season. He is the type of the literary fop, and the
most complete that has ever appeared in literature. But AE! I wonder
if we could get him into a phrase, John. After a while I said: He has
the kindly mind of a shepherd, and ten years ago he was thin, lithe,
active, shaggy, and I can see him leaning on his crook meditating.

That is just what I don't think he does. He talks about meditation,
but his mind is much too alert. There is this resemblance, however:
the shepherd knows little but the needs of his flock, and the other
day, at Horace Plunkett's, I heard that AE exhibited a surprising
ignorance in an argument with some English economists. He did not know
that Athenian society was founded on slavery.

I am glad to hear it, for if he knew all the things that one learns
out of books I should never get him into a literary silhouette.

You admit, John said, inspiration in his painting, but you think it
lacks quality; and in your study of him you will explain--

Of course, a most important point. AE has come out of many previous
existences and is going toward many others, and looks upon this life
as an episode of no importance.

An interesting explanation, but the real one is--

Is what? I asked eagerly.

He is too impatient. I told him so once, but he answered indignantly
that there was no more patient man than he.

I prefer my explanation, I answered.

It is the more poetic, but temperament goes deeper than belief, John
replied.

Not deeper than AE's belief in his own eternity, I said; and my answer
had the effect of rolling John for a moment out of his ideas. He'll
soon be back in them again, I said to myself. At the end of another
long silence John told me that somebody had said that AE was an
unhappy man.

It never struck me that he was unhappy. He always seems among the
happiest. And I began to wonder if John Eglinton looked upon me as a
happy man.

You're happy in your work, but I don't know if you are happy in your
life.

And you, John, I said, are happy in your thoughts.

Yes, he answered, and my unhappiness is caused by the fact that I get
so little time for enjoying them.

It was pleasant for two old cronies to sit by the fire, wondering what
they had gotten out of life; and when John bade me goodbye at the door
he admonished me to be very careful what I said about AE's home life.

But he has asked me to tack him on to life, and now you think, since
he has been tacked on, he won't like it.

Damn these models! I said, returning to my room. Models are
calamitous, and it would perhaps be calamitous to be without them.
Shakespeare, too, is a calamity. And, dismayed by the number of plays
I should have to read, my thoughts turned to dear little John
Eglinton, to the little shrivelled face and the round head with a
great deal of back to it, to the reddish hair into which grey is
coming, to the gaunt figure, and I fell to thinking how his trousers
had wound round his legs as he had walked down the street. It seemed
to me that I should never find anything more suitable to my talent as
a narrator and as a psychologist than this dear little man that had
just left me, dry, determined, and all of a piece, valiant in his
ideas and in his life, come straight down from the hard North into the
soft Catholic Dublin atmosphere, which was not, however, able to rob
him of any of his individuality. The Catholic atmosphere has
intensified John Eglinton--boiled him down, as it were--made him a
sort of Liebig extract of himself, and I seemed to realise more than
ever I had done before how like he was to himself: the well-backed
head and the square shoulders, and the hesitating, puzzled look that
comes into his face. I had often sought a reason for that look. Now I
know the cause of it: because he gets so little time for his ideas. He
does not wish to write them out any more than Steer wishes to exhibit
his Chelsea figures; he rearranges them and dusts them, and sits among
them conscious of familiar presences, and as the years go by he seems
to us to sink deeper into his armchair, and his contempt of our
literary activities strengthens; he is careful to hide the fact from
us lest he should wound our feelings, but it transpired the evening I
ran over to the Library to tell him of Goethe's craving for
information on all subjects, including even a little midwifery. So
that he might continue a little dribble of ink in the morning, he
said, for John never lacks a picturesque phrase, but that is neither
here nor there; the sentiment it expresses is John Eglinton--a lack of
faith in all things. Of late years he seems to have been drawn toward
Buddhism, and goes out to a lonely cottage among the Dublin mountains
in the hope that the esoteric lore of the East may allow him to look a
little over the border. I shall never find a better model than John
Eglinton. It seems to me that I understand him; and what a fine foil
he would make to the soft and peaty Hyde, the softest of all our
natural products, a Protestant that Protestantism has not been able to
harden! A moment after I sat pondering on his yellow skull floating
back from the temples, collecting hugely on the crown; his black
eyebrows and a drooping black moustache; his laugh, shallow and a
little vacant, a little mechanical; and his words and thoughts, casual
as the stage Irishman's. We would pick him out for a Catholic in a
tram, and if there were a priest in the tram Hyde would be interested
in him at once, and he would like nothing better than to visit Clare
Island with a batch of ecclesiastics, a dozen or fifteen parish
priests, not one of them weighing less than fifteen stone, and the
bishop eighteen. It would be a pleasure to Hyde to drop the words Your
Grace into as many sentences as possible; whether he would kiss the
bishop's ring may be doubted--being a Protestant, he could hardly do
so--but he would fly for a pillow to put under His Grace's throbbing
head. On Clare Island the parish priest would have prepared legs of
mutton and sirloins of beef, chickens and geese, and Hyde's comment to
His Grace would be: The hospitality of the Irish priest is unequalled.
He will crack a bottle of champagne with any visitor. A gathering of
this kind is very agreeable to the Catholic Protestant, and the
Catholic bishop likes to do business with the Catholic Protestant
better than with anybody else. The Catholic might stand up to him;
there are one or two, perhaps, who would venture to disagree with His
Grace, but the Catholic Protestant melts like peat into fine ash
before His Grace's ring. But Hyde was not always Catholic Protestant.
In the old Roscommon glebe there was sufficient Protestantism in him
to set him learning Irish. He has written some very beautiful poems in
Irish, and it is to Hyde that we owe the jargon since become so
famous, for the great discovery was his that to write beautiful
English one has only to translate literally from the Irish; his prose
translations of the _Love Songs of Connaught_ are as beautiful as
Synge's, and it is a pity he was stopped by Father Tom Finlay, who
said: Write in Irish or in English, but our review does not like mixed
languages. And these words and his election to the Presidency of the
Gaelic League made an end to Hyde as a man of letters. I took his
measure at the banquet at the Shelbourne Hotel, his noisy
demonstration in Irish and English convincing me that the potential
scholar would be swallowed up in the demagogue, for the Gaelic League
must make no enemies; and that the way to success is to stand well
with everybody--members of Parliament, priests, farmers,
shopkeepers--and by standing well with these people, especially with
the priests, Hyde has become the archetype of the Catholic Protestant,
cunning, subtle, cajoling, superficial, and affable, and these
qualities have enabled him to paddle the old dug-out of the Gaelic
League up from the marshes through many an old bog, lake, and river,
reaching at last Portobello Bridge, where he took on board two
passengers, Agnes O'Farrelly and Mary Hayden, and, having placed them
in the stern, he paddled the old dug-out to the steps of the National
University. He gallantly handed them up the steps, and so amazed were
the three at the salaries that were offered to them that they forgot
the old dug-out; and worn and broken and water-logged, it has drifted
back to the original Connemara bog-hole, to sink under the brown water
out of sight of the quiet evening sky, unwatched, unmourned save by
dear Edward, who will weep a few tears, I am sure, when the last
bubbles arise and break.




XI


The sinking of the old dug-out will rob Edward of an evening's
occupation, and the question comes, to what great national or civic
end he will devote his Thursdays. On Monday evening he presides at the
Piper's Club, on Tuesday he goes to the theatre, on Wednesday he
attends a meeting of Sinn Fein, on Thursday he dozes through the
proceedings of the Coisde Gnotha, on Friday there is choir practice in
the cathedral, on Saturday he speaks severely to his disobedient
choristers, tries new voices in his rooms in Lincoln Place, and plans
new programmes with Vincent O'Brien, his choirmaster, chosen by him
because he believes in O'Brien's talent and in his desire to give the
music in accordance with tradition and Edward's own taste. On Sunday
he is ever watchful in the cathedral, sitting with his hand to his
ear, noting the time and the efficiency of the singers.

I had to give way on one point, he said to me, but I think I told you
already that the Archbishop stipulated that if a great composer of
Church music should arise, the cathedral should not be debarred from
giving his music. I don't think it will happen very often, so there
was no use in opposing His Grace on this particular point. We have now
eight hundred a year--

Eight hundred a year out of ten thousand!

You see, he said, the Archbishop has added ten thousand to mine, and
that invested at four per cent will bring in eight hundred.

So you succeeded in persuading the Archbishop to give you ten thousand
as well as to grant you the Headship! My admiration for Edward as a
business man swelled.

It was a hard fight, he said, and very often the negotiations were
nearly broken off; but I stuck to my guns, for of course it wasn't
likely that I was going to give ten thousand without getting what I
was bargaining for.

The sum of money seemed to strike a chord in my memory, and I was
moved to ask him what had led him to fix on this sum, but refrained
lest I should appear too inquisitive. Something must have happened, I
said, to fix this sum in his mind. It has never been less, it has
never been more, and in the beginning he didn't know how much money
was necessary to found the choir. Would he have given the twenty
thousand if--

It suddenly dropped upon me that he had told me in Bayreuth, in the
great yawning street between the little bridge and the railway-station,
that he had come out of a great conscientious crisis, and had had to go
to Bishop Healy and lay the whole matter before him. What sin can he
have committed? I said to myself, and, quelling my curiosity as best I
could, I tried to induce him to confide in me, and after some persuasion
he confessed that his mother, fearing the Land Acts, had prevailed upon
him to redistribute his grass-farms. He had told the tenants that he
would reinstate them; whereas he had given them other farms equally
good, but they had found fault with the lands he had put them into, and
his bailiff had been fired at on the highroad to Gort. He had received
coffins and crossbones; it was not, however, fear of his life or his
money that had brought about the great mental breakdown, but his
conscience. If he had acted wrongly, he must make reparation before his
sin would be forgiven him.... And while I pictured him as a prey to
remorse, of pallid and rueful countenance, he told me that the one thing
that stood to him was his appetite. For after a night of agony he often
descended his Gothic stairs forgetful of everything but the sirloin on
the side-table. He is always original, I said, and has discovered an
unexpected connection between conscience and appetite. But
notwithstanding his appetite, he had had to leave Tillyra for Cork. He
had always liked the sea and its influences, and in six weeks had
returned much improved in health, but still unable to smoke his
churchwarden, only an occasional cigar, and that a mild one.

It may have been from too much smoking, I said; but I can't think why
you wanted to send for Bishop Healy. I could have advised you better.

Nothing would have satisfied me but a bishop, he answered, with a
terrified look in his eyes.

To tell you that you must keep your promise?

All these business matters are very intricate, and it is difficult to
say who is right and who is wrong. One doesn't know oneself, and when
one's interests are concerned one doesn't see straight.

My heart went out to him, for it is seldom that one meets anybody
altogether honourable about money matters, and rarer still is he who
accepts the advice that he asks for: Edward had reinstated his
tenants, and I began to wonder if the ten thousand that he had spent
upon his choir was connected in some remote way with his management of
the property, or with his mother's management, or with his father's. A
conscience like Edward's might lead him back one hundred years, to his
grandfather.

But if he had had any suspicion about this money, I should have heard
it. He has been confessing himself to me for the last thirty years....
Now I come to think of it, he never told me how he first came to hear
of Palestrina. It was when we lived in the Temple together that he
began to speak to me about the Mass of Pope Marcellus; and one
Christmas Eve he persuaded me to go over to Paris with him to hear it.
And shall I ever forget how he sidled up to me when we came out of the
church?

Now what do you think of Palestrina?

About the beauty of the music there can be no question, and as far
advanced in his art as--shall we say--Botticelli?

And what about the plain-chant? You will never say again that you
don't like plain-chant.

But there was no plain-chant. None was sung today.

Yes, the hymn. And the boy's voice--how much purer than a woman's!

He sang very beautifully, Edward.... You don't mean the _Adeste
Fideles_?

Of course I do.

But Edward--And we began to argue, myself convinced, in spite of the
fact that he showed me the _Adeste Fideles_ in his Prayer-Book among
plain-chant tunes, that it could not be else than modern music. A
Raphael doesn't become a Rubens because it happens to have been hung
among Rubenses.

We argued about plain-chant endings till I was on the point of
reminding him of the thirteenth-century windows in Aix-la-Chapelle,
but restrained myself for once, and admitting he had eaten too much
steak, drunken too much wine, he asked me to come with him. He was
taking me to the other end of Paris to buy the masses and motets of
the great Italian contrapuntalists; we walked and we walked, arriving
at last at the shop. His negotiations with the music-seller began to
astonish me. I had fancied he was going to buy music to the value of a
pound or thirty shillings--two pounds, perhaps--but I heard: And if I
add three motets by Clemens non Papa and two masses by Orlando di
Lasso, that will come to how much? Five hundred francs. And if I take
six more motets and six more masses by Vittoria? That will bring up
the total to twelve hundred francs. I may be wrong in my figures, but
he certainly bought that morning from thirty to forty pounds' worth of
music; and while the bundle was being tied, Borde, the conductor, came
in, and I told him that my friend Edward Martyn was about to give ten
thousand pounds to found a choir in Dublin, and was buying music.
Borde was, of course, very much interested in the Dublin choir, and he
led me into conversation graciously, in the course of which I said:

I congratulate you, M. Borde, on your wonderful boy treble.

A cloud came into his face, and after some pressing he admitted that
there was no boy in his choir.

No boy! and Mr Martyn thinks a boy's voice much more beautiful than a
woman's. It wasn't a boy, then, who sang the _Adeste Fideles_?

No ... a woman. He added that she was fifty. I thanked him inwardly,
and, feeling sorry for Edward, persuaded Borde to admit that he had
taught her to sing like a boy. But if Edward had mistaken a woman's
voice for a boy's he may be mistaken about plain-chant.

Mr Martyn tells me that the _Adeste_ is a plain-chant tune. Surely
not.

No, he answered; it is a Portuguese tune, and it was written about one
hundred years ago.

But, Edward spluttered, it is in my Prayer-Book among the plain-chant.
How did it get there?

Borde could not enlighten him on that point, and I suggested that he
should make application to the publisher of his Prayer-Book and get
his money back. There is nobody. I said, like him. He is more
wonderful than anything in literature. I prefer him to Sancho who was
untroubled with a conscience and never thought of running to the
Bishop of Toledo. All the same he is not without the shrewdness of his
ancestors, and got the better of Archbishop Walsh, and for the last
five years Vincent O'Brien has been beating time, and will beat it
till the end of his life; and he will be succeeded by others, for
Edward has, by deed, saved the Italian contrapuntalists till time
everlasting from competition with modern composers. He certainly has
gotten the better of Walsh. And I thought of a picture-gallery in
Dublin with nothing in it but Botticelli and his school, and myself
declaring that all painting that had been done since had no interest
for me.... A smile began to spread over my face, for the story that
was coming into my mind seemed oh! so humorous, so like Ireland, so
like Edward, that I began to tell myself again the delightful story of
the unrefined ears that, weary of erudite music, had left the
cathedral and sought instinctively modern tunes and women's voices,
and as these were to be found in Westland Row the church was soon
overflowing with a happy congregation. But in a little while the
collections grew scantier. This time it couldn't be Palestrina, and
all kinds of reasons were adduced. At last the truth could no longer
be denied--the professional Catholics of Merrion Square had been
driven out of Westland Row by the searching smells of dirty clothes,
and had gone away to the University Church in Stephen's Green. So if
it weren't Palestrina directly it was Palestrina indirectly, and the
brows of the priests began to knit when Edward Martyn's name was
mentioned. Them fal-de-dals is well enough on the Continent, in Paris,
where there is no faith, was the opinion of an important ecclesiastic.
But we don't want them here, murmured a second ecclesiastic. All this
counterpoint may make a very pretty background for Mr Martyn's
prayers, but what about the poor people's? Good composer or bad
composer, there is no congregation in him, said a third. There's too
much congregation, put in the first, but not the kind we want! The
second ecclesiastic took snuff, and the group were of opinion that
steps should be taken to persuade dear Edward to make good their
losses. The priests in Marlborough Street sympathised with the priests
of Westland Row, and told them that they were so heavily out of pocket
that Mr Martyn had agreed to do something for them. It seemed to the
Westland Row priests that if Mr Martyn were making good the losses of
the priests of the pro-Cathedral, he should make good their losses. It
was natural that they should think so, and to acquit himself of all
responsibility Edward no doubt consulted the best theologians on the
subject, and I think that they assured him that he is not responsible
for indirect losses. If he were, his whole fortune would not suffice.
He was, of course, very sorry if a sudden influx of poor people had
caused a falling-off in the collections of Westland Row, for he knew
that the priests needed the money very much to pay for the new
decorations, and to help them he wrote an article in the _Independent_
praising the new blue ceiling, which seemed, so he wrote, a worthy
canopy for the soaring strains of Palestrina.

Unfortunately rubbing salt into the wound, I said. A story that will
amuse Dujardin and it will be great fun telling him in the shady
garden at Fontainebleau how Edward, anxious to do something for his
church, had succeeded in emptying two. All the way down the alleys he
will wonder how Edward could have ever looked upon Palestrina's masses
as religious music. The only music he will say, in which religious
emotion transpires is plain-chant. Huysmans says that the _Tantum
Ergo_ or the _Dies Irae_, one or the other, reminds him of a soul
being dragged out of purgatory, and it is possible that it does; but a
plain-chant tune arranged in eight-part counterpoint cannot remind one
of anything very terrible. Dujardin knows that Palestrina was a
priest, and he will say: That fact deceived your friend, just as the
fact of finding the _Adeste Fideles_ among the plain-chant tunes
deceived him. For of course I shall tell Dujardin that story too. It
is too good to be missed. He is wonderful, Dujardin! I shall cry out
in one of the sinuous alleys. There never was anybody like him! And I
will tell him more soul-revealing anecdotes. I will say: Dujardin,
listen. One evening he contended that the great duet at the end of
_Siegfried_ reminded him of mass by Palestrina. Dujardin will laugh,
and, excited by his laughter, I will try to explain to him that what
Edward sees is that Palestrina took a plain chant tune and gave
fragments of it to the different voices, and in his mind these become
confused with the motives of _The Ring_. You see, Dujardin, the
essential always escapes him--the intention of the writer is hidden
from him. I am beginning to understand your friend. He has, let us
suppose, a musical ear that allows him to take pleasure in the music;
but a musical ear will not help him to follow Wagner's idea--how, in a
transport of sexual emotion, a young man and a young woman on a
mountain-side awaken to the beauty of the life of the world.
Dujardin's appreciations will provoke me, and I will say: Dujardin,
you shouldn't be so appreciative. If I were telling you of a play I
had written, it would be delightful to watch my idea dawning upon your
consciousness; but I am telling you of a real man, and one that I
shall never to able to get into literature. He will answer: We invent
nothing; we can but perceive. And then, exhilarated, carried beyond
myself, I will say: Dujardin, I will tell you something still more
wonderful than the last _gaffe. II gaffe dans les Quat'z Arts_. He
admires Ibsen, but you'd never guess the reason why--because he is
very like Racine; both of them, he says, are classical writers. And do
you know how he arrived at that point? Because nobody is killed on the
stage in Racine or in Ibsen. He does not see that the intention of
Racine is to represent men and women out of time and out of space,
unconditioned by environment, and that the very first principle of
Ibsen's art is the relation of his characters to their environment.
In many passages he merely dramatises Darwin. There never was anybody
so interesting as dear Edward, and there never will be anybody like
him in literature ... I will explain why presently, but I must first
tell you another anecdote. I went to see him one night, and he told me
that the theme of the play he was writing was a man who had married a
woman because he had lost faith in himself; the man did not know,
however, that the woman had married him for the same reason, and the
two of them were thinking--I have forgotten what they were thinking,
but I remember Edward saying: I should like to suggest hopelessness. I
urged many phrases, but he said: It isn't a phrase I want, but an
actual thing. I was thinking of a broken anchor--that surely is a
symbol of hopelessness. Yes, I said, no doubt, but how are you going
to get a broken anchor into a drawing-room? I don't write about
drawing-rooms. Well, living-rooms. It isn't likely that they would buy
a broken anchor and put it up by the coal-scuttle.

There's that against it, he answered. If you could suggest anything
better--What do you think of a library in which there is nothing but
unacted plays? The characters could say, when there was nothing for
them to do on the stage, that they were going to the library to read,
and the library would have the advantage of reminding everybody of the
garret in the _Wild Duck_. A very cruel answer, my friend, Dujardin
will say, and I will tell him that I can't help seeing in Edward
something beyond Shakespeare or Balzac. Now, tell me, which of these
anecdotes I have told you is the most humorous? He will not answer my
question, but a certain thoughtfulness will begin to settle in his
face, and he will say: Everything with him is accidental, and when his
memory fails him he falls into another mistake, and he amuses you
because it is impossible for you to anticipate his next mistake. You
know there is going to be one; there must be one, for he sees things
separately rather than relatively. I am beginning to understand your
friend.

You are, you are; you are doing splendidly. But you haven't told me,
Dujardin, which anecdote you prefer. Stay, there is another one.
Perhaps this one will help you to a still better understanding. When
he brought _The Heather Field_ and Yeats's play _The Countess
Cathleen_ to Dublin for performance, a great trouble of conscience
awakened suddenly in him, and a few days before the performance he
went to a theologian to ask him if _The Countess Cathleen_ were a
heretical work, and, if it were would Almighty God hold him
responsible for the performance? But he couldn't withdraw Yeats's play
without withdrawing his own, and it appears that he breathed a sigh of
relief when a common friend referred the whole matter to two other
theologians, and as these gave their consent Edward allowed the plays
to go on; but Cardinal Logue intervened, and wrote a letter to the
papers to say that the play seemed to him unfit for Catholic ears,
and Edward would have withdrawn the plays if the Cardinal hadn't
admitted in his letter that he had judged the play by certain extracts
only.

He wishes to act rightly, but has little faith in himself; and what
makes him so amusing is that he needs advice in aesthetics as well as
in morals. We are, I said, Dujardin, at the roots of conscience. And I
began to ponder the question what would happen to Edward if we lived
in a world in which aesthetics ruled: I should be where Bishop Healy
is, and he would be a thin, small voice crying in the wilderness--an
amusing subject of meditation, from which I awoke suddenly.

I wonder how Dujardin is getting on with his Biblical studies? Last
year he was calling into question the authorship of the Romans--a most
eccentric view; and, remembering how weakly I had answered him, I took
the Bible from the table and began to read the Epistle with a view to
furnishing myself with arguments wherewith to confute him. My Bible
opened at the ninth chapter, and I said: Why, here is the authority
for the Countess Cathleen's sacrifice which Edward's theologian deemed
untheological. It will be great fun to poke Edward up with St Paul,
and on my way to Lincoln Place I thought how I might lead the
conversation to _The Countess Cathleen_.

[Illustration: Musical Notation]

A few minutes afterwards a light appeared on the staircase and the
door slowly opened.

Come in, Siegfried, though you were off the key.

Well, my dear friend, it is a difficult matter to whistle above two
trams passing simultaneously and six people jabbering round a
public-house, to say nothing of a jarvey or two, and you perhaps
dozing in your armchair, as your habit often is. You won't open to
anything else except a motive from _The Ring_; and I stumbled up the
stairs in front of Edward, who followed with a candle.

Wait a moment; let me go first and I'll turn up the gas.

You aren't sitting in the dark, are you?

No, but I read better by candle-light, and he blew out the candles in
the tin candelabrum that he had made for himself. He is original even
in his candelabrum; no one before him had ever thought of a
caridelabrum in tin, and I fell to admiring his appearance more
carefully than perhaps I had ever done before, so monumental did he
seem lying on the little sofa sheltered from daughts by a screen, a
shawl about his shoulders. His churchwarden was drawing famously, and
I noticed his great square hands with strong fingers and square nails
pared closely away, and as heretofore I admired the curve of the great
belly, the thickness of the thighs, the length and breadth and the
width of his foot hanging over the edge of the sofa, the apoplectic
neck falling into great rolls of flesh, the humid eyes, the skull
covered with short stubbly hair. I looked round the rooms and they
seemed part of himself: the old green wallpaper on which he pins
reproductions of the Italian masters. And I longed to peep once more
into the bare bedroom into which he goes to fetch bottles of
Apollinaris. Always original! Is there another man in this world whose
income is two thousand a year, and who sleeps in a bare bedroom,
without dressing-room, or bathroom, or servant in the house to brush
his clothes, and who has to go to the baker's for his breakfast?

We had been talking for some time of the Gaelic League, and from Hyde
it was easy to pass to Yeats and his plays.

His best play is _The Countess Cathleen_.

_The Countess Cathleen_ is only a sketch.

But what I never could understand, Edward, was why you and the
Cardinal could have had any doubts as to the orthodoxy of _The
Countess Cathleen_.

What, a woman that sells her own soul in order to save the souls of
others!

I suppose your theologian objected--

Of course he objected.

He cannot have read St Paul.

What do you mean?

He can't have read St Paul, or else he is prepared to throw over St
Paul.

_Mon ami Moore, mon ami Moore_.

The supernatural idealism of a man who would sell his soul to save the
souls of others fills me with awe.

But it wasn't a man; it was the Countess Cathleen, and women are never
idealists.

Not the saints?

His face grew solemn at once.

If you give me the Epistles I will read the passage to you. And it was
great fun to go to the bookshelves and read: I say the truth in
Christ, I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy
Ghost, that I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart.
For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my
brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.

Edward's face grew more and more solemn, and I wondered of what he was
thinking.

Paul is a very difficult and a very obscure writer, and I think the
Church is quite right not to encourage the reading of the Epistles,
especially without comments.

Then you do think there is something in the passage I have read?

After looking down his dignified nose for a long time, he said:

Of course, the Church has an explanation. All the same, it's very odd
that St Paul should have said such a thing--very odd.

There is no doubt that I owe a great deal of my happiness to Edward;
all my life long he has been exquisite entertainment. And I fell to
thinking that Nature was very cruel to have led me, like Moses, within
sight of the Promised Land. A story would be necessary to bring Edward
into literature, and it would be impossible to devise an action of
which he should be a part. The sex of a woman is odious to him, and a
man with two thousand a year does not rob nor steal, and he is so
uninterested in his fellow-men that he has never an ill word to say
about anybody. John Eglinton is a little thing; AE is a soul that few
will understand; but Edward is universal--more universal than Yeats,
than myself, than any of us, but for lack of a story I shall not be
able to give him the immortality in literature which he seeks in
sacraments. Shakespeare always took his stories from some other
people. Turgenev's portrait of him would be thin, poor, and evasive,
and Balzac would give us the portrait of a mere fool. And Edward is
not a fool. As I understand him he is a temperament without a rudder;
all he has to rely upon is his memory, which isn't a very good one,
and so he tumbles from one mistake into another. My God! it is a
terrible thing to happen to one, to understand a man better than he
understands himself, and to be powerless to help him. If I had been
able to undo his faith I should have raised him to the level of Sir
Horace Plunkett, but he resisted me; and perhaps he did well, for he
came into the world seeing things separately rather than relatively,
and had to be a Catholic. He is a born Catholic, and I remembered one
of his confessions--a partial confession, but a confession: If you had
been brought up as strictly as I have been--I don't think he ever
finished the sentence; he often leaves sentences unfinished, as if he
fears to think things out. The end of the sentence should run: You
would not dare to think independently. He thinks that his severe
bringing-up has robbed him of something. But the prisoner ends by
liking his prison-house, and on another occasion he said: If it hadn't
been for the Church, I don't know what would have happened to me.

My thoughts stopped, and when I awoke I was thinking of Hughes.
Perhaps the link between Hughes and Edward was Loughrea Cathedral. He
had shown me a photograph of some saints modelled by Hughes. Hughes is
away in Paris, I said, modelling saints for Loughrea Cathedral. The
last time I saw him was at Walter Osborne's funeral, and Walter's
death set me thinking of the woman I had lost, and little by little
all she had told me about herself floated up in my mind like something
that I had read. I had never seen her father nor the Putney villa in
which she had been brought up, but she had made me familiar with both
through her pleasant mode of conversation, which was never to describe
anything, but just to talk about things, dropping phrases here and
there, and the phrases she dropped were so well chosen that the
comfort of the villa, its pompous meals and numerous servants, its
gardens and greenhouses, with stables and coach-house just behind, are
as well known to me as the house that I am living in, better known in
a way, for I see it through the eyes of the imagination ... clearer
eyes than the physical eyes.

It does not seem to me that any one was ever more conscious of whence
she had come and of what she had been; she seemed to be able to see
herself as a child again, and to describe her childhood with her
brother (they were nearly the same age) in the villa and in the
villa's garden. I seemed to see them always as two rather staid
children who were being constantly dressed by diligent nurses and
taken out for long drives in the family carriage. They did not like
these drives and used to hide in the garden; but their governess was
sent to fetch them, and they were brought back. Her father did not
like to have the horses kept waiting, and one day as Stella stood with
him in the passage, she saw her mother come out of her bedroom
beautifully dressed. Her father whispered something in his wife's ear,
and he followed her into her bedroom. Stella remembered how the door
closed behind them. In my telling, the incident seems to lose some of
its point, but in Stella's relation it seemed to put her father and
his wife before me and so clearly that I could not help asking her
what answer her father would make were she to tell him that she had a
lover. A smile hovered in her grave face. He would look embarrassed,
she said, and wonder why I should have told him such a thing, and then
I think he would go to the greenhouse, and when he returned he would
talk to me about something quite different. I don't think that Stella
ever told me about the people that came to their house, but people
must have come to it, and as an example of how a few words can convey
an environment I will quote her: I always wanted to talk about
Rossetti, she said, and these seven words seem to me to tell better
than any description the life of a girl living with a formal father in
a Putney villa, longing for something, not knowing exactly what, and
anxious to get away from home.... I think she told me she was eighteen
or nineteen and had started painting before she met Florence at the
house of one of her father's friends; a somewhat sore point this
meeting was, for Florence was looked upon by Stella's father as
something of a Bohemian. She was a painter, and knew all the Art
classes and the fees that had to be paid, and led Stella into the
world of studios and models and girl friends. She knew how to find
studios and could plan out a journey abroad. Stella's imagination was
captured, and even if her father had tried to offer opposition to her
leaving home he could not have prevented her, for she was an heiress
(her mother was dead and had left her a considerable income); but he
did not try, and the two girls set up house together in Chelsea; they
travelled in Italy and Spain; they had a cottage in the country; they
painted pictures and exhibited their pictures in the same exhibitions;
they gave dances in their studios and were attracted by this young man
and the other; but Stella did not give herself to any one, because, as
she admitted to me, she was afraid that a lover would interrupt the
devotion which she intended to give to Art. But life is forever
casting itself into new shapes and forms, and no sooner had she begun
to express herself in Art than she met me. I was about to go to
Ireland to preach a new gospel, and must have seemed a very impulsive
and fantastic person to her, but were not impulsiveness and fantasy
just the qualities that would appeal to her? And were not gravity and
good sense the qualities that would appeal to me, determined as I was
then to indulge myself in a little madness?

I could not have chosen a saner companion than Stella; my instinct had
led me to her; but because one man's instinct is a little more clear
than another's, it does not follow that he has called reason to his
aid. It must be remembered always that the art of painting is as
inveterate in me as the art of writing, and that I am never altogether
myself when far away from the smell of oil paint. Stella could talk to
one about painting, and all through that wonderful summer described in
_Salve_ our talk flowed on as delightfully as a breeze in Maytime, and
as irresponsible, flashing thoughts going by and avowals perfumed with
memories. Only in her garden did conversation fail us, for in her
garden Stella could think only of her flowers, and it seemed an
indiscretion to follow her as she went through the twilight gathering
dead blooms or freeing plants from noxious insects. But she would have
had me follow her, and I think was always a little grieved that I
wasn't as interested in her garden as I was in her painting; and my
absent-mindedness when I followed her often vexed her and my mistakes
distressed her.

You are interested, she said, only in what I say about flowers and not
in the flowers themselves. You like to hear me tell about Miss
----whose business in life is to grow carnations, because you already
see her, dimly, perhaps, but still you see her in a story. Forget her
and look at this Miss Shifner!

Yes, it is beautiful, but we can only admire the flowers that we
notice when we are children, I answered. Dahlias, china roses, red and
yellow tulips, tawny wallflowers, purple pansies, are never long out
of my thoughts, and all the wonderful varieties of the iris, the
beautiful blue satin and the cream, some shining like porcelain, even
the common iris that grows about the moat.

But there were carnations in your mother's garden?

Yes, and I remember seeing them being tied with bass. But what did you
say yesterday about carnations? That they were the--

She laughed and would not tell me, and when the twilight stooped over
the high trees and the bats flitted and the garden was silent except
when a fish leaped, I begged her to come away to the wild growths that
I loved better than the flowers.

But the mallow and willow-weed are the only two that you recognise.
How many times have I told you the difference between self-heal and
tufted vetch?

I like cow parsley and wild hyacinths and--

You have forgotten the name. As well speak of a woman that you loved
but whose name you had forgotten.

Well, if I have, I love trees better than you do, Stella. You pass
under a fir unstirred by the mystery of its branches, and I wonder at
you, for I am a tree worshipper, even as my ancestors, and am moved as
they were by the dizzy height of a great silver fir. You like to paint
trees, and I should like to paint flowers if I could paint; there we
are set forth, you and I.

I have told in _Salve_ that in Rathfarnham she found many motives for
painting; the shape of the land and the spire above the straggling
village appealed to me, but she was not altogether herself in these
pictures. She would have liked the village away, for man and his
dwellings did not form part of her conception of a landscape; large
trees and a flight of clouds above the trees were her selection, and
the almost unconscious life of kine wandering or sheep seeking the
shelter of a tree.

Stella was a good walker, and we followed the long road leading from
Rathfarnham up the hills, stopping to admire the long plain which we
could see through the comely trees shooting out of the shelving
hillside.

If I have beguiled you into a country where there are no artists and
few men of letters, you can't say that I have not shown you comely
trees. And now if you can walk two miles farther up this steep road I
will show you a lovely prospect.

And I enjoyed her grave admiration of the old Queen Anne
dwelling-house, its rough masonry, the yew hedges, the path along the
hillside leading to the Druid altar and the coast-line sweeping in
beautiful curves, but she did not like to hear me say that the drawing
of the shore reminded her of Corot.

It is a sad affectation, she said, to speak of Nature reminding one of
pictures.

Well, the outlines of Howth are beautiful, I answered, and the haze is
incomparable. I should like to have spoken about a piece of sculpture,
but for your sake, Stella, I refrain.

She was interested in things rather than ideas, and I remember her
saying to me that things interest us only because we know that they
are always slipping from us. A strange thing for a woman to say to her
lover. She noticed all the changes of the seasons and loved them, and
taught me to love them. She brought a lamb back from Rathfarnham, a
poor forlorn thing that had run bleating so pitifully across the windy
field that she had asked the shepherd where the ewe was, and he had
answered that she had been killed overnight by a golf-ball. The lamb
will be dead before morning, he added. And it was that March that the
donkey produced a foal, a poor ragged thing that did not look as if it
ever could be larger than a goat, but the donkey loved her foal.

Do you know the names of those two birds flying up and down the river?

They look to me like two large wrens with white waistcoats.

They are water-ouzels, she said.

The birds flew with rapid strokes of the wings, like kingfishers,
alighting constantly on the river, on large mossy stones, and though
we saw them plunge into the water, it was not to swim, but to run
along the bottom in search of worms.

But do worms live under water?

The rooks were building, and a little while after a great scuffling
was heard in one of the chimneys and a young jackdaw came down and
soon became tamer than any bird I had ever seen, tamer than a parrot,
and at the end of May the corncrake called from the meadow that summer
had come again, and the kine wandered in deeper and deeper and deeper
herbage. The days seemed never to end, and looking through the
branches of the chestnut in which the fruit had not begun to show, we
caught sight of a strange spectacle. Stella said, A lunar rainbow, and
I wondered, never having heard of or seen such a thing before.

I shall never forget that rainbow, Stella, and am glad that we saw it
together.

In every love story lovers reprove each other for lack of affection,
and Stella had often sent me angry letters which caused me many
heart-burnings and brought me out to her; in the garden there were
reconciliations, we picked up the thread again, and the summer had
passed before the reason of these quarrels became clear to me. One
September evening Stella said she would accompany me to the gate, and
we had not gone very far before I began to notice that she was
quarrelling with me. She spoke of the loneliness of the Moat House,
and I had answered that she had not been alone two evenings that week.
She admitted my devotion. And if you admit that there has been no
neglect--

She would not tell me, but there was something she was not satisfied
with, and before we reached the end of the avenue she said, I don't
think I can tell you. But on being pressed she said:

Well, you don't make love to me often enough.

And full of apologies I answered, Let me go back.

No, I can't have you back now, not after having spoken like that.

But she yielded to my invitation, and we returned to the house, and
next morning I went back to Dublin a little dazed, a little shaken.

A few days after she went away to Italy to spend the winter and wrote
me long letters, interesting me in herself, in the villagers, in the
walks and the things that she saw in her walks, setting me sighing
that she was away from me, or that I was not with her. And going to
the window I would stand for a long time watching the hawthorns in
their bleak wintry discontent, thinking how the sunlight fell into the
Italian gardens, and caught the corner of the ruin she was sketching;
and I let my fancy stray for a time unchecked. It would be wonderful
to be in Italy with her, but--

I turned from the window suspicious, for there was a feeling at the
back of my mind that with her return an anxiety would come into my
life that I would willingly be without. She had told me she had
refrained from a lover because she wished to keep all herself for her
painting, and now she had taken to herself a lover. She was twenty
years younger than I was, and at forty-six or thereabouts one begins
to feel that one's time for love is over; one is consultant rather
than practitioner. But it was impossible to dismiss the subject with a
jest, and I found myself face to face with the question--If these
twenty years were removed, would things be different? It seemed to me
that the difficulty that had arisen would have been the same earlier
in my life as it was now, and returning to the window I watched the
hawthorns blowing under the cold grey Dublin sky.

The problem is set, I said, for the married, and every couple has to
solve it in one way or another, but they have to solve it; they have
to come to terms with love, especially the man, for whom it is a
question of life and death. But how do they come to terms? And I
thought of the different married people I knew. Which would be most
likely to advise me--the man or the woman? It would be no use to seek
advice; every case is different, I said. If anybody were to advise me
it would be the man, for the problem is not so difficult for a woman.
She can escape from love more easily than her lover or her husband;
she can plead, and her many pleadings were considered, one by one, and
how in married life the solution that seems to lovers so difficult is
solved by marriage itself, by propinquity. But not always, not always.
The question is one of extraordinary interest and importance; more
marriages come to shipwreck, I am convinced, on this very question
than upon any other. In the divorce cases published we read of
incompatibility of temper and lack of mutual tastes, mere euphemisms
that deceive nobody. The image of a shipwreck rose up in me naturally.
She will return, and like a ship our love for each other will be
beaten on these rocks and broken. We shall not be able to get out to
sea. She will return, and when she returns her temperament will have
to be adjusted to mine, else she will lose me altogether, for men have
died of love, though Shakespeare says they haven't. Manet and
Daudet--both died of love; and the somewhat absurd spectacle of a
lover waiting for his mistress to return, and yet dreading her
returning, was constantly before me.

It often seemed to me that it was my own weakness that created our
embarrassment. A stronger man would have been able to find a way out,
but I am not one that can shape and mould another according to my
desire; and when she returned from Italy I found myself more helpless
than ever, and I remember, and with shame, how, to avoid being alone
with her, I would run down the entire length of a train, avoiding the
empty carriages, crying Not here, not here! at last opening the door
of one occupied by three or four people, who all looked as if they
were bound for a long journey. I remember, too, how about this time I
came with friends to see Stella, whether by accident or design,
frankly I know not; I only know that I brought many friends to see
her, thinking they would interest her.

If you don't care to come to see me without a chaperon, I would rather
you didn't come at all, she said, humiliating me very deeply.

It seemed to me, I answered, blushing, that you would like to see
----, and I mentioned the name of the man who had accompanied me.

If I am cross sometimes it is because I don't see enough of you.

It seems to me that it was then that the resolve hardened in my heart
to become her friend ... if she would allow me to become her friend.
But in what words should I frame my request and my apology? All the
time our life was becoming less amiable, until one evening I nipped
the quarrel that was beginning, stopping suddenly at the end of the
avenue.

It is better that we should understand each other. The plain truth is
that I must cease to be your lover unless my life is to be sacrificed.

Cease to be my lover!

That is impossible, but a change comes into every love story.

The explanation stuttered on. I remember her saying: I don't wish you
to sacrifice your life. I have forgotten the end of her sentence. She
drew her hand suddenly across her eyes. I will conquer this obsession.

A man would have whined and cried and besought and worried his
mistress out of her wits. Women behave better than we; only once did
her feelings overcome her. She spoke to me of the deception that life
is. Again we were standing by the gate at the end of the chestnut
avenue, and I remembered her telling me how a few years ago life had
seemed to hold out its hands to her; her painting and her youth
created her enjoyment.

But now life seems to have shrivelled up, she said; only a little dust
is left.

Nothing is changed, so far as you and I are concerned. We see each
other just the same.

I am no more to you than any other woman.

She went away again to Italy to paint and returned to Ireland, and one
day she came to see me, and remained talking for an hour. I have no
memory of what we said to each other, but a very clear memory of our
walk through Dublin over Carlisle Bridge and along the quays. I had
accompanied her as far as the Phoenix Park gates, and at the corner of
the Conyngham Road, just as I was bidding her goodbye, she said:

I want to ask your advice on a matter of importance to me.

And to me, for what is important to you is equally important to me.

I am thinking, she said, of being married.

At the news it seems to me that I was unduly elated and tried to
assume the interest that a friend should.




XII


It was three years after that the Colonel asked me to go to see some
friends who lived in the Clondalkin district, and we followed the
quays talking of the woman we were going to see and her sisters in
Galway, but when we reached the long road leading to the Moat House, a
group of trees (one of Stella's motives) recalled her, and so vividly,
that I could not keep myself from speaking of her.

I have no peace since her death. Not every day, I said, nor every
night, else I should be dead by now, or mad; consciousness is
spasmodic, and no warning is given. Any sight or sound is enough. She
painted those trees; they hang in my room, feathery against a blue
sky that has changed to grey, to everlasting grey. A touch of rhetoric
had come into my speech.... Yet I was speaking truthfully, and the
Colonel tried to soothe me.

Blame! Of course no blame attaches to me, and yet ... I may have
wronged Florence. But I never felt any remorse on her account, only on
Stella's. The question isn't whether I gave her the best advice that
might have been given in the circumstances; I gave her the only advice
that was possible for me to give. I knew nothing but good of the man;
and the advice I gave was the only advice she would have taken. No, I
cannot reproach myself with anything, and yet, and yet--Why did I
speak in his favour? And that is what I am afraid no one will ever be
able to tell me. Was it because I wished to free myself from all
responsibility? There was none. She took her chance with me and I took
mine with her--an equal chance in these days when women desert their
lovers as frequently as men desert their mistresses. We were bound by
no contract; it was no passing fancy, no infidelity that parted us.
Again and again I have given thanks to my stars, to my destiny, to the
Providence that watches over me that it is impossible to trace any
connection between my confession to her and her announcement to me of
her marriage. More than a year intervened.

I can't see that any blame attaches to you for the advice that you
gave.

Nor can I, yet her death overshadows my life, and for no reason. You
see I told her, but not till she had admitted that she was going to be
married, or was thinking of being married, that I had gotten a letter
from Elizabeth, inviting me to come to see her. She had neglected me
for years, ever since her marriage, but she is the only woman of whom
I did not weary. A sister-mistress, I said. The Colonel, who does not
understand these subtleties, kept silence. I had expected him to ask
why I had told Stella of the letter, but the Colonel never asks
personal questions, and I doubt if he was very much interested in my
story. It may have been to drive her into this marriage that I told
her that this other woman had written to me. What do you think?

I don't think it at all likely. She was determined on her marriage
before she spoke to you about it. You have no reason to suppose that
her marriage was not a happy one?

On the contrary, there are many reasons to think that it was a very
happy one.

I don't see there is any cause for blame.

Nor do I, but her death is the one thing that I wish had not happened
to me.

I waited for the Colonel to continue the inquiry, but he showed no
inclination to do so, and his indifference exasperated me without
shocking me as Edward had done when I had gone to him for sympathy,
throwing all the blame upon myself, and he had answered: Why didn't
she mind herself?--the pure peasant speaking through him; and to
escape from the atmosphere of the cabin I looked toward the Colonel.
Any mention, I thought, of Sarsfield and the Siege of Limerick would
rouse him; but having no desire for a historical disquisition at that
moment, I began to think out the whole story again, finding some
consolation in remembering that it was not for any mere woman I had
crossed two seas, but for her whom I had sought for twenty years,
turning from many fallacious forms and vain appearances, till at
length I discovered the divine reciprocation of all my instincts and
aspirations, the prophetic echo of my eternity, one summer's day among
a luncheon-party in the Savoy Hotel. Certain moments cannot pass from
us, and I do not think I shall ever outlive the moment when I rose
from my chair to meet my fate in the Savoy Hotel. My readers do not
need telling that the moving tints of a shot-silk gown did not cover a
dusky body from Italy or Spain; they have guessed already that my fate
came to me out of Flanders in all the fair bloom of her twentieth
summer; the full, flower-like eyes, the round brow, the golden hair, a
dryad by Rubens in appearance and withal a dryad's nature. If Ruben's
dryad were to come upon a traveller's fire in a forest, she would sit
by it warming her shins as long as it lasted, and then depart for lack
of thought to rouse the ashes into flame, and I have often thought
that Elizabeth treats the arts as the dryad the traveller's fire; she
warms her shins and departs, and overtaking satyrs and fauns in mossy
dells abandons herself again to her instincts. I can pick up a thread,
I have heard her say, but continuity I cannot abide; and feeling that
it would have been stupid to answer: You look upon me as a thread that
can be picked up and dropped with every change of fancy, I fell to
thinking how after a long day's journey I had come upon Elizabeth in a
hilly country fronting great prospects of pasture in which kine
wandered in long herds, and how she led me day after day through the
woods, through sunny interspaces that I remember for many a pleasant
frolic in the warm fragrant grass. I remember the tasselled branches
of the larches, the blackbird in the underwood, the thrush on the high
branch, and the mocking laughter of the yaffle when he crossed from
wood to wood; but Elizabeth remembers nothing; the dryad is without
our human memories.

All the whiles of this summer pleasance somebody was dying near us; we
were parted for many months, and when we came together again our love
story was no longer told in the woods. Yet she seemed contended with
me for a lover, and so docile was she in this Michaelmas summer of our
love that I said: There will be no change. I wonder, I asked her in
my folly, if we shall love each other always, if in ten years'
time--She laughed, and three weeks after she took me aside to confide
a strange project to me.

You don't mind, darling, if I don't see you tonight? I prefer to tell
you ---- has asked me if he might come. I can't well refuse. You don't
mind?

It would be vain for me to try to oppose your wishes, and you would
hate me if I did.

How well you know me! How clever you are!

The pair of shanks and ears that had come into our garden through the
underwood disappeared soon after, never to return; and we resumed our
love story; and then another pair of shanks and another pair of ears
appeared, and these were succeeded by more shanks and ears, and the
thought became clear that the last leaves were falling, and that no
renewal of our love would ever happen in my life again. Love, she had
said, is for the young and for the middle-aged, and I was growing old,
the love of the senses was burning out, and it would be better to
quench it by a sudden resolve than to keep blowing upon the ashes. By
fifty, I said to myself, we should have learnt that human life is a
lonely thing and cannot be shared, and that we are further from our
mistresses when they throw their arms about us than we are when we sit
by the fire, elderly men, dreaming of the kisses given and the words
said in distant years. Recollection is the resource of the
middle-aged, so says Turgenev in one of his many beautiful stories. So
did I reason with myself, and for two or three months I believed that
love would never flame up in my life again, but one evening a lady
whom I had known many years ago crossed a restaurant, and I ran to her
for news of a friend of hers. She had not heard of Doris for some
years, and in reply to my question if Doris were married she said she
had not heard of any marriage, and becoming suddenly anxious about
this girl I wrote to her relations, who answered that Doris was not
married; but my letter had been forwarded to her, and to this letter
came a delightful answer from Florac, a town that will be sought
vainly on the map. It will be discovered, however, in a story entitled
_The Lovers of Orelay_, and if the reader of _Vale_ be wishful to know
what happened at Orelay he can do so in a volume entitled _Memoirs of
my Dead Life_, but he need not read this novel to follow adequately
the story of _Vale_. The difference between one man and another is so
little that I could come to no other conclusion than that dear Edward
was right and that women cannot be adjudged an aesthetic sense. Man, I
said to Dujardin, possesses an aesthetic sense, but he is not an
aesthetic animal like cats, horses, or women, and he had answered me
that woman's point of view is different from man's, an argument that
calls into question the reality of the visible world. I don't think
the point has ever been fairly argued out; however this may be, I have
never been able to get it out of my head that women are idealists, and
that it is their natural idealism which enables them to ignore our
ugliness. Extraordinary! I said, for looking into Doris's face I could
see that she was pleased and happy; and the thought came into my mind
that if Lewis Hawkins were to see us together he would be astonished
by it, for it had always been his conviction that no woman could ever
love me. I remembered his hardly concealed pity of my ugliness, his
sudden inspiration that I should grow a beard for my chin deflected,
and how I had been taken to a tailor, and instructed when the clothes
came home how I must lean against the doorpost and look through the
ballroom. The company should be gazed at with indifference; a
nonchalant air, he said, attracted women, and many years of my life
were spent trying to imitate him. Time, he said to me, wears away
everything, even ugliness; you will be more interesting after thirty
than before. And it was he who told me that Goethe had said, We had
better take care what we desire in youth, for in age we will get it.

The pedant that was in Goethe muddied this utterance. We do not choose
our desires; he should have said, If we desire in youth ardently, our
desires will be fulfilled in age. But what is truth? the sage has
often asked, and the aesthetician in me regretted Doris's taste for
elderly men, and, stopping before the _armoire  glace_ at Orelay, I
had felt intensely that this love story was no frolic of nymph and
satyr, but a disgraceful exhibition of Beauty and the Beast.

Theories, however, avail us nothing, and it was not till several
months after parting with Doris that I began to reconsider the
important question--important, for no man lives who can say he is not
interested in the question when a man should begin to try--how shall I
put it? Well, to avoid unplatonic love encounters. But is an encounter
ever platonic? A question for grammarians, for me it is to tell that a
few months after my return to Dublin a lady called to see my pictures,
and that the encounter of our lips sent the blood rushing to my head,
and so violently that for ten minutes I lay where I had fallen on the
sofa, holding my splitting temples. My time for love encounters is
over, I said, reaching out my hand to her sadly.... She was too
frightened to answer, and after proposing a glass of water was glad to
get away out of the house. A sigh escaped me; my head was quieter,
and, struggling to my feet, I stood by the window watching the
hawthorns blowing. At last words came to me: Love's period is over for
me. Life is for ever changing, and very little remains after fifty for
a man and still less for a woman. We are for ever dying. Woolly bear
is succeeded by the cricket bat, the bat is followed by the rod, the
gun, the horse, the girl, and between fifty and sixty we discover that
our love-life is over and done. Our interest in sex, however, remains
the same, but it is an intellectual interest, changed, transformed,
lifted out of the flesh. Our eyes follow the movement of the body
under the silken gown, a well-turned neck and shapely bosom please us,
and we like to look into the feminine eyes and read the feminine soul;
but we do not kiss the point of white shoulders when thoughtless
ladies lead us away after dinner into a corner of a shadowy
drawing-room and cry in our ears, No, all is not over yet.

I wandered out into the garden, finding consolation in the thought
that one does not grieve for a lost appetite, for a lost power, for a
lost force. Horrible, I said, and my eyes wandered over my garden, for
the month was October. The dahlias were blackening and the Michaelmas
daisies were growing slattern; soon there would be no flowers left but
the flower that never fails to remind me of the mops with which
coachmen wash their carriage wheels. The swallows must be by now
half-way across the Mediterranean. Soon they will be nesting among the
stones of Cheops' Pyramid, and, my thoughts returning to myself, I
said, My mother used to say that I was born with a silver spoon in my
mouth. Celibacy is set above all the other virtues in Ireland, and the
Irish people will listen to my exhortations now that I have become the
equal of the priest, the nun, and the ox. Chastity is the prerogative
of the prophet, why no man can tell, and dear Edward, to whom the
virtue of chastity is especially dear, believes that it was the
stories of what the newspapers would call my unbridled passions that
had caused the Irish people to turn a deaf ear to my exhortations that
they should speak Irish and write Irish, and to my prophesying that a
new literature would arise out of the new language, or the old
language revived.

My thoughts unfolded, and I remembered how strangely I had been moved
the night in the Temple when Edward said he would like to write his
plays in Irish. _The Tale of a Town_ had brought me to Tillyra, and I
had caught sight of Cathleen ni Houlihan in the dusk over against the
Burran mountains as I returned through the beech-woods and the dank
bracken. The rewriting of _The Tale of a Town_ had awakened the
Irishman, that was dormant in me, and the Boer War had turned my love
of England to hatred of England, and a voice heard on three different
occasions had bidden me pack my portmanteau and return to Ireland. The
voice was one that had to be obeyed, but Ireland had not listened to
me and until now it seemed that I had misread the signs. But Nature is
not a humorist. She intended to redeem Ireland from Catholicism and
has chosen me as her instrument, and has cast chastity upon me so that
I may be able to do her work, I said. As soon as my change of life
becomes known the women of Ireland will come to me crying, Master,
speak to us, for, at the bidding of our magicians, we have borne
children long enough. May we escape from the burden of child-bearing
without sin? they will ask me, and I will answer them: Ireland has
lain too long under the spell of the magicians, without will, without
intellect, useless and shameful, the despised of nations. I have come
into the most impersonal country in the world to preach
personality--personal love and personal religion, personal art,
personality for all except for God; and I walked across the greensward
afraid to leave the garden, and to heighten my inspiration I looked
toward the old apple-tree, remembering that many had striven to draw
forth the sword that Wotan had struck into the tree about which
Hunding had built his hut. Parnell, like Sigmund, had drawn it forth,
but Wotan had allowed Hunding to strike him with his spear. And the
allegory becoming clearer I asked myself if I were Siegfried, son of
Sigmund slain by Hunding, and if it were my fate to reforge the sword
that lay broken in halves in Mimi's cave.

It seemed to me that the garden filled with tremendous music, out of
which came a phrase glittering like a sword suddenly drawn from its
sheath and raised defiantly to the sun.

[Illustration: Musical Notation]




XIII


Since the day I walked into my garden saying: Highly favoured am I
among authors, my belief had never faltered that I was an instrument
in the hands of the Gods. But the chosen of the Gods are always given
the needful means for the accomplishment of the Gods' mighty purposes,
and for many months I had stood perplexed, but never doubting. I had
striven to fashion a story, and then a play, but the artist in me
could not be suborned. Davitt came with a project for a newspaper, but
he died; and I had begun to lose patience, to lose spirit, and to
mutter, I am without hands to smite, and suchlike, until one day on
coming in from the garden, the form which the book should take was
revealed to me. But an autobiography, I said, is an unusual form for a
sacred book. But is it? My doubts quenched a moment after in a memory
of Paul, and the next day the dictation of the rough outline from the
Temple to Moore Hall was begun, and from that outline, decided upon in
a week of inspiration, I have never strayed. I had not been to Moore
Hall for many years, and loath to go there had often said to Miss
Gough: Why should I go to Moore Hall? for it is all mirrored in
memory; all the beautiful curves of the bay are before me, along
Kiltoome and Connor Island.

But if the lake hasn't changed, the country has, and you'll bring back
many new impressions and moods.

You may be right. The gentry have gone and the big houses are in
ruins, or empty or sold to nuns and monks, who are the only people who
can afford to live in fine houses. Ballinafad is now a monastery.
You'll see Ballinafad. I know it as well as Moore Hall. But you
haven't seen it as a monastery?

You may be right. I'll go. Nature is full of surprises. Prolific
mother of detail, I'll go to thee.

Ballinafad lies away to the left between Balla and Manulla, and on
stepping out of the train I said: To take in Ballinafad would mean a
round of four or five miles. I will instead drive over from Moore
Hall. But where is the Colonel's gig? and overtaking the porter I laid
hand on his shoulder and he told me that if the Colonel's gig did not
arrive soon, my best chance of getting a car would be in the village.
He promised that as soon as his work was finished he would go down and
inquire, but he was afraid Johnnie MacCormac had gone to Westport, and
if Johnnie wasn't at home the only thing to do would be to telegraph
for a car to Balla. And Balla being seven miles away, I should have to
wait an hour and a half at Manulla Junction, watching grey sky and
bridge, listening to the plaint of telegraph wires. The porter said he
thought he heard a yoke coming up the road. He'll cross the bridge
over beyant; and the bridge became at once the object of interest to
me. It's his yoke right enough. You'll be off now in no time; and
these words were spoken in a tone that convinced me the man was
conscious of his melancholy lot. But I couldn't stop at Manulla to
keep him company; as soon as I left he would be as lonely as before;
and the Colonel's groom being anxious to excuse himself for being late
told me [he] had gone to Derrinanny to sleep with his wife overnight.

I wonder where the station-master and the porters live?

Are you after leaving anything behind you, sir?

No, I was merely wondering what they do when not at work at the
station. There are only two trains in the day. The boy thought there
were three, but he would be able to find out at the grocer's. So there
is a shop in Manulla?

We'll be passing it in a minute, sir; we're just going into the
village now.

Nobody was about; we saw neither cat, nor dog, nor pig in the muddy
street; the groom mentioned, however, that the Colonel knew the
priest, and as soon as we passed his chapel the fields began again,
uneventful little fields, for there was neither tree nor brook to be
seen, nor any one at work in them. Great stones had rolled down from
the walls into the boreens leading from the main road up a landscape
that it would be flattering to call hilly; it was merely a little
tumbled. Over the hillside a cabin showed sometimes, and at last a dog
bounded out of one, and I said:

Where there's a dog there's a man, and where there's a man a woman
isn't far off--isn't that so?

The boy did not answer, and, as seemingly he could not be persuaded
into talk of any interest, I continued my survey of the country,
noticing, for lack of something else to do, that it had flattened out
without becoming a plain, and that the clouds were gathering on the
horizon in a mass foretelling a downpour. But to mention that we were
in for a wetting would only provoke a monosyllable from the boy. On
the whole, the better chance of conversation seemed to be in a
comparison between the Manulla and the Balla Road.

The Colonel thinks this is the easier road.

It doesn't seem to be quite so hilly, but it is treeless, whereas on
the Balla road there are trees nearly all the way to Moore Hall.
Ballinafad--by the way, Mr Llewellyn Blake has settled the monks at
Ballinafad, hasn't he?

So I've heard tell, sir.

And how do the country people like that, and they going to get the
estate divided between them?

The boy called to the pony, and I had to repeat the question.

The monks is giving fine wages at Ballinafad.

But how much they were paying he could not tell, and I tried to forget
his presence, remembering that on the road out of Balla we leave Athy
Valley on the right, and I took pleasure in recalling Sir Robert
Blosse and Lady Harriet; their children I never knew. A little farther
on was Browne Hall; Edith and Alice were beautiful girls. The Browne
Hall and the Ballinafad estates were contiguous, and Joe Blake going
off to Castlebar races with his arms round his serving-maid's waist
rose up in my mind as if it had been yesterday. And two miles farther
up the road is Ballyglass, our post town; the mail coach used to
change horses there, and I remembered my mother reining in her ponies
so that we might have a good view of the coach as it came swinging
round the bend. The men that clipped horses lived in Ballyglass, in a
cottage with a pretty flower garden in front--a rare thing in Mayo;
and from the gate of Tower Hill to Carnacun the road is wooded,
between Carnacun and Moore Hall the hills are naked, and the Annys
River dribbles through the low-lying fields under Annys Bridge to
Lough Carra.

We shall turn into the Castlebar road presently, shan't we?

Yes, sir, round by Clogher.

Clogher! the name carried my thoughts over the years to the time when
we went thither to gather cherries and were suffered to tear down
branches unreproved. There were four girls at Clogher--Helena, Lizzie,
Livy, and May. Lizzie was the merriest, and her inventiveness won my
father's admiration, for, needing a hearthrug for her doll's house,
she set a trap and caught a mouse. My father delighted in this
association of images--a mouse-skin rug for a doll's house; and as we
drove toward Moore Hall it seemed to me that I could see Clogher and
its dead girls quite plainly. No more than a little mist had come
between us. In another instant I shall be pondering on life and its
meaning, I said, and looked round for something in the landscape to
which I might direct the lad's attention. May we not hope for a fine
day after all? I asked him, and the question seemed legitimate enough,
for at that moment a ray lit the worn field in which a yoe bleated
after her lamb to come at once to relieve her udder. He did not
answer, so I pressed him with:

The lamb is the first sign of spring. The lamb comes before the
daffodil. Do you know the flower?

Do you mean the daffydowndilly, sir?

That's what old Betty MacDonald used to call them.

We're just turning into the Clogher road, sir.

Yes, and yonder is the police-station, and beyond is the
cross-road--to the right Castlebar, to the left Carnacun.

You've a fine memory, God bless it, yer honour.

The whitewash of the Clogher police barracks struck through the trees
the same as forty years before, and I began to wonder what answer the
boy would make if I were to tell him that the trees had not grown a
foot within forty years. I suppose the police are always after the
girls now as they were in my time? and the boy answered me: Them
fellows do be too busy oiling their quiffs to put the comether on the
girls.

As soon as we pass the barracks, I said, we shall turn to the left and
there will be hazel-bushes and rocks on both sides of the road, and
about two hundred yards farther on we shall get a blink of Carnacun
Lake where the hill drops. But the groom was not listening, and I fell
to thinking of the pretty brooks one sees in England, purling and
curling between low green banks, and shadowed by willow-trees. The
willow follows the brook, and the Irish landscape lacks brooks and
willows. Lakes are not in my temperament, I said; and set myself to
remembering the many different lakes that we catch sight of from our
roads; and then my thoughts were whisked away to Domnick Browne, who
went to New Zealand, taking with him a bundle of hazel rods for
walking-sticks, forty years ago, and did not write to me till he
discovered that he could trace me no further back than Charles V, but
himself went back to Charlemagne. A wonderful thing life is, I said,
and began to notice the endless stone walls between Moore Hall and
Manulla, loose walls dividing little fields with a hawthorn growing in
one corner and two magpies flying--whither? The people and the country
are still savage, I mused, and Ireland is without pleasant objects to
look upon, though why there have never been windmills in Ireland it
would be difficult to say, for there is plenty of wind. In my
childhood there were a few water-mills, and it was pleasing to recall
the day when the governess and the Colonel and myself had tripped over
to Tower Hill to watch the mill-wheel. But long ago that mill stopped
working. Yonder is Carnacun Lake, behind a scrubby hillside with the
pines foment it, as the groom would say if he could be persuaded into
speech. The lake seemed smaller than I remembered it, but he could not
tell me if it were drying up. I looked forward to the crossroads, and
it was pleasant to see that the smith's forge was still there, and
Grayon's house, one of my tenants, the tenant of Ballintubber, a
wealthy man, even forty years ago, for he could afford to lend me two
hundred pounds ... money spent during my minority. The chapel stood up
over the village on a knoll, and the fringe of trees about it was as
ragged as when our carriage used to turn in the gateway. The smith's
house and three or four cabins with sagging roofs were still the
village of Carnacun; nothing had been added or taken away, and I
looked out for the house licensed to sell beer and tobacco. It was
there, as dark and as dismal as of yore, a threshold that any moralist
would approve, and above it was the great wall of the ball alley
denounced by Father James Browne in his sermons: You think I don't be
hearing your brogues about the doorways, and after I have gone up the
steps to the altar, he used to say. And now the rival of his Mass had
fallen into ruins, some of the cut stone had tumbled out of the high
wall, weeds had sprung up in the alley, and Father James's house, to
which I liked to ride my pony for a Latin lesson, was a ruin too. The
present priest lives higher up the hill, in a two-storeyed house with
plate-glass windows; but does he read Virgil for his pleasure and
drink as good port as Father James? Be this as it may, it will always
seem to me that a great deal of the character of the village of
Carnacun has gone with the old cottage under the ilex-trees, the ball
alley, and Father James Browne. His image has nearly faded from my
mind, but I can still recall a high-shouldered man with a large hooked
nose and a complexion like a Crofton apple, whose wont it was to walk
about the parish in a torn cassock seeing that everybody was about his
business. He would hop over the wall down into the road and out of the
road again, on to the path across the triangular field to the
school-house over yonder on the hillside. Why, Misther School-masther,
do you mind being called the school-masther? You are the
school-masther just as I am the parish priesht. I don't mind being
called the parish priesht. I like being called the parish priesht, so
why should you not like being called the school-masther? So class
distinctions were beginning to jar even then, I said. And to this
school we owe the disappearance of the Irish language from this part
of the country. I remembered the children returning from this school
along a road that winds through damp fields on one side, melting
almost into bog about the Annys River; on the other side the land
rises, and all the cabins appeared just as I had left them; a little
improvement was noticeable in the last one; a sty it used to be in old
time, amid cesspools, unfit truly for an animal to live in. My hope
often was that no human being would come out of its doorway until we
had passed it by, and I recalled the satisfaction with which I learnt
one day that this cabin was not on our but on the Tower Hill property.
I anticipated the elder-bushes a few yards farther on, and could still
see my mother and my governess in my thoughts gathering elder flowers
for they were supposed to be good for sunburn, and myself cutting
elder stems to make pop-guns. A path leads over the hill to the right,
and down to the left a boreen runs along one of our woods, to
Runnineal, a Tower Hill village by the Annys River, and the house
under the pines where the main road strikes through is a wood-ranger's
lodge, the dwelling of a man called Murphy, whose welcome I used to
dread; for, like a great big dog, he would run out of his house or
saw-pit when he heard the wheels of the car, and his bark of welcome
followed us until we reached the little bridge that spans the bog
drain. In those days a path was a wonderful thing, much more wonderful
than a road, and there was an enticing little path by the bridge-head.
My governess forbade it; but one day I succeeded in persuading her to
wander down it, and we had followed it through some young fir-trees;
and yet undaunted I had implored that we should follow the path
through a wood, and it had led us at last to a field golden with
buttercups and a drain in which wild irises grew. A little farther on
we spied another path leading up the hillside, a dark and suspicious
path, but a girl who dropped a curtsy told us that it would lead us
right on to the stables of the Big House. We had dared to follow it
too; and had come upon dells, open spaces, and copses, and trees of
every kind; silver firs in whose vasty heights I was certain there
were wood-pigeons' nests; and as we descended the hill on the other
side a rowan delayed us; the berries were just beginning to redden,
and immediately after we were in the bog road which was well known to
us, and at the end of our adventure. Red Rowan berries and blue irises
are not of the same month; two memories seem to have got mingled. No
matter, this wooded hillside was once full of adventure and mystery,
and there was a dark place under the turret at the end of the garden
into which I did not dare to go, bramble-covered hollows into which I
used to peep and then run away, afraid to look back. But the day came
when I pushed my way through the dark coverts, and lo! there was
nothing. Suddenly the pony stopped, and whilst the driver opened the
gates I admired the fine ironwork and the cut-stone pillars topped
with round balls that the Colonel had brought from Newbrook, and it
looked handsomer even than I had expected, though the Colonel's praise
had led me to expect a good deal. It had opened upon one of the
Newbrook avenues a hundred years ago; cut stone was not so costly then
as it is today; even so, money must have been more plentiful in those
days, for the gateway obviously represented a great deal of labour. In
those times everything came off the land: mutton, beer, butter, bread,
jam; the stewards, gardeners, butlers, and huntsmen came from the
village, the housemaids too, for feudalism had lasted in Ireland down
to 1870. But the peasants have come into possession of the lands from
which they were evicted, and are now felling the trees of the
beautifully timbered parks--trees two hundred years old are being sold
at eighteen-pence apiece at Newbrook. And the trees that I am now
looking at--the Moore Hall trees--will soon after my death be felled,
the gateway will be offered for sale again, and the cut stone will
find its way into cottage walls.

The pony stopped in front of the high pitch in the road, jerking me
forward in my seat, and began the laborious ascent whilst I looked out
for the tall laburnum up whose slippery stem I had never succeeded in
swarming. It was among the gone; some hawthorn-bushes I missed too,
and very little was left of the great lilac-bush that marked another
path to the stables. We had looked forward to seeing it when we walked
out with our governess, and I remembered how one day in midsummer,
after chasing through the woods, playing at Red Indians, yelling as we
imagined Red Indians yell on the war-path, I had thrown myself into a
haycock just by this lilac-bush, and planned the morrow: we would
bring out whips with louder lashes and extend our adventure into
mysterious places whither we had never dared to venture. But the next
day the woods had lost some of their mystery. When summer returned the
ghouls and fairies had died out of my imagination, and finding that I
no longer experienced any desire to crack my whip, or to hide in the
lilac-bush, or to roll in the hay, I went to old Joseph to ask him how
this was. He answered I had grown older.... The drive turned round a
hawthorn, passed through a glade, and I looked out for the next
lilac-bush, for it was within its perfume that I had had my first
religious conversation with the Colonel. It, too, was among the gone,
but on the left, on the brow of the lawn, were two holly-trees into
which I had shot many an arrow from the steps. But the laburnums that
had once decorated the head of the drive, had they died too, died of
old age or for lack of human companionship, the laburnum being a
familiar tree?

The last ascent is steep, and the pony walked every step of it, not
consenting to trot till he reached the gravel sweep in front of the
square Georgian house with the great flight of steps and big pillars
supporting a balcony. On these steps a couple of red setters were
always waiting--a special breed for which the house was famous. Nell
rose up before me in her colour, in her shape, in all her winsome
ways. A better dog never drew the scent of a covey of partridges or
pack of grouse, and she would retrieve a duck far out in the reeds. My
father often beat her for coursing hares, but despite these beatings
she could not bear to be separated from him, and one evening he pulled
her out of the lake into the boat saying that she had been swimming
after us for more than an hour, and that if the large trout had not
delayed us outside the reeds, she would have gone on swimming till she
sank. Her son, Saddler, the biggest setter ever known--like a
Newfoundland he was, and not a single white hair in his coat--used to
lie in the hall on the mat. One day my father mentioned that the dog
always snapped if he was stirred out of his sleep, and looked round
with a bewildered air, and then suddenly seemed to recover himself.
Saddler was suffering all this while from rabies, and as soon as the
veterinary surgeon saw him he ordered him to be shot. Blush and Ruby
were the last setters that adorned the steps, and the steps were the
only part of the architecture that I ever liked, Moore Hall not being
in my early taste, which was for brick, and perhaps it is still, for
houses that have been added to by different generations rather than
for grey square blocks with pillared balconies. Moore Hall had always
seemed to me a Mansion House inferior to Clogher and Tower Hill. But
it is superior to either, for it was built in 1780, and it was with a
sense of relief that I had heard from the Colonel in Dublin that the
roof had been raised by my father after winning some big races. The
old roof was fifteen feet lower, and the slates that covered it were
the small green Irish slates like tiles mortared together. I learnt
from him that it had never been completely water-tight, and constant
leakage having rotted the beams, the roof had to be raised. So my
antipathy to this eighteenth-century house was to some extent
justified. It was no longer eighteenth century; its eighteenth-century
proportions had been spoilt by the new roof and by the plate-glass
that my father had put into the windows of the hall and dining-room
and drawing-room, and I felt sure that if I were ever to come to live
in Moore Hall, the whole countryside would have to be searched for the
old hand-made glass with rings in each pane like blobs of grease in
soup. But I had always liked the imposing flight of steps, the iron
railings, the pillared balcony, and the hall with its Adam ceiling,
and should have liked the rooms on either side better if they had not
been decorated in accordance with Victorian taste. It would seem that
my father's journey to the East had to expend itself somehow, and
being a clever man of many aptitudes he had designed a Greek room in
an interval between racing and politics. His room had filled my
childhood with admiration. But the straw colour and the blue-grey
chosen for the walls had faded in the course of forty years, and the
decorators that had come from Dublin when the Colonel went into his
residence at Moore Hall had failed to divine the original tints in the
faded; the Colonel had warned me that they had failed, but I was not
prepared for so complete a failure, and the somewhat coarse, very
nearly vulgar appearance that had been given to the room set me
thinking that perhaps it would be well to replace all this plaster of
Paris with a pretty French paper. But who could restore the Adam
ceiling? I asked myself, as I crossed a hall of fine proportions, and
untouched, I muttered, as I went into the dining-room. My father's
pilasters and parquets in variegated woods displeased me, and I felt
certain that if Moore Hall were to be the end of my life the
drawing-room and dining-room would have to be brought into harmony
with the hall and the roof lowered some ten or fifteen feet; my father
was too near the Georgian period to appreciate it, I added, and,
raising my eyes from the carved merman and mermaid on either side of
the fireplace to my ancestor in the red coat, I began to wonder if the
painting were Spanish.... Be that as it may, my grandfather is a
Wilkie for sure; and just as I had arrived at this conclusion the
Colonel bounced in, fresh and rosy from the farmyard, all breeches and
gaiters, and anxious to show me round the house, and I followed him
into the hall. It opens on to a wide passage with a staircase at
either end, and off this passage there were four rooms--our old
schoolroom, the water-closet, and two more rooms opening one into the
other, and known as the doctor's and the priest's room. All these
rooms the Colonel had thrown into one, and he had brought down
grandfather's book-cases and set them along the walls, achieving in
this way a fine room, no doubt; but a long narrow room is un-Georgian,
and character in a house is as important as in a man. No one sits in a
long, narrow room. The fireplace is necessarily at one end, so while
our left side is freezing our right is being roasted. Rooms should be
square, there can be no doubt about it; and the present library is at
another disadvantage--it overlooks a backyard, a desert place
surrounded by high walls, the top of the walls spiked like a jail.
This desert place was once set round with outhouses; a scullery opened
on to this yard, and the hen-house was next to it. There was the
wood-house, and on the other side of the gate was a turf-house, and in
the right-hand corner I remembered the great chimney of the brew-house
where William Mullowney's father brewed the household beer. But that
was before my time. Our beer came from Ballinrobe in the 'sixties: our
beer now comes from Dublin.

In old times the backyard was the centre of activity. The water for
the house was brought from the lake in a water-barrel, the cart stood
in the yard with the mule-boy beside it, and when the maids had filled
their cans he put the mule into the shafts and went away to the lake
again, leaving them to exchange words with the garden-boy, their
gossip interrupted by the voice of the cook or the arrival of the ass
from the bog with creels of turf, which the turf-boy would carry up
the back staircase, emptying his load into the great barrels that
stood on the different landings, filling with special care the barrel
in Joseph Applely's pantry, and I think it was Joseph who told me that
these vats had come from Spain filled with port and sherry. And my
thoughts passing into dialogue, I said: You have read all the family
papers and can tell when these importations of wine ceased. After our
great-grandfather's death probably. The Colonel could not tell me if
this were so, and so inveterate a dreamer is he that he led me to the
pantry window to ask me if it would be better to rebuild the outhouses
or cover in the yard.

Cover in the yard! I said.

Why not? A series of arches and a terrace on the top.

And a flight of steps would serve from the higher to the lower
terrace.

And on either hand vases--

Or rare pieces of sculpture, I said. The Colonel looked distressed.
But how would the yard underneath be lighted?

By side windows.

And the drip? The rain would have to go somewhere. On our way to the
bathroom he explained how the drip might be mitigated. Here, he said,
is the bathroom, and I answered: 'Tis well; but the great eighteenth
century knew not bathrooms, and we talked of the footpans and the
bidets that once formed part of the furniture of every bedroom, and
the disrepute into which bathing had fallen since Roman times, all
through the Middle Ages, until Anglo-Indians reintroduced the habit of
the thorough washing of the body into Europe. From the bathroom window
we caught sight of the ruined privy under the beech-trees to which our
ancestors were wont to adjourn in the morning, their pipes in their
mouths, to talk the news, and the news was always of a race-horse, or
a duel, or a hunt. We have improved upon those times, yet our
neighbours still allow their dogs to deposit ordure upon our doorsteps
in London. And whilst I meditated on humanity's slow advancement, the
Colonel told me that he had chosen my father's dressing-room for the
bathroom. I never should have had the courage to make the change, so
real is my memory of the room as it stood in my father's lifetime,
himself seated at the great bureau full of countless drawers at which
he wrote his letters, or standing before the toilet-table between the
windows covered with cut-glass phials of macassar oil, pots of bear's
grease, many kinds of ivory brushes, tortoiseshell combs of all sorts
and sizes, some destined for the hair of the head, some for the
whiskers, relics of the days of his dandyhood, for he must have been a
great dandy when Anonymous turned a shoe at Liverpool and Corunna won
the Chester Cup.

He liked me to come into his dressing-room to talk to him while he
lathered his face, and I remembered the lie I told him when he asked
me if I had used the top of his silver shaving-pot to knock in a nail,
and his alarm when I stumbled over the long s's in grandfather's
edition of Burke's speeches. I have forgotten his reproofs to me, but
can still see him in my thoughts opening the green-baize door, and can
almost hear him communicating the direful tidings to my mother. As she
showed little or no alarm the governess was sent for and it was put to
them: Had they ever known or heard of a child of seven who could not
read Burke's speeches without faltering in an edition printed with the
long s's? Before Miss Westby had time to answer, my mother said that
she didn't believe that any child of seven could read the long s's
without faltering, and I can recall his long mouth speaking through
the latter, telling that when he was three he used to read the _Times_
aloud to his mother at breakfast. My mother's incredulity exasperated
him; he ordered my governess and me to the schoolroom, and for days we
sat reading a very indifferent history of England by one Lingard. We
listened with apprehension while Joseph Applely brushed the master's
silk hats and arranged his gloves for him in the hall, and we breathed
more freely when we heard the hall door clang, for we knew then he had
gone to the stables to run his fingers down the horses' forelegs, and
our hope was that his interest in the morning gallops would help him
to forget my lessons. We passed the door of the room to which my
mother had taken me to pray by the death-bed. It had not been in use
since mother's death. The Colonel was with her; he had probably seen
her die, and I supposed that that was why he had chosen for himself
the two rooms at the end of the passage--rooms that I recollected as
grandmother's rooms; and after visiting them he threw open the door of
the summer room, a pretty room opening on to the balcony that the four
great pillars support, and in an instant the room returned to what it
had been forty years before, my father sitting at the rosewood table
in the evening, drinking a large cup of tea, telling me stories of
Egypt and the Dead Sea, Baghdad, the Euphrates and the Ganges, stories
of monkeys and alligators and hippopotami, stories that a boy loves.
We left the room to go to the rooms that were once grandfather's
library. The Colonel had turned them into bedrooms. Grandfather's
spirit seems still to animate these rooms, I said. The Colonel did not
answer, and then I seemed to apprehend something that had hitherto
escaped me: Moore Hall had always seemed alien and remote to me
because it was pervaded by the minds of those that preceded me. My
grandfathers and grandmothers were underground, but along the landings
and in the large rooms opening on the passages I seemed to be aware of
mentalities different from my own. Nor is it strange that this should
be so, Moore Hall not having been subjected to any new influences
after 1870; and going down to luncheon with my brother I felt I should
never be able to live in this house; I should always feel my
grandfather sitting by me wondering how it was that his grandson
should practise so familiar a style, one so unlike Gibbon.

I should always be engaged in imaginary dialogues, I said, telling him
he did not always write like Gibbon but like me in his preface to the
_French Revolution_, and that the preface is the best part of it. If
you were to say that, said the Colonel, he would answer, But you
haven't read my history of the French Revolution. I asked myself if
the Colonel intended a reproach. After luncheon, he proposed to show
me the garden, but I could barely see it, so clear was my memory of
the old eighteenth-century garden with its rows of espalier
apple-trees and four great walnut-trees, one in each plot. The two
great ilex-trees whose branches leaned in front of the turret were
gone; the turret was in ruins, and the Colonel had felled a good many
beeches along the twenty-foot wall to get light and air for his
fruit-trees. I was sorry for these.

But nothing grows under them, he explained, and led me round his peach
and pear and apple and cherry-trees, and while he explained the
different varieties, I dreamed of the sweet-briar hedge that divided
my mother's flower-garden from the plots in which we had once grown
potatoes, cabbages, onions, spinach, chives, parsnips, cauliflowers,
beans, asparagus. The asparagus-bed was never a great success, because
of the walnut-trees which my father would not allow to be felled, his
mother having planted them. Even more distinct in my memory than these
trees was a great apple-tree--a very venerable tree, moss-grown and
carious. It stood up a little beyond the flower-walk, and near it,
tucked away in a corner, was a dense growth of raspberry-bushes
enclosed by a thick hedge, a dangerous place in my imagination, one in
which witches and other evil spirits were to be met, but the fruit
tempted me, and my governess once boxed my ears for having hidden
myself among the raspberries. And then we came upon the ruins of the
greenhouse from which we used to steal the grapes, even when the door
was kept locked, and my father once beat me with a horse-whip for
breaking the panes, and now, elderly men both of us, the Colonel and I
stood looking at a large cut-stone chimney that the Colonel had saved
in case I should care to rebuild the greenhouse again. Cut stone is
very expensive, he said, but in our grandfathers' days labour was
cheaper; and we passed into the stables, none of which had fallen.
There was the box in which Croagh Patrick neighed when the boy
brought his sieveful of corn. How he plunged his muzzle into it! for
he was a greedy feeder and ready to kick any one that came near him
till the last grain was licked up. In the next box I had seen Master
George, one of the best horses of his year, only a few pounds behind
Croagh Patrick at a mile and a half, and his superior at two miles, a
terrible buck-jumper that would have dislodged any cowboy. The little
ponies that these horsemen ride have not sufficient strength to throw
them out of the high Mexican saddles, but Master George was sixteen
hands and a half, and when his head disappeared between his legs it
was no easy thing to keep on a six-pound saddle, and the tightest
might have been flung out of it as I was three times one morning
before breakfast, these falls irritating my father scarcely less than
the long s's had done eight years before, compelling him to declare
that no horse could unseat him. Joseph Applely smiled and went out of
the room, and next morning my father was thrown in front of the house
by the holly-trees, breaking his collar-bone, and the doctor had to be
sent for. The Colonel started to enumerate: Wolf Dog, Anonymous, and
Corunna have dragged hay out of those very racks, he said; and the
coach-house recalled the coach hung on leather straps, and the great
phaeton, likewise on leather straps, which hardly ever went out--a
museum piece it was--and the tiny phaeton in which our mother used to
drive Primrose and Ivory, a beautiful pair of ponies. The great fir at
the back of the stable, in front of the hayrick, reminded me of the
day that Joseph Applely took me out for a walk and taught me a little
bird-lore. The nest he showed me at the end of the bough was a
goldfinch's, and we explored the woods together, and far clearer than
today is that fragrant morning by the hawthorn-tree all in flower,
Joseph lifting me up to see into the blackbird's nest. And I remember
his voice: You mustn't touch the eggs, Master George, or the bird will
forsake her nest. But how will the bird know? Let's try. We must go
back, Master George, and if we return at one we shall get home in time
for dinner. Let's go a little farther, Joseph, and find some more
nests, I cried, for it did not seem to me that I should ever want
dinner again.

But of what was the Colonel thinking? He is like his father, discreet;
therefore not a man of letters, and we talked about the foreign firs
which our father had planted in the 'sixties, and they seemed to me to
be out of keeping with the landscape. Deodars may be suited to India,
I said, and the Wellingtonia may be well enough in California, but
here they are detestable; and far worse than the deodar and the
Wellingtonia is that cypress los--something, a tree of vile habit,
sending down branches to take root, creating a little jungle. The
Colonel admitted the habit, which he could not well deny, but he could
not be persuaded to send round for a couple of hatchets, urging that
felling trees is not the light work that I imagined it to be, the
real reason being that he is as averse as I am from felling a tree, an
aversion inherent in every sensitive nature, one might almost say in
every nature except the woodcutter's; habit has blunted his; he has
forgotten the original instinct of tree-worship, and perceives no
longer the mystery of the vasty height sprung out of a single seed.

It was while I was thinking these things that the great walls of the
farmyard rose up through the beech-trees, eighteen or twenty feet
high, enclosing buildings of all kinds; stables for many cart-horses,
granaries, barns, haggards, byres, smithies. A great deal of cut stone
had been used in these buildings, and the Colonel had saved many
pieces from the ruins of the smithy, and these he said would come in
useful when the time came to rebuild the farmyard. I liked to hear him
dreaming his dreams while I meditated the question whether it were
crueller to fell an ox or a tree. Behind that wall I had seen death
for the first time, and with that kind of morbid pleasure which one
feels in wounding oneself, I recalled how the shepherd had come one
day into the yard driving half a dozen sheep before him, and how,
stopping in my play, I asked him why he had brought them from the
fields. He answered me that Friday was always killing day, and putting
out his crook he caught a sheep by the leg and felt for the fat; but
not being satisfied with the animal, he allowed it to escape from him.
Again he put out his crook and caught another, and again he was not
satisfied; three or four sheep were tried; it may have been over the
fourth that he muttered, This one will do, and led it into a corner.
He and his boy stretched it on a slightly raised platform, and I asked
why a bucket was placed under its head. To catch the blood, Master
George, the shepherd answered as he sharpened his knife; and all this
ritual was so enticing that I waited impatiently, and marvelled how it
was that the sheep accepted death without a bleat, looking at us all
the time with round, peaceful eyes, in which one could read neither
love of life, nor fear of death, nor reproach. At last the eyes began
to glaze, and I said to the shepherd, He has begun to die, and the
shepherd pressed the sheep all over with his great strong fingers,
urging the blood out of the wound in the neck. A few days later we
were stopped in our walk by strange squealings, and scenting death, we
appealed to a peasant; and he told us the butcher was killing pigs. We
ran from our governess to see the pigs killed; we hid from her in a
stable, and did not venture out till she had given up the search. I'm
afraid you're late; he's a goner by this time, the peasant called
after us, and when we arrived at the farmyard the carcass was being
cut up and salted, and it would be some time before the butcher would
be ready for another. The Colonel was a little diffident, uncertain
whether he should stay to see a pig killed, but perhaps ashamed to go
lest I might laugh at him. I took on authoritative airs, and bade the
men hurry, returning now and again to the dung-heap to watch the pigs;
there were eleven or twelve rooting and rolling, happy, for the warm
May sunlight caressed their sides, and apparently the screams of their
fellow, now passed away into salt pork, had not disturbed them.
Standing by them I picked out the biggest to be taken next, a
pigheaded animal that contested every yard of the way, two rustics
dragging him, and myself applying an ash-stick as a goad to his rump,
and so cruelly that one of the rustics begged me to desist. He was
bleeding under the tail when he was hoisted to the platform, and I
felt ashamed of my cruelty; but he was a vicious brute that would have
bitten the butcher had it not been for the rope about his snout. The
butcher worked his knife slowly through the neck; and I plied him with
questions: Why was it that pigs squealed when they were being killed
and sheep died without uttering a bleat? Was it because it hurt pigs
more to die than it did sheep? The butcher answered that pigs were
noisy devils; somebody else added that they liked music, the bagpipes
especially--answers that perplexed me; and I stood watching the blood,
noting that with its flowing the squeals grew fainter and fainter.
Dead he seemed such a stupid thing that I began to wish him alive
again. My governess came into the cowyard saying she had been looking
for us everywhere; our dinner was ready and we must come at once. But
we haven't got the bladder yet. The butcher put his hand into the pig,
tore it out, and handed it to us all stinking, our governess begging
us to relinquish it, but we explained to her that we were going to
blow it out and tie it to the end of a stick. We shall want two more
bladders to beat each other with, I explained, and hurried the Colonel
through his dinner. I would have brought my sister to the farmyard,
where still some more pigs wallowed in the dung-heap outside Fright's
stable, waiting the great experience of their lives--the butcher's
knife.

Fright was a very handsome thoroughbred horse. He had won some big
races--the Cesarewitch, I think--and had gone to the stud with a
deformed foreleg. My father was sure Fright would get winners if he
were given the right mares, and the horse stood at Moore Hall for many
years at ten pounds for thoroughbred mares, five for half-breds; the
groom's fee was, I think, the same in every case, five shillings, and
it was a very well-earned five shillings, for Fright needed a great
deal of coaxing and encouragement before he showed any interest in the
mare waiting for him in the yard outside his box, and he would
certainly have gone to the knacker's if he had not neighed at the
sight of some cart-mares as Pat Kelly was bringing him home from
exercise. And seeing that the mares were in the horse's mind, Pat
began to tell me how he had spoken in the horse's ear. I was all ear,
but Pat became reticent suddenly, and I was left pondering on the
mystery of the continuous existence of life in this world.

I had been told, as every child is told, that babies were found under
gooseberry-bushes, and had accepted the explanation for some years,
but between the ages of ten and twelve this explanation seemed hardly
worthy of a boy's serious credence, and I had accepted the only other
possible solution--that the female produced children unaided, and had
begun to regret my sex when Pat Kelly's words made life seem again
worth living. And not to find myself lacking when my day came, I used
to hide in the carpenter's shop (the carpenter's shop being next to
Fright's stable) so that I might hear Pat encouraging the horse with
all kinds of coaxings: That's the old boy, that's the old man, and
sometimes with so little effect that Pat's mouth would grow dry and he
would curse the horse, and after cursing him he would start another
set of coaxings, at the end of which, perhaps, the horse would be led
out of the stable. It was then time for me to run out of the
carpenter's shop and climb into one of the beech-trees overlooking the
yard. One day I succeeded in persuading the Colonel to come with me,
and that was the very day that Pat pointed us out to our father, who
called to us to come down and caned the Colonel severely.

With all these memories flocking through my mind, it was sad to see
the carpenter's shop in ruins, for in it I had spent many days with
Micky Murphy trying to learn to use the chisel, the plane, and the
saw; but to no purpose did I labour, for I was without handicraft,
less gifted than the carpenter's son. The Colonel had never collected
hatchets and hammers, saws and chisels, planes and gouges, files and
augers and gimlets, and perhaps that is why he had bought an old
saw-mill in Ballinrobe and established it in a corner of the haggard
where, once upon a time, there used to be great sport ferreting rats
in the wheat stacks built upon short stone pillars about three feet
from the ground, with a slab on the top to keep out the rats. But a
mischievous boy, preferring a rick full of rats to his father's grain,
will leave a plank for them to climb; and when threshing-day comes,
the rats will scurry before a ferret with the dogs in full tilt after
them; and if perchance a curious dog should try to appreciate the
smells of rat and ferret and get his nose bitten, he will cry, You'll
know better next time, Towser.

Outside the barn was a curious old threshing-machine; two horses yoked
to a great beam were the motive power; and these set going within a
little stone circle all kinds of wheels and cogwheels, and in response
the winnowing-machine inside the barn clattered; and when I came to
see how the work was progressing, the women smiled upon me as they fed
it with sheaves, asking me not to come too near lest I should have my
fingers chopped. When the threshing-machine went out of gear, the
flail was flung, and dodging the thresher's weary flingin' tree, I
would snatch a handful of grain and throw it to the finches waiting in
the fir-trees on the hillside; not out of kindness of heart, but to
entice them to their death; for when they assembled in sufficient
numbers and were pecking unmindful of danger, two barrels of a
fowling-piece were loosed upon them, and the ground was quickly
covered with blood and feathers. A boy must learn to shoot, and whilst
learning he fires at blackbirds and thrushes on the lawn, at the
jackdaws as they hover about the chimneys, at the magpies as they fly
from thorn to thorn, and the gulls flapping about the lake's shore are
shot at again and again; gulls will dive after a wounded gull, and so
the sportsman has a chance of shooting gulls till his heart sickens.
And then wandering from the shore into the woods he will shoot a
squirrel, a badger, a raven; hawks and owls he considers it his duty
to loose upon, and wood-pigeons, too, for they are greedy birds and
the farmer does not reap where he has sown. A boy lusts to kill; he
will set dogs after a cat, and one day a very beautiful white cat was
hunted out of the laundry into the lofts and then out of the lofts;
and when the cat escaped by a broken window the dogs were set after
her, and when puss crossed the road, the dogs in hot pursuit, she was
forced to take to one of the trees growing out of the shelving
hillside. The laundry-maids came running down the road pleading for
their cat, but a barbarous boy climbed the tree and shook her out of
the branches, and in imitation of a huntsman pulled out a knife and
cut off the cat's head and distributed the flesh, treating the cat as
if she were a wild animal--a hare or a rabbit--whose function it is to
provide us with sport as well as food.

You would like to see the Stone Park, the Colonel said. The name of
the field awakened a memory pleasanter than the infamous hunting of
the cat, a gathering of nuts one summer evening long ago with two
laundry-maids and a stable-boy. Perhaps there is nothing that takes a
deeper hold on memory than the drawing down of boughs laden with fruit
in the dusk of a dead day. We had gathered till strange shadows began
to move about the fairy ring spared by my father when he set to work
to redeem the Stone Park from the hazel, more acres being needed for
the growing of oats, so numerous were the racehorses at Moore Hall at
this time. The corn prospered in the virgin soil and a great crop was
expected; but our horses got none of it, for our peafowl had encamped
in the middle of the field, leaving only a fringe, and the villagers
muttered when the birds took to their heels or their wings: The master
would have done well not to have meddled with the good people!

The good people seem to have recovered their holding, I said to myself
whilst seeking the road that our father had built. But all trace of
it was lost in a jungle of blackthorn and hazel. Our mearing was the
wall of the great park that had once extended round Castle Carra, and
whilst the Colonel narrated his plans for the second ridding of the
Stone Park by means of dynamite, I heard him break off in the middle
of a sentence: The goats again! and away he went with thirty or forty
goats trotting in front of him. It is just as I suspected, said he a
little later. They feed on green boughs during the summer, but just at
this time of the year they come over the deer-park wall in search of
grass.

He told me that he had thought of shooting them, but was afraid to
raise up hatred against himself in the country, for the goats were not
altogether wild; for certain, somebody had a claim upon them. And he
continued talking, but for a long time my thoughts were among the days
when we clambered the deer-park wall and wandered to Castle Carra, a
great stronghold in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, abandoned
so it was said, in the seventeenth, or later, the descendants of the
great chieftains having gone to live in the modern house, now a ruin
like the castle. In the 'sixties a herdsman lived in a corner of it;
we bought goat's milk from him, and how good it was in the noggins,
foaming over the brims! The circumstances of the abandonment of the
castle must have been wonderful. Or was it abandoned by degrees? At
one time all the headland was fortified, but of this vast castle
little remains except the central tower or fort, now grown about with
thorn and hazel. My mother's wont was to repeat verses from _Marmion_
as we passed under the gateway, and our tablecloth was laid on the
grassy space which we believed to be the ancient banqueting-hall.
Above us were glimpses of staircases built between the walls, and one
day I climbed up the wall and mounted the stairs. But the chieftains
had left neither treasure nor pistols nor swords behind them.

We might do a little clearing every year, the Colonel broke in, and
all the trees that we get out of the Stone Park can be cut up by the
saw-mill, creating a provision of fuel for the house, and in ten or
twelve years we shall find we have added many acres of arable land to
the estate. Aren't you listening?

Yes, I'm listening, and I think you're right; in about ten or twelve
years Moore Hall will have returned to the Moore Hall of before-times.
But have you been to Castle Carra lately?

He had visited Castle Carra some three or four months ago, and the
castle was crumbling; last Christmas there had been a great downfall;
the old gateway had wellnigh disappeared, and he did not think the
castle itself would last more than fifty years. The great modern or
quasi-modern house, to which the chieftains repaired when private wars
were no longer recognised as lawful, is passing away, he said, even
more rapidly than the castle. I found pieces of the great stone fox
that stood in the middle of the courtyard and the two hounds one on
either side among the brushwood. Another thing. Castle Island needs
repair. Michael Malia was on the island last summer, and he tells me
that the base of the old castle is insecure, but that a few pounds
would make it safe.

My dear Maurice, it is sad to see ancient Ireland passing away before
our eyes. But we cannot rebuild ancient Ireland, and it is clear to me
that as soon as I am gone Moore Hall will be pulled down to build
cottages in Derrinany and Ballyholly, or the house will become a
monkery or a nunnery. Which would you prefer?

The Colonel sought refuge in silence, and I read in the melancholy
that overspread his face that the abandonment of family property to
the prelacy was distasteful to him. And now that Llewellyn has given
Ballinafad to the monks, he may, I said to myself, be more willing
than he was some years ago to allow me to bring up one of his children
a Protestant, on condition, of course, that I leave him Moore Hall. I
had written to him once on this very subject, and his answer had
reached me in Paris. A very angry letter it was, characterising my
proposal as infamous and outrageous. Why should my proposal be looked
upon as infamous and disgraceful? I had asked myself, and I began to
ask myself again the same question. He may, I said, think differently
now; circumstances have changed. Moreover, the proposal might be put
to him again in conversation; words pass rapidly; there is no time for
anger if they be dealt out skilfully; and I thought how after dinner,
when his wife had gone to bed and we were sitting in two armchairs
before the turf fire, I might begin by complaining that now that
Stella and Walter Osborne and Hughes were gone, Dublin had become a
little too small for me. He would ask me whether I was going to London
or to Paris. Paris would introduce Dujardin's name, and I would tell
him that Dujardin's ambitions were to found a new religion in which
there was no dogma, only rite. The Colonel would shrug his shoulders
and ask how rite could exist independently of dogma, and I would
answer that there was no dogma in ancient religions. The Colonel would
answer, Judaism, and I would explain incidentally that the Jews had
never indulged in heresy hunting. It was not permitted to insult
Jehovah, and anybody who did so was condemned to death, as Socrates
was condemned for insulting the Gods. Dogma and its concomitant,
heresy hunting, arose when? What Pope founded the Holy Order? The
Reformation would be mentioned, and it would be an easy transition
from the Reformation to my proposal.

We make these plans, but very rarely do we adhere to them; and after
dinner, when we two were sitting in the drawing-room, without prelude
or introductory matter of any kind, I said:

My dear Maurice, I have a proposal to make to you. I am quite willing
to pay for the education of your eldest son, and to leave him any
property and pictures that may remain after my death, but I should
like to bring him up a Protestant. Our family is a Protestant family;
there are one or two apostates, it is true, but--

I should never consent to what you are proposing. You needn't go on.

I'm sorry for that, for of course it is impossible for you to deny
that Catholicism makes for illiteracy. As I have pointed out again and
again, Catholicism has hardly produced a book worth reading since the
Reformation.

But I deny that completely.

It doesn't suit you to admit it. But this you will admit, that if
Catholicism degrades, corrodes, paralyses, and stupefies the
intelligence, its day is over.

I admit that, if your premises be correct, but I deny your premises.

To deny is easy; but if what I say be not true, if Catholics have
written as well as Agnostics and Protestants, the books are known.
Name them.

At the end of a long waste of argument, I said:

Well, if you are convinced that the Catholic is equal to the
Protestant, why not bring the matter to the test? Do you bring up one
of your sons a Catholic, I will bring up the other a Protestant, and
back him to be the superior of the Catholic boy, to the extent of five
hundred pounds. I'll be generous. If I win, I will give the five
hundred to the Catholic as a sort of consolation prize.

The proposal you are making to me is utterly inacceptable and
horrible. I can't think of anything more detestable than that I should
give you one of my children to be brought up in a religion of which I
disapprove, and that I should be tempted to do this by a promise that
you will leave him money! If, later on, my children were to tell me
that they preferred Protestantism to Catholicism, I don't say that I
shouldn't be sorry, but I should do nothing to prevent them following
the religion which they wished to follow, but if they were to change
their religion in order to inherit property, or to get money, I should
hate the very sight of them.

But, my dear Maurice, nobody except Cardinal Newman ever changed his
religion for theological reasons. All changes of religion are brought
about by pecuniary or sexual reasons.

The Colonel did not answer. He lay back in his armchair white with
passion, the first time I had ever seen him lose his temper since he
was a little boy. It would have been easier to let the matter drop,
but I had determined to make a last attempt to save the boy, and could
not stop half-way.

You told me I libelled my great-grandfather when I hinted that he
became a Catholic because it was impossible to carry on business in
Spain as a Protestant.

And I say so still; but we're not talking now of our
great-grandfather, but of my children.

But you knew that our great-grandfather never became a Catholic, and
knowing the truth why did you conceal it? Because you are a Catholic?

We are talking now of the religion my children are being brought up
in, and I say that your proposal is not an honourable one, and if
possible it would be less honourable of me to accept it.

Everybody has his own ideas of honour; there is no fixed standard; but
it is a very common thing, as you must know, that when parents are
divided in religious beliefs some of the children are brought up in
one religion and some in another, and it would be difficult to impugn
the fairness of such an arrangement. I am prejudiced in favour of
Protestantism for intellectual reasons, and because my life is moulded
on facts rather than upon sentimentalities. And the answer I got from
the Colonel was that I looked at the world through a narrow tube and
could only see one spot at a time, and that my opinions were always as
narrow as the tube; and then, getting angrier and angrier, his face
bleaching with a passion which I could not help admiring, for at all
events he was himself in this scene, he reminded me that I had said I
would leave Moore Hall to his children, but no sooner had I said that
than I began to impose conditions. In the beginning they were to learn
Irish, that was the condition; now a new condition was to be imposed,
they were to be brought up Protestants.

Not both, only one, I protested; and if I pay for his education you
can't expect me to bring up a boy in a religion which I think
paralyses the intelligence. Your concern is with the possibility of a
future life, the soul's arrival in Purgatory and its subsequent
release by means of Masses paid for the Pope's indulgences, and--




XIV


And when on a subsequent occasion my brother told me, in answer to a
question, that I had been paying fifty pounds a year to the Jesuits,
and afterwards one hundred and thirty a year to the Benedictines for
the education of my nephew, I uttered the cry or moan of a man taken
with a sudden sickness. The sensation the news brought me was,
strangely enough, physical, a sort of fainting in the very bowels, or
else I cannot describe it. I wrote to you from Paris offering to pay
for my nephew's education, I said, if he were brought up a
Protestant, and the answer I got was that my proposal was a
dishonourable one. How, then, could you think that I was willing to
pay for a Catholic education? and it has been going on year after year
and I was never told. His answer was that he would repay me; and with
the transference of some hundreds of pounds from Cox's to the National
Bank, the question of money would be settled between us. But there is
no question of money, I bewailed. I don't care a fig for the money.
But the deception ... I could not answer him further; the shock of the
discovery deprived me of any power of reasoning, and I ascended the
stairs, thinking as well as I could that any calamity had been
preferable to the one that had befallen me, and that I should have
been paying for the education of a Catholic while meditating _Hail and
Farewell_ rankled like salt in a wound. While writing _Ave_ and
_Salve_, I muttered, and a deeper sense of unhappiness than I had ever
known before began to steal over me as I dragged my feet along the
landing to the room in which I was to sleep.

I shall get no sleep tonight, I said, raising the blind in the hope
that the moon shining on the lake would calm me; and my eyes roved
over the dim outlines of the lake into the pearly distances neither
blue nor grey. A moment later the words: He is a born Catholic, fell
from my lips, and the phrase seemed to me to represent a truth
hitherto unexpected or insufficiently appreciated. We do not acquire
our religion, we bring it into the world. We are born Catholics or
Protestants. Catholicism and Protestantism are attitudes of mind. And
I pondered the question for what seemed a long while, awakened
suddenly by the thought that if my nephews had a worth they would
discover themselves to be Protestants. From eighteen to twenty-one is
the time when we stick for ever or find a way out. Every man of worth
chooses a religion for himself, and so my money has been only wasted;
but it has not gone to the moulding of a soul. All the same, I would
not have had this happen, no, not for all the money in the world. And
I fell to thinking how I had laughed and jeered at dear Edward because
he dreaded lest his money might be applied to the production of
heretical plays; yet here was I suffering from the same dread. The
perfect circle of the moon detained my thoughts a little while, and
the lonely castle beneath it set me thinking of savage hordes of Welsh
and Irish disputing for possession of the island. But however far our
thoughts may wander we are awakened by the old pain. My senses
sickened again. A judgment upon me, I cried, for having jeered at dear
Edward! And at the words: dear Edward, my thoughts sped away to
Bayreuth and returned to my brother and to our childhood. My mind, I
said, is like an ever-veering wind, and sleep will be sought in vain;
all the same, I must seek sleep. And all night long the same thoughts
revisited me, marching round my brain like prisoners in a yard, high
walls, and no strip of sky above the multitudinous bricks. Round and
round they go, I cried, and then away went my thoughts again, and of
what I was thinking when I feel asleep I cannot tell.

Your bath-water is ready, sir.

Yes, yes, I answered, and turned over. If I could only cease to think!
But the moment I see him I shall begin to think again of Jesuits and
Benedictines. Of what shall we speak? I asked, and going to the bath,
and in the bath, and coming from the bath, I tried to discover
subjects of conversation, lingering over my dressing, and so
advantageously that Evelyn was dispensing tea and coffee and when I
entered the dining-room, and after breakfast I thanked her kindly when
she said:

Now, Maurice, won't you take George out and show him the new gateway,
which he says he has not seen sufficiently?

The Colonel murmured some answer, and whilst hustling himself into his
old yellow overcoat, he told me that the part of the ironwork missing
from the gates brought from Newbrook had been supplied by the smith at
Carnacun, and that he was curious to hear if I should be able to
distinguish the old from the new. The stonework was complete, all
except two knobs; these Michael Malia would be able to replace, and
the cost would not be more than five or ten pounds a knob. His
optimism was somewhat dismal, for I never imagined anybody living in
Moore Hall again, and after viewing the gateway which had only cost me
forty pounds, we turned down the road to the gate lodge, now empty,
the Colonel having succeeded in expelling its late tenants, his
gardener. A gate lodge, I said, is generally beside the gate, but this
one is fifty yards away. The Colonel declared it to be an excellent
house, and I meditated, for this gate lodge was associated in my mind
with many memories. It had a loft which was reached by a ladder, and I
had often thought that I would like to sleep in a loft among the hay;
and there was a deep drain beyond the garden at the edge of the wood,
and down this drain I had often floated on a raft made out of a plank
and the shutters from the windows, into deep water under the bridge.
It was a thrilling experience to find oneself on a raft under an arch,
but the novelty wore away quickly, and one day I had undertaken a
longer voyage, punting the raft down the drain into the lake. But in
the lake the punt pole (a branch torn from a tree) had proved
insufficient, and the freshening wind had carried me and the raft out
into the open lake, and looking at the Colonel I remembered him crying
among the rushes while I debated my chances, whether it would be
better to remain on the raft trusting it to carry me to some island,
or to throw myself from it into the lake in the hope that the water
was not deep enough to drown me. The waves leaped higher and higher,
threatening to wash the shutters from the plank, till at last it
became clear that the chance that the water was not deep enough to
drown me would have to be accepted. It rose to my chin, lifting me off
my feet, and I continued wading, hoping not to stumble into a hole.
Yes, I said to the Colonel, I had a near escape that day from
drowning, and now I can still see you running along the strand crying
for some one to come and save your brother. If the accident had
happened a few years before, he said, you would have been drowned; the
lake was deeper, and he told me how in the 'sixties a young engineer
had come down from the Board of Works with a project for draining
Lough Carra into Lough Mask, but our father had offered such
opposition to the scheme that it had to be abandoned. Up to the
'seventies, I answered, we were feudal lords, and he was listened to
in the House of Commons when he said that he could not allow a small
Sahara to be created before his front door. We controlled our
landscapes in those days, or it may have been that the shores of Lough
Mask were implicated in this drainage scheme. As likely as not it was
discovered that the draining of Lough Carra would inundate the shores
of Lough Mask. A weir was therefore constructed in the River Robe,
said the Colonel, and his words revived the day I had brought a boat
from Lough Carra to Lough Mask and had put back frightened by the
great waves of that gloomy lake.

Our father saved Lough Carra, but it is for certain many feet lower
than it used to be; and I reminded the Colonel of the great
pleasure-boat about whose rotting planks we often played in childhood.
It had been allowed to rot under a group of pines, standing some fifty
or sixty yards from the lake's edge, by the side of a walled trench,
once its harbour. For to what other purpose could the walled trench
have been put? we often asked our governess, our subsequent questions
drifting into dim speculation as to how many pounds it would cost to
mend the boat; and if Micky Murphy could mend it if he were paid ten
pounds. This rotting boat appealed to our imaginations, for its seats
would hold a dozen or more ladies and gentlemen, and there were
rowlocks for eight oars, and the Colonel and I were wont to imagine
the great picnic-parties that had sat under the sail, for there was a
hole in one of the seats for a mast. Was Castle Hag or Castle Island
the destination of these picnic-parties? we asked each other; and was
there a turkey stuffed with chestnuts in the hamper? We were certain
that there were cakes and fruits and jams, and that the footman spread
a snowy cloth in the glade under the castle wall. Our governess read
while we dreamed. We! Did the Colonel dream? If he did, he never told
me his dreams. He is reticent about his dreams, but garrulous about
externals, and as we walked round the shores of Lough Carra for the
last time, he regretted that he had not brought with him the key of
the new boat-house, for he would like to show me his brother-in-law's
boats, rowing-boats, skiffs, wherries, a steam launch, and a yacht. A
shrunken lake for certain, else the reeds would not have thriven. ----
had had to cut a passage through them for his boats, and the Colonel
unfolded a project to me whereby the lake might be cleared of reeds,
and before he had reached the end of his project we were at the bridge
that stretches over the turlough (a turlough in Mayo is a low-lying
field, that is flooded in winter), and he pointed out the pump that
drew the water from a well out in the middle of the lake--a well that
old Betty MacDonald told us was once up in Kiltoome, but it had
suddenly descended and had sprung up in the lake, with a ring of grass
around it, for it was a holy, or maybe a fairy well. She was note
quite sure which. The pump had cost me two hundred pounds, but I had
to admit that if people were to live at Moore Hall, a pump was
necessary. The walls require mending, I remarked, coming upon a
cottage that my father had built but had never put a roof on; and I
added, A ruin that will supply excellent material for the building of
necessary walls.

But the Colonel said there was plenty of stone, and no need either to
pull down the cottage or to roof it. The walls were probably too
rotten to bear a roof, and, speaking of the Congested Districts Board,
he said, They even ask for the paddock, the field behind the cottage.
The fields beyond the gate were Corrour, the New Gardens, Lough
Navadogue, Rochetown, and our father's racecourse, on which he had
trained Corunna, Wolf Dog, Anonymous, Crough Patrick, and Master
George, to number a few of his famous horses, and all these fields the
Congested District Board required.

So that the holdings of three tenants might be extended, the Colonel
said; and if you yield, Moore Hall will be no more than a villa in the
midst of a wild country; cottagers within the woods right up against
Kiltoome, and who can say that pigsties will not be built? The present
cottagers would probably prevent the pigs from rotting in the
graveyard, but the cottagers fifty years hence will have no scruples.
The Board insist on acquiring all the land right up to Kiltoome, and
at their own price, and if you refuse to sell, the Board may refuse to
buy your other estates, Ballintubber, and those in Galway and
Roscommon. A very serious matter for you if the Board refused to buy.

How is that?

The next move of the Board will be to stir up all the tenants to
combine in a campaign against rent--like putting a stick into a wasp's
nest, the Colonel added, with a deep note of anger in his voice. So
far as I understand, the proposal is to leave you Derrinrush.

We returned to Moore Hall, and so gloomy were our thoughts that we
turned aside instinctively from the Dark Road and ascended the steep
lawn together.

My dear Maurice, Moore Hall was built in feudal times. Read the tablet
over the balcony, 1790, and feudalism continued down to 1870; a big
square house on a hill, to which the peasants came every morning to
work. You remember the bell that hung over the laundry? It rang at
seven, and before it ceased clanging our labourers assembled and were
bidden to their day's work; and a shilling a day was fine wages in
those good times. And you remember the women coming from the village
with their husbands' and brothers' dinners? Half a dozen boiled
potatoes in a cloth, and a great dinner it was if they got a noggin of
buttermilk from the cook. They ate their potatoes and drank their
buttermilk under the hawthorn hedge in the backyard, if the day were
fine, and, if it were wet, in byre or stable. The young men wore
corduroy trousers and frieze coats, the old men were still in knee
breeches and tall hats; a red petticoat hung to the women's knees and
they wore a printed handkerchief round their heads. We were kings in
those days; little kings, but kings for all that, with power of life
and death as has been said and truly, for we often sundered wife and
husband, sister from brother; and often drove away a whole village to
America if it pleased us to grow beef and mutton for the English
market. And in those days the peasants were afraid to thatch their
cottages lest their rent should be raised, nor was there one peasant
in our villages or in the Tower Hill villages worth a ten-pound note.
The Colonel asked me if I remembered a cabin in the middle of Annys
bog, a dwelling hardly suited for an animal, yet a man and woman lived
there and children were born in it, and I answered him: We used to
pass it on our walks, you and I and our governess. Yes, I remember it,
and I remember one day up in the mountains while grouse-shooting
stabling my horse in a man's cabin. But we shall never be able to do
it again. The landlords have had their day. We are a disappearing
class, our lands are being confiscated, and our houses are decaying or
being pulled down to build cottages for the folk. All that was has
gone or is going. Moore Hall represents feudalism.

I think that anybody who would like to live in a comfortable house--

Square rooms and lofty passages conformed to the ideas of our
ascendants, and jerry-built villas, all gables, red tiles, and mock
beams, stand for modern taste and modern comfort; hot water on every
landing and electric light. Nobody wants a real house unless an
American millionaire, and it is not because of its reality that he
wants it but for its unreality. It is unreal to him, and having a
great deal of money, he indulges in eccentricity. In this way the old
world is carried on by Americans; even in England there are very few
houses that are the capitals of the estate they stand in as Moore Hall
was up to fifty years ago. Moore Hall is out of date, and it
astonishes me that you don't feel it. I wish in a way that I could
summon sufficient courage to pull it down and sell it; it would make
excellent rubble to build labourers' cottages, and if I could I would
cut down every tree and lay the hillside bare. Why not, since I know
it will be laid bare a few years after my death? The fate that
overtook Ashbrook hangs over Muckloon. It will be given over to
peasants, like Ashbrook. You remember the piece of tapestry that was
woven in Ashbrook by our great-grand-aunt or grandmother and is now on
exhibition in South Kensington Museum? I wonder how long it will be
before another piece of tapestry like that is woven in Mayo. In the
dining-room hangs a portrait of a lady with a dog, painted by a young
girl in Galway. Is there one in Galway now who would paint as well?
No. With all our so-called culture, sculpture, painting, architecture,
and the art of the use of words are disappearing. By the way, Maurice,
I don't know whether you have heard my theory that the age of art is
over as much as the Stone Age.

People have always been saying, he answered, that the age of art is
over. I could cite you many passages from Elizabethan writers in which
they deplore the decline of art and the English language. They were
wrong, I replied, that is all. But it cannot be denied that there was
neither art nor literature in Europe in the Middle Ages, from the
sixth, shall we say, to the twelfth century? The Colonel answered me
that art cannot flourish in the midst of invasions; and he began: Rome
was sacked by Alaric in the fifth century, and in the same century
Europe was overrun by the Huns, headed by Attila, and a century later
the Saracens invaded Europe and were defeated by the French at the
Battle of Tours; and as we walked toward the house he explained that
if this defeat had not taken place we might all be Mohammedans now.

But do you think that the sleep of Mohammedanism is a deeper sleep
than the sleep of Catholicism? I beg your pardon for introducing the
religious question. You are appreciative of the trend of the past, but
seem blind to that of the present. I cannot help being sorry for my
poor country that has never been able to show a brave face to the
world. Some extraordinary curse seems to have been laid upon this land
in the tenth century or about that time. Ireland was something then;
she had a religion of her own--and she was inventing an art of her
own. Up to the tenth century it looked as if God intended to do
something for Ireland, and in the tenth or the eleventh century he
changed his mind, and ever since the curse seems to have been
deepening. In another fifty years Ireland will have lost all the
civilisation of the eighteenth century and will be a swamp of peasants
with a priest here and there, the exaltation of sacraments and whisky
her lot, and a hundred legislators united only in protecting monkeries
and nunneries from secular inquisition. The Colonel did not agree with
me that the gentry were dying out in Mayo. The Brownes of Breaghwy
and the Lynches of Partry had been building lately. My dear Maurice,
you will not see things as they are. Or is it that you don't remember
Mayo in the days of the gentry as well as I do? Athy Valley is empty,
and you told me that you and an old peasant had searched for traces of
Browne Hall, but could find none. Ballinafad is a monastery. The
Blakes are still in Tower Hill, and a last Lynch lives his lonely life
in Clogher. Cornfield is empty, and will be pulled down very soon. The
Knoxs have left Creagher. Newbrook is sold, and the masonry
distributed--part of it is at the end of the drive. Brownestown House
was burnt before our time, but not much before it. How many more? The
Lamberts are gone. What was the name of their place? Brook something.

Every class has its ups and downs, and there is no doubt that ours is
going through a crisis.

No crisis whatsoever. We have outlived our day, that is all; and in
thirty years we shall be, as I have said, as extinct as the dodo,
unless religion comes to our aid. You seem not to have heard of the
New French party--the Catholic Atheists? Religion is to be taught
again in the hope that man may be persuaded to forgo the joy of a
woman's bosom for the sake of Abraham's. The Colonel laughed, but he
was not pleased, and to break the irritating silence he told me that
Castle Carra had been sold to the Congested Districts Board, and out
of the arch, built during the famine, a row of concrete cottages had
been run up according to specifications. The old deer park will supply
some material, I said. The jungle will be grubbed up; you will get rid
of the goats. And we talked on in this fashion, and after dinner
resumed the same talk, saying the same things over and over again; and
when we ascended the stairs to our beds, about eleven o'clock, the
Colonel promised to drive me over to Llewellyn's monastery next day.

Llewellyn Blake is my uncle, my mother's youngest brother, and he came
into the property of Ballinafad on the death of Joe Blake, famous in
the county Mayo for many racehorses and a love story. Joe seems to
have been the only one in the family whose soul did not trouble him.
His brother Mark, from whom he inherited the property of Ballinafad,
was a fine old country rake, leaving samples of his voice and
demeanour and appearance in every village, and then going to Dublin to
repent his sins, attaining in the last years of his life the
spectacular appearance of Father Christmas, causing much annoyance in
the chapels that he frequented from his incurable habit of
interrupting the services with Oh, Lord; oh, Lord; my unfortunate
soul! Llewellyn is as tall as his brother Mark, two or three inches
over six feet, large in proportion, with sloping shoulders, snapping
his words out and then relapsing into silence. He used to be much
admired at dances in the drawing-rooms of Merrion and Fitzwilliam
Squares, and in the old Royalty Theatre he patronised the Muse
Terpsichore. But those days are over and done with, and, like his
brother Mark, he has become uneasy about his soul. He was warned of
its disease by me years ago, but he paid no heed to my warnings, and
convinced of its continuous existence, and that priests can help him
to save it, he has founded a monastery. I should do the same if I were
a Roman Catholic, but the Colonel, who is one, would have me try to
prevent the founding of this monastery by action at law, and I am
still trying to understand the Colonel who believes in the efficacy of
masses for the dead, but seems to think that Llewellyn's relations
should come before his soul--a most impossible Colonelesque argument;
and the spirit fumed within me to express my point of view; but I put
chains upon my spirit, and Carnacun went by for the last time. We were
on the heights of Ballyglass when the struggling spirit sundered its
last fetters, and I said:

How is it that you disapprove of this monastery? It seems to me that
you should, on the contrary, urge me to found another at Moore Hall.
You believe that masses for the dead will get your soul out of
Purgatory. If you don't, you are not a Catholic. Now, why shouldn't we
have a little plump of monasteries in Mayo? At Moore Hall we could
have Benedictines; at Clogher Franciscans. Lynch is a Roman Catholic:
he has got no children, what better could he do? At Tower Hill some
arrangements might be come to with the Blakes to put in Trappists. You
don't know what order is in Ballinafad? The Colonel answered sullenly
that he was not sure whether Llewellyn had founded a mission house or
a monastery. Well, no matter. This little plump of monasteries sending
up prayers for your soul, for Llewellyn's soul, for Lynch's soul, and
for the souls of all at Tower Hill; and the prayers bringing down the
archangels constantly, crooks in their hands, pulling you one after
the other out of Purgatory. The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost;
nectar perpetually on tap, and aureoles that never wear out. A rich
prospect before you all!

An ironical smile, deliberately introduced, pervaded the Colonel's
face, and it said as plainly as words: How very superficial you are,
and vulgar, quite vulgar!

My dear friend, I am sorry for bringing up this question again. It is
the fault of Llewellyn Blake.

Count Llewellyn Blake. He has been made Count of the Papal States,
said the Colonel.

But why laugh? In his eyes the Pope is not only a spiritual, but a
temporal power. His title is more valid than any other. Don't you
think so?

The Colonel never answers these questions, and while wondering at my
own detestable character in thus plaguing him, I looked round the
fields. They seemed very small and dim. And yet, I said, that gleam of
light falling across the worn fields reminds us that summer is coming
in. The fine days we meet in January are illusory, but the ray that
lights up the dim February landscape is a herald. We believe in it,
and that is the principal thing.

A peasant stood in the roadway in front of the car, and the Colonel
had to pull up.

Long life to yer honour, cried the old man, and in his eyes I read the
reverence of yore. He was a hairy and boisterous fellow, and we had to
listen to his description of his house, which he said was damp enough
to give a wild-duck rheumatism. I promised to help him, and we bade
him godspeed. A godspeed, I said, which is probably for eternity.

We are very late, the Colonel muttered. It was unlucky meeting him.

Don't say that. It is pleasant to meet literature on the road from
Ballyglass to Ballinafad.

The road looped the shoulder of a hill, and beyond a long straight
bridge or viaduct we spied the gate of Ballinafad.

But, said the Colonel, I am afraid that this gate is always kept
locked. You'll miss your train.

If I were to miss a thousand trains, I will see Llewellyn's monastery.

You'll certainly miss your train. It is two miles round--two Irish
miles.

He pulled up before a rusty gate, and bounding out of the trap, I
shook it. It was locked, but there was a stile beside it.

We can send the trap round to the other gate, which is nearer by two
miles to the station, and walk up to the house.

Yes, we can do that, he said.

Then let us do it, for I must see Llewellyn's mission house or
monastery.

Before Moore Hall, Ballinafad was, the Colonel answered, and he told
me how the Blakes had kept their property through the Penal Laws by a
special charter granted to them by Charles II. The charter he assured
me was still preserved, and I asked if all this comely woodland were
going to be given over to the monks. Groves in which, I said, it would
be easy to imagine a rout of nymphs and satyrs. Or Thyrsis praying the
goat-herd to seat himself in the shelter of that great oak, and pipe
to him. Delightful woods. And whilst talking of Amaryllis, Silenus and
the Zephyrs, some twenty or thirty youths passed across the glade, and
having need to overtake them for inquiry we called to their shepherd,
who stopped his flock. He told us that we should find Father
----'within,' and on the house coming into view I said: I always hated
that strange porch, so out of keeping is it with the landscape.

The Colonel answered that the house was built by our grandfather,
Maurice Blake, a soldier who had served in the Peninsula, and that the
porch was probably an imperfect memory of one he had seen in Italy on
his way home. No attempt, I said, has been yet made to give the house
an ecclesiastical air.

The ecclesiastical changes will come later on, the Colonel replied,
and he expounded once more the complex question of Llewellyn's rights
under his father's will, and he continued to expound it whilst I
looked round the drawing-room in which my mother and her sisters had
certainly played a selection from _Norma_, and in which Joe had
strummed his memories of _Traviata_ and _Il Trovatore_ for Biddy's and
for his own amusement. The remembered pictures were still on the
walls--setters creeping up to birds, probably grouse; and I began to
peer into the painting like a Bond Street dealer, for the approach of
a priest always sets me mumming. The door opened, and a young man of
sleek speech and calves begged us to be seated; and choosing the most
comfortable chair for himself, and tossing himself till he discovered
its easiest corner, he told us that a large number of the last batch
of missionaries sent out to West Africa had died, the climate being
unhealthy, but another batch was going out shortly, and he hoped not
to lose so many.

And did those that died pray for the soul of Count Llewellyn Blake?

He hoped that they had done so, for Count Llewellyn Blake had done a
great deal for them, and I put it to him that Llewellyn's soul was a
heavy tax upon the population of Mayo, something like seventeen out of
thirty-six having died. We asked him some questions regarding the
possibility of converting the savages to a more rational spirituality
than that which they practised in the forest.

We meet with a great many difficulties; first and foremost the
unwillingness of the men to relinquish their wives.

I asked if any provision was being made for the abandoned wives?

The young man admitted that they had not thought out that side of the
question.

The children, I answered, offer you a fairer field.

Yes, we try to get hold of the children, he answered; and after some
conversation with me about the climate of Africa being answerable for
much of the faith of the savages in their superstitions, the young
priest turned to the Colonel, and ventured to express a hope that he
would come over again from Moore Hall to see them, bringing his two
little boys with him. Father Zimmermann, who is at present in
Switzerland, he said, will be back in Ballinafad at the end of the
month.

The whole scheme is intimately associated with Father Zimmermann, the
Colonel said on our way to the stables. A very different man from the
one we have seen.

But how can he be different and continue the traffic he is engaged
in? I cannot disassociate a man from his work as you do. A man is his
work.

In the stables we were met by some of Joe Blake's hirelings, stablemen
of old time who had seen the cracks go up to the Curragh, and they
lamented the change; a foreign priest, they said, come to take
Irishmen away to Africa, one whom Count Llewellyn had met at
Ballinafad some two or three years ago, and when he ordered Jimmy
Glynn to ready the dining-room for Mass, they began to have a notion
of what was going to happen. The tenants, too, had got wind of the
change, and were waiting at the hall door, asking how much of the land
the Count was going to make over to the Swiss boyo, who was up to the
height of his ankles in carpets before he took up with religion.
Literature again, I whispered, and listened with glee to the tale of
how the Swiss boyo and the Count had escaped through the garden, but
were caught up at Lakemount, brought to bay, and how getting round
them the peasants had sworn that every one of them would turn
Protestant if any bloody monks were put into Ballinafad. The rain that
came towards us aslant over the bog was in our faces, and with large
drops running down my nose I continued: The monks and Llewellyn's
anxiety about his soul may well bring about a revival of Christianity.
You heard them say they would turn Protestant.

I think the word Protestant was a sop for you, the Colonel answered.

The rain splashed in our faces, making conversation difficult, and
when it ceased I heard the Colonel's voice saying from under his
mackintosh: I should like to outwit Llewellyn.

It is very difficult for me to understand you, for you are not moved
by any mean sense of future pecuniary loss to yourself; your fingers
do not itch to clutch. Family feeling is strong in you, stronger than
in me. No one could be more shocked than you when I told you that I
had heard the ecclesiastics had gotten Howth Castle, and the
disappearance of Ballinafad affects you in the same way. Yet you
contrive to reconcile admiration of the cause with detestation of the
result. For, of course, as long as priests can persuade people that
Masses for the dead will get their souls out of Purgatory they will
continue to despoil their relations.

The rain is coming on again, the Colonel interjected, and if the train
isn't late we shall miss it. At every hill I asked how far we were
from the station. The train was late, and walking up the platform I
grew so bitter about Catholicism that he at last said: A religion, at
all events, that has made more converts than any other.

The witless and hysterical--ladies who have been through the Divorce
Courts and young men with filthy careers behind them.

The train steamed in, and the porter cried, First class behind! Would
you like to have your hat-box in the carriage with you? Yes, I
answered mechanically, and jumped into the train, glad to escape from
a wrangle that had become unendurable. The Colonel had said the night
before last that we had better not see each other, and though the
words seemed hard I could not resist their truth, for it was indeed a
relief to get away from him. Catholics and Protestants don't mix; we
are never comfortable in the society of Catholics. The guard blew his
whistle, the train moved up the platform, the Colonel passed out of
sight, and I said: So this is the end. He thinks that I have changed.
We have both changed, and the fault is neither with him nor with me.
He was born a Papist, and this is the end; unendurable words if we
have given all our love. And thinking how much I had lost, I sat
looking out on the wet fields of Mayo. So this is the end! I cried,
scaring a fellow-passenger, who looked at me askance over his
newspaper. He returned to his paper, I to my thoughts, which were no
longer with the Colonel but with myself. In which direction does my
life lie? I asked. My mission in Ireland is over, and there is little
casual visiting in Paris. I shall write less and read more, and the
large book containing the thirty-six plays will never be out of my
hand.

At the prospect of becoming another Sir Sidney Lee, Paris began to
recede, and I remembered that Steer and Tonks and Sickert lived in
London. But even if I live in London I shall have to spend my evenings
alone, unless I join a club. Bayreuth falls only every second year,
and the concerts at the Queen's Hall are often common enough.
Saint-Sans and Dvorak are often played, and a private orchestra is
beyond my means. But with a piano.... A piano demands a wife, and with
one who could play Schumann, Schubert, Wagner, Chopin, and Liszt, the
evenings would go by happily, an excellent cigar in my mouth, my stern
in a comfortable armchair. Had I married Doris I should have an hour
and a half of music every evening, and if the rule were maintained for
several years, we should get through the vast pile of chamber-music. I
have a taste for Scarlatti; and if this admirable woman who can play
all Bach were to bear me a child, he would inherit his mother's
musical ear, and it is not likely that my son would lack inventive
faculty and sense of composition. And while watching the musical
instinct developing in him, my heart will be filling with joy, and I
shall look forward to hearing all the ridiculous and uncouth strains
that have tempted and deceived me reduced to shape, but not in
symphonies--my son will write operas, the words as well as the music,
for I should like him to inherit as much of my literary gifts as will
enable him to construct the poem on which to weave the woof, but not
more.

My thoughts were away in a jiffy in France, for the German musical
idiom is worn to rags; but there is a musical atmosphere in France,
and I remembered a great stone bridge with fishermen sitting on the
quays, their legs hanging over the side. I had watched their floats
being carried down by the current last year, had seen them lift their
floats out of the current and drop them in again, and had waited,
pretending to myself, that I would like to see a fish rise, but really
interested in the adventure that I knew to be at my heels. An empty
fly came by, and the driver asked if he might take me to Chinon. It
seemed as if I heard the name, and feeling Chinon to be my adventure,
I jumped into the carriage, and was driven along a road of which I
remember nothing except a steep hill and at the top of it a feudal
castle in ruins. Our poor little horse could hardly drag us up the
hill, and the coachman turned in his seat and began to relate some
history; but at that moment my eyes were taken up by a poster
representing a house, or castle--I was not sure which--an extravagant
painting it was. _Post-Impressionism_, I said, at Chinon; and
dismissing the driver, I applied to an old man sitting by the side of
the gate, his shaggy dog beside him, for information.

_C'est le portrait de la maison_.

_Laquelle? Pardon, monsieur, mais je ne vois pas une maison ici qui
ait pu vous servir de modle_.

_La maison n'est pas encore construite. Je l'ai seulement dessine
pour inspirer l'acheteur de la proprit que voici. Le clos St
Georges_.

_Une vraie petite aventure_, I said to myself and followed the old man
round the enclosure, amused by the pomp with which he vaunted the
excellence of his grapes and the courtesy with which he invited my
admiration of the pears and peaches ripening on the southern wall. I
had seen fine peaches and pears at home, but never flowers like silk
gathered into a rosette. And seeing that I was genuinely ignorant, he
told me the tree in question was a _grenadier_, and trying to remember
what a _grenadier_ was in English, I stood admiring the roofs of
Chinon under the hill.

_C'est l o naquit notre grand Rabelais_.

_Finir mes jours en face de la ville de Rabelais; quelle joie pour un
Irlandais!_

_Mais, monsieur, vous tes encore jeune; cinquante et quelques
annes_; and he looked at me interrogatively and regretfully, for the
old man was seventy _et quelques annes_.

_Ici, je voudrais vivre et mourir_, I answered mechanically.

_Rien ne vous empche, monsieur, d'acheter ma vigne ... et pas cher.
Voyez-vous il y a des avantages_; and he led me down into a pit which
he had digged in the centre of the enclosure, and pointed out to me a
great many stones and broken arches.

_Il y a de quoi btir une jolie maison_; and I learnt from him that
these stones had once formed part of the castle, that it was here
that Henry of Anjou (Henry II of England) had died on the altar
steps, and that the house I had in mind, with the old carvings he had
stacked by the hut in which he and his dog lived let into the walk,
would not cost me more than a thousand pounds to build. He asked me if
I would like to see his pictures, for when he was not spraying his
vines he was painting scenes from the life of Joan of Arc in
distemper, and spraying vines had become hard work; he was
seventy-five, and wished to finish his paintings before he died.

_Achetez donc ma vigne, monsieur; finissez vos jours en face de la
ville o naquit notre grand Rabelais_.

Why not?

And now with the advent of my new idea--that a musician was the
legitimate end of my life--the Clos St Georges began to acquire a new
and potent significance. She and the boy and the vineyard will be the
pear and the peach, the apricot, the nectarine, the bottle of wine
from my own vineyard. My life will have to end somewhere. Why not in
the Clos St Georges? Because _Hail and Farewell_ must be written, a
voice answered from within. Before the vineyard could be purchased and
the house built _Hail and Farewell_ must be finished. _Ave_ was in the
publisher's hands; a good deal of _Salve_ was written; there was a
sketch, chapter for chapter, down to the very end. And between
Mullingar and Dublin I realised, more acutely than I had ever done
before, that _Hail and Farewell_ could not be abandoned for a
vineyard. I have been led to write it, by whom I know not, but I have
been led by the hand like a little child. And it was borne in upon me
at the same time that a sacrifice was demanded of me, by whom I knew
not, nor for what purpose, but I felt I must leave my native land and
my friends for the sake of the book; a work of liberation I divined it
to be--liberation from ritual and priests, a book of precept and
example, a turning-point in Ireland's destiny, and yet I prayed that I
might be spared the pain of the writing it and permitted instead to
acquire the Clos St Georges, a wife, and a son. But no man escapes his
fate. Something was propelling me out of Ireland, whither I was not
yet sure. I must yield to instinct, I said to AE. He was deeply moved.

You are going away from us to spend your evenings with Steer and
Tonks, but where shall I spend mine?

It may grieve you to lose me, dear AE, and it grieves me to lose
you.... I shall never find anybody like you again. AE is only found
once in a lifetime.

You'll not forget me? he said, grasping my hand.

The next night we met at Bailey's, the Land Commissioner, who lives in
Earlsfort Terrace. I had gained his friendship in the last year of my
sojourn in Ireland, and found his alert and witty mind so pleasant
that I had begun to think it a pity I had let him go by unknown for so
many years. Bailey knows a good picture and buys one occasionally, he
reads books and has practised literature, and will probably practise
it again; some day he will write his memoirs. And, better still, he
practises life, going away every year for long travel, to return to
Ireland, his mind enriched. He has not influenced me in my life as AE,
or John Eglinton, or Yeats, and to speak of him here is a little
outside of my subject, but if I closed this book without mention of
him it would seem that I had forgotten the many hours we passed
together. Besides, his dinner-party is fixed in my mind. He assembled
all my friends: AE, Ernest Longworth, Philip Hanson, John Healy, John
Eglinton, the graceful and witty Dena Tyrrell, and Susan Mitchell, who
sang songs about the friends I was leaving behind me.

On a grey windless morning in February the train took me to Kingstown,
and I had always looked forward to leaving Ireland in May, seeking the
words of a last farewell or murmuring the words of Catullus when he
journeyed over land and sea to burn the body of his brother, fitting
them to my circumstance by the change of a single word:

  ATQUE IN PERPETUUM, MATER, AVE ATQUE VALE,

but our dreams and circumstances are often in conflict, and never were
they in greater opposition than the day the train took me from
Westland Row past a long, barren tract of sand: a grey sky hanging low
over the sea far away in the offing without a ripple upon it. If the
evening had been a golden evening my heart might have overflowed with
fine sentiments; for it is on golden evenings that fine sentiments
overflow the heart! the heart is then like crystal that the least
touch will break; but on a cold, bleak, February morning the prophet
is as uninspired as his humblest fellow, and a very humble fellow,
forgetful of Ireland, forgetful of Catholicism, forgetful of
literature, went below to think of the friends he had left behind
him--AE and the rest.



[End of _Hail and Farewell_ by George Moore]
