(AUGUST 1913)
Once I knew a Bishop who used to devote the greater part of his spare
time to writing Limericks in competition for prizes offered by
newspapers. You will find it difficult to imagine a Bishop writing
Limericks. One imagines a Bishop in his spare hours writing biblical
commentaries or cultivating a neat garden in which the characteristic
flower is lily-of-the-valley. And yet my Bishop was a saint. The not
very apostolic occupation of his leisure had its origin in an apostolic
simplicity and charity. The Bishop had a little niece of whom he was
very fond, and the ambition of the little niece’s life was to win one of
the large prizes offered by London newspapers for clever Limericks. The
good Bishop sent in a vast number of Limericks in his niece’s name, and
if he or she won a prize (which, I am sorry to say, neither of them ever
did), half the money was to be spent in sending the little niece on a
pilgrimage to Lourdes and the other half to be given to the Society of
St. Vincent de Paul. If I had not learned all this from a friend of the
little niece’s I might have set down the Limerick writing (for some of
the Limericks were very bad) as a reprehensible eccentricity on the part
of an otherwise excellently behaved Bishop.
* * * * *
At that time I was not a hermit, and was not versed in the wise
foolishness of saints. From the Bishop’s and from other instances I have
since elaborated this piece of wisdom: when a good man does an
inexplicable thing there is always a motive creditable to his goodness.
Men’s follies are often more symptomatic of their virtues than of their
vices. Apply this to those round about you, in your home, in your
office, in your organisation: apply it to the busy-bodies and the fools
who appear to be making a mess of everything you are interested in, from
your breakfast to your country, and you will come to respect them for
their very blunders, to love them for their lunacy. You prefer your eggs
well boiled. Your wife insists on serving them to you half raw. This is
not perverseness on her part: she knows that the albumen of eggs when
solidified is highly indigestible and when swallowed hastily every
morning, and washed down with tea, will assuredly induce appendicitis.
You hate to sit in a draught. The man whose stool is next you in your
office insists on keeping a window open from which an atmospheric stream
constantly impinges upon your thinly-thatched cranium. This is not
cruelty on his part: he knows (being a reader of Lady Aberdeen’s
_Slainte_) that you are tubercular, and that fresh air is the only thing
that will kill the germs. You are a member of the Gaelic League. A
friend and colleague writes to the press to point out that you are
selling the League to the Liberals and that your reward will be a title.
This is not a damned lie: it is his way of hinting that you ought to be
a little more strenuous, to smite a little harder and a little oftener,
to keep up perpetually a sort of Berserker rage or _riastral_ in the way
of the old heroes. It is his crude, inartistic, modern notion of playing
Laegh to your Cuchulainn. The bravest hero of the Gael had to endure
being called “a little fairy phantom” by his charioteer. Were he
fighting at the Ford to-day he would be called a “Do-Nothing.” When
Cuchulainn was reviled by Laegh he did not turn round and fell him. He
fought on the harder against the foe of his country.
* * * * *
I love and honour Douglas Hyde. I have served under him since I was a
boy. I am willing to serve under him until he can lead and I can serve
no longer. I have never failed him. He has never failed me. I am only
one of many who could write thus, who at this moment are thinking thus.
But probably my service has been longer than that of most, for it began
when I was only sixteen; and perhaps it has been more intimate than that
of all but a very few, for I have been in posts that required constant
communication with him for fifteen years. It has, too, been my privilege
to be the first fosterer of many who are now serving under him--pupils
of mine, now pupils of his in the National University or young workers
in the Gaelic League; and these form a new bond between him and me. Thus
by service given and service received I have earned the right to say
here the things I am about to say. I can speak to him at once as friend
to friend and as loyal soldier to loyal captain.
* * * * *
Or rather, since it has become the fashion to write Open Letters to
Douglas Hyde, I will write him an Open Letter. I will commence: “My dear
Hyde,--Among God’s gracious gifts to you, perhaps the most gracious, at
any rate the most useful, is your gift of humour. You have always had a
great Homeric laugh. I call upon you to laugh it now. I could show you
much matter for laughter in these noises and irrelevancies that disturb
you.... Laugh, my dear Craoibhin. Laugh your great genial laugh. It will
ease the situation. Bulfin used to say that O’Daly’s smile would split
the ceiling at 24 Upper O’Connell Street. Let your laughter shake the
Clock Tower in Earlsfort Terrace.”[5]
* * * * *
To be quite serious, laughter is what is required just now. A shout of
laughter that will roll out from the Ard-Fheis at Galway till it
re-echoes from the cliffs of Aran and reverberates through the stony
solitudes of Burren. Why all this passion of invective when laughter
will solve the difficulty? Let us laugh. Laughter is the one gift that
God has given to men but denied to brutes and angels. Laughter is the
crowning grace of the heroes. The epic tells how the dying Cuchulainn
noticed that a raven which had stooped to drink his blood, becoming
entangled in the clotted gore, was ludicrously upset. “Then Cuchulainn,
knowing that it was his last laugh, laughed aloud.” I think that Emmet,
I am quite sure that Tone, would have laughed in similar circumstances.
* * * * *
For my own part, I have found the need of laughter in order to preserve
my sanity. And you, Craoibhin, have counselled sanity. There is one
piece of sanity that I have learned from being a schoolmaster. Always
remember that in a school you have to deal with boys, not cherubim. An
enthusiastic teacher often makes the mistake of forming an ideal picture
of schoolboy virtue, and is shocked and disheartened when he finds that
his actual pupils fall far below his ideal. You have, for instance, a
little pupil with a virginal face. You say to yourself, “This boy will
surely never buy cigarettes in the forbidden shop at the corner, or
steal into the garden when the apples are ripe.” You come upon him some
day in the walk through the wood, and as you approach he hastily
conceals a cigarette; you enter the garden in autumn time, and you
notice a slight figure with the face of a saint making a dash from the
place where the apple-trees are. You are angry with the boy, but it is
with yourself you should be angry, or rather you should laugh at
yourself for a blunderer. The boy has only proved himself a boy, whereas
you have proved yourself a goose. Instead of taking down the boy’s
trousers, you ought to take down the impossible image you had so
foolishly erected.
* * * * *
I wonder whether this schoolmaster’s wisdom might not be of service to
Dr. Hyde. He must try to remember that those around him are men, not
archangels. They are men with all the little lovable and unlovable
weaknesses of men, and without any of the vision and strength of angels.
And he must try to forgive them and to imagine that they mean well even
when they act badly; that sometimes at the bottom of their blundering
there may be a grain of sense; and that often their fury is only a
slightly diseased love of the cause we all serve. And perhaps human
causes are best served by men with human strength and human weaknesses.
Archangels are fitted to go upon the mighty embassies of God, not to do
the little paltry tasks of human life. Archangels are at home in the
shining spaces of heaven, not in the habitations and committee rooms of
earth. Curious as it seems, we ridiculous men, with all our faults and
all our follies, are very capable where angels might fail. Angelic
attributes might hinder us in our humble and humdrum but necessary
little careers. The inconveniences of being angels on earth would be
dreadful. As we sat on our office stools, as we gathered round the table
of our committee room, where, for instance, should we tuck in our wings?
The buildings would have to be enlarged. In point of fact, a heaven
would be necessary to our comfort. But this is earth. And so we are back
at our first position that we must put up with our human world and with
the human material we have got, until we are all translated and become
members of the eternal committee and delegates to the Ard-Fheis of God.
* * * * *
Thus much to Dr. Hyde. To those on whose behalf I appeal to his
magnanimity I say only this: O ye of little sense, know ye not when ye
have got a good captain for a good cause? And know ye not that it is the
duty of the soldier to follow his captain, unfaltering, unquestioning,
“seeing obedience in the bond of rule”? If ye know not this, ye know not
the first thing that a fighting man should know.
-----
Footnote 5:
The Clock Tower, I observe, has since collapsed.