A YOUNG man came to see me at my lodgings the other night, and began
to talk of the making of the earth and the heavens and much else. I
questioned him about his life and his doings. He had written many poems
and painted many mystical designs since we met last, but latterly
had neither written nor painted, for his whole heart was set upon
making his mind strong, vigorous, and calm, and the emotional life of
the artist was bad for him, he feared. He recited his poems readily,
however. He had them all in his memory. Some indeed had never been
written down. They, with their wild music as of winds blowing in the
reeds,[A] seemed to me the very inmost voice of Celtic sadness, and of
Celtic longing for infinite things the world has never seen. Suddenly
it seemed to me that he was peering about him a little eagerly. ‘Do you
see anything, X——?’ I said. ‘A shining, winged woman, covered by her
long hair, is standing near the doorway,’ he answered, or some such
words. ‘Is it the influence of some living person who thinks of us,
and whose thoughts appear to us in that symbolic form?’ I said; for I
am well instructed in the ways of the visionaries and in the fashion
of their speech. ‘No,’ he replied; ‘for if it were the thoughts of a
person who is alive I should feel the living influence in my living
body, and my heart would beat and my breath would fail. It is a spirit.
It is some one who is dead or who has never lived.’
I asked what he was doing, and found he was clerk in a large shop.
His pleasure, however, was to wander about upon the hills, talking
to half-mad and visionary peasants, or to persuade queer and
conscience-stricken persons to deliver up the keeping of their troubles
into his care. Another night, when I was with him in his own lodging,
more than one turned up to talk over their beliefs and disbeliefs, and
sun them as it were in the subtle light of his mind. Sometimes visions
come to him as he talks with them, and he is rumoured to have told
divers people true matters of their past days and distant friends, and
left them hushed with dread of their strange teacher, who seems scarce
more than a boy, and is so much more subtle than the oldest among them.
The poetry he recited me was full of his nature and his visions.
Sometimes it told of other lives he believes himself to have lived in
other centuries, sometimes of people he had talked to, revealing them
to their own minds. I told him I would write an article upon him and
it, and was told in turn that I might do so if I did not mention his
name, for he wished to be always ‘unknown, obscure, impersonal.’ Next
day a bundle of his poems arrived, and with them a note in these words:
‘Here are copies of verses you said you liked. I do not think I could
ever write or paint any more. I prepare myself for a cycle of other
activities in some other life. I will make rigid my roots and branches.
It is not now my turn to burst into leaves and flowers.’
The poems were all endeavours to capture some high, impalpable mood in
a net of obscure images. There were fine passages in all, but these
were often embedded in thoughts which have evidently a special value
to his mind, but are to other men the counters of an unknown coinage.
To them they seem merely so much brass or copper or tarnished silver
at the best. At other times the beauty of the thought was obscured by
careless writing as though he had suddenly doubted if writing was not a
foolish labour. He had frequently illustrated his verses with drawings,
in which an imperfect anatomy did not altogether hide extreme beauty of
feeling. The faeries in whom he believes have given him many subjects,
notably Thomas of Ercildoune sitting motionless in the twilight while
a young and beautiful creature leans softly out of the shadow and
whispers in his ear. He had delighted above all in strong effects of
colour: spirits who have upon their heads instead of hair the feathers
of peacocks; a phantom reaching from a swirl of flame towards a star;
a spirit passing with a globe of iridescent crystal—symbol of the
soul—half shut within his hand. But always under this largess of
colour lay some tender homily addressed to man’s fragile hopes. This
spiritual eagerness draws to him all those who, like himself, seek
for illumination or else mourn for a joy that has gone. One of these
especially comes to mind. A winter or two ago he spent much of the
night walking up and down upon the mountain talking to an old peasant
who, dumb to most men, poured out his cares for him. Both were unhappy:
X—— because he had then first decided that art and poetry were not
for him, and the old peasant because his life was ebbing out with no
achievement remaining and no hope left him. Both how Celtic! how full
of striving after a something never to be completely expressed in word
or deed. The peasant was wandering in his mind with prolonged sorrow.
Once he burst out with ‘God possesses the heavens—God possesses the
heavens—but He covets the world’; and once he lamented that his old
neighbours were gone, and that all had forgotten him: they used to draw
a chair to the fire for him in every cabin, and now they said, ‘Who is
that old fellow there?’ ‘The fret’ [Irish for doom] ‘is over me,’ he
repeated, and then went on to talk once more of God and heaven. More
than once also he said, waving his arm towards the mountain, ‘Only
myself knows what happened under the thorn-tree forty years ago’; and
as he said it the tears upon his face glistened in the moonlight.
This old man always rises before me when I think of X——. Both seek—one
in wandering sentences, the other in symbolic pictures and subtle
allegoric poetry—to express a something that lies beyond the range of
expression; and both, if X—— will forgive me, have within them the vast
and vague extravagance that lies at the bottom of the Celtic heart. The
peasant visionaries that are, the landlord duellists that were, and the
whole hurly-burly of legends—Cuchulain fighting the sea for two days
until the waves pass over him and he dies, Caolte storming the palace
of the gods, Oisin seeking in vain for three hundred years to appease
his insatiable heart with all the pleasures of faeryland, these two
mystics walking up and down upon the mountains uttering the central
dreams of their souls in no less dream-laden sentences, and this mind
that finds them so interesting—all are a portion of that great Celtic
phantasmagoria whose meaning no man has discovered, nor any angel
revealed.