Very often have writers told the story of how Sir Horace Plunkett,
a tongue-tied, hesitant man with very delicate health, returned to
Ireland after a long stay in America, to begin the Co-operative
Movement, and found, in a Dublin shop, keeping accounts for a
tea-merchant, a poet and a painter, a mystic who was also an economist
with the capacity, as it afterwards proved, to become the ablest
journalist in Ireland. This man of multiple energies was George William
Russell, who was born in Lurgan, in the County of Armagh, on April 10,
1867. He is two years younger than Mr. Yeats, eleven years younger
than Mr. Shaw, and fifteen years younger than Mr. George Moore. The
order of these births is significant. Observe how an aloof artist has
been succeeded by a furious economist! Mr. Moore, who began life as a
realist after the manner, but not after the style, of Zola, and then
turned his back on Zola and sought the company of Turgeniev so that he
might pursue apt and beautiful words and delicate and elusive thoughts,
was followed by Mr. Shaw, who began life by filling his mind with the
ideas of Henry George and Karl Marx, and then turned his back on both
of them in order that he might consort with Mr. Sidney Webb. Mr. Yeats,
with his vague poetry and vague mysticism--none the less vague because
of the curious care for exactness which causes him to count the nine
and fifty swans at Coole and the nine bean rows on Innisfree--followed
Mr. Shaw, and in his turn was followed by "A. E." so closely connected
with economics that a wag, when asked what was the meaning of "A. E's."
pen-name, replied "agricultural economist."[1]
One cannot, however, leave the matter as simply as that. Mr. Shaw likes
to think of himself as an economist, but he is more than an economist;
he is John the Baptist pretending to be Karl Marx. "A. E." likes to
think of himself as an expert on the price of butter and milk and cows
and sheep, but he is more than an expert on these things: he is Blake
pretending to be Sir Horace Plunkett. Or Walt Whitman pretending to be
President Wilson. It has always seemed to me that Sir Horace Plunkett
and "A. E.," colleagues in a great enterprise, are the embodiment of
the peculiarly interwoven strands of Irish character, of that queer
mingling of the material and the spiritual in the Irish people which
at once allures and astounds the Englishman, accustomed to keeping
his materialism and his spirituality in separate compartments. Sir
Horace has a neat and unexpected wit, but he does not appear to me
to have much feeling for poetry or for any other literature or art.
He has respect for these things and will talk on them sometimes with
singular incisiveness, but his interest in them is an outside interest.
If he had to choose between a co-operative creamery and the Heroic
Legends of Ireland, I do not doubt for a moment that he would choose
the co-operative creamery. "A. E.," on the contrary, would choose the
Heroic Legends and would give the good reason for so doing that without
the Heroic Legends, the co-operative creamery is useless. When "A. E."
pleads for the co-operative societies, he does so because he believes
that these are part of the means whereby the Irish people will be
restored to their ancient stature.
Organize your industry, he said to the farmers, so that you may become
what your fathers were, fit company for the Shining Ones, for Lugh
and Balor and Manannan, the great and brave and beautiful Pagan gods.
Each by himself, Sir Horace or "A. E.," might have failed to make
much out of the co-operative movement in Ireland, but both together,
each possessed of a different, yet complementary, crusading spirit,
could not fail to make a happy issue of it. When Garibaldi appealed
for recruits for his Thousand, he offered them wounds and death. When
Sir Horace Plunkett appealed for helpers in the Irish Agricultural
Organization Society, he offered them hard and discouraging labour and
poor wages. Mankind, which responds to a noble appeal as readily as it
responds to a base appeal, offered its best to both of them. Garibaldi
got his Thousand, and Sir Horace Plunkett got his colleagues.
They were diverse in character, and included Nationalists and
Unionists, Catholics and Protestants, peers and peasants. For the
first time in Irish history, Irishmen of all classes were united on a
matter which had no relationship with passions! There were no angry
emotions astir when the I. A. O. S. brought the diverse elements of
the Irish entity into accord as there had been when the union of the
North and the South was made many years earlier; and consequently
the movement could not be split, as that Union was, by the collision
of one angry emotion with another. In face of every conceivable
discouragement and even of active enmity and in spite of the grave
unhealth of Sir Horace himself, the movement grew in strength until now
it is indestructible.[2] Chief among the colleagues whom Sir Horace
gathered about him was "A. E." Mr. Russell could, without doubt, earn
a large income as a journalist if he were to offer his pen to a rich
newspaper proprietor--his weekly review, the _Irish Homestead_, is
the most ably-edited and skillfully-written organ in Ireland--and he
could probably earn as much as, if not more than, he receives from
his Co-operative work if he were to devote himself exclusively to
his mystical and poetical writings; but just as Mazzini felt himself
compelled to sacrifice his heart's desire, the life of a man of
letters, in order to devote himself to a political career which was
distasteful to him, so "A. E." felt compelled to hitch his star to Sir
Horace Plunkett's wagon, and for many years now he has preached, week
after week, the gospel of co-operation to Irish farmers when he would,
perhaps, have preferred exclusively to tell stories of the ancient gods
and heroes.