MR. GEORGE W. RUSSELL ("A.E.")
Synge is the one instinctive dramatist of the earlier group of writers
of the Celtic Renaissance, the one to whom drama was the inevitable
medium for the expression of the best that was in him. Yet even Synge
came to write plays only through an external stimulus, the urging of Mr.
Yeats on their meeting in Paris. It was fortunate for the Irish drama,
this meeting, and fortunate for Synge. If he had not been brought to the
theatre of his own country, he would probably never have written
anything of first importance. Mr. Yeats himself, of course, had been
interested in verse plays from boyhood, but he, for all the energy he
has expended in learning his own particular art of the stage, speaks
more beautifully through his lyrics and the lyrical passages of his
plays than through their passages that are dramatic speech, and not only
more beautifully but with more of dignity and power. Nor is Lady
Gregory, any more than Mr. Yeats, essentially a dramatist. Her great
power is the power of dialogue, and dialogue, of course, is as often
employed in the service of the story as in the service of the play. Yet
it is not difficult to understand how in Lady Gregory the dialogue and
in Mr. Yeats the love of the spoken word led, when opportunity was made,
to writing for the stage, and for success on the stage. But in the case
of "A.E." it is as difficult to find a foreshadowing of the playwright
in the mystical poet as it would be to see in all but all of the essays
of "The Treasure of the Humble," any proof that their author was a
playwright. To those who knew Mr. Russell only through his verses, and
were unaware of the versatility of the man, his turning dramatist was as
surprising as Emerson turned dramatist would have been to the America of
anti-slavery days.
[Illustration]
It was not, of course, because of an impulse from within that Mr.
Russell attempted drama in "Deirdre" (1902), but because the young
enthusiasts of Ireland's national literary movement wanted plays that
should be at once native in quality and the work of writers of standing.
It did not seem a strange request to Cumann nan Gaedheal to ask Mr.
Russell for a play. What if he had never written a play? He was hardly
in their estimation more of an amateur than Mr. Yeats or Mr. Moore or
Mr. Martyn, who had written plays for "The Irish Literary Theatre" that
had achieved success of a kind, and he was surely as ardent a
Nationalist as any of these. So he was asked for a play to be played at
the Spring Festival of 1902 by the Irish National Dramatic Company that
was forming, and he did what he was asked to do, blocking it all out in
six hours, and finishing it sufficiently in three days for it to be put
in rehearsal. It was in the summer following its first presentation that
I saw it again in rehearsal in a little hall back of a produce shop in
Dublin, and got to know Mr. Russell as playwright before I read his
play. One of the actors, himself maker of verses and plays, gave me his
copy of "Deirdre," with cues marked. I had seen notices of its first
performance in the Irish papers and I had written Mr. Russell to see if
I could get a copy, but he had not yet published it. Then he wrote me of
young poets I met this night in Dublin, and the names on the lips of the
enthusiasts we talked to, and their names were names Mr. Russell had
written me of four months before. Here were they introducing me to his
work as he had thus introduced me to theirs: "There are many poets here
who write beautiful lyrics who are quite unknown out of Ireland because
they never collected them from the pages of obscure magazines.... I have
seen many verses signed 'I.O,' 'Alice Milligan,' 'Ethna Carberry,'
'Oghma,' 'Paul Gregan,' which I enviously wish I could claim as my
own.... I think myself many of these unknown poets and poetesses write
verses which no living English writer could surpass." The best of the
verses of some of these and of others among his following Mr. Russell
collected in "New Songs" (1904), which bore out much that he claimed for
them.
It was to six of these young poets he dedicated his last volume of
verse, "The Divine Vision" (1904), as he had dedicated his two earlier
volumes to poet-mystics, "Homeward" (1894) to Mr. Charles Weekes and
"The Earth Breath" (1898) to Mr. Yeats. The young writers (for they were
almost all writers as well as actors) we met this Saturday night in
Dublin, one and all, looked to "A.E." as leader, and some of them looked
to him as high priest of their cult, as seer of that ancient type that
combined as its functions the deliverance of religious dicta, prophecy,
and song. My thoughts went back to our Concord of half a century ago,
yet I wondered was Emerson's fascination as compelling as this.
It was in a commonplace-looking editorial sanctum that I found "A.E." on
the following morning, at 22, Lincoln Place, to which he had descended
from his office in the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, to edit
"The Homestead" in its editor's absence. I was to see him, in the hour I
was to spend with him there, in many rôles. First was that of one of the
beginners of the Irish Literary Revival. He has himself given the credit
to Mr. Standish James O'Grady for furnishing the initial stimulus to the
movement, in his "Heroic Period" and "Cuchulain and his Contemporaries"
of 1878 and 1880; but to "A.E." and Mr. Yeats and Dr. Hyde also is due
much of the credit. Mr. Russell said that when he came up to Dublin, a
boy from Lurgan, there was no independent thought in Dublin, but now he
thought there was a good deal, and he and his fellows of the Hermetic
Society, he took mild pride in believing, had had something to do with
the change. Even then, as a boy, he could not read most English
literature, and so he took to reading the literature of the East, the
Bhagavad-Gîta and the Sufis. From his reading of these, with other young
men that somehow found each other out, came the Hermetic Society, at
whose meetings everything mystic from the Upanishads to Thomas Taylor
was discussed. From the study of the universal, he said, they came at
last to the national, to the study of the ancient folk-lore and stories
of their people, which, had it not been for the Danes and Normans, would
have been shaped into literary form long before now, when, he said,
they were only being so shaped.
His disciples had told me the night before that "A.E." had helped them
much in the National Dramatic Company, painting scenery for them,
designing costumes, and aiding in a hundred other ways. He was silent
about these matters and not very proud of the play. "Of course," he said,
"I was very familiar with the story of Deirdre, and I had thought of its
dramatic effectiveness, but I knew nothing of the stage and I was very
much surprised it went so well." That it went well, I, who had seen it
but the night before, could testify, though that rehearsal could give
but a suggestion of the beautiful stage pictures it presents when played
in the costume of the Heroic Age. Despite its intensely dramatic
situations, it is, however, essentially a decorative rather than a
dramatic play, and its exalted prose is seldom true dramatic speech. But
you carry from it the memory of beautiful pictures, and a feeling that
something noble has passed your way, to enter into and become a part of
you.
As we were talking of the "movement," in came a young Roscommon
landlord, and with him another of its phases and my discovery of Mr.
Russell, man of business, organizer of the Irish Agricultural
Organization Society. The talk was now of the erection of a hall, and
Mr. Russell seemed as familiar with stone and lime and sand as with
mysticism and poetry, which we had discussed, and with painting, which
we were considering in a few minutes, when Mr. J.B. Yeats, Jr., arrived,
to talk over an exhibition of his pictures to be held in Dublin the
following week. A few days later I was reading Mr. Russell's review of
Mr. Yeats's pictures, but before I left 22, Lincoln Place, I had a
mental picture of "art critic" added to the already long list of titles
after "A.E.'s" name, and I had still another evidence of his
impressiveness. Mr. J.B. Yeats, Sr., his son said, would be around to
have Mr. Russell sit for him next morning, in order to get on with the
two orders he had of portraits of the mystic, one of them from an
admirer in America. It was pleasant on leaving him to go away with his
laugh ringing in my ears as a surety that the high seriousness of his
purpose, and the higher seriousness with which some of his admirers take
him, had not dulled his sense of humor.
Eight o'clock the next evening saw us in the eminently Philistine
suburban street where was the little house of conventional exterior that
sheltered the high dreams of "the Irish Emerson." Once entered, his
embodied visions attract you from all four walls of the study. Piles of
them in corners make you wonder is Mrs. Russell a saint. The pictures
are of Irish landscape; of "the Other People"; of heroes and heroines of
Ireland's prehistoric days; of souls that have yet to be born; of souls
that have passed through incarnation after incarnation, never to rise
above an animal existence; of souls whose every rebirth has taken them
to higher spirituality, and that now wait to pass along the "path of
liberation" into that immortality from which they shall never be born
again. These visions have come to him, as the visions whose presence he
records in his poetry, in all places--as he left the office and looked
down the sun-gilded streets at close of day; as he wandered in the
mountains under the stars with peasants who had "second sight"; as he
talked with fellow Hermetists in meeting-rooms in back streets whose
shabby interiors grew rosy gloom as the talk turned on mysteries.
To us Mr. Russell talked much, talked kindly of all men, talked well of
many things, said startling things of society and art and poetry so
gently that you did not think until afterwards that in another you would
hold them gages of combat. I can hear him yet, as I sat and tried at the
same time to listen to him and to look at his flaming-hearted spirits
with luminous angel wings and flashing halos enveloped in an atmosphere
in which "the peacock twilight rays aloft its plumes and blooms of
shadowy fire"--I can hear him saying, "You can't read Shakespeare, can
you?" As I thought over this question later, I understood. Then I was
too far rapt by the pictures to wonder at it greatly. Later came to mind
Emerson's declaration that Homer, Milton, and Shakespeare "do not fully
content us," that the "heavenly bread" is to be found in Zoroaster,
Plato, St. John, and Menu. Both Emerson and Mr. Russell fail to use art
as the standard. To the mystic, to whom this world is not reality, what
appeal may have its seeming truths and shows as compared to the certain
truth of the idealists and the beauties of the eternal life? The deep
human knowledge, the great pageants of Shakespeare's kings and queens,
are but "glories of our blood and state ... shadows, not substantial
things."
Mr. Russell talked very simply of his pictures, of how their subjects
came to him, and of his enjoyment in thus recording them. He does not
consider himself a painter, but he thinks there was the making of a
painter in him had he had instruction in his earlier years. This
attitude towards his various powers, as well as the attitude towards him
of ardent young countrymen of his, came out in a story he told us of a
boy that he found waiting for him one night at a street corner near his
home. The boy timidly asked him was he not Mr. Russell, and then walked
silently by his side until the house was reached. They entered and the
boy mustered up courage to say he had waited for him two hours at the
head of the street. "A.E." had been waiting for the boy to say what
brought him, but he was obliged to encourage the boy before he would out
with it. Said "A.E.," "You came here to talk with me. You must be
interested in one of the three interests I have given much time to. Is
it economics?" "No," replied the boy, indignantly. "Is it mysticism?"
continued "A.E." "No," cried the boy, almost angry at such an interest
being attributed to him. "It must be literary art, then?" "Yes," said
the boy, with a sigh, his haven reached at last. "A.E." soon found the
boy an exquisite who thought the literary movement was becoming
vulgarized through so many people becoming interested in it. Finally the
boy turned questioner and found that "A.E." was seeking the Absolute.
Having found this out, he again sighed, this time regretfully, and said
decidedly that "A.E." could not be his Messiah, as he abhorred the
Absolute above everything else. He was infected with Pater's Relative,
said Mr. Russell, "which has fallen like a blight on all English
literature." So the boy--he was not yet twenty-one--went out into the
night with, I suppose, another of his idols fallen.
As this boy came to "A.E.," so come scores of others, and most of those
that have real troubles go away comforted, to return for advice and
counsel and friendship, as their need is. This I knew before I met
"A.E.," and his kindness I felt and certain magnetism, but the qualities
that make him the leader of men, and hierophant to his personal
following, do not lie on the surface to be quickly distinguished by
every comer. Neither, we are told, did Emerson's, who was leader of men
and hierophant. I thought often of "A.E.'s" pictures as I looked at the
pictures of Watts in the Tate Gallery in London, and I have thought more
often of them since I have come to know haloed Rosicrucian drawings and
strange symbols in such books as our own Wissahickon mystics, Kelpius
and his brethren, brought with them to "The Woman in the Wilderness"
from Germany late in the seventeenth century. How notable the impression
of Mr. Russell's paintings and visions upon two Irish writers the
English-speaking world reads to-day may be learned from their
exploitation in Mr. Stephen Gwynn's "The Old Knowledge" (1901), whose
Owen Conroy owes being to "A.E." and his pictures, and from Mr. George
Moore's "Evelyn Innes" (revised edition, 1901), whose Ulick Dean has his
appearance and his power of seeing visions.
As the evening wore on, Mr. Russell picked up a manuscript collection of
poems--that we were to have two years later as "The Divine Vision"--and
read us several. Most distinctly of these I remember "Reconciliation"
which he chanted most lovingly of all he read. It is a poem I do not
pretend to understand in detail, but I do feel its drift, and I can
never read out its stately music, or even read it silently, without
hearing his sonorous chanting. Many of his poems are like this poem in
that you must content yourself with their general drift and not insist
on understanding their every phrase. I suppose to the initiate mystic
they are more definite, but I doubt whether some of them are more than
presentations of emotions that need not be translated into terms of
thought for their desired effect.
To Mr. Russell poetry is a high and holy thing; like his friend Mr.
Yeats he is at one with Spenser in believing it the fruit of a "certain
enthousiasmos and celestial inspiration"; it is his religion that Mr.
Russell is celebrating in his verses, many of which are in a sense hymns
to the Universal Spirit, and all of which are informed by such sincerity
that you do not wonder that his followers make them their gospel. In his
own words:--
The spirit in man is not a product of nature, but antecedes nature,
and is above it as sovereign, being of the very essence of that
spirit which breathed on the face of the waters, and whose song,
flowing from the silence as an incantation, summoned the stars into
being out of chaos. To regain that spiritual consciousness, with
its untrammelled ecstasy, is the hope of every mystic. That ecstasy
is the poetic passion.... The act which is inspired by the Holy
Breath must needs speak of things which have no sensuous existence,
of hopes all unearthly, and fires of which the colors of day are
only shadows.
About a score of the less than tenscore poems of "A.E." are definitely
declarations of belief, but declarations so personal, so undogmatic,
that you would hardly write him down a didactic poet at first reading "A
New Theme" tells of his desertion of subjects "that win the easy
praise," of his venturing
"in the untrodden woods
To carve the future ways."
Here he acknowledges that the things he has to tell are "shadowy," that
his breath in "the magic horn" can make but feeble murmurs. In the
prologue to "The Divine Vision" he states the conditions of his
inspiration:--
"When twilight over the mountains fluttered
And night with its starry millions came,
I too had dreams: the songs I have uttered
Came from this heart that was touched by the flame";--
that is, the flame of his being that, "mad for the night and the deep
unknown," leaps back to the "unphenomenal" world whence his spirit came
and blends his spirit into one with the Universal Spirit. This same
union through the soul's flame "A.E." presents in his pictures, and in
his prologue to "The Divine Vision" he writes that he wishes to give his
reader
"To see one elemental pain,
One light of everlasting joy."
This elemental pain, as I take it, is the pain of the soul shut up in
its robe of clay in this physical, phenomenal world, and so shut off
from the spiritual world, the world of the unphenomenal or unknowable.
The "everlasting joy" I take to be the certainty of eventual union with
the Universal Spirit in the unphenomenal world, a union and a joy
anticipated in the occasional temporary absorptions of the soul into
the Universal Spirit in moments Emerson experienced as "revelation" and
Plotinus as ecstasy.
"A.E.'s" friend, Mr. Charles Johnston, records the two young Irishmen's
joint attempts to attain ecstasy, when he writes of those days when "we
lay on our backs in the grass, and, looking up into the blue, tried to
think ourselves into that new world which we had suddenly discovered
ourselves to inhabit." Do not think this ecstasy too rare and wonderful
a thing. To Plotinus it meant an utter blotting-out of self, a rapture
of peace, and to Mr. Russell it frequently means that he is entirely
"heart-hidden from the outer things," but I suspect it means sometimes
mere lift of the heart through lungs full of fresh air, or through green
fields for tired eyes, or through mountain air for worn nerves, or
through skies thick-sown with stars for the vexed spirit.
The typical poem of "A.E." is that in which the sight of beautiful
things of this phenomenal world in which we live lifts his soul to
participation in the Universal Spirit. It is most often through some
beauty of the sky at sunset, when
"Withers once more the old blue flower of day,"
as in "The Great Breath"; or at twilight, when
"Dusk wraps the village in its dim caress,"
as in "Dusk"; or at night, when
"The yellow constellations shine with pale and tender glory
In the lilac-scented stillness,"
as in "The Singing Silences"; or at sunrise, when there is
"Fire on the altar of the hills,"
as in "Dawn";--it is most often through some beauty of the sky at such
times that he becomes one with the Universal Spirit in "the rapture of
the fire," that he is "lost within the 'Mother's Being,'" he would say
that the soul returns to the Oversoul, Emerson would There are ways by
which the soul homes other than these--sometimes it is
"By the hand of a child I am led to the throne of the King."
but it is most often by way of beauties of the sky. Some reasons are not
far to seek. From sunset to sunrise the poet is free as he may be from
the treadmill of the "common daily ways," and the high moods he tries to
express are most easily symbolized by skyey images--massed clouds and
sweeping lights of diamond, sapphire, amethyst; the still blue black of
heaven thrilling with far stars; the purples of twilight horizons. In
his use of these splendid symbols he is but following Proclus, whom he
found quoted by Emerson as saying that "the mighty heaven exhibits, in
its transfiguration, clear images of the splendor of intellectual
perceptions, being moved in conjunction with the unapparent period of
intellectual natures."
How important the symbol is to "A.E."--as important as it is to
Emerson--may be gathered from "Symbolism," which, read in the light of
what I have quoted, needs, I hope, no further interpretation.
"Now when the giant in us wakes and broods,
Filled with home-yearnings, drowsily he flings
From his deep heart high dreams and mystic moods.
Mixed with the memory of the loved earth things:
Clothing the vast with a familiar face;
Reaching his right hand forth to greet the starry race.
Wondrously near and clear the great warm fires
Stare from the blue; so shows the cottage light
To the field laborer whose heart desires
The old folk by the nook, the welcome bright
From the housewife long parted from at dawn--
So the star villages in God's great depths withdrawn.
"Nearer to Thee, not by delusion led,
Though there no house-fires burn nor bright eyes gaze:
We rise, but by the symbol charioted,
Through loved things rising up to Love's own ways:
By these the soul unto the vast has wings
And sets the seal celestial on all mortal things."
In this poem is the proof of how intimately "A.E." could write of the
sweet things of earth did he so choose. But he does not so choose,
except rarely, and sometimes he leaves out the statement of beautiful
material things by which he customarily bids farewell to earth in his
aspiration to spiritual things, and writes only of unearthly things--as
of some girl that he, an Irishman living in the Dublin of to-day, loves
in the Babylon of three thousand years ago, to the annihilation of space
and time. This is written in the very spirit of Emerson's declaration
that "before the revelations of the soul, Time, Space, and Nature shrink
away." Need I quote further to show that "A.E.," like Emerson, holds
that the true poet is he who "gives men glimpses of the law of the
Universe; shows them the circumstance as illusion; shows that Nature is
only a language to express the laws, which are grand and beautiful; and
lets them, by his songs, into some of the realities"? Emerson yearns
that "the old forgotten splendors of the Universe should glow again for
us," and "A.E." believes that we at times attain "the high ancestral
Self"; his restless ploughman, "walking through the woodland's purple"
under "the diamond night"
"Deep beneath his rustic habit finds himself a King"
"A.E.'s" poems on death are little different from those in which he
celebrates the soul's absorption into the Universal Spirit, since death
means to him only a longer absorption into the Universal Spirit or
sometimes such absorption forever. In the event of this last, he in some
moods sees
"Life and joy forever vanish as a tale is told.
Lost within the 'Mother's Being,'"
or no sense of individuality in souls in heaven; in other moods he sees
individuality preserved after death among those "High souls," that,--
"Absolved from grief and sin,
Leaning from out ancestral spheres,
Beckon the wounded spirit in."
So sustained is the habitual altitude of Mr. Russell's thought, so
preoccupied his mood with spiritual things, that the human reader must
feel lonely at times, must feel the regions of the poet's thought alien
to him. At such times it is a positive relief to find the poet yearning
for the concrete sweet things of earth. It is perhaps only in
"Weariness" that Mr. Russell's high mood does fail, but I rejoice when
that failure makes him acknowledge--
"Fade the heaven-assailing moods:
Slave to petty tasks I pine
For the quiet of the woods,
And the sunlight seems divine.
"And I yearn to lay my head
Where the grass is green and sweet;
Mother, all the dreams are fled
From the tired child at thy feet."
It is love, love of country, love of countryside, and love of woman that
he writes of when he does write of "loved earth things." "A Woman's
Voice" and "Forgiveness" are poems so simple that none may
misunderstand; they have the human call so rare in "A.E.," but it is not
a strong human call. Of such love songs he has written but few--poems
out of the peace and not out of the passion of love; of passion other
than spiritual ecstasy and rapt delight in nature there is none in his
verse. Although he has been given "a ruby-flaming heart," he has been
given also "a pure cold spirit." Only about a fourth of his poems have
the human note dominant, and even when it is so dominant, as when he
writes of his country, he is very seldom content to rest with a
description of the beauty of place or legend; the beautiful place must
be threshold to the Other World, as "The Gates of Dreamland," which he
finds at the end of "the lonely road through bogland to the lake at
Carrowmore," Carrowmore, the great cemetery of the great dead of
prehistoric Ireland under Knocknarea near Sligo; or the legend must be
symbol of some mystic belief--"Connla's well is a Celtic equivalent of
the First Fountain of mysticism."
He can draw starkly, when he will, a picture of bare Irish landscape:--
"Still rests the heavy share on the dark soil:
Upon the black mould thick the dew-damp lies:
The horse waits patient: from his lowly toil
The ploughboy to the morning lifts his eyes.
"The unbudding hedgerows dark against day's fires
Glitter with gold-lit crystals: on the rim
Over the unregarding city's spires
The lonely beauty shines alone for him."
In "In Connemara" and "An Irish Face," poems with earthly titles, you
expect only things earthly, but in these too, he uses the picture of the
concrete only as the symbol of the universal. The reason Mr. Russell
must take you to the supernatural in these poems is because he sees
spirits everywhere he goes in Ireland. "Never a poet," he writes, "has
lain on our hillsides, but gentle, stately figures, with hearts shining
like the sun, move through his dreams, over radiant grasses, in an
enchanted world of their own." Start "The Memory of Earth" and you think
you are to read one of the many fine poems of twilight in our
literature, but the fourth line undeceives you:--
"In the wet dusk silver sweet,
Down the violet-scented ways,
As I moved with quiet feet
I was met by mighty days.
"On the hedge the hanging dew
Glassed the eve and stars and skies;
While I gazed a madness grew
Into thundered battle-cries.
"Where the hawthorn glimmered white,
Flashed the spear and fell the stroke--
Ah, what faces pale and bright
Where the dazzling battle broke!
"There a hero-hearted queen
With young beauty lit the van.
Gone! the darkness flowed between
All the ancient wars of man.
"While I paced the valley's gloom
Where the rabbits pattered near,
Shone a temple and a tomb
With the legend carven clear.
"Time put by a myriad fates
That her day might dawn in glory;
Death made wide a million gates
So to close her tragic story."
And so it is in "A.E.'s" score and more poems that are suggested by
Irish places and Irish legends and Irish loves. Never an Irish exile but
will have a dear home place brought before him by such lines as
"The Greyhound River windeth through a loneliness so deep
Scarce a wild fowl shakes the quiet that the purple boglands keep";
and a story of the home place brought before him by such lines as
"Tarry thou yet, late lingerer in the twilight's glory;
Gay are the hills with song: earth's fairy children leave
More dim abodes to roam the primrose-hearted eve,
Opening their glimmering lips to breathe some wondrous story";
and a girl of the home place brought before him by such lines as
"Dusk, a pearl-grey river, o'er
Hill and vale puts out the day--
What do you wonder at, asthore,
What's away in yonder grey?"
but all these poems, of which these lines are the fine onsets, lead past
"the dim stars" and "unto the Light of Lights."
A man that believes that his spirit is one with the Universal Spirit
cannot but be an optimist if he believe that Spirit is the Spirit of
Good, and that a Platonist must believe. Yet "A.E." so longs to be rapt
into everlasting union with the Universal Spirit that he tires of the
earth, where that union is interrupted by the necessities of daily life.
The fairies call to him and he would away--
"'Come away,' the red lips whisper, 'all the world is weary now;
'Tis the twilight of the ages and it's time to quit the plough.
Oh, the very sunlight's weary ere it lightens up the dew,
And its gold is changed and faded before it falls to you.'"
But it is not always twilight to him, and there are many blither moods.
Over against these lines you may put,
"I always dwell with morning in my heart,"
and
"Oh, but life is sweet, is sweet."
Earth is not an unhappy place, but he sighs sometimes for the happiness
unalloyed of heaven.
When we come to consider the technique of Mr. Russell's art, we find him
anything but Emersonian. Mr. Russell has, in general, command of form,
melody, harmony, distinction. Who reads carefully will remember many
fine lines; who reads only once will be as one lost in sun-filled fog
like that of "A E.'s" own Irish mountains, but he should be patient, he
should wait and look again and again, and finally he will see, even if
earth be still dimmed with fogbanks, much of the heavens, free of fog,
and radiant with cold white light.
"Forest glooms
Rumorous of old romance"
and
"But joy as an Arctic sun went down"
the kind of lines rarest in his verse; more characteristic are,
"Hearts like cloisters dim and grey,"
"the great star swings
Along the sapphire zone,"
"The Angel childhood of the earth,"
"Glint the bubble planets tossing in the dead black sea of night,"
"The old enchantment lingers in the honey heart of earth."
There are comparatively few "purple patches" in Mr. Russell's poetry,
for the reasons that each poem depends for its chief appeal on one mood
or thought or dream immanent in it, rather than on any fine phrasing.
The effort to catch the meaning of the verse--seldom apparent at first
glance--prevents the noting of as many purple lines as there are. Nor
when noted are such lines readily memorable, since they are apt to lack
association with known and loved things to bring them home to the
reader. And again the poems are very short,--intimations, suggestions
rather than expressions,--and their intangible themes are often much
alike, and poem becomes confused with poem in the memory.
It may be that to those to whom the Other World is very instant, as it
is to many Irishmen, or to those that go about daily preparing for the
world beyond the grave, as did our Puritan ancestors of the seventeenth
century, these poems of Mr. Russell's speak familiar language, as they
of a certainty do to the mystic, but to the many modern art lovers who
hold to Pater's "New Cyrenaicism,"--as Mr. Russell would say, "those
under the blight of the Relative,"--as well as to the man in the street
their language is new and difficult to understand. But the poems have
found their audience--there is no doubt about that--and they are
regarded as oracular by hundreds. This is the more curious in that there
is so little personality in them, surprisingly little when one knows how
strong is the personality of the man that made them But this lack of
personality follows naturally on the mystic's creed--he must put into
his writings chiefly his relation with God,--for all other relations are
as nothing to that,--and if he attain his desire he is rapt away from
himself and his fellows into oneness with God.
Quality, a very definite quality, these verses of Mr. Russell's have,
but it is an almost unchanging sameness of quality; almost all his
verses, as I have said, have the same theme. So there is a monotony
about them, and their reader is apt to cry out that mysticism is
inimical to art. It may well be that this unswerving following of one
theme is of definite purpose; that Mr. Russell feels that he as Irishman
and mystic has a mission, as indeed Mr. Charles Johnston owns. Speaking
of Irishmen, in "Ireland" (1902), he says,--
We live in the invisible world. If I rightly understand our mission
and our destiny, it is this: To restore to other men the sense of
that invisible; that world of our immortality; as of old our race
went forth carrying the Galilean Evangel. We shall first learn and
then teach, that not with wealth can the soul of man be satisfied;
that our enduring interest is not here but there, in the unseen,
the hidden, the immortal, for whose purposes exist all the visible
beauties of the world. If this be our mission and our purpose,
well may our fair mysterious land deserve her name: Inis Fail, the
Isle of Destiny.
Very like Emerson this, too, but very Irish. Let us not forget that
Berkeley and Scotus Erigena were Irishmen.
I do not wish to overemphasize the influence of Emerson on "A.E.," and
indeed it is no greater than Emerson's influence over M. Maeterlinck. I
believe Emerson was as much guide as master, that he pointed "A.E." the
way to the mystics. I might dwell on the resemblance between thoughts
common to the two much more than I have--there are even lines of the
younger man's that show the influence of lines of the elder. But that is
not my object. I wish to point out that Puritanism in Ireland has
flowered up into the mystic poetry of "A.E.," into poetry of that
strange quality, cold ecstasy, as Puritanism in America has flowered up
into the mystic poetry of Emerson, poetry of cold ecstasy. In England,
so far as I know, Puritanism, that has given us so great a poet as
Milton, has never so flowered. Crashaw was born of a Puritan father, but
it was through the Old Faith his greatest inspiration came, and his
ecstasy, as that of his latter-day disciple, Francis Thompson, is warm
ecstasy, not cold like that of the two Puritan poets. Henry More,
Platonist and seer of visions, never attained ecstasy in his poetry. It
may be that it required transplantation of Englishmen into Ireland and
into America to bring about this phenomenon. Nor is it the only quality
these two earliest bodies of English colonists alike developed. But it
is more than dangerous to dogmatize where so many races went to the
making of a people as went to the making of Anglo-Irishmen and
Americans.
How different are the types of Anglo-Irish I could not but ponder as we
left "A E.'s" home and went out into the chill rain of that August
night. To the right hand, as we walked with "A.E.'s" disciples, they
pointed to Maud Gonne's house. "Irish Joan of Arc" they call her, leader
of men whom men worship at first sight; most exciting of Ireland's mob
orators, all proclaim her, a very Pytho whose prophecies stir unrest and
tumult! And here next door the Quietist, the man of dreams and visions,
to whom all the war of the world is of as little moment as all other
unrealities, since here in this world he has begun already the real, the
spiritual life. Both are types that have been as long as Ireland has
been; both Pytho and priest were among the high order of druid and
druidess of old time; agitator and reconciler, by Mr. Russell's belief,
might well be reincarnations of the wise women and wise men of
prehistoric days. To the world Maud Gonne is more representative of
Ireland than Mr. Russell, but he is just as truly a symbol of Ireland as
she: to those who know Irish history the thought of her quiet
monasteries of the seventh century, whence she sent out teachers to all
of Europe, is as recurrent as her political agitation of the nineteenth,
and to those who know her countryside the memories of soft sunny rains
and moonlit evenings are as lingering as those of black angry days and
wild blind nights. Her very colors, her grays and greens and purples,
proclaim her peace. It is of this peace and of the greater peace of that
unphenomenal or spiritual world, that lies nearer to Ireland than to
any Western land, that Mr. Russell is interpreter.
You may think of Mr. Russell as you will, as organizer of the Irish
Agricultural Organization Society, as stimulator of the Irish Literary
Revival, as economist, playwright, poet, painter, preacher, but always
as you put by his books you will think of him as mystic, as stargazer,
wandering, as he so often tells us in his poems, on the mountains by
night, with his eyes keener with wonder at the skies than ever
shepherd's under the Star of Bethlehem; you will see him, the human
atom, on the bare Dublin mountains, thrilling as he watches the sweep of
world beyond world; and yet, atom that he is, the possessor of it
all;--you will think of him as stargazer whose "spirit rolls into the
vast of God."