BOOK II

IRELAND AFTER THE FALL OF PARNELL

_IRELAND AFTER THE FALL OF PARNELL_

I

A couple of years before the death of Parnell, I had wound up my

introduction to those selections from the Irish novelists with the

prophecy of an intellectual movement at the first lull in politics, and

now I wished to fulfil my prophecy. I did not put it in that way, for I

preferred to think that the sudden emotion that now came to me, the sudden

certainty that Ireland was to be like soft wax for years to come, was a

moment of supernatural insight. How could I tell, how can I tell even now?

There was a little Irish Society of young people, clerks, shop boys, and

shop girls, called "The Southwark Irish Literary Society," and it had

ceased to meet because the girls got the giggles when any member of the

Committee got up to speak. Every member of it had said all he had to say

many times over. I had given them a lecture about the falling asunder of

the human mind, as an opening flower falls asunder, and all had professed

admiration because I had made such a long speech without quotation or

narrative; and now I invited the Committee to my father's house at Bedford

Park, and there proposed a new organization, "The Irish Literary Society."

T. W. Rolleston came to that first meeting, and it was because he had much

tact, and a knowledge of the technical business of committees, that a

society was founded which was joined by every London-Irish author and

journalist. In a few months somebody had written its history, and

published that history, illustrated by our portraits, at a shilling. When

it was published I was in Dublin, founding a society there called "The

National Literary Society," and affiliating it with certain Young Ireland

Societies in country towns which seemed anxious to accept its leadership.

I had definite plans; I wanted to create an Irish Theatre; I was finishing

my _Countess Cathleen_ in its first meagre version, and thought of a

travelling company to visit our country branches; but before that there

must be a popular imaginative literature. I arranged with Mr. Fisher Unwin

and his reader, Mr Edward Garnett--a personal friend of mine--that when

our organization was complete Mr Fisher Unwin was to publish for it a

series of books at a shilling each. I told only one man of this

arrangement, for after I had made my plans I heard an alarming rumour. Old

Sir Charles Gavan Duffy was coming from Australia to start an Irish

publishing house, and publish a series of books, and I did not expect to

agree with him, but knew that I must not seek a quarrel. The two societies

were necessary because their lectures must take the place of an educated

popular press, which we had not, and have not now, and create a standard

of criticism. Irish literature had fallen into contempt; no educated man

ever bought an Irish book; in Dublin Professor Dowden, the one man of

letters with an international influence, was accustomed to say that he

knew an Irish book by its smell, because he had once seen some books whose

binding had been fastened together by rotten glue; and Standish O'Grady's

last book upon ancient Irish history--a book rather wild, rather too

speculative, but forestalling later research--had not been reviewed by any

periodical or newspaper in England or in Ireland.

At first I had great success, for I brought with me a list of names

written down by some member of the Southwark Irish Literary Society, and

for six weeks went hither and thither appealing and persuading. My first

conversation was over a butter-tub in some Dublin back street, and the man

agreed with me at once; everybody agreed with me; all felt that something

must be done, but nobody knew what. Perhaps they did not understand me,

perhaps I kept back my full thoughts, perhaps they only seemed to listen;

it was enough that I had a plan, and was determined about it. When I went

to lecture in a provincial town, a workman's wife, who wrote patriotic

stories in some weekly newspaper, invited me to her house, and I found all

her children in their Sunday best. She made a little speech, very formal

and very simple, in which she said that what she wrote had no merit, but

that it paid for her children's schooling; and she finished her speech by

telling her children never to forget that they had seen me. One man

compared me to Thomas Davis, another said I could organise like Davitt,

and I thought to succeed as they did, and as rapidly. I did not examine

this applause, nor the true thoughts of those I met, nor the general

condition of the country, but I examined myself a great deal, and was

puzzled at myself. I knew that I was shy and timid, that I would often

leave some business undone, or purchase unmade, because I shrank from

facing a strange office or a shop a little grander than usual, and yet,

here was I delightedly talking to strange people every day. It was many

years before I understood that I had surrendered myself to the chief

temptation of the artist, creation without toil. Metrical composition is

always very difficult to me, nothing is done upon the first day, not one

rhyme is in its place; and when at last the rhymes begin to come, the

first rough draft of a six-line stanza takes the whole day. At that time I

had not formed a style, and sometimes a six-line stanza would take several

days, and not seem finished even then; and I had not learnt, as I have

now, to put it all out of my head before night, and so the last night was

generally sleepless, and the last day a day of nervous strain. But now I

had found the happiness that Shelley found when he tied a pamphlet to a

fire balloon.

II

At first I asked no help from prominent persons, and when some clerk or

shop-assistant would say "Dr So-and-so or Professor So-and-so will have

nothing to do with us" I would answer, "When we prove we can gather sheep

shepherds will come." Presently, come they did, old, middle-aged, or but

little older than myself, but all with some authority in their town: John

O'Leary, John F. Taylor, and Douglas Hyde, and Standish O'Grady, and of

these much presently; Dr. Sigerson who has picked a quarrel with me and of

whom I shall say nothing that he may not pick another; Count Plunkett,

Sinn Feiner of late and Minister of Dail Eireann; Dr. Coffey, now head of

the National University; George Coffey, later on Curator of the Irish

Antiquities at the Museum of the Royal Dublin Society; Patrick J. McCall,

poet and publican of Patrick Street, and later member of corporation;

Richard Ashe King, novelist and correspondent of _Truth_, a gentle,

intelligent person, typical of nothing; and others, known or unknown. We

were now important, had our Committee room in the Mansion House, and I

remember that the old Mansion House butler recognised our importance so

fully, that he took us into his confidence once in every week, while we

sat waiting for a quorum. He had seen many Lord Mayors, and remembered

those very superior Lord Mayors who lived before the extension of the

municipal franchise, and spoke of his present masters with contempt. Among

our persons of authority, and among the friends and followers they had

brought, there were many who at that time found it hard to refuse if

anybody offered for sale a pepper-pot shaped to suggest a round tower with

a wolf-dog at its foot, and who would have felt it inappropriate to

publish an Irish book, that had not harp and shamrock and green cover, so

completely did their minds move amid Young Ireland images and metaphors,

and I thought with alarm of the coming of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy; while

here and there I noticed that smooth, smiling face that we discover for

the first time in certain pictures by Velasquez; all that hungry,

mediaeval speculation vanished, that had worn the faces of El Greco and in

its place a self-complacent certainty that all had been arranged, provided

for, set out in clear type, in manual of devotion or of doctrine. These,

however, were no true disciples of Young Ireland, for Young Ireland had

sought a nation unified by political doctrine, a subservient art and

letters aiding and abetting. The movement of thought, which had in the

'fifties and 'fourties at Paris and London and Boston, filled literature,

and especially poetical literature with curiosities about science, about

history about politics, with moral purpose and educational

fervour--abstractions all--had created a new instrument for Irish

politics, a method of writing that took its poetical style from Campbell,

Scott, Macauley, and Beranger, with certain elements from Gaelic, and its

prose style--in John Mitchell, the only Young Ireland prose writer who had

a style at all--from Carlyle. To recommend this method of writing as

literature without much reservation and discrimination I contended was to

be deceived or to practice deception. If one examined some country

love-song, one discovered that it was not written by a man in love, but by

a patriot who wanted to prove that we did indeed possess, in the words of

Daniel O'Connell, "the finest peasantry upon earth." Yet one well-known

anthology was introduced by the assertion that such love-poetry was

superior to "affected and artificial" English love-songs like "Drink to me

only with thine eyes"--"affected and artificial," the very words used by

English Victorians who wrote for the newspapers to discourage capricious,

personal writing. However, the greater number even of those who thought

our famous anthology, _The Spirit of the Nation_, except for three or four

songs, but good election rhyme, looked upon it much as certain enlightened

believers look upon the story of Adam and Eve and the apple, or that of

Jonah and the whale, which they do not question publicly, because such

stories are an integral part of religion to simple men and women. I, upon

the other hand, being in the intemperance of my youth, denied, as publicly

as possible, merit to all but a few ballads translated from Gaelic

writers, or written out of a personal and generally tragic experience.

III

The greater number of those who joined my society had come under the seal

of Young Ireland at that age when we are all mere wax; the more ambitious

had gone daily to some public library to read the bound volumes of Thomas

Davis's old newspaper, and tried to see the world as Davis saw it. No

philosophic speculation, no economic question of the day, disturbed an

orthodoxy which, unlike that of religion had no philosophic history, and

the religious bigot was glad that it should be so. Some few of the younger

men were impatient, and it was these younger men, more numerous in the

London than in the Dublin Society, who gave me support; and we had been

joined by a few older men--some personal friends of my own or my

father--who had only historical interest in Thomas Davis and his school.

Young Ireland's prose had been as much occupied with Irish virtue, and

more with the invader's vices, than its poetry, and we were soon mired and

sunk into such problems as to whether Cromwell was altogether black, the

heads of the old Irish clans altogether white, the Danes mere robbers and

church burners (they tell me at Rosses Point that the Danes keep to this

day the maps of the Rosses fields they were driven out of in the 9th

century, and plot their return) and as to whether we were or were not once

the greatest orators in the world. All the past had been turned into a

melodrama with Ireland for blameless hero and poet, novelist and historian

had but one object, that we should hiss the villain, and only a minority

doubted that the greater the talent the greater the hiss. It was all the

harder to substitute for that melodrama a nobler form of art, because

there really had been, however different in their form, villain and

victim; yet fight that rancour I must, and if I had not made some head

against it in 1892 and 1893 it might have silenced in 1907 John Synge, the

greatest dramatic genius of Ireland. I am writing of disputes that

happened many years ago, that led in later years to much bitterness, and I

may exaggerate their immediate importance and violence, but I think I am

right in saying that disputes about the merits of Young Ireland so often

interrupted our discussion of rules, or of the merit of this or that

lecturer, and were so aggravated and crossed by the current wrangle

between Parnellite and anti-Parnellite that they delayed our public

appearance for a year. Other excited persons, doubtless, seeing that we

are of a race intemperate of speech, had looked up from their rancours to

the dead Lord Mayors upon the wall, superior men whose like we shall not

see again, but never, I think, from rancours so seemingly academic. I was

preparing the way without knowing it for a great satirist and master of

irony, for master works stir vaguely in many before they grow definite in

one man's mind, and to help me I had already flitting through my head,

jostling other ideas and so not yet established there, a conviction that

we should satirize rather than praise, that original virtue arises from

the discovery of evil. If we were, as I had dreaded, declamatory, loose,

and bragging, we were but the better fitted, that once declared and

measured, to create unyielding personality, manner at once cold and

passionate, daring long premeditated act; and if bitter beyond all the

people of the world, we might yet lie, that too declared and measured,

nearest the honeyed comb:--

"Like the clangour of a bell

Sweet and harsh, harsh and sweet,

That is how he learnt so well

To take the roses for his meat."

IV

There were others with followers of their own, and too old or indifferent

to join our society. Old men who had never accepted Young Ireland, or

middle-aged men kept by some family tradition to the school of thought

before it arose, to the Ireland of Daniel O'Connell and of Lever and of

Thomas Moore, convivial Ireland with the traditional tear and smile. They

sang Moore's _Melodies_, admitted no poetry but his, and resented Young

Ireland's political objections to it as much as my generation's objection

to its artificial and easy rhythm; one, an old commercial traveller, a

Gaelic scholar who kept an erect head and the animal vigour of youth,

frequented the houses of our leading men, and would say in a loud voice,

"Thomas Moore, sir, is the greatest heroic poet of ancient or modern

times." I think it was the Fire Worshippers in _Lalla Rookh_ that he

preferred to Homer; or, jealous for the music of the _Melodies_, denounce

Wagner, then at the top of his vogue; "I would run ten miles through a bog

to escape him," he would cry. Then there was a maker of tombstones of whom

we had heard much but had seen little, an elderly fighting man, lately

imprisoned for beating a wine-merchant. A young member of the London

society, afterwards librarian to the National University, D. J. O'Donohue,

who had published a dictionary of the Irish poets, containing, I think,

two thousand names, had come to Dublin and settled there in a fit of

patriotism. He had been born in London, and spoke the most Cockney dialect

imaginable, and had picked up--probably from London critics--a dislike for

the poetry of Thomas Moore. The tombstone maker invited him to tea, and he

arrived with a bundle of books, which he laid beside him upon the table.

During tea he began expounding that dislike of his; his host was silent,

but he went on, for he was an obstinate little man. Presently the

tombstone-maker rose, and having said solemnly, "I have never permitted

that great poet to be slandered in my presence," seized his guest by the

back of the collar, and flung him out into the street, and after that

flung out the books one after another. Meanwhile the guest--as he himself

told the tale--stood in the middle of the street repeating, "Nice way to

treat a man in your own 'ouse."

V

I shared a lodging full of old books and magazines, covered with dirt and

dust, with the head of the Fenian Brotherhood, John O'Leary. "In this

country," he had said to me, "a man must have upon his side the Church or

the Fenians, and you will never have the Church." He had been converted to

nationality by the poems of Davis, and he wished for some analogous

movement to that of Davis, but he had known men of letters, had been the

friend of Whistler, and knew the faults of the old literature. We had made

him the President of our Society, and without him I could do nothing, for

his long imprisonment and longer exile, his magnificent appearance, and,

above all, the fact that he alone had personality, a point of view not

made for the crowd's sake, but for self-expression, made him magnetic to

my generation. He and I had long been friends, he had stayed with us at

Bedford Park, and my father had painted his portrait, but if I had not

shared his lodging he would have opposed me. He was an old man, and my

point of view was not that of his youth, and it often took me half the day

to make him understand--so suspicious he was of all innovation--some

simple thing that he would presently support with ardour. He had grown up

in a European movement when the revolutionist thought that he, above all

men, must appeal to the highest motive, be guided by some ideal principle,

be a little like Cato or like Brutus, and he had lived to see the change

Dostoievsky examined in _The Possessed_. Men who had been of his

party--and oftener their sons--preached assassination and the bomb; and,

worst of all, the majority of his countrymen followed after constitutional

politicians who practised opportunism, and had, as he believed, such low

morals that they would lie, or publish private correspondence, if it might

advance their cause. He would split every practical project into its

constituent elements, like a clerical casuist, to find if it might not

lead into some moral error; but, were the project revolutionary, he would

sometimes temper condemnation with pity. Though he would cast off his

oldest acquaintance did he suspect him of rubbing shoulders with some

carrier of bombs, I have heard him say of a man who blew himself up in an

attempt to blow up Westminster Bridge, "He was not a bad man, but he had

too great a moral nature for his intellect, not that he lacked intellect."

He did not explain, but he meant, I suppose, that the spectacle of

injustice might madden a good man more quickly than some common man. Such

men were of his own sort, though gone astray, but the constitutional

politicians he had been fighting all his life, and all they did displeased

him. It was not that he thought their aim wrong, or that they could not

achieve it; he had accepted Gladstone's Home Rule Bill; but that in his

eyes they degraded manhood. "If England has been brought to do us justice

by such men," he would say, "that is not because of our strength, but

because of her weakness." He had a particular hatred for the rush of

emotion that followed the announcement of Gladstone's conversion, for what

was called "The Union of Hearts," and derided its sentimentality; "Nations

may respect one another," he would say, "they cannot love." His ancestors

had probably kept little shops, or managed little farms in County

Tipperary, yet he hated democracy, though he never used the word either

for praise or blame, with more than feudal hatred. "No gentleman can be a

socialist," he said, and then, with a thoughtful look, "He might be an

anarchist." He had no philosophy, but things distressed his palate, and

two of those things were International propaganda and the Organised State,

and Socialism aimed at both, nor could he speak such words as

"philanthropy," "humanitarianism," without showing by his tone of voice

that they offended him. The Church pleased him little better; there was an

old Fenian quarrel there, and he would say, "My religion is the old

Persian, to pull the bow and tell the truth." He had no

self-consciousness, no visible pride, and would have hated anything that

could have been called a gesture, was indeed scarce artist enough to

invent a gesture; yet he would never speak of the hardship of his prison

life--though abundantly enough of its humours--and once, when I pressed

him, replied, "I was in the hands of my enemy, why should I complain?" A

few years ago I heard that the Governor of the prison had asked why he did

not report some unnecessary discomfort, and O'Leary had said, "I did not

come here to complain." Now that he is dead, I wish that I could question

him, and perhaps discover whether in early youth he had come across some

teacher who had expounded Roman virtue, but I doubt if I would have learnt

anything, for I think the wax had long forgotten the seal--if seal there

were. The seal was doubtless made before the eloquent humanitarian

'forties and 'fifties, and was one kind with that that had moulded the

youthful mind of Savage Landor. Stephens, the founder of Fenianism, had

discovered him searching the second-hand bookstalls for rare editions, and

enrolled him in his organization. "You have no chance of success," O'Leary

had said "but it will be good for the _morale_ of the country" (_morale_

was his great word), "and I will join on the condition that I am never

asked to enrol anybody." He still searched the second-hand bookstalls, and

had great numbers of books, especially of Irish history and literature,

and when I, exhausted over our morning's casuistry, would sit down to my

day's work (I was writing _The Secret Rose_) he would make his tranquil

way to the Dublin Quays. In the evening, over his coffee, he would write

passages for his memoirs upon postcards and odd scraps of paper, taking

immense trouble with every word and comma, for the great work must be a

masterpiece of style. When it was finished, it was unreadable, being dry,

abstract, and confused; no picture had ever passed before his mind's eye.

He was a victim, I think, of a movement where opinions stick men together,

or keep them apart, like a kind of bird lime, and without any relation to

their natural likes and tastes, and where men of rich nature must give

themselves up to an irritation which they no longer recognise because it

is always present. I often wonder why he gave me his friendship, why it

was he who found almost all the subscribers for my _Wanderings of Usheen_,

and why he now supported me in all I did, for how could he like verses

that were all picture, all emotion, all association, all mythology? He

could not have approved my criticism either, for I exalted Mask and Image

above the 18th century logic which he loved, and set experience before

observation, emotion before fact. Yet he would say, "I have only three

followers, Taylor, Yeats, and Rolleston," and presently he cast out

Rolleston--"Davitt wants to convert thousands, but I want two or three." I

think that perhaps it was because he no more wished to strengthen Irish

Nationalism by second-rate literature than by second-rate morality, and

was content that we agreed in that. "There are things a man must not do to

save a Nation," he had once told me, and when I asked what things, had

said, "To cry in public," and I think it probable that he would have

added, if pressed, "To write oratorical or insincere verse."

O'Leary's movements and intonations were full of impulse, but John F.

Taylor's voice in private discussion had no emotional quality except in

the expression of scorn; if he moved an arm it moved from the shoulder or

elbow alone, and when he walked he moved from the waist only, and seemed

an automaton, a wooden soldier, as if he had no life that was not dry and

abstract. Except at moments of public oratory, he lacked all personality,

though when one saw him respectful and gentle with O'Leary, as with some

charming woman, one saw that he felt its fascination. In letters, or in

painting, it repelled him unless it were harsh and obvious, and,

therefore, though his vast erudition included much art and letters, he

lacked artistic feeling, and judged everything by the moral sense. He had

great ambition, and had he joined some established party, or found some

practicable policy, he might have been followed, might have produced even

some great effect, but he must have known that in defeat no man would

follow him, as they followed O'Leary, as they followed Parnell. His

oratory was noble, strange, even beautiful, at moments the greatest I have

ever listened to; but, the speech over, where there had been, as it

seemed, so little of himself, all coming from beyond himself, we saw

precisely as before an ungainly body in unsuitable, badly-fitting clothes,

and heard an excited voice speaking ill of this man or that other. We knew

that he could never give us that one price we would accept, that he would

never find a practicable policy; that no party would admit, no government

negotiate with, a man notorious for a temper, that, if it gave him genius,

could at times carry him to the edge of insanity.

Born in some country town, the son of some little watchmaker, he had been

a shop assistant, put himself to college and the bar, learned to speak at

temperance meetings and Young Ireland societies, and was now a Queen's

Counsel famous for his defence of country criminals, whose cases had

seemed hopeless--Taylor's boys, their neighbours called them or they

called themselves. He had shaped his style and his imagination from

Carlyle, the chief inspirer of self-educated men in the 'eighties and

early 'nineties. "I prefer Emerson's _Oversoul_," the Condalkin cobbler

said to me, "but I always read Carlyle when I am wild with the

neighbours"; but he used his master's style, as Mitchell had done before,

to abase what his master loved, to exalt what his master scorned. His

historical erudition seemed as vast as that of York Powell, but his

interests were not Powell's, for he had no picture before the mind's eye,

and had but one object--a plea of not guilty--entered in his country's

name before a jury which he believed to be packed. O'Leary cared nothing

for his country's glory, its individuality alone seemed important in his

eyes; he was like some man, who serves a woman all his life without asking

whether she be good or bad, wise or foolish; but Taylor cared for nothing

else; he was so much O'Leary's disciple that he would say in conversation,

"We are demoralised, what case for change if we are not?" for O'Leary

admitted no ground for reform outside the moral life, but when he spoke to

the great plea he would make no admission. He spoke to it in the most

obscure places, in little halls in back streets where the white-washed

walls are foul with grease from many heads, before some audience of

medical students or of shop assistants, for he was like a man under a

curse, compelled to hide his genius, and compelled to show in conspicuous

places his ill judgment and his temper.

His distaste for myself, broken by occasional tolerance, in so far as it

was not distaste for an imagination that seemed to him aesthetic rather

than ethical, was because I had published Irish folk-lore in English

reviews to the discredit, as he thought, of the Irish peasantry, and

because, England within earshot, I found fault with the Young Ireland

prose and poetry. He would have hated _The Playboy of the Western World_,

and his death a little before its performance was fortunate for Synge and

myself. His articles are nothing, and his one historical work, a life of

Hugh O'Neill, is almost nothing, lacking the living voice; and now, though

a most formidable man, he is forgotten, but for the fading memory of a few

friends, and for what an enemy has written here and elsewhere. Did not

Leonardo da Vinci warn the imaginative man against pre-occupation with

arts that cannot survive his death?

VI

When Carleton was dying in 1870, he said there would be nothing more about

Irish Literature for twenty years, and his words were fulfilled, for the

land war had filled Ireland with its bitterness; but imagination had begun

to stir again. I had the same confidence in the future that Lady Gregory

and I had eight or nine years later, when we founded an Irish Theatre,

though there were neither, as it seemed, plays or players. There were

already a few known men to start my popular series, and to keep it popular

until the men, whose names I did not know, had learnt to express

themselves. I had met Dr. Douglas Hyde when I lived in Dublin, and he was

still an undergraduate. I have a memory of meeting in college rooms for

the first time a very dark young man, who filled me with surprise, partly

because he had pushed a snuffbox towards me, and partly because there was

something about his vague serious eyes, as in his high cheek bones, that

suggested a different civilization, a different race. I had set him down

as a peasant, and wondered what brought him to college, and to a

Protestant college, but somebody explained that he belonged to some branch

of the Hydes of Castle Hyde, and that he had a Protestant Rector for

father. He had much frequented the company of old countrymen, and had so

acquired the Irish language, and his taste for snuff, and for moderate

quantities of a detestable species of illegal whiskey distilled from the

potato by certain of his neighbours. He had already--though intellectual

Dublin knew nothing of it--considerable popularity as a Gaelic poet,

mowers and reapers singing his songs from Donegal to Kerry. Years

afterwards I was to stand at his side and listen to Galway mowers singing

his Gaelic words without knowing whose words they sang. It is so in India,

where peasants sing the words of the great poet of Bengal without knowing

whose words they sing, and it must often be so where the old imaginative

folk life is undisturbed, and it is so amongst schoolboys who hand their

story books to one another without looking at the title page to read the

author's name. Here and there, however, the peasants had not lost the

habit of Gaelic criticism, picked up, perhaps, from the poets who took

refuge among them after the ruin of the great Catholic families, from men

like that O'Rahilly, who cries in a translation from the Gaelic that is

itself a masterpiece of concentrated passion--

"The periwinkle and the tough dog-fish

Towards evening time have got into my dish."

An old rascal was kept in food and whiskey for a fortnight by some

Connaught village under the belief that he was Craoibhin Aoibhin, "the

pleasant little branch," as Doctor Hyde signed himself in the newspapers

where the villagers had found his songs. The impostor's thirst only

strengthened belief in his genius, for the Gaelic song-writers have had

the infirmities of Robert Burns, "It is not the drink but the company,"

one of the last has sung. Since that first meeting Doctor Hyde and I had

corresponded, and he had sent me in manuscript the best tale in my _Faery

and Folk Tales_, and I think I had something to do with the London

publication of his _Beside the Fire_, a book written in the beautiful

English of Connaught, which is Gaelic in idiom and Tudor in vocabulary,

and indeed, the first book to use it in the expression of emotion and

romance, for Carleton and his school had turned it into farce. Henley had

praised him, and York Powell had said, "If he goes on as he has begun, he

will be the greatest folk-loreist who has ever lived"; and I know no first

book of verse of our time that is at once so romantic and so concrete as

his Gaelic _Abhla de'n Craoibh_; but in a few years Dublin was to laugh

him, or rail him, out of his genius. He had no critical capacity, having

indeed for certain years the uncritical folk-genius, as no educated Irish

or Englishman has ever had it, writing out of an imitative sympathy like

that of a child catching a tune and leaving it to chance to call the tune;

and the failure of our first attempt to create a modern Irish literature

permitted the ruin of that genius. He was to create a great popular

movement, far more important in its practical results than any movement I

could have made, no matter what my luck, but, being neither quarrelsome

nor vain, he will not be angry if I say--for the sake of those who come

after us--that I mourn for the "greatest folk-loreist who ever lived,"

and for the great poet who died in his youth. The Harps and Pepperpots got

him and the Harps and Pepperpots kept him till he wrote in our common

English--"It must be either English or Irish," said some patriotic editor,

Young Ireland practice in his head--that needs such sifting that he who

would write it vigorously must write it like a learned language, and took

for his model the newspaper upon his breakfast table, and became for no

base reason beloved by multitudes who should never have heard his name

till their schoolmasters showed it upon his tomb. That very incapacity for

criticism made him the cajoler of crowds, and of individual men and women;

"He should not be in the world at all," said one admiring elderly woman,

"or doing the world's work"; and for certain years young Irish women were

to display his pseudonym, "Craoibhin Aoibhin," in gilt letters upon their

hat bands.

"Dear Craoibhin Aoibhin,......impart to us,

We'll keep the secret, a new trick to please;

Is there a bridle for this Proteus

That turns and changes like his draughty seas,

Or is there none, most popular of men,

But, when they mock us, that we mock again?"

VII

Standish O'Grady, upon the other hand, was at once all passion and all

judgment. And yet those who knew him better than I assured me he could

find quarrel in a straw; and I did know that he had quarrelled a few years

back with Jack Nettleship. Nettleship's account had been, "My mother

cannot endure the God of the Old Testament, but likes Jesus Christ;

whereas I like the God of the Old Testament, and cannot endure Jesus

Christ; and we have got into the way of quarrelling about it at lunch; and

once, when O'Grady lunched with us, he said it was the most disgraceful

spectacle he had ever seen, and walked out." Indeed, I wanted him among my

writers, because of his quarrels, for, having much passion and little

rancour, the more he quarrelled, the nobler, the more patched with

metaphor, the more musical his style became, and if he were in his turn

attacked, he knew a trick of speech that made us murmur, "We do it wrong,

being so majestical, to offer it the show of violence." Sometimes he

quarrelled most where he loved most. A Unionist in politics, a

leader-writer on _The Daily Express_, the most Conservative paper in

Ireland, hater of every form of democracy, he had given all his heart to

the smaller Irish landowners, to whom he belonged, and with whom his

childhood had been spent, and for them he wrote his books, and would soon

rage over their failings in certain famous passages that many men would

repeat to themselves like poets' rhymes. All round us people talked or

wrote for victory's sake, and were hated for their victories--but here was

a man whose rage was a swan-song over all that he had held most dear, and

to whom for that very reason every Irish imaginative writer owed a portion

of his soul. In his unfinished _History of Ireland_ he had made the old

Irish heroes, Fion, and Oisin, and Cuchullan, alive again, taking them,

for I think he knew no Gaelic, from the dry pages of O'Curry and his

school, and condensing and arranging, as he thought Homer would have

arranged and condensed. Lady Gregory has told the same tales, but keeping

closer to the Gaelic text, and with greater powers of arrangement and a

more original style, but O'Grady was the first, and we had read him in our

'teens. I think that, had I succeeded, a popular audience could have

changed him little, and that his genius would have stayed, as it had been

shaped by his youth in some provincial society, and that to the end he

would have shown his best in occasional thrusts and parries. But I do

think that if, instead of that one admirable little book _The Bog of

Stars_, we had got all his histories and imaginative works into the hands

of our young men, he might have brought the imagination of Ireland nearer

the Image and the honeycomb.

Lionel Johnson was to be our critic, and above all our theologian, for he

had been converted to Catholicism, and his orthdoxy, too learned to

question, had accepted all that we did, and most of our plans. Historic

Catholicism, with all its counsels and its dogmas, stirred his passion

like the beauty of a mistress, and the unlearned parish priests who

thought good literature or good criticism dangerous were in his eyes "all

heretics." He belonged to a family that had called itself Irish some

generations back, and its recent English generations but enabled him to

see as one single sacred tradition Irish nationality and Catholic

religion. How should he fail to know the Holy Land? Had he not been in

Egypt? He had joined our London Irish Literary Society, attended its

committee meetings, and given lectures in London, in Dublin, and in

Belfast, on Irish novelists and Irish poetry, reading his lectures always,

and yet affecting his audience as I, with my spoken lectures, could not,

perhaps because Ireland had still the shape it had received from the

eighteenth century, and so felt the dignity, not the artifice, of his

elaborate periods. He was very little, and at a first glance he seemed

but a schoolboy of fifteen. I remember saying one night at the Rhymers',

when he spoke of passing safely, almost nightly, through Seven Dials, then

a dangerous neighbourhood, "Who would expect to find anything in your

pockets but a pegtop and a piece of string?" But one never thought of his

small stature when he spoke or read. He had the delicate strong features

of a certain filleted head of a Greek athlete in the British Museum, an

archaistic Graeco-Roman copy of a masterpiece of the fourth century, and

that resemblance seemed symbolic of the austere nobility of his verse. He

was now in his best years, writing with great ease and power; neither I,

nor, I think, any other, foresaw his tragedy.

He suffered from insomnia, and some doctor, while he was still at the

University, had recommended alcohol, and he had, in a vain hope of sleep,

increased the amount, as Rossetti had increased his doses of chloral, and

now he drank for drinking's sake. He drank a great deal too much, and,

though nothing could, it seemed, disturb his calm or unsteady his hand or

foot, his doctrine, after a certain number of glasses, would become more

ascetic, more contemptuous of all that we call human life. I have heard

him, after four or five glasses of wine, praise some church father who

freed himself from sexual passion by a surgical operation, and deny with

scorn, and much historical evidence, that a gelded man lost anything of

intellectual power. Even without stimulant his theology conceded nothing

to human weakness, and I can remember his saying with energy, "I wish

those people who deny the eternity of punishment could realise their

unspeakable vulgarity."

Now that I know his end, I see him creating, to use a favourite adjective

of his, "marmorean" verse, and believing the most terrible doctrines to

keep down his own turbulence. One image of that stay in Dublin is so clear

before me that it has blotted out most other images of that time. He is

sitting at a lodging-house table, which I have just left at three in the

morning, and round him lie or sit in huddled attitudes half-a-dozen men in

various states of intoxication: and he is looking straight before him with

head erect, and one hand resting upon the table. As I reach the stairs I

hear him say, in a clear, unshaken voice, "I believe in nothing but the

Holy Roman Catholic Church." He sometimes spoke of drink as something

which he could put aside at any moment, and his friends believed, and I

think he liked us to believe, that he would shortly enter a monastery. Did

he deceive us deliberately? Did he himself already foresee the moment when

he would write _The Dark Angel_? I am almost certain that he did, for he

had already written _Mystic and Cavalier_, where the historical setting

is, I believe, but masquerade.

"Go from me: I am one of those, who fall.

What! hath no cold wind swept your heart at all,

In my sad company? Before the end,

Go from me, dear my friend!

Yours are the victories of light: your feet

Rest from good toil, where rest is brave and sweet.

But after warfare in a mourning gloom

I rest in clouds of doom.

* * * * *

Seek with thine eyes to pierce this crystal sphere:

Canst read a fate there, prosperous and clear?

Only the mists, only the weeping clouds:

Dimness, and airy shrouds.

* * * * *

O rich and sounding voices of the air!

Interpreters and prophets of despair:

Priests of a fearful sacrament! I come

To make with you my home."

VIII

Sir Charles Gavan Duffy arrived. He brought with him much manuscript, the

private letters of a Young Ireland poetess, a dry but informing

unpublished historical essay by Davis, and an unpublished novel by William

Carleton, into the middle of which he had dropped a hot coal, so that

nothing remained but the borders of every page. He hired a young man to

read him, after dinner, Carlyle's _Heroes and Hero-Worship_, and before

dinner was gracious to all our men of authority and especially to our

Harps and Pepperpots. Taylor compared him to Odysseus returning to Ithaca,

and every newspaper published his biography. He was a white-haired old

man, who had written the standard history of Young Ireland, had emigrated

to Australia, had been the first Australian Federalist, and later Prime

Minister, but, in all his writings, in which there is so much honesty, so

little rancour, there is not one sentence that has any meaning when

separated from its place in argument or narrative, not one distinguished

because of its thought or music. One imagined his youth in some little

gaunt Irish town, where no building or custom is revered for its

antiquity; and there speaking a language where no word, even in solitude,

is ever spoken slowly and carefully because of emotional implication; and

of his manhood of practical politics, of the dirty piece of orange-peel in

the corner of the stairs as one climbs up to some newspaper office; of

public meetings where it would be treacherous amid so much geniality to

speak, or even to think of anything that might cause a moment's

misunderstanding in one's own party. No argument of mine was intelligible

to him, and I would have been powerless, but that fifty years ago he had

made an enemy, and though that enemy was long dead, his school remained.

He had attacked, why or with what result I do not remember, the only Young

Ireland politician who had music and personality, though rancorous and

devil-possessed. At some public meeting of ours, where he spoke amid great

applause, in smooth, Gladstonian periods, of his proposed Irish publishing

firm, one heard faint hostile murmurs, and at last a voice cried,

"Remember Newry," and a voice answered, "There is a grave there!" and a

part of the audience sang, "Here's to John Mitchell that is gone, boys,

gone; Here's to the friends that are gone." The meeting over, a group of

us, indignant that the meeting we had called for his welcome should have

contained those malcontents, gathered about him to apologize. He had

written a pamphlet, he explained: he would give us copies. We would see

that he was in the right, how badly Mitchell had behaved. But in Ireland

personality, if it be but harsh and hard, has lovers, and some of us, I

think, may have gone home muttering, "How dare he be in the right if

Mitchell is in the wrong?"

IX

He wanted "to complete the Young Ireland movement"--to do all that had

been left undone because of the Famine, or the death of Davis, or his own

emigration; and all the younger men were upon my side in resisting that.

They might not want the books I wanted, but they did want books written by

their own generation, and we began to struggle with him over the control

of the company. Taylor became very angry, and I can understand what I

looked like in his eyes, when I remember Edwin Ellis's seriously-intended

warning, "It is bad manners for a man under thirty to permit himself to be

in the right." But John O'Leary supported me throughout.

When Gavin Duffy had gone to London to draw up articles of association for

his company, for which he had found many shareholders in Dublin, the

dispute became very fierce. One night members of the general public

climbed the six flights of stairs to our committee room, now no longer in

the Mansion House, and found seats for themselves just behind our chairs.

We were all too angry to send them away, or even to notice their presence,

for I was accused of saying at a public meeting in Cork, "Our books," when

I should have said, "Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's books." I was not Taylor's

match with the spoken word, and barely matched him with the written word.

At twenty-seven or twenty-eight I was immature and clumsy, and O'Leary's

support was capricious, for, being but a spectator of life, he would

desert me if I used a bad argument, and would not return till I found a

good one; and our chairman, Dr. Hyde, "most popular of men," sat dreaming

of his old white cockatoo in far-away Roscommon. Our very success had been

a misfortune, for an opposition which had been literary and political, now

that it had spread to the general public, brought religious prejudice to

its aid. Suddenly, when the company seemed all but established, and a

scheme had been thought out which gave some representation on its

governing board to contemporary Irish writers, Gavan Duffy produced a

letter from Archbishop Walsh, and threw the project up. The letter had

warned him that after his death the company would fall under a dangerous

influence. At this moment the always benevolent friend, to whom I had

explained in confidence, when asking his support, my arrangements with my

publisher, went to Gavan Duffy and suggested that they should together

offer Mr Fisher Unwin a series of Irish books, and Mr Fisher Unwin and his

reader accepted the series under the belief that it was my project that

they accepted. I went to London to find the contract signed, and that all

I could do was to get two sub-editors appointed, responsible to the two

societies. Two or three good books were published, especially Dr. Hyde's

_Short History of Gaelic Literature_, and Standish O'Grady's _Bog of

Stars_; but the series was killed by its first volume, Thomas Davis's dry

but informing historical essay. So important had our movement seemed that

ten thousand copies had been sold before anybody had time to read it, and

then came a dead stop.

Gavan Duffy knew nothing of my plans, and so was guiltless, and my friend

had heard me discuss many things that evening. I had perhaps dispraised

the humanitarian Stephen Phillips, already in his first vogue, and praised

Francis Thompson, but half-rescued from his gutter; or flouted his belief

in the perpetual marriage of genius and virtue by numbering the vices of

famous men; this man's venery, that man's drink. He could not be expected

to remember that where I had said so much of no account, I said one

thing, and he had made no reply, that I thought of great account. He died

a few months ago, and it would have surprised and shocked him if any man

had told him that he was unforgiven; had he not forgotten all about it

long ago? A German doctor has said that if we leave an umbrella at a

friend's house it is because we have a sub-conscious desire to re-visit

that house; and he had perhaps a sub-conscious desire that my too

tumultuous generation should not have its say.

X

I was at Sligo when I received a letter from John O'Leary, saying that I

could do no more in Dublin, for even the younger men had turned against

me, were "jealous," his letter said, though what they had to be jealous of

God knows. He said further that it was all my own fault, that he had

warned me what would happen if I lived on terms of intimacy with those I

tried to influence. I should have kept myself apart and alone. It was all

true; through some influence from an earlier generation, from Walt

Whitman, perhaps, I had sat talking in public bars, had talked late into

the night at many men's houses, showing all my convictions to men that

were but ready for one, and used conversation to explore and discover

among men who looked for authority. I did not yet know that intellectual

freedom and social equality are incompatible; and yet, if I had, could

hardly have lived otherwise, being too young for silence. The trouble came

from half a dozen obscure young men, who having nothing to do attended

every meeting and were able to overturn a project, that seemed my only

bridge to other projects, including a travelling theatre. We had planned

small libraries of Irish literature in connection with our country

branches; we collected books and money, sending a lecturer to every branch

and taking half the proceeds of that lecture to buy books. Maud Gonne,

whose beauty could draw a great audience in any country town, had been the

lecturer. The scheme was very nearly self-supporting, and six or seven

bundles of books, chosen after much disputation by John O'Leary, J. F.

Taylor, and myself, had been despatched to some six or seven branches.

"The country will support this work" Taylor had said somewhere on some

public platform, "because we are the most inflammable people on God's

earth," his harsh voice giving almost a quality of style to Carlylian

commonplace; but we are also a very jealous people. The half-a-dozen young

men, if a little jealous of me, were still more jealous of those country

branches which were getting so much notice, and where there was so much of

that peasant mind their schoolmasters had taught them to despise. One must

be English or Irish, they would have said. I returned to find a great box

of books appropriated for some Dublin purpose and the whole scheme

abandoned. I know that it was a bitter moment because I remember with

gratitude words spoken not to my ear, but for my ear, by a young man who

had lately joined our Society, Mr. Stephen McKenna, now well-known amongst

scholars for his distinguished translations of Plotinus, and I seem to

remember that I lost through anger what gift of persuasion I may possess,

and that I was all the more helpless because I felt that even the best of

us disagreed about everything at heart. I began to feel that I needed a

hostess more than a society, but that I was not to find for years to

come. I tried to persuade Maud Gonne to be that hostess, but her social

life was in Paris, and she had already formed a new ambition, the turning

of French public opinion against England. Without intellectual freedom

there can be no agreement, and in Nationalist Dublin there was not--indeed

there still is not--any society where a man is heard by the right ears,

but never overheard by the wrong, and where he speaks his whole mind

gaily, and is not the cautious husband of a part; where phantasy can play

before matured into conviction; where life can shine and ring, and lack

utility. Mere life lacking the protection of wealth or rank, or some

beauty's privilege of caprice cannot choose its company, taking up and

dropping men merely because it likes, or dislikes, their manners and their

looks, and in its stead opinion crushes and rends, and all is hatred and

bitterness: wheel biting upon wheel, a roar of steel or iron tackle, a

mill of argument grinding all things down to mediocrity. If, as I think,

minds and metals correspond the goldsmiths of Paris foretold the French

Revolution when they substituted steel for that unserviceable gold in the

manufacture of the more expensive jewel work, and made those large, flat

steel buttons for men of fashion whereby the card players were able to

cheat by studying the reflections of the cards.

XI

No country could have more natural distaste for equality, for in every

circle there was some man ridiculous for posing as the type of some

romantic or distinguished quality. One of our friends, a man of talent

and of learning, whose ancestors had come, he believed, from Denmark in

the ninth century, looked and talked the distinguished foreigner so

perfectly that a patriotic newspaper gave particulars of his supposed

relations in contemporary Denmark! A half-mad old man who had served for a

few months in the Pope's army, many years before, still rode an old white

warhorse in all national processions, and, if their enemies were not

lying, one Town Councillor had challenged another to a duel by flinging

his glove upon the floor; while a popular Lord Mayor had boasted in a

public speech that he never went to bed at night without reading at least

twelve pages of _Sappho_. Then, too, in those conversations of the small

hours, to which O'Leary had so much objected, whenever we did not speak of

art and letters, we spoke of Parnell. We told each other that he had

admitted no man to his counsel; that when some member of his party found

himself in the same hotel by chance, that member would think to stay there

a presumption, and move to some other lodging; and, above all, we spoke of

his pride, that made him hide all emotion while before his enemy. Once he

had seemed callous and indifferent to the House of Commons, Foster had

accused him of abetting assassination, but when he came among his

followers his hands were full of blood, because he had torn them with his

nails. What excitement there would have been, what sense of mystery would

have stirred all our hearts, and stirred hearts all through the country,

where there was still, and for many years to come, but one overmastering

topic, had we known the story Mrs. Parnell tells of that scene on Brighton

Pier. He and the woman that he loved stood there upon a night of storm,

when his power was at its greatest height, and still unthreatened. He

caught her from the ground and held her at arm's length out over the water

and she lay there motionless, knowing that, had she moved, he would have

drowned himself and her. Perhaps unmotived self-immolation, were that

possible, or else at mere suggestion of storm and night, were as great

evidence as such a man could give of power over self, and so of the

expression of the self.

XII

When I look back upon my Irish propaganda of those years I can see little

but its bitterness. I never met with, or but met to quarrel with, my

father's old family acquaintance; or with acquaintance I myself might have

found, and kept, among the prosperous educated class, who had all the

great appointments at University or Castle; and this I did by deliberate

calculation. If I must attack so much that seemed sacred to Irish

nationalist opinion, I must, I knew, see to it that no man suspect me of

doing it to flatter Unionist opinion. Whenever I got the support of some

man who belonged by birth and education to University or Castle, I would

say, "Now you must be baptized of the gutter." I chose Royal visits

especially for demonstrations of disloyalty, rolling up with my own hands

the red carpet spread by some elderly Nationalist, softened or weakened by

time, to welcome Viceroyalty; and threatening, if the London Society drank

to the King's health, that my friends and I would demonstrate against it

by turning our glasses upside down; and was presently to discover that one

can grow impassioned and fanatical about opinions, which one has chosen

as one might choose a side upon the football field; and I thought many a

time of the pleasant Dublin houses that would never ask me to dine; and

the still pleasanter houses with trout-streams near at hand, that would

never ask me upon a visit. I became absurdly sensitive, glancing about me

in certain public places, the private view of our Academy, or the like, to

discover imagined enemies; and even now, after twenty or thirty years, I

feel at times that I have not recovered my natural manner. Yet it was in

those pleasant houses, among the young men and the young girls, that we

were to make our converts. When we loathe ourselves or our world, if that

loathing but turn to intellect, we see self or world and its anti-self as

in one vision; when loathing remains but loathing, world or self consumes

itself away, and we turn to its mechanical opposite. Popular Nationalism

and Unionism so changed into one another, being each but the other's

headache. The Nationalist abstractions were like the fixed ideas of some

hysterical woman, a part of the mind turned into stone, and all the rest a

seething and burning; and Unionist Ireland had re-acted from that seething

and burning to a cynical indifference, and from those fixed ideas to

whatever might bring the most easy and obvious success.

I remember Taylor at some public debate, stiff of body and tense of voice;

and the contrasting figure of Fitzgibbon, the Lord Justice of Appeal of

the moment and his calm, flowing sentences, satisfactory to hear and

impossible to remember. Taylor speaks of a little nation of antiquity,

which he does not name, "set between the great Empire of Persia and the

great Empire of Rome." Into the mouths of those great Empires he puts the

arguments of Fitzgibbon, and such as he, "Join with our greatness! What

in comparison to that is your little, beggarly nationality?" And then I

recall the excitement, the shiver of the nerves, as his voice rose to an

ecstatic cry, "Out of that nation came the salvation of the world." I

remember, too, and grow angry, as it were yesterday, a letter from that

Lord Justice of Appeal, who had changed his politics for advancement's

sake, recommending a correspondent to avoid us, because we dissuaded

people from the study of "Shakespeare and Kingsley."

Edward Dowden, my father's old friend, with his dark romantic face, the

one man of letters Dublin Unionism possessed, was withering in that barren

soil. Towards the end of his life he confessed to a near friend that he

would have wished before all things to have been the lover of many women;

and some careless lecture, upon the youthful Goethe, had in early life

drawn down upon him the displeasure of the Protestant Archbishop. And yet

he turned Shakespeare into a British Benthamite, flattered Shelley but to

hide his own growing lack of sympathy, abandoned for like reason that

study of Goethe that should have been his life-work, and at last cared but

for Wordsworth, the one great poet who, after brief blossom, was cut and

sawn into planks of obvious utility. I called upon him from time to time

out of gratitude for old encouragements, and because, among the Dublin

houses open to me, his alone was pleasant to the eye, with its many books

and its air of scholarship. But when O'Grady had declared, rancorous for

once but under substantial provocation, that he had "a bad head and a

worse heart," I found my welcome troubled and called no more.

XIII

The one house where nobody thought or talked politics was a house in Ely

Place, where a number of young men lived together, and, for want of a

better name, were called Theosophists. Beside the resident members, other

members dropped in and out during the day, and the reading-room was a

place of much discussion about philosophy and about the arts. The house

had been taken in the name of the engineer to the Board of Works, a

black-bearded young man, with a passion for Manichean philosophy, and all

accepted him as host; and sometimes the conversation, especially when I

was there, became too ghostly for the nerves of his young and delicate

wife, and he would be made angry. I remember young men struggling, with

inexact terminology and insufficient learning, for some new religious

conception, on which they could base their lives; and some few strange or

able men.

At the top of the house lived a medical student who read Plato and took

haschisch, and a young Scotchman who owned a vegetarian restaurant, and

had just returned from America, where he had gone as the disciple of the

Prophet Harris, and where he would soon return in the train of some new

prophet. When one asked what set him on his wanderings, he told of a young

Highlander, his friend in boyhood, whose cap was always plucked off at a

certain twist in the road, till the fathers of the village fastened it

upon his head by recommending drink and women. When he had gone, his room

was inherited by an American hypnotist, who had lived among the Zuni

Indians with the explorer Cushant, and told of a Zuni Indian who,

irritated by some white man's praise of telephone and telegraph, cried

out, "Can they do that?" and cast above his head two handfuls of sand that

burst into flame, and flamed till his head seemed wrapped in fire. He

professed to talk the philosophy of the Zuni Indians, but it seemed to me

the vague Platonism that all there talked, except that he spoke much of

men passing in sleep into the heart of mountains; a doctrine that was

presently incorporated in the mythology of the house, to send young men

and women hither and thither inquiring for sacred places. On a lower floor

lived a strange red-haired girl, all whose thoughts were set upon painting

and poetry, conceived as abstract images like Love and Penury in the

_Symposium_; and to these images she sacrificed herself with Asiatic

fanaticism. The engineer had discovered her starving somewhere in an

unfurnished or half-furnished room, and that she had lived for many weeks

upon bread and shell-cocoa, so that her food never cost her more than a

penny a day. Born into a county family, who were so haughty that their

neighbours called them the Royal Family, she had quarrelled with a mad

father, who had never, his tenants declared, "unscrewed the top of his

flask with any man," because she wished to study art, had ran away from

home, had lived for a time by selling her watch, and then by occasional

stories in an Irish paper. For some weeks she had paid half-a-crown a week

to some poor woman to see her to the art schools and back, for she

considered it wrong for a woman to show herself in public places

unattended; but of late she had been unable to afford the school fees. The

engineer engaged her as a companion for his wife, and gave her money

enough to begin her studies once more. She had talent and imagination, a

gift for style; but, though ready to face death for painting and poetry,

conceived as allegorical figures, she hated her own genius, and had not

met praise and sympathy early enough to overcome the hatred. Face to face

with paint and canvas, pen and paper, she saw nothing of her genius but

its cruelty, and would have scarce arrived before she would find some

excuse to leave the schools for the day, if indeed she had not invented

over her breakfast some occupation so laborious that she could call it a

duty, and so not go at all. Most watched her in mockery, but I watched in

sympathy; composition strained my nerves and spoiled my sleep; and yet, as

far back as I could trace--and in Ireland we have long memories--my

paternal ancestors had worked at some intellectual pursuit, while hers had

shot and hunted. She could at any time, had she given up her profession,

which her father had raged against, not because it was art, but because it

was a profession, have returned to the common comfortable life of women.

When, a little later, she had quarrelled with the engineer or his wife,

and gone back to bread and shell-cocoa I brought her an offer from some

Dublin merchant of fairly well paid advertisement work, which would have

been less laborious than artistic creation; but she said that to draw

advertisements was to degrade art, thanked me elaborately, and did not

disguise her indignation. She had, I believe, returned to starvation with

joy, for constant anaemia would shortly give her an argument strong enough

to silence her conscience when the allegorical images glared upon her,

and, apart from that, starvation and misery had a large share in her

ritual of worship.

XIV

At the top of the house and at the time I remember best, in the same room

with the young Scotchman, lived Mr. George Russell (A.E.), and the house

and the society were divided into his adherents and those of the engineer;

and I heard of some quarrelling between the factions. The rivalry was

sub-conscious. Neither had willingly opposed the other in any matter of

importance. The engineer had all the financial responsibility, and George

Russell was, in the eyes of the community, saint and genius. Had either

seen that the question at issue was the leadership of mystical thought in

Dublin, he would, I think, have given way, but the dispute seemed trivial.

At the weekly meetings, anything might be discussed; no chairman called a

speaker to order; an atheistic workman could denounce religion, or a pious

Catholic confound theosophy with atheism; and the engineer, precise and

practical, disapproved. He had an object. He wished to make converts for a

definite form of belief, and here an enemy, if a better speaker, might

make all the converts. He wished to confine discussion to members of the

society, and had proposed in committee, I was told, a resolution on the

subject; while Russell, who had refused to join my National Literary

Society, because the party of Harp and Pepperpot had set limits to

discussion, resisted, and at last defeated him. In a couple of years some

new dispute arose; he resigned, and founded a society which drew doctrine

and method from America or London; and Russell became, as he is to-day,

the one masterful influence among young Dublin men and women who love

religious speculation, but have no historical faith.

When Russell and I had been at the Art School six or seven years before,

he had been almost unintelligible. He had seemed incapable of coherent

thought, and perhaps was so at certain moments. The idea came upon him, he

has told me, that, if he spoke he would reveal that he had lost coherence;

and for the three days that the idea lasted spent the hours of daylight

wandering upon the Dublin mountains, that he might escape the necessity

for speech. I used to listen to him at that time, mostly walking through

the streets at night, for the sake of some stray sentence, beautiful and

profound, amid many words that seemed without meaning; and there were

others, too, who walked and listened, for he had become, I think, to all

his fellow students, sacred, as the fool is sacred in the East. We copied

the model laboriously, but he would draw without research into the natural

form, and call his study "St. John in the Wilderness"; but I can remember

the almost scared look and the half-whisper of a student, now a successful

sculptor, who said, pointing to the modelling of a shoulder, "That is too

easy, a great deal too easy!" For with brush and pencil he was too

coherent.

We derided each other, told absurd tales to one another's discredit, but

we never derided him, or told tales to his discredit. He stood outside the

sense of comedy his friend John Eglinton has called "the social cement" of

our civilization; and we would "gush" when we spoke of him, as men do when

they praise something incomprehensible. But when he painted there was no

difficulty in comprehending. How could that ease and rapidity of

composition, so far beyond anything that we could attain to, belong to a

man whose words seemed often without meaning?

A few months before I had come to Ireland he had sent me some verses,

which I had liked till Edwin Ellis had laughed me from my liking by

proving that no line had a rhythm that agreed with any other, and that,

the moment one thought he had settled upon some scheme of rhyme, he would

break from it without reason. But now his verse was clear in thought and

delicate in form. He wrote without premeditation or labour. It had, as it

were, organized itself, and grown as nervous and living as if it had, as

Dante said of his own work, paled his cheek. The Society he belonged to

published a little magazine, and he had asked the readers to decide

whether they preferred his prose or his verse, and it was because they so

willed it that he wrote the little transcendental verses afterwards

published in _Homeward Songs by the Way_.

Life was not expensive in that house, where, I think, no meat was eaten; I

know that out of the sixty or seventy pounds a year which he earned as

accountant in a Dublin shop, he saved a considerable portion for his

private charity; and it was, I think, his benevolence that gave him his

lucidity of speech, and, perhaps, of writing. If he convinced himself that

any particular activity was desirable in the public interest or in that of

his friends, he had at once the ardour that came to another from personal

ambition. He was always surrounded with a little group of infirm or

unlucky persons, whom he explained to themselves and to others, turning

cat to griffin, goose to swan. In later years he was to accept the

position of organizer of a co-operative banking system, before he had even

read a book upon economics or finance, and within a few months to give

evidence before a Royal Commission upon the system, as an acknowledged

expert, though he had brought to it nothing but his impassioned

versatility.

At the time I write of him, he was the religious teacher, and that

alone--his painting, his poetry, and his conversation all subservient to

that one end. Men watched him with awe or with bewilderment; it was known

that he saw visions continually, perhaps more continually than any modern

man since Swedenborg; and when he painted and drew in pastel what he had

seen, some accepted the record without hesitation, others, like myself,

noticing the academic Graeco-Roman forms, and remembering his early

admiration for the works of Gustave Moreau, divined a subjective element,

but no one doubted his word. One might not think him a good observer, but

no one could doubt that he reported with the most scrupulous care what he

believed himself to have seen; nor did he lack occasional objective

corroboration. Walking with some man in his park--his demesne, as we say

in Ireland--he had seen a visionary church at a particular spot, and the

man had dug and uncovered its foundations; then some woman had met him

with, "Oh, Mr Russell, I am so unhappy," and he had replied, "You will be

perfectly happy this evening at seven o'clock," and left her to her

blushes. She had an appointment with a young man for seven o'clock. I had

heard of this a day or so after the event, and I asked him about it, and

was told it had suddenly come into his head to use those words; but why he

did not know. He and I often quarrelled, because I wanted him to examine

and question his visions, and write them out as they occurred; and still

more because I thought symbolic what he thought real like the men and

women that had passed him on the road. Were they so much a part of his

sub-conscious life that they would have vanished had he submitted them to

question; were they like those voices that only speak, those strange

sights that only show themselves for an instant, when the attention has

been withdrawn; that phantasmagoria of which I had learnt something in

London: and had his verse and his painting a like origin? And was that why

the same hand that painted a certain dreamy, lovely sandy shore, now in

the Dublin Municipal Gallery, could with great rapidity fill many canvases

with poetical commonplace; and why, after writing _Homeward Songs by the

Way_, where all is skilful and much exquisite, he would never again write

a perfect book? Was it precisely because in Swedenborg alone the conscious

and the sub-conscious became one, as in that marriage of the angels, which

he has described as a contact of the whole being, that Coleridge thought

Swedenborg both man and woman?

Russell's influence, which was already great, had more to support it than

his versatility, or the mystery that surrounded him, for his sense of

justice, and the daring that came from his own confidence in it, had made

him the general counsellor. He would give endless time to a case of

conscience, and no situation was too difficult for his clarity; and

certainly some of the situations were difficult. I remember his being

summoned to decide between two ladies who had quarrelled about a

vacillating admirer, and called each other, to each other's faces, the

worst names in our somewhat anaemic modern vocabulary; and I have heard of

his success on an occasion when I think no other but Dostoievsky's idiot

could have avoided offence. The Society was very young, and, as its

members faced the world's moral complexities as though they were the first

that ever faced them, they drew up very vigorous rules. One rule was that

if any member saw a fault growing upon any other member, it was his duty

to point it out to that member. A certain young man become convinced that

a certain young woman had fallen in love with him; and, as an unwritten

rule pronounced love and the spiritual life incompatible, that was a heavy

fault. As the young man felt the delicacy of the situation, he asked for

Russell's help, and side by side they braved the offender, who, I was

told, received their admonishment with surprised humility, and promised

amendment. His voice would often become high, and lose its self-possession

during intimate conversation, and I especially could put him in a rage;

but the moment the audience became too large for intimacy, or some

exciting event had given formality to speech, he would be at the same

moment impassioned and impersonal. He had, and has, the capacity, beyond

that of any man I have known, to put with entire justice not only the

thoughts, but the emotions, of the most opposite parties and

personalities, as it were dissolving some public or private uproar into

drama by Corneille or by Racine; and men who have hated each other must

sometimes have been reconciled, because each heard his enemy's argument

put into better words than he himself had found for his own; and this gift

was in later years to give him political influence, and win him respect

from Irish Nationalist and Unionist alike. It was, perhaps, because of it,

joined to a too literal acceptance of those noble images of moral

tradition which are so like late Graeco-Roman statues, that he had seen

all human life as a mythological system, where, though all cats are

griffins, the more dangerous griffins are only found among politicians he

has not spoken to, or among authors he has but glanced at; while those men

and women who bring him their confessions and listen to his advice, carry

but the snowiest of swan's plumage. Nor has it failed to make him, as I

think, a bad literary critic; demanding plays and poems where the

characters must attain a stature of seven feet, and resenting as something

perverse and morbid all abatement from that measure. I sometimes wonder

what he would have been had he not met in early life the poetry of Emerson

and Walt Whitman, writers who have begun to seem superficial precisely

because they lack the Vision of evil; and those translations of the

Upanishads, which it is so much harder to study by the sinking flame of

Indian tradition than by the serviceable lamp of Emerson and Walt Whitman.

We are never satisfied with the maturity of those whom we have admired in

boyhood; and, because we have seen their whole circle--even the most

successful life is but a segment--we remain to the end their harshest

critics. One old schoolfellow of mine will never believe that I have

fulfilled the promise of some rough unscannable verses that I wrote before

I was eighteen. Does any imaginative man find in maturity the admiration

that his first half-articulate years aroused in some little circle; and is

not the first success the greatest? Certainly, I demanded of Russell some

impossible things, and if I had any influence upon him--and I have little

doubt that I had, for we were very intimate--it may not have been a good

influence for I thought there could be no aim for poet or artist except

expression of a "Unity of Being" like that of a "perfectly proportioned

human body"--though I would not at the time have used that phrase. I

remember that I was ironic and indignant when he left the Art Schools

because his "will was weak, and must grow weaker if he followed any

emotional pursuit;" as, later, when he let the readers of a magazine

decide between his prose and his verse. I now know that there are men who

cannot possess "Unity of Being," who must not seek it or express it--and

who, so far from seeking an anti-self, a Mask that delineates a being in

all things the opposite to their natural state, can but seek the

suppression of the anti-self, till the natural state alone remains. These

are those who must seek no image of desire, but await that which lies

beyond their mind, unities not of the mind, but unities of nature, unities

of God: the man of science, the moralist, the humanitarian, the

politician, St. Simon Stylites upon his pillar, St. Antony in his cavern;

all whose pre-occupation is to know themselves for fragments, and at last

for nothing; to hollow their hearts out till they are void and without

form, to summon a creator by revealing chaos, to become the lamp for

another's wick and oil; and indeed it may be that it has been for their

guidance in a very special sense that the "perfectly proportioned human

body" suffered crucifixion. For them Mask and Image are of necessity

morbid, turning their eyes upon themselves, as though they were of those

who can be law unto themselves, of whom Chapman has written, "Neither is

it lawful that they should stoop to any other law," whereas they are

indeed of those who can but ask, "Have I behaved as well as So-and-so?"

"Am I a good man according to the commandments?" or, "Do I realise my own

nothingness before God?" "Have my experiments and observations excluded

the personal factor with sufficient rigour?" Such men do not assume wisdom

or beauty as Shelley did, when he masked himself as Ahasuerus, or as

Prince Athanais, nor do they pursue an Image through a world that had else

seemed an uninhabitable wilderness till, amid the privations of that

pursuit, the Image is no more named Pandemos, but Urania; for such men

must cast all Masks away and fly the Image, till that Image, transfigured

because of their cruelties of self-abasement, becomes itself some Image or

epitome of the whole natural or supernatural world, and itself pursues.

The wholeness of the supernatural world can only express itself in

personal form, because it has no epitome but man, nor can _The Hound of

Heaven_ fling itself into any but an empty heart. We may know the

fugitives from others poets because, like George Herbert, like Francis

Thompson, like George Russell, their imaginations grow more vivid in the

expression of something which they have not themselves created, some

historical religion or cause. But if the fugitive should live, as I think

Russell does at times, as it is natural for a Morris or a Henley or a

Shelley to live, hunters and pursuers all, his art surrenders itself to

moral or poetical commonplace, to a repetition of thoughts and images that

have no relation to experience.

I think that Russell would not have disappointed even my hopes had he,

instead of meeting as an impressionable youth with our modern subjective

romanticism, met with some form of traditional belief, which condemned all

that romanticism admires and praises, indeed, all images of desire; for

such condemnation would have turned his intellect towards the images of

his vision. It might, doubtless, have embittered his life, for his strong

intellect would have been driven out into the impersonal deeps where the

man shudders; but it would have kept him a religious teacher, and set him,

it may be, among the greatest of that species; politics, for a

vision-seeking man, can be but half achievement, a choice of an almost

easy kind of skill instead of that kind which is, of all those not

impossible, the most difficult. Is it not certain that the Creator yawns

in earthquake and thunder and other popular displays, but toils in

rounding the delicate spiral of a shell?

XV

I heard the other day of a Dublin man recognizing in London an elderly man

who had lived in that house in Ely Place in his youth, and of that elderly

man, at the sudden memory, bursting into tears. Though I have no such

poignant memories, for I was never of it, never anything but a

dissatisfied critic, yet certain vivid moments come back to me as I write.

...Russell has just come in from a long walk on the Two Rock mountain,

very full of his conversation with an old religious beggar, who kept

repeating, "God possesses the heavens, but He covets the earth--He covets

the earth."

* * * * *

I get in talk with a young man who has taken the orthodox side in some

debate. He is a stranger, but explains that he has inherited magical art

from his father, and asks me to his rooms to see it in operation. He and a

friend of his kill a black cock, and burn herbs in a big bowl, but nothing

happens except that the friend repeats again and again, "Oh, my God," and

when I ask him why he has said that, does not know that he has spoken; and

I feel that there is something very evil in the room.

* * * * *

We are sitting round the fire one night, and a member, a woman, tells a

dream that she has just had. She dreamed that she saw monks digging in a

garden. They dug down till they found a coffin, and when they took off the

lid she saw that in the coffin lay a beautiful young man in a dress of

gold brocade. The young man railed against the glory of the world, and

when he had finished, the monks closed the coffin reverently, and buried

it once more. They smoothed the ground, and then went on with their

gardening.

* * * * *

I have a young man with me, an official of the National Literary Society,

and I leave him in the reading-room with Russell, while I go upstairs to

see the young Scotchman. I return after some minutes to find that the

young man has become a Theosophist, but a month later, after an interview

with a friar, to whom he gives an incredible account of his new beliefs,

he goes to Mass again.