THE STIRRING OF THE BONES
_THE STIRRING OF THE BONES_
I
It may have been the Spring of 1897 that Maud Gonne, who was passing
through London, told me that for some reason unknown to her, she had
failed to get a Dublin authorization for an American lecturing tour. The
young Dublin Nationalists planned a monument to Wolfe Tone which, it was
hoped, might exceed in bulk and in height that of the too compromised and
compromising Daniel O'Connell, and she proposed to raise money for it by
these lectures. I had left the Temple and taken two rooms in Bloomsbury,
and in Bloomsbury lived important London Nationalists, elderly doctors,
who had been medical students during the Fenian movement. So I was able to
gather a sufficient committee to pass the necessary resolution. She had no
sooner sailed than I found out why the Dublin committee had refused it, or
rather put it off by delay and vague promises. A prominent Irish American
had been murdered for political reasons, and another Irish American had
been tried and acquitted, but was still accused by his political
opponents, and the dispute had spread to London and to Ireland, and had
there intermixed itself with current politics and gathered new bitterness.
My committee, and the majority of the Nationalist Irish Societies
throughout England were upon one side, and the Dublin committee and the
majority of the Nationalist Societies in Ireland upon the other, and
feeling ran high. Maud Gonne had the same friends that I had, and the
Dublin committee could not be made to understand that whatever money she
collected would go to the movement, and not to her friends and their
opponents. It seemed to me that if I accepted the Presidency of the '98
Commemoration Association of Great Britain, I might be able to prevent a
public quarrel, and so make a great central council possible; and a public
quarrel I did prevent, though with little gain perhaps to anybody, for at
least one active man assured me that I had taken the heart out of his
work, and no gain at all perhaps to the movement, for our central council
had commonly to send two organizers or to print two pamphlets, that both
parties might be represented when one pamphlet or one organizer had
served.
II
It was no business of mine, and that was precisely why I could not keep
out of it. Every enterprise that offered, allured just in so far as it was
not my business. I still think that in a species of man, wherein I count
myself, nothing so much matters as Unity of Being, but if I seek it as
Goethe sought, who was not of that species, I but combine in myself, and
perhaps as it now seems, looking backward, in others also, incompatibles.
Goethe, in whom objectivity and subjectivity were intermixed I hold, as
the dark is mixed with the light at the eighteenth Lunar Phase, could but
seek it as Wilhelm Meister seeks it intellectually, critically, and
through a multitude of deliberately chosen experiences; events and forms
of skill gathered as if for a collector's cabinet; whereas true Unity of
Being, where all the nature murmurs in response if but a single note be
touched, is found emotionally, instinctively, by the rejection of all
experience not of the right quality, and by the limitation of its
quantity. Of all this I knew nothing, for I saw the world by the light of
what my father had said, speaking about some Frenchman who frequented the
dissecting rooms to overcome his dread in the interest of that Unity. My
father had mocked, but had not explained why he had mocked, and I, for my
unhappiness had felt a shuddering fascination. Nor did I understand as yet
how little that Unity, however wisely sought, is possible without a Unity
of Culture in class or people that is no longer possible at all.
"The fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart."
III
I went hither and thither speaking at meetings in England and Scotland and
occasionally at tumultuous Dublin conventions, and endured some of the
worst months of my life. I had felt years before that I had made a great
achievement when the man who trained my uncle's horses invited me to share
his Xmas dinner, which we roasted in front of his harness room fire; and
now I took an almost equal pride in an evening spent with some small
organizer into whose spitoon I secretly poured my third glass of whiskey.
I constantly hoped for some gain in self-possession, in rapidity of
decision, in capacity for disguise, and am at this moment, I dare say, no
different for it all, having but burgeoned and withered like a tree.
When Maud Gonne returned she became our directing mind both in England and
in Ireland, and it was mainly at her bidding that our movement become a
protest against the dissensions, the lack of dignity, of the Parnellite
and Anti-Parnellite parties, who had fought one another for seven or eight
years, till busy men passed them by, as they did those performing cats
that in my childhood I used to see, pretending to spit at one another on a
table, outside Charing Cross station. Both parliamentary parties seeing
that all young Ireland, and a good part of old, were in the movement,
tried to join us, the Anti-Parnellite without abandoning its separate
identity. They were admitted I think, but upon what terms I do not
remember. I and two or three others had to meet Michael Davitt, and a
member of parliament called F. X. O'Brien to talk out the question of
separate identity, and I remember nothing of what passed but the manner
and image of Michael Davitt. He seemed hardly more unfitted for such
negotiation, perhaps even for any possible present politics, than I
myself, and I watched him with sympathy. One knows by the way a man sits
in his chair if he have emotional intensity, and Davitt's suggested to me
a writer, a painter, an artist of some kind, rather than a man of action.
Then, too, F. X. O'Brien did not care whether he used a good or a bad
argument, whether he seemed a fool or a clever man, so that he carried his
point, but if he used a bad argument Davitt would bring our thought back
to it though he had to wait several minutes and re-state it. One felt
that he had lived always with small unimaginative, effective men whom he
despised; and that perhaps through some lack of early education, perhaps
because nine years' imprisonment at the most plastic period of his life
had jarred or broken his contact with reality, he had failed, except
during the first months of the Land League, to dominate those men. He told
me that if the split in the Irish Party had not come he would have carried
the Land League into the Highlands, and recovered for Ireland as much of
Scotland as was still Gaelic in blood or in language. Our negotiations,
which interested so much F. X. O'Brien and my two negotiators, a barrister
and a doctor, bored him I thought, even more than they did me, to whom
they were a novelty; but the Highland plan with its historical foundation
and its vague possibilities excited him, and it seemed to me that what we
said or did stirred him, at other moments also, to some similar remote
thought and emotion. I think he returned my sympathy, for a little before
his death he replied to some words of congratulation I sent him after the
speech in which he resigned his seat in the House of Commons, with an
account of some project of his for improving the quality of the Irish
representation there.
IV
I think that he shared with poet and philosopher the necessity of speaking
the whole mind or remaining silent or ineffective, and he had been for
years in a movement, where, to adapt certain words of a friend of mine, it
was as essential to carry the heart upon the sleeve as the tongue in the
cheek. The founders of the Irish Agrarian movement had acted upon the
doctrine, contradicted by religious history, that ignorant men will not
work for an idea, or feel a political passion for its own sake, and that
you must find "a lever" as it was called, some practical grievance; and I
do not think that I am fantastic in believing that this faith in "levers,"
universal among revolutionaries, is but a result of that mechanical
philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, which has, as Coleridge said, turned
the human mind into the quicksilver at the back of a mirror, though it
still permits a work of art to seem "a mirror dawdling along a road."
O'Leary had told me the story, not I think hitherto published. A prominent
Irish American, not long released from the prison where Fenianism had sent
him, cabled to Parnell:--"Take up Land Reform side by side with the
National Question and we will support you. See Kickham." What had Parnell,
a landowner and a haughty man, to do with the peasant or the peasant's
grievance? And he was indeed so ignorant of both that he asked Kickham,
novelist and Fenian leader, if he thought the people would take up a land
agitation, and Kickham answered:--"I am only afraid they would go to the
Gates of Hell for it;" and O'Leary's comment was, "and so they have."
And so was founded an agitation where some men pretended to national
passion for the land's sake; some men to agrarian passion for the nation's
sake; some men to both for their own advancement, and this agitation at
the time I write of had but old men to serve it, who found themselves
after years of labour, some after years of imprisonment, derided for
unscrupulous rascals. Unscrupulous they certainly were, for they had
grown up amid make-believe, and now because their practical grievance was
too near settlement to blind and to excite, their make-believe was visible
to all. They were as eloquent as ever, they had never indeed shared
anything in common but the sentimental imagery, the poetical allusions
inherited from a still earlier generation, but were faced by a generation
that had turned against all oratory. I recall to my memory a member of
Parliament who had fought for Parnell's policy after Parnell's death, and
much against his own interest, who refused to attend a meeting my friends
had summoned at the declaration of the Boer War, because he thought
"England was in the right," and yet a week later when the Dublin mob had
taken the matter up, advised Irish soldiers to shoot their officers and
join President Kruger. I recall another and more distinguished politician
who supported the Anti-Parnellite Party in his declining years, and in his
vigorous years had raked up some scandal about some Colonial Governor. A
friend of mine, after advising that Governor's son to write his father's
life, had remembered the scandal and called in her alarm upon the
politician; "I do beseech you," he had said and with the greatest
earnestness, "to pay no attention whatever to anything I may have said
during an election."
Certain of these men, all public prepossessions laid aside, were excellent
talkers, genial and friendly men, with memories enriched by country
humour, and much half sentimental, half practical philosophy, and at
moments by poetical feeling that was not all an affectation, found very
moving by English sympathisers, of the tear and the smile in Erin's eye.
They may even have had more sincerity than their sort elsewhere, but they
had inherited a cause that men had died for, and they themselves had gone
to jail for it, and had so worn their hereditary martyrdom that they had
seemed for a time no common men, and now must pay the penalty. "I have
just told Mahaffy," Wilde had said to me, "that it is a party of men of
genius," and now John O'Leary, Taylor, and many obscure sincere men had
pulled them down; and yet, should what followed, judged by an eye that
thinks most of the individual soul, be counted as more clearly out of the
common? A movement first of poetry, then of sentimentality, and land
hunger, had struggled with, and as the nation passed into the second
period of all revolutions, had given way before a movement of abstraction
and hatred; and after some twenty years of the second period, though
abstraction and hatred have won their victory, there is no clear sign, of
a third, a _tertium quid_, and a reasonable frame of mind.
Seeing that only the individual soul can attain to its spiritual opposite,
a nation in tumult must needs pass to and fro between mechanical
opposites, but one hopes always that those opposites may acquire sex and
engender. At moments when I have thought of the results of political
subjection upon Ireland I have remembered a story told me by Oscar Wilde
who professed to have found it in a book of magic, "if you carve a
Cerberus upon an emerald," he said, "and put it in the oil of a lamp and
carry it into a room where your enemy is, two heads will come upon his
shoulders and devour one another."
Instead of sharing our traditional sentimental rhetoric with every man who
had found a practical grievance, whether one care a button for the
grievance or not, most of us were prosecuting heretics. Nationality was
like religion, few could be saved, and meditation had but one theme--the
perfect nation and its perfect service. "Public opinion," said an
anonymous postcard sent to a friend of mine, "will compel you to learn
Irish," and it certainly did compel many persons of settled habits to
change tailor and cloth. I believed myself dressed according to public
opinion, until a letter of apology from my tailor informed me that "It
takes such a long time getting Connemara cloth as it has to come all the
way from Scotland."
The Ireland of men's affections must be, as it were, self-moving,
self-creating, though as yet (avoiding a conclusion that seemed hopeless)
but few added altogether separate from England politically. Men for the
moment were less concerned with the final achievement than with
independence from English parties and influence during the struggle for
it. We had no longer any leaders, abstractions were in their place; and
our Conventions, where O'Leary presided interrupting discussion without
the least consideration for rules of procedure when the moment came for
his cup of coffee, were dominated by little groups, the Gaelic
propagandists, though still very few, being the most impassioned, which
had the intensity and narrowness of theological sects.
I had in my head a project to reconcile old and new that gave Maud Gonne
and myself many stirring conversations upon journeys by rail to meetings
in Scotland, in Dublin, or in the Midlands. Should we not persuade the
organizations in Dublin and in London, when the time drew near for the
unveiling of our statue, or even perhaps for the laying of its foundation
stone, to invite the leaders of Parnellite or Anti-Parnellite, of the new
group of Unionists who had almost changed sides in their indignation at
the over-taxation of Ireland, to lay their policy before our
Convention--could we not then propose and carry that the Convention sit
permanently, or appoint some Executive Committee to direct Irish policy
and report from time to time. The total withdrawal from Westminster had
been proposed in the 'Seventies, before the two devouring heads were of
equal strength, and now that the abstract head seemed the strongest, would
be proposed again, but the Convention could send them thither, not as an
independent power, but as its delegation, and only when, and for what
purpose the Convention might decide. I dreaded some wild Fenian movement,
and with literature perhaps more in my mind than politics, dreamed of that
Unity of Culture which might begin with some few men controlling some form
of administration. I began to talk my project over with various
organizers, who often interrupted their attention which was perhaps only
politeness, with some new jibe at Mr. Dillon or Mr. Redmond. I thought I
had Maud Gonne's support, but when I overheard her conversation, she
commonly urged the entire withdrawal of the Irish Members, or if she did
refer to my scheme, it was to suggest the sending to England of eighty
ragged and drunken Dublin beggars or eighty pugilists "to be paid by
results."
She was the first who spoke publicly or semi-publicly of the withdrawal of
the Irish Members as a practical policy for our time, so far as I know,
but others may have been considering it. A nation in crisis becomes almost
like a single mind, or rather like those minds I have described that
become channels for parallel streams of thought, each stream taking the
colour of the mind it flows through. These streams are not set moving, as
I think, through conversation or publication, but through "telepathic
contact" at some depth below that of normal consciousness, and it is only
years afterwards, when future events have shown the themes' importance,
that we discover that they are different expressions of a common theme.
That self-moving, self-creating nation necessitated an Irish centre of
policy, and I planned a premature impossible peace between those two
devouring heads because I was sedentary and thoughtful; but Maud Gonne was
not sedentary, and I noticed that before some great event she did not
think but became exceedingly superstitous. Are not such as she aware, at
moments of great crisis, of some power beyond their own minds; or are they
like some good portrait painter of my father's generation and only think
when the model is under their eye? Once upon the eve of some
demonstration, I found her with many caged larks and finches which she was
about to set free for the luck's sake.
I abandoned my plans on discovering that our young men, not yet educated
by Mr. Birrell's university, would certainly shout down everyone they
disagreed with, and that their finance was so extravagant that we must
content ourselves with a foundation stone and an iron rail to protect it,
for there could never be a statue; while she carried out every plan she
made.
Her power over crowds was at its height, and some portion of the power
came because she could still, even when pushing an abstract principle to
what seemed to me an absurdity, keep her own mind free, and so when men
and women did her bidding they did it not only because she was beautiful,
but because that beauty suggested joy and freedom. Besides there was an
element in her beauty that moved minds full of old Gaelic stories and
poems, for she looked as though she lived in an ancient civilization where
all superiorities whether of the mind or the body were a part of public
ceremonial, were in some way the crowd's creation, as the Pope entering
the Vatican is the crowd's creation. Her beauty, backed by her great
stature, could instantly affect an assembly, and not as often with our
stage beauties because obvious and florid, for it was incredibly
distinguished, and if--as must be that it might seem that assembly's very
self, fused, unified, and solitary--her face, like the face of some Greek
statue, showed little thought, her whole body seemed a master work of long
labouring thought, as though a Scopas had measured and calculated,
consorted with Egyptian sages, and mathematicians out of Babylon, that he
might outface even Artemisia's sepulchral image with a living norm.
But in that ancient civilization abstract thought scarce existed, while
she but rose partially and for a moment out of raging abstraction; and for
that reason, as I have known another woman do, she hated her own beauty,
not its effect upon others, but its image in the mirror. Beauty is from
the antithetical self, and a woman can scarce but hate it, for not only
does it demand a painful daily service, but it calls for the denial or the
dissolution of the self.
"How many centuries spent
The sedentary soul,
In toil of measurement
Beyond eagle or mole
Beyond hearing and seeing
Or Archimedes' guess,
To raise into being
That loveliness?"
V
On the morning of the great procession, the greatest in living memory, the
Parnellite and Anti-Parnellite members of Parliament, huddled together
like cows in a storm, gather behind our carriage, and I hear John Redmond
say to certain of his late enemies, "I went up nearer the head of the
Procession, but one of the Marshals said, 'This is not your place, Mr
Redmond; your place is further back.' 'No,' I said, 'I will stay here.'
'In that case,' he said, 'I will lead you back.'" Later on I can see by
the pushing and shouldering of a delegate from South Africa how important
place and procedure is; and noticing that Maud Gonne is cheered
everywhere, and that the Irish Members march through street after street
without welcome, I wonder if their enemies have not intended their
humiliation.
* * * * *
We are at the Mansion House Banquet, and John Dillon is making the first
speech he has made before a popular Dublin audience since the death of
Parnell; and I have several times to keep my London delegates from
interrupting. Dillon is very nervous, and as I watch him the abstract
passion begins to rise within me, and I am almost overpowered by an
instinct of cruelty; I long to cry out, "Had Zimri peace who slew his
master?"
* * * * *
Is our Foundation Stone still unlaid when the more important streets are
decorated for Queen Victoria's Jubilee?
I find Maud Gonne at her hotel talking to a young working-man who looks
very melancholy. She had offered to speak at one of the regular meetings
of his socialist society about Queen Victoria, and he has summoned what
will be a great meeting in the open air. She has refused to speak, and he
says that her refusal means his ruin, as nobody will ever believe that he
had any promise at all. When he has left without complaint or anger, she
gives me very cogent reasons against the open air meeting, but I can think
of nothing but the young man and his look of melancholy. He has left his
address, and presently at my persuasion, she drives to his tenement, where
she finds him and his wife and children crowded into a very small
space--perhaps there was only one room--and, moved by the sight, promises
to speak. The young man is James Connolly who, with Padraic Pearce, is to
make the Insurrection of 1916 and to be executed.
* * * * *
The meeting is held in College Green and is very crowded, and Maud Gonne
speaks, I think, standing upon a chair. In front of her is an old woman
with a miniature of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, which she waves in her
excitement, crying out, "I was in it before she was born." Maud Gonne
tells how that morning she had gone to lay a wreath upon a martyr's tomb
at St. Michael's Church, for it is the one day in the year when such
wreaths are laid, but has been refused admission because it is the
Jubilee. Then she pauses, and after that her voice rises to a cry, "Must
the graves of our dead go undecorated because Victoria has her Jubilee?"
* * * * *
It is eight or nine at night, and she and I have come from the City Hall,
where the Convention has been sitting, that we may walk to the National
Club in Rutland Square, and we find a great crowd in the street, who
surround us and accompany us. Presently I hear a sound of breaking glass,
the crowd has begun to stone the windows of decorated houses, and when I
try to speak that I may restore order, I discover that I have lost my
voice through much speaking at the Convention. I can only whisper and
gesticulate, and as I am thus freed from responsibility, I share the
emotion of the crowd, and perhaps even feel as they feel when the glass
crashes. Maud Gonne has a look of exultation as she walks with her
laughing head thrown back.
Later that night Connolly carries in procession a coffin with the words
"British Empire" upon it, and police and mob fight for its ownership, and
at last that the police may not capture, it is thrown into the Liffey. And
there are fights between police and window-breakers, and I read in the
morning papers that many have been wounded; some two hundred heads have
been dressed at the hospitals; an old woman killed by baton blows, or
perhaps trampled under the feet of the crowd; and that two thousand pounds
worth of decorated plate glass windows have been broken. I count the links
in the chain of responsibility, run them across my fingers, and wonder if
any link there is from my workshop.
* * * * *
Queen Victoria visits the city, and Dublin Unionists have gathered
together from all Ireland some twelve thousand children and built for them
a grandstand, and bought them sweets and buns that they may cheer. A week
later Maud Gonne marches forty thousand children through the streets of
Dublin, and in a field beyond Drumcondra, and in the presence of a Priest
of their Church, they swear to cherish towards England until the freedom
of Ireland has been won, an undying enmity.
How many of these children will carry bomb or rifle when a little under or
a little over thirty?
* * * * *
Feeling is still running high between the Dublin and London organizations,
for a London doctor, my fellow-delegate, has called a little after
breakfast to say he was condemned to death by a certain secret society the
night before. He is very angry, though it does not seem that his life is
in danger, for the insult is beyond endurance.
* * * * *
We arrive at Chancery Lane for our Committee meeting, but it is Derby Day,
and certain men who have arranged a boxing match are in possession of our
rooms. We adjourn to a neighbouring public-house where there are little
pannelled cubicles as in an old-fashioned eating house, that we may direct
the secretary how to answer that week's letters. We are much interrupted
by a committee man who has been to the Derby, and now, half lying on the
table, keeps repeating, "I know what you all think. Let us hand on the
torch, you think, let us hand it on to our children, but I say no! I say,
let us order an immediate rising."
Presently one of the boxers arrives, sent up to apologise it seems, and to
explain that we had not been recognized. He begins his apology but stops,
and for a moment fixes upon us a meditative critical eye. "No, I will
not," he cries. "What do I care for anyone now but Venus and Adonis and
the other Planets of Heaven."
* * * * *
French sympathisers have been brought to see the old buildings in Galway,
and with the towns of Southern France in their mind's eye, are not in the
least moved. The greater number are in a small crowded hotel. Presently an
acquaintance of mine, peeping, while it is still broad day, from his
bedroom window, sees the proprietress of the hotel near the hall door, and
in the road a serious-minded, quixotic Dublin barrister, with a little boy
who carries from a stick over his shoulder twelve chamber pots. He hears
one angry, and one soft pleading explanatory voice, "But, Madam, I feel
certain that at the unexpected arrival of so many guests, so many guests
of the Nation, I may say, you must have found yourself unprepared." "Never
have I been so insulted." "Madam, I am thinking of the honour of my
country."
* * * * *
I am at Maud Gonne's hotel, and an Italian sympathiser Cipriani, the
friend of Garibaldi, is there, and though an old man now, he is the
handsomest man I have ever seen. I am telling a ghost story in English at
one end of the room, and he is talking politics in French at the other.
Somebody says, "Yeats believes in ghosts," and Cipriani interrupts for a
moment his impassioned declamation to say in English, and with a
magnificent movement and intonation, "As for me, I believe in nothing but
cannon."
* * * * *
I call at the office of the Dublin organization in Westmoreland Street,
and find the front door open, and the office door open, and though the
office is empty the cupboard door open and eighteen pounds in gold upon
the shelf.
* * * * *
At a London Committee meeting I notice a middle-aged man who slips into
the room for a moment, whispers something to the secretary, lays three or
four shillings on a table, and slips out. I am told that he is an Irish
board-school teacher who, in early life, took an oath neither to drink nor
smoke, but to contribute the amount so saved weekly to the Irish Cause.
* * * * *
VI
A few months before I was drawn into politics, I made a friendship that
was to make possible that old project of an Irish Theatre. Arthur Symons
and I were staying at Tillyra Castle in County Galway with Mr. Edward
Martyn, when Lady Gregory, whom I had met once in London for a few minutes
drove over, and after Symon's return to London I stayed at her house,
which is some four miles from Tillyra. I was in poor health, the strain
of youth had been greater than it commonly is, even with imaginative men,
who must always, I think, find youth bitter, and I had lost myself besides
as I had done periodically for years, upon _Hodos Camelionis_. The first
time was in my eighteenth or nineteenth years, when I tried to create a
more multitudinous dramatic form, and now I had got there through a novel
that I could neither write nor cease to write which had _Hodos Camelionis_
for its theme. My chief person was to see all the modern visionary sects
pass before his bewildered eyes, as Flaubert's St. Anthony saw the
Christian sects, and I was as helpless to create artistic, as my chief
person to create philosophic order. It was not that I do not love order,
or that I lack capacity for it, but that--and not in the arts and in
thought only--I outrun my strength. It is not so much that I choose too
many elements, as that the possible unities themselves seem without
number, like those angels, that in Henry More's paraphrase of the
Schoolman's problem, dance spurred and booted upon the point of a needle.
Perhaps fifty years ago I had been in less trouble, but what can one do
when the age itself has come to _Hodos Camelionis_?
Lady Gregory seeing that I was ill brought me from cottage to cottage to
gather folk-belief, tales of the fairies, and the like, and wrote down
herself what we had gathered, considering that this work, in which one let
others talk, and walked about the fields so much, would lie, to use a
country phrase, "Very light upon the mind." She asked me to return there
the next year, and for years to come I was to spend my summers at her
house. When I was in good health again, I found myself indolent, partly
perhaps because I was affrighted by that impossible novel, and asked her
to send me to my work every day at eleven, and at some other hour to my
letters, rating me with idleness if need be, and I doubt if I should have
done much with my life but for her firmness and her care. After a time,
though not very quickly, I recovered tolerable industry, though it has
only been of late years that I have found it possible to face an hour's
verse without a preliminary struggle and much putting off.
Certain woods at Sligo, the woods above Dooney Rock and those above the
waterfall at Ben Bulben, though I shall never perhaps walk there again,
are so deep in my affections that I dream about them at night; and yet the
woods at Coole, though they do not come into my dream are so much more
knitted to my thought, that when I am dead they will have, I am persuaded,
my longest visit. When we are dead, according to my belief, we live our
lives backward for a certain number of years, treading the paths that we
have trodden, growing young again, even childish again, till some attain
an innocence that is no longer a mere accident of nature, but the human
intellect's crowning achievement. It was at Coole that the first few
simple thoughts that now, grown complex, through their contact with other
thoughts, explain the world, came to me from beyond my own mind. I
practised meditations, and these, as I think, so affected my sleep that I
began to have dreams that differed from ordinary dreams in seeming to take
place amid brilliant light, and by their invariable coherence, and certain
half-dreams, if I can call them so, between sleep and waking. I have
noticed that such experiences come to me most often amid distraction, at
some time that seems of all times the least fitting, as though it were
necessary for the exterior mind to be engaged elsewhere, and it was
during 1897 and 1898, when I was always just arriving from or just setting
out to some political meeting, that the first dreams came. I was crossing
a little stream near Inchy Wood and actually in the middle of a stride
from bank to bank, when an emotion never experienced before swept down
upon me. I said, "That is what the devout Christian feels, that is how he
surrenders his will to the will of God." I felt an extreme surprise for my
whole imagination was preoccupied with the pagan mythology of ancient
Ireland, I was marking in red ink upon a large map, every sacred mountain.
The next morning I awoke near dawn, to hear a voice saying, "The love of
God is infinite for every human soul because every human soul is unique,
no other can satisfy the same need in God."
Lady Gregory and I had heard many tales of changelings, grown men and
women as well as children, who as the people believe are taken by the
fairies, some spirit or inanimate object bewitched into their likeness
remaining in their stead, and I constantly asked myself what reality there
could be in these tales, often supported by so much testimony. I woke one
night to find myself lying upon my back with all my limbs rigid, and to
hear a ceremonial measured voice which did not seem to be mine speaking
through my lips, "We make an image of him who sleeps," it said, "and it is
not him who sleeps, and we call it Emmanuel." After many years that
thought, others often found as strangely being added to it, became the
thought of the Mask, which I have used in these memoirs to explain men's
characters. A few months ago at Oxford I was asking myself why it should
be "An image of him who sleeps," and took down from the shelf not knowing
why I was doing so, a book which I had never read, Burkitt's _Early
Eastern Christianity_, and opened it at random. My eyes lit upon a passage
from a Gnostic Hymn telling how a certain King's son being exiled, slept
in Egypt, a symbol of the natural state, and while he slept an Angel
brought him a royal mantle; and at the bottom of the page I found a
footnote saying that the word mantle did not represent the meaning
properly for that which the Angel gave had the exile's own form and
likeness. I did not, however, find in the Gnostic Hymn my other thought
that Egypt and that which the Mask represents are antithetical. That, I
think, became clear, though I had had some premonitions when a countryman
told Lady Gregory and myself that he had heard the crying of new-dropped
lambs in November--Spring in the world of Fairy, being November with us.
* * * * *
On the sea coast at Duras, a few miles from Coole, an old French Count,
Florimond de Bastero, lived for certain months in every year. Lady Gregory
and I talked over my project of an Irish Theatre looking out upon the lawn
of his house, watching a large flock of ducks that was always gathered for
his arrival from Paris, and that would be a very small flock, if indeed it
were a flock at all, when he set out for Rome in the autumn. I told her
that I had given up my project because it was impossible to get the few
pounds necessary for a start in little halls, and she promised to collect
or give the money necessary. That was her first great service to the Irish
intellectual movement. She reminded me the other day that when she first
asked me what she could do to help our movement I suggested nothing; and,
certainly, no more foresaw her genius that I foresaw that of John Synge,
nor had she herself foreseen it. Our theatre had been established before
she wrote or had any ambition to write, and yet her little comedies have
merriment and beauty, an unusual combination, and those two volumes where
the Irish heroic tales are arranged and translated in an English so simple
and so noble, may do more than other books to deepen Irish imagination.
They contain our ancient literature, are something better than our
_Mabinogion_, are almost our _Morte D'Arthur_. It is more fitting,
however, that in a book of memoirs I should speak of her personal
influence, and especially as no witness is likely to arise better
qualified to speak. If that influence were lacking, Ireland would be
greatly impoverished, so much has been planned out in the library, or
among the woods at Coole; for it was there that John Shawe Taylor found
the independence from class and family that made him summon the conference
between landlord and tenant, that brought land purchase, and it was there
that Hugh Lane formed those Irish ambitions that led to his scattering
many thousands, and gathering much ingratitude; and where, but for that
conversation at Florimond de Bastero's, had been the genius of Synge?
I have written these words instead of leaving all to posterity, and though
my friend's ear seems indifferent to praise or blame, that young men to
whom recent events are often more obscure than those long past, may learn
what debts they owe and to what creditor.
END.
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE DUNEDIN PRESS LIMITED, EDINBURGH
Transcriber's Notes:
Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.
Periods after "Mr" and "Mrs" are used inconsistently in the original.
The following misprints have been corrected:
"philospohy" corrected to "philosophy" (page 51)
"unkown" corrected to "unknown" (page 87)
"have have" corrected to "have" (page 92)
"comparson" corrected to "comparison" (page 117)
"politicion" corrected to "politician" (page 128)
"spendid" corrected to "splendid" (page 137)
"mother'" corrected to "mother's" (page 151)
"discoverey" corrected to "discovery" (page 161)
"Shakesspeare's" corrected to "Shakespeare's" (page 169)
"knowlege" corrected to "knowledge" (page 183)
"mechnical" corrected to "mechanical" (page 230)
"delgation" corrected to "delegation" (page 234)
"precedure" corrected to "procedure" (page 237)
Other than the corrections listed above, inconsistencies in spelling and
hyphenation have been retained from the original.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Trembling of the Veil, by William Butler Yeats