by George Moore
CHAPTER 4.
A WEEK GOES by easily amid renewals of friendship, and verifications of the people of “Hail and Farewell,” one after the other — a roll-call in fact, all answering their names except Bailey and Yeats; Bailey died a few months ago of a gun-shot wound, and already Dublin society has forgotten him. His gift was atmosphere. He brought an atmosphere of happiness into the room; a precious gift truly for the conduct of life, but one so easily appreciated that it is forgotten as easily as the passage of a pleasant breeze coming and going in and out of a garden. Yeats now lives, or is going to live, in a ruined castle in Galway, for the sake of the spectres — such is the report, which, however untrue, is an acceptable explanation of his strange choice of dwelling — himself having become a myth from too long brooding on myths, and myths being, if not spectres, at least of the same kin. Another report avers that his retirement may be attributed to his belief that the poet should apply himself as soon as his poetry is written to the weaving of a “Poetic Personality.” And at once the ruined castle rises before our eyes, for has it not been said that a poet must live in a cabin or a castle, these two dwellings representing the poles of humanity? Yeats’ belief in his relationship to the Duke of Ormond precludes the cabin, and piecing the two reports, or shall we say the two myths, together, we seem to be justified in imagining him in the vaulted hall of the castle of Bally lee — weaving the myths that will preserve his works when all life has departed from them, passing the shuttle to and fro, weaving industriously, Lady Gregory standing by, distaff in hand.
And these twain visionaries recall my old friend, the Comte Villiers de L’lsle Adam, for Villiers believed himself to be the heir to the great name, and the conviction strikes root immediately that he would have welcomed Yeats as a dream for himself or as a subject of a story for others, summarising our poet in some melancholy and ornate phrase spoken by Yeats as he rises from the loom of poetic personality one sultry summer afternoon before going down to Coole. Though my heart be empty of all else, he would say, his eyes wandering over the escutcheoned walls (escutcheoned in his imagination), though my heart be empty of all else, I bear in it at least the sterile glory of many forgotten dukes.
CHAPTER 5.
YOU ARE GOING by the Limited Mail, sir? the porter asked overnight, and I answered that I hoped there would be in me the needful strength of will to turn out of bed before six; but it was doubtful. No fear of that, sir, the porter replied; I’ll get you up, and if you leave here at twenty minutes to seven you’ll be in time. But it will be as well to order the car for half-past six; these carmen are always late and the horses on the night shift are a sorry lot, hardly able to pull the cars behind them.
There’ll be neither breakfast nor bath, I murmured, and went to my room dreading the mental struggle that would befall me in the morning.
Nor was it a less tough one than I had imagined it, and had not the porter stood over my bed I should have slept for hours. My father was the same before me, one to whom an early rise was intolerable, only to see a horse gallop could he manage it.
At last I threw my legs out of bed and began to seek my clothes. The worst moment is over, I said, and at seven minutes past the half-hour a car arrived drawn by a horse that only a goat-herd could distinguish from a goat; and seeing that his horse, for it was one, did not inspire belief in his power to reach the station in time, the driver began to condone his appearance, saying it was the worst part of him, and amid many assurances we drove away, leaving the last glimpse of the flowering green behind us when we turned into Grafton Street, a desert as all streets are at seven in the morning. But the emptiness of Grafton Street surprises us more than the emptiness of any other street, so accustomed are we to see it filled with thronging passengers. Its faint descent tried the power of the horse to keep back the car, and so feeble were his totterings that I began to fear we should miss the train, but forgot my fears as soon as we emerged from its narrowness, for the beauty of the day appeared in a delightful blueness overhead and in shadows falling westward from the pillared porticoes of the noble bank. How delightful it will be in Kildare, I said to myself, if we catch the train, and to the jarvey, that no more than a dozen minutes remained before the train started.
We’ll be there in time, he said, and I contemplated once more the destruction of many a back-yard. A more than usually foolish revolution, I muttered; truly Catholic, I added, and was about to beg the jarvey not to whip his horse so cruelly, but before the words could be spoken the thought crossed my mind that if he did not urge his heavily laden horse up the hill-side I should be confronted to-morrow with the necessity of rising at six. It behooves him to suffer, I said. We suffer differently, but we all suffer. It is my suffering to witness his; he will forget but I shall remember; and as soon as we arrive at the station I applied myself to the elucidation of many irrelevant matters connected with my journey westward, and helped by the almost impenetrable dullness of the railway porter succeeded in ridding myself of all memory of the scarecrow horse. But no sooner had I comfortably settled myself in a seat than his pitifulness reappeared, and remained with me till the train had rolled some little distance into the country, and it might have remained with me all the way to Mullingar if a sudden memory of the beautiful flowering country we should soon be passing through had not blotted out his unwelcome image. After all, I said, we arrived, and by getting me to the station he achieved his destiny; and with the same industry that he applied himself to his, let me apply myself to mine, which is clearly to recall the city as it was all last week engarlanded with chestnut, laburnum and lilac bloom; yes, and with hawthorn trees leaning over every railing. White, pink and rose hawthorn, one as beautiful as the other, I continued, and fell to thinking how last year travelling through the same country it had pleased me to imagine myself in the part of Paris! with this difference, that my trouble was not to discriminate between three beautiful women, but three beautiful trees — a more difficult task than the one accomplished on Mount Ida.... The white may be the beautifulest, but which smells the sweeter, the pink or the rose? I asked myself. And mile after mile of hawthorn bloom passed by unobserved, the reality blotted out by the potent remembrance of the hawthorns that had bloomed ten years ago in my garden in Ely Place. The blooms in memory are always sweeter than the blooms on the bough, I said; and on awaking fully from my meditation, I saw.
A country passing by me and in such incomparable bloom that it seemed like madness. The madness of May, I said, for the 6th of June is as much May as June, and on this remark or aphorism, whichever it may be, my thoughts fled away like the cuckoo at the end of June. Whither they went I know not, nor do I know whither the cuckoo goes or the salmon, only that bird and fish return, and that our thoughts return too, sometimes bearing in their beaks new thoughts, if thoughts have beaks, and who will say they have not, and sharp claws.
And presently my thought of May returned, bearing in its beak a memory of Rossetti: one from the Blessed Damozel, the lady who leaned out of heaven with three lilies lying asleep along her bended arm — a gift for the Virgin. A better gift for the Virgin would have been a wreath of hawthorn, one that would have reminded her more intimately of the beauty of earth than the lilies. An oversight on the part of Rossetti.... But, no, there are no hawthorns in ruined Galilee, and as likely as not that is why everybody was so discontented with his life in Galilee and failed to understand that our life is beautiful because it is transitory, and that the joys of heaven would weary us before we had been listening to sonatas for ten thousand years. But if there had been hawthorn in Galilee all might have been different, March in Galilee is May in England and had there been hawthorn in Galilee I should have noticed it at once.
And then, a little cross with myself for thinking of Galilee, a country that is responsible for more wasted time than any other, I said: the white, no doubt, is more beautiful than the pink, and yet the pink tree that has just fled past is extraordinarily beautiful. I remember it from last year, and in my memory it e
xhales a more subtle scent than perhaps the white. But am I sure that this preference is not a prejudice sprung from the fact that a large tree of pink grew in my garden when I lived in Upper Ely Place? And once again I fell to thinking of the hawthorns that had bloomed for me ten years ago in my garden. The blooms of yester year haunt us, I cried, and awaking suddenly I saw a country passing, beautiful as antiquity. And my thoughts turning to Thessaly I said:
Thessaly is too hot in June. Its nymphs and fauns, and Silenus, should migrate here at the end of April and tempt the druids of Maynooth out of their celibacy; and then, imagination taking the place of reason once again, I began to believe that a nymph would reveal herself to me if I were to keep my thoughts fixed on those dim sunny fields passing by, and sure enough I very soon espied one reclining in a drift of haze that curled and went out along the edge of a pond.
Goddess or cloud, God knows which, I cried, and asked myself if I should allow the occasion to pass without stopping the train to inquire, for to let such an occasion pass without inquiry, I meditated, would be folly surely. But, alas, at the moment of starting to my feet to pull the cord of communication I foresaw the guard’s face and the faces of many passengers agleam with various anger at the only worthy reason ever given by a passenger for the stopping of an express train — that he had been vouchsafed a glimpse of a goddess in a garment of drifting haze. And almost as distinctly as the altercation between me and the guard, the scene in the police court appeared to me, with myself in the dock pleading justification for my action, saying, and saying well, if a man may not stop the Limited Mail to see goddesses in drifting haze, for what may he stop the train? A belief in goddesses being essential for the maintenance of the world. If that were so the world would have ended long ago, his Worship raps out. But your Worship saw a goddess in the haze. Never saw such a thing in my life, his Worship answers. But I thought that your Worship married beautiful Miss Lynch from Partry. At which remark a cloud gathers in his Worship’s face, and he declares that I am wasting the time of the Court, but not before I succeed in interjecting: your vision vanished like mine, and am I to understand that because yours endured a little longer than mine I am to be condemned to the cells while you go scot free?
Forty shillings or a month, the magistrate cries, inwardly pleased but unable to escape from the toils of the law.
And in such characteristic Irish fashion the adventure would have ended: forty shillings or a month! But forty shillings have often been wasted on things as unimportant as the stopping of a train to see a goddess. My thought melted into a dream of the subsequent assemblage of the passengers, many of whom have been prone to search the hedge-rows. Too late, too late, I cried; my goddess is now many hundred yards behind me... drunken up perchance by the sun.
As if to console me, a poem arose out of my very legitimate despondency, and in it Pan as he went down the Vale of Mænalus singing pursues a maiden and discovers a flute in one of the reeds into which he could pour his grief; and then I fell to thinking of the name Mænalus, but Mænalus is not a more beautiful name than Avoca; Greece lacks our incomparable haze — the only fitting garment for a goddess if she be not wholly ungarmented. Ah! if it were not for our incurable love of druids, Ireland would be teeming with nymphs and dryads. The last one was Etain, and we are told that the sweetness of her legs pierced one of our elder poets to the heart, and Mary whom we received in exchange has no legs, being a virgin, or if she had any, nobody saw them, not even her husband, so does a majority in this county aver, whereas the majority in the county I have come from says he did. An important question truly and one not less difficult to decide than the hawthorn.
CHAPTER 6.
I SUPPOSE THE climate is answerable for the virginity of our goddess, I said to myself, and the words might have given rise to some pleasant fancies if my eyes had not caught sight of a man in gaiters following a path through a field in which a long herd stood up to their knees in buttercups: one of our immemorial herdsmen, I said, and some thought concerning him expressed in Salve came upon me suddenly, and for a long time I sat chewing the cud of it, that the Irish herdsman divined the steak in the bullock’s rump with the same intuitive perception as the Greek did the statue in the marble. A long passage followed, one of my best, the point of it being that the Irish should be content with having produced the finest herdsmen in the world. And the witticism was continued into the sauce, for though the Irish had discovered the steak the sauce Bernaise was beyond the genius of the race.
A truly admirable appreciation of one’s own country and countrymen, and after having enjoyed it I cannot do else than lose myself in admiration of the man’s measured gait, and approve his project, which doubtless was to change the pasture of his herds. And having chosen the field in which his cattle are to graze, I said, he will stand leaning over a gate till dinner-time, an unending exemplar of Ireland. He was in the beginning and ever shall be, world without end. A race, I continued, that does not change; and at that moment an indolent priest was being driven swiftly along a pleasant road bending round a hill-side, and I added: he, too, is an exemplar of the Irish race as it always was and always will be, world without end. And whither goes he? To a convent to shrive some helpless nuns, or is he on his way to Maynooth, where the meals are in accordance with long ecclesiastical usage; or to some rich farmer’s house chosen by him for stations?
The priest to his nuns and I to my reveries in a train that jolts and hurtles along at a fine rate by the side of an old canal full of reeds and rushes. We passed a lock-house seemingly in ruins. MacCan, I said, believed in the revival of the waterways, but since his death the canals have fallen into idleness, which is a pity, for the life of the canal is in keeping with our unaccentuated climate. But the ruin of the canal is not complete, I cried; for yonder comes a horse urged forward by a sapling freshly torn from the hedge. In Ireland nothing disappears, all is that ever was; and pleased with the raciness of my thoughts, my eyes return to the landscape. England, I said, does not fade out of Ireland until we reach Mullingar, and after leaving Mullingar behind us we pass many spots almost undistinguishable from English scenery, for wherever the land rises out of bog rich fields begin and the trees emerge like vapours. Corot should have painted an Ireland. But why should his name have come into my mind, for I am weary of spinnage and vapour.
A lonely country, sir. The words startled me, and I could only answer my fellow-traveller: yes, sir, a lonely country. But gathering from his face that he seemed to expect something more from me than a mere repetition of the words he used, I roused into some sort of mental activity. The cattle aren’t lonely; they’re always in company like the monks and the nuns, I said, for in Ireland the first thought in a railway carriage is — am I travelling with a Protestant or a Catholic? His smile told me he was a Protestant, and from his speech and appearance I began to guess a landlord’s agent, a man between fifty and sixty, tall and lean, reminding me of Don Quixote, and the Don’s appearance is but the symbol of the Don’s credulous soul; whosoever has been given the body has received the soul, or some part of it; and it was therefore grateful to me to hear before we reached Mullingar that he, too, had projects for the advancement of Ireland, all of which I had heard before, but which he seemed to exalt a little in the telling. And giving my ear to him I heard again the project for the establishment of factories for the compression of peat, which when compressed would yield as much heat as coal; with compressed fuel Ireland will become a great industrial nation, he said, and I answered that Ireland is so winning among her ruins that it would be a pity to reform her. She has rejected so many reformations that it would be a pity if she now — I was going to say if she put off her Catholic rags and appeared in clean Pauline linen; but a cloud seemed to gather in my fellow-traveller’s face, and instead of continuing my native protestantism, with a deft turn of words I whisked the conversation back to economic difficulties and professed sympathy with the building of piers, the laying down of oyster beds and a tunnel under the sea uni
ting Scotland with Ireland. Portpatrick and Galway, I said, could be connected by a line of railway and the bay thereby turned into a great Transatlantic port. A big job, he said. True, quite true, I answered, but realisable in the end. It might, however, be better to begin by setting up a bacon factory in Castlebar.
Every pig breeder, he said, could take a ten-pound share, and in Mayo, he continued, every cottager owns a pig. But can cottagers afford a ten-pound share? I interjected; and will you guarantee a minimum price for the pigs? and of all is the Mayo pig the kind of pig that produces the London rasher?
