by George Moore
The spring-time! The spring-time! Wake up and see it, Yeats, I cried, poking him up with this objection — that before he met the Indian who had taught him metaphysics his wont was to take pleasure in the otter in the stream, the magpie in the hawthorn and the heron in the marsh, the brown mice in and out of the corn-bin, and the ousel that had her nest in the willow under the bank. Your best poems came to you through your eyes. You were never olfactory. I don’t remember any poems about flowers or flowering trees. But is there anything, Yeats, in the world more beautiful than a pink hawthorn in flower? For all the world like one of those purfled waistcoats that men wore in the sixteenth century. And then, changing the conversation, I told him about an article which I should write, entitled, The Soul of Edward Martyn, if dear Edward should yield to popular outcry and withdraw The Countess Cathleen. But I wouldn’t be walking about all the morning, Yeats; let us sit on a bench where the breeze comes filled with the scent of the gillyflowers. What do you say to coming with me to see one of the old Dublin theatres — a wreck down by the quays? Some say it was a great place once ... before the Union.
The ghost of a theatre down by the quays? I answered.
One does not like to speak of a double self, having so often heard young women say they fear they never can be really in love, because of a second self which spies upon the first, forcing them to see the comic side even when a lover pleads. Yet if I am to give a full account of my visit to Dublin, it seems necessary that I should speak of my self-consciousness, a quality which I share with every human being; but as no two human beings are alike in anything, perhaps my self-consciousness may be different from another’s. The reader will be able to judge if this be so when he reads how mine has been a good friend to me all my life, helping me to while away the tediousness of walks taken for health’s sake, covering my face with smiles as I go along the streets; many have wondered, and never before have I told the secret of my smiling face. In my walks comedy after comedy rises up in my mind, or I should say scene after scene, for there are empty interspaces between the scenes, in which I play parts that would have suited Charles Mathews excellently well. The dialogue flows along, sparkling like a May morning, quite different from any dialogue that I should be likely to find pen in hand, for in my novels I can write only tragedy, and in life play nothing but light comedy, and the one explanation that occurs to me of this dual personality is that I write according to my soul, and act according to my appearance.
The reader will kindly look into his mind, and when the point has been considered he will be in a mood to take up my book again and to read my story with profit to himself.
These unwritten dialogues are often so brilliant that I stop in my walk to repeat a phrase, making as much of it as Mathews or Wyndham would make, regretting the while that none of my friends is by to hear me. All my friends are actors in these unwritten plays, and almost any event is sufficient for a theme on which I can improvise. But never did Nature furnish me with so rich a theme as she did when Yeats and Edward came to see me in Victoria Street. The subject was apparent to me from the beginning, and the reason given for my having agreed to act with them in the matter of the Irish Literary Theatre (the temptation to have a finger in every literary pie) has to be supplemented. There was another, and a greater temptation — the desire to secure a good part in the comedy which I foresaw, and which had for the last three weeks unrolled itself, scene after scene, exceeding any imagination of mine. Who could have invented the extraordinary rehearsals, Miss Vernon and her psaltery? Or the incident of Yeats’s annunciation that Edward had consulted a theologian in London? My anger was not assumed; Yeats told me he never saw a man so angry; how could it be otherwise, ready as I am always to shed the last drop of my blood to defend art? Yet the spectacle of Edward and the theologian heresy-hunting through the pages of Yeats’s plays was behind my anger always, an irresistible comicality that I should be able to enjoy some day. And then the telegram saying that the sceptre of intelligence had passed from London to Dublin. Who could have invented it? Neither Shakespeare nor Cervantes. Nor could either have invented Yeats’s letter speaking of the Elizabethan audiences at the Antient Concert Rooms. The hissing of The Countess Cathleen had enraged me as every insult upon art must enrage me — my rage was not factitious; all the same, when Yeats spoke to me of his arch-enemy the author of the pamphlet The Cross or the Guillotine, the West Kensington conspirators and the President of the Order of the Golden Door who had expelled the entire society and gone away to Paris, I felt that the comedy was not begotten by any poor human Aristophanes below, but was the invention of the greater Aristophanes above.
We had only just finished the first act of the comedy in which I found myself playing a principal part, and the second act promised to exceed the first, as all second acts should, for I learned from Yeats that The Cross or the Guillotine had been sent to Cardinal Logue, and that a pronouncement was expected from him in the evening papers. If Logue’s opinion was adverse to the play, Yeats was afraid that Edward would not dare to challenge his authority, he being Primate of all Ireland. Further rumours were current in Dublin that morning — the names of the priests to whom Gill had sent the play; it had gone, so it was said, to a Jesuit of high repute as an educationalist, and to a priest of some literary reputation in England. Yeats wouldn’t vouch for the truth of these rumours, but if there were any truth in them he felt sure that Edward would be advised that to stop the play would raise the question whether Catholicism was incompatible with modern literature; and this was a question that no Jesuit would care to raise. The line Yeats said that the pamphlet laid special stress on was: And smiling, the Almighty condemns the lost. I begged for an explanation, for, as we can only conceive the Almighty in the likeness of a man, we must conceive him as smiling or frowning from his Judgment-seat. Frowning, I suppose, would mean that he was angry with those who had disobeyed the commands of his priests, and smiling would mean that he wasn’t thinking of priests at all, which, of course, would be very offensive to a majority of the population. Yeats laughed, but could not be pressed into a theological argument. You look upon theology, Yeats, as a dead science. At that he cawed a little — the kindly caw of the jackdaw it was, and I wondered why he was not more angry with Edward and with the priests.
Ecclesiastical interference is intolerable, I said, trying to rouse him. But if he were indifferent to the fate of his play, if he did not care for literature as much as I thought he did, why was it that he did not notice the spring-time? Have tulips and nursemaids no part in the Celtic Renaissance? It isn’t kind not to look at them; they have come out to be looked at. Do notice the fragrance of the lilacs. Are all of you Irish indifferent to the spring-time? Upon my word, it wouldn’t surprise me if the spring forgot one of these days to turn up in Ireland. Yeats, I looked forward to finding Ireland a land of endless enchantment, but so far as I can see at present Ireland isn’t bigger than a priest’s back.
We passed out of the gates and walked up the sunny pavement; girls were going by in pretty frocks. That one, Yeats. How delightful she is in her lavender dress.
To exaggerate one’s ignorance of Dublin seemed to me to be parcel of the character of the returned native, and though I knew well enough that we were walking down Grafton Street, Yeats was asked what street we were in. When he mentioned the name, I told him the name was familiar, but the street was changed, or my memory of it imperfect. For such parade — for parade it was — I have no fault to find with myself, nor for stopping Yeats several times and begging of him to admire the rich shadows that slumbered in the brick entanglements, making an ugly street seem beautiful. But I cannot recall, without frowning disapproval, the fact that I compared the sky at the end of Grafton Street to a beautiful sky by Corot. The sky I mean rises above yellow sand and walls, blue slates, and iron railings; and these enhance its beauty very much in the same way as the terra-cotta shop fronts in Grafton Street enhanced the loveliness of the pale blue sky that I saw the day I walked down Grafton
Street with Yeats. To exalt art above nature has become a platitude; and resolving never to be guilty of this platitude again, I asked Yeats if the grey walls at the end of the street were Trinity College, and standing on my toes insisted on looking through the railings and admiring the greenswards, and the trees, and the cricket-match in progress. Yeats was willing to talk of Trinity, but not to look at it; and though I have no taste or knowledge in architecture, it was pleasant, even with Yeats, to admire the Provost’s House and the ironwork over the gateway, and the beautiful proportions of the courtyard. It was pleasant to allow one’s enthusiasm to flow over like a mug of ale at the sight of the front of Trinity, to contrast the curious differences in style that the Bank presented to the College — the College severe and in straight lines, the Bank all in curves.
The Venus de Milo facing the Antinous, I cried.
Yeats laughed a somewhat chilling approval as is his wont; all the same, he joined me in admiration of the curve of the parapet cutting the sky, the up-springing statues breaking the line and the beautiful pillared porticoes up and down the street, the one in Westmorland Street reminding me of a walk with my father when I was a child of ten. In those times a trade in umbrellas was permitted under the great portico, and though it could interest Yeats nowise, I insisted on telling him that I remembered my father buying an umbrella there, and that my affection for Dublin was wilting for lack of an umbrella-stand under the portico. Impossible to interest Yeats in that umbrella my father bought in the ‘sixties, he seemed absorbed in some project on the other side of the street, and when the opposite pavement was reached he began to tell me of a friend of his, a clerk in a lawyer’s office who I gathered was a revolutionary of some kind (after business hours), a follower of Miss Gonne. I refused, however, to listen to his account in Miss Gonne’s prophecies or in the mild-eyed clerk on the third landing, who said he would join us on the quays when he had finished drafting a lease.
The quays were delightful that day, and I wished Yeats to agree with me that there is nothing in the world more delightful than to dawdle among seagulls floating to and fro through a pleasant dawdling light. But how is it, Yeats, you can only talk in the evening by the fire, that yellow hand drooping over the chair as if seeking a harp of apple-wood? Yeats cawed; he could only caw that morning, but he cawed softly, and my thoughts sang so deliciously in my head that I soon began to feel his ideas to be unnecessary to my happiness, and that it did not matter how long the clerk kept us waiting. When he appeared he and Yeats walked on together, and I followed them up an alley discreetly remaining in the rear, fearing that they might be muttering some great revolutionary scheme. I followed them up a staircase full of dust, and found myself to my great surprise in an old library. Very like a drawing by Phiz, I said to myself, bowing, for Yeats and the clerk were bowing apologies for our intrusion to twenty or more shabby-genteel scholars who sat reading ancient books under immemorial spider webs. At the end of the library there was another staircase, and we ascended, leaving footprints in the dust. We went along a passage, which opened upon a gallery overlooking a theatre, one that I had no difficulty in recognising as part of the work done in Dublin by the architects that were brought over in the eighteenth century from Italy. The garlands on the ceiling were of Italian workmanship, and the reliefs that remained on the walls. Once the pit was furnished with Chippendale chairs, carved mahogany chairs, perhaps gilded chairs in which ladies in high-bosomed dresses and slippered feet had sat listening to some comedy or tragedy when their lovers were not talking to them; and in those times the two boxes on either side of the stage let out at a guinea or two guineas for the evening.
Once supper-parties were served in them, for Abbey Street is only a few yards from the old Houses of Parliament, and even Grattan may have come to this theatre to meet a lady, whom he kissed after giving her an account of his speech. It amused me to imagine the love-scene, the lady’s beauty and Grattan’s passion for her, and I wondered what her end might have been, if she had died poor, without money to buy paint for her cheeks or dye for her hair, old, decrepit, and alone like that fair helm-maker who had lived five hundred years ago in France, or the helm-maker who had lived a thousand years ago in Ireland. She, too, had been sought by kings for her sweet breasts, her soft hair, her live mouth and sweet kissing tongue; and she, too, tells how she fell from love’s high estate into shameful loves at nightfall in the wind and rain. I looked on the plank benches that were all the furniture of this theatre, I thought of the stevedores, the carters, the bullies and their trulls, eating their suppers, listening the while to some farce or tragedy written nobody knows by whom. Grattan’s mistress may have sat among such, eating her bread and onions about eighty years ago. A little later she may have fallen below even the lust of the quays, and in her great want may have written to Grattan some simple letter, and her words were put into my mind. Dear Henry, — You will be surprised to hear from me after all these years. I am sorry to say that I am in very poor health, and distress. I had to leave a good place last Christmas, and have not been able to do much since. I thought you might send me a few shillings. If you do I shall be very grateful and will not trouble you again. Send them for old time’s sake. Do you know that next year it will be forty years since we met for the first time? Looking over an old newspaper, I saw your speech, and am sending this to the House of Commons. My address is 24 Liffey Street; Mrs Mulhall, my proper name.
Grattan would read this letter, hurriedly thrusting it into the brown frock-coat with brass buttons which he wore, and that night, and the next day, and for many a week, the phrase of the old light-o’-love: Do you know that next year it will be forty years since we met for the first time? would startle him, and would recall a beautiful young girl whom he had met in some promenade, listening to music, walking under trees — the Vauxhall Gardens of Dublin — and he would say, Now she is old with grey hair and broken teeth, and he would wonder what was the good place she had lost last Christmas. He would send her something, or tell somebody to give her a few pounds, and then would think no more of her.
Yeats and the clerk were talking about the rebuilding of the theatre, saying that the outer walls seemed sound enough, but all the rest would have to be rebuilt, and I wandered round the gallery wondering what were Yeats’s dreams while looking into the broken decorations and the faded paint. Plays were still acted in this bygone theatre. But what plays? And who were the mummers that came to play them?
As if in answer, a man and two women came on the stage. I heard their voices, happily not the words they were speaking, for at the bottom of my heart a suspicion lingered that it might be The Colleen Bawn they were rehearsing, and not to hear that this was so I moved up the gallery and joined Yeats, saying that we had been among dust and gloom long enough, that I detected drains, and would like to get back into the open air.
We moved out of the theatre, Yeats still talking to the clerk about the price of the building, telling him that the proprietor must never know from whom the offer came; for if he were to hear that there was a project on foot for the establishment of an Irish Literary Theatre his price would go up fifty per cent. The clerk muttered something about a hundred per cent. And if he were to hear that Mr Edward Martyn was as the back of it — Yeats muttered. The clerk interjected that if he were to hear that it would be hard to say what price he would not be putting upon his old walls.
A dried-up, dusty fellow was the clerk, a man about fifty, and I wondered what manner of revolution it might be that he was supposed to be stirring, and how deep was his belief that Maud Gonne would prove herself to be an Irish Joan of Arc; not very much deeper than Yeats’s belief that he would one day become possessed of a theatre in Dublin and produce literary plays in it for a people unendowed with any literary sense whatever. Yet they continued shepherding their dreams up the quays, just as if The Countess Cathleen had not been hissed the night before, as if Cardinal Logue were not about to publish an interdiction, as if Edward were the one that could be recovered f
rom ecclesiasticism.
It is an old philosophy to say that the external world has no existence except in our own minds, and that day on the quays my experience seemed to bear witness to its truthfulness. The houses on the other side, the quays themselves, the gulls floating between the bridges, everything seemed to have put off its habitual reality, to have sloughed it, and to have acquired another — a reality that we meet in dreams; and connecting the external world with the fanciful projects that I heard discussed with so much animation at my elbow, I began to ask myself if I were the victim of an hallucination. Had I come over to Ireland? Else surely Ireland had lost her reality? The problem was an interesting one, and getting it well before me, I began to consider if it might be that through excessive indulgence in dreams for over a hundred years the people had at last dreamed themselves and Ireland away. And this was a possibility that engaged my thoughts as we crossed Carlisle Bridge. I put it to myself in this way: reality can destroy the dream, why shouldn’t the dream be able to destroy reality? And I continued to ponder the theory that had been accidentally vouchsafed to me until the clerk left us, and Yeats said: Even if it should happen that Edward should stop the performances (I don’t think he will), the Irish literary movement will go on.
It’s extraordinary what conviction they can put into their dreams, I thought, and we walked on in silence, for in spite of myself Yeats’s words had revealed to me a courage and a steadfastness in his character that I had not suspected. There is more stuffing in him than I thought for, and I shouldn’t be surprised if he carried something through. What that will be, and how he will carry it, it is impossible to form any idea.
