by George Moore
I laid a hand on Edward’s shoulder and another on Yeats’s, and looked into their faces. Now, Edward — Well, all I can say is, the Irish people liked my play, and it wouldn’t have been listened to in London ... any more than Ibsen is.
And what about Yeats?
His would have been listened to if he had not put things into it which shocked people’s feelings. I know there are many calling themselves Christians who are only Christians in name, but it is very hurtful for those who really believe to have to listen to lines.... And Edward stopped, fearing to wound Yeats’s feelings.
He bade us goodbye soon after. Perhaps he is going to Vespers, I said. A good fellow — an excellent one, and a man who would have written well if his mother hadn’t put it into his head that he had a soul. The soul is a veritable pitfall. I’m afraid, Yeats, you’ll find it difficult to persuade him to buy the theatre for you. He would live in terror lest you should let him in for some heresy.
IV
I READ AN historic entertainment in the appearance of the waiters; they were more clean and spruce and watchful than usual; the best shirts had been ordered from the laundry, every button-hole held its stud, shoes had been blacked scrupulously; and the head waiter, a tall, thin man, confident in his responsibilities, pointed out the way to the cloak-room, and in subdued voice told us that we should find Mr Gill in the ante-room.
And we found him receiving his guests, blithe and alert as a bird in the spring-time. All his seriousness had vanished from him, he stroked his beard and he laughed, and his eye brightened as he told of his successes ... the extreme ends of Dublin had yielded to his persuasiveness, and under the same roof-tree that night Trinity College and the Gaelic League would dine together. Hyde was coming, and John O’Leary, the Fenian leader, was over yonder. And looking through the evening coats and shirt-fronts, I caught sight of the patriarchal beard that had bored me years ago in Paris, for John would talk about Ireland when I wanted to talk about Ingres and Cabanel. All the same I went to him, and he angered me for the last time by asking for news of Marshall, my friend in the Confessions, instead of speaking to me about the Gaelic literary movement. As tedious as ever, I said, escaping from him; and seeing nobody who might amuse me, I returned to Gill to reproach him for not having asked his guests to bring their females with them.
At these public repasts there is nothing to distract our eyes from the food but the eternal feminine, and when that is absent, the eternal masculine confronts us shamelessly in his office clothes; and looking round I said to myself not an opera-hat among them; and lowering my eyes, I noticed that some of the men had not even taken the trouble to change their shoes. Perhaps they haven’t even changed their socks, and to pass the time away I began to wonder how it was that women could take any faint interest in men. Every kind seemed present: men with bellies and without, men with hair on their heads, bald men, short-legged men and long-legged men; but looking up and down the long tables, I could not find one that might inspire passion in a woman; no one even looked as if he would like to do such a thing. And with this sad thought in my head I sought for my chair, and found it next to a bald, obese professor, with Yeats on the other side, next to Gill, at the head of the table. It is always nice to see dear Edward, and he was not far away, on Gill’s left hand, as happy as a priest at a wedding. He sat, chewing his cud of happiness, a twig from The Heather Field; slightly triumphant, I thought, over Yeats, whose Countess Cathleen had not been received quite so favourably.
Beside me, on my right, was a young man, clean-shaven and demure; the upper lip was long, but the nose and eyes and forehead were delicately cut, like a cameo, and his bright auburn hair was brushed over his white forehead, making a line that a girl might have envied if she were inclined to that style of coiffure. He answered my questions, but he answered them somewhat dryly. Yeats would not speak, but sat all profile, like a drawing on an Egyptian monument, thinking his speech; and it was not until we had eaten the soup and the fish, and a glass of champagne had been drunk, that I discovered the young man at my right elbow to be full of information about the people present.
The very person, I said, I stand in need of. And that is why Gill put him next to me. So I began to speak of our host, of his kind and genial nature. My young friend knew him (he was one of the writers on the Express), and seemed to be much amused at my story of Gill’s plan to introduce Continental culture into Dublin. As we talked of Gill our eyes went towards him, and we admired in silence, thinking how like he was to some portraits we had seen in the Louvre, or in the National Gallery — we were not sure which.
Bellini, I think.
My young friend had some knowledge of the art of painting, for he corrected me, saying that Giorgione was the first designer of that round brow, shaded by pretty curling hair. I believe you’re right, I said. It was he who started the fashion for a certain wisdom which Gill seems to have caught admirably, and which, though enhanced by, is not dependent upon the beauty of a blond and highly trimmed beard.
Did you see a portrait of Gill done before he grew his beard?
I answered that I had not seen it, surprised a little by the question. My young friend smiled.
He rarely shows that photograph now. Perhaps he has destroyed it.
But at what are you smiling?
Well, you see, he answered, Gill was nothing before he grew his beard. His face is so thin, and falls away at the chin so quickly, that no one credited him with any deep and commanding intelligence.
The round, prettily drawn eyes have nothing to recommend them. One couldn’t call them crafty eyes.
My young friend smiled, but as I was about to ask him why he was smiling. Gill addressed some remarks to me over Yeats’s head, disturbing, I feared, some wondrous array of imagery collecting in the poet’s mind. The professor I had perforce to fall back upon, and I succeeded in engaging his attention with a remark regarding Tennyson’s proneness to write the sentiment of his time rather than the ideas of all time.
But his language is always so exquisite. You must know the line — something you know: Doves murmuring in immemorial elms, not since Milton, and I am not sure that I don’t prefer Tennyson’s imagery, excepting that immortal line: Blazed in the forehead of the morning sky. Give me, said the professor, the sublime diction. You can have all the rest — the sentiments, the ideas, the thoughts ... all. You remember that wonderful line when he addresses Virgil, that ... that ... (I waited for the rare adjective), that excellent line. The waiter interposed a bottle between us. This excellent wine goes very well with the entrée. He was then called into the conversation which Gill was holding with Edward, regarding the necessity of founding a school of acting, and I found myself free to return to the young gentleman on my right.
You mentioned just now that Gill’s beard was the origin of Gill.
Lowering his voice, my young neighbour said:
I’m afraid the story is difficult to tell here.
Nobody is listening; everybody is engaged in different conversations.
Gill is not very strong, and has often to go away in quest of health. It was in Paris that it happened.
We were interrupted many times by the waiters, and our neighbours, seeing that we were amused, sought to share our amusement. All the same, the young man succeeded in telling me how, at the end of a long convalescence, Gill had entered a barber’s shop, his beard neglected, growing in patches, thicker on one side of the face than on the other. He fell wearily into a chair, murmuring, La barbe, and exhausted by illness and the heat of the saloon, he did not notice for some time that no one had come to attend upon him. The silence at last awoke him out of the lethargy or light doze into which he had slipped, and looking round it seemed to him that his dream had come true; that the barber had gone: that he was alone, for some reason unaccountable, in the shop. A little alarmed he turned in his chair, and for a moment could find nobody. The barber had retreated to the steps leading to the ladies’ saloon, whence he could study his customer intent
ly, as a painter might a picture. As Gill was about to speak the barber struck his brow, saying, Style Henri Quatre, and drew his scissors from the pocket of his apron.
Gill does not remember experiencing any particular emotion while his beard was being trimmed. It was not until the barber gave him the glass that he felt the sudden transformation — felt rather than saw, for the transformation effected in his face was little compared with that which had happened in his soul. In the beginning was the beard, and the beard was with God, who in this case happened to be a barber; and glory be to the Lord and to his shears that a statesman of the Renaissance walked that day up the Champs Élysées, his thoughts turning — and we think not unnaturally — towards Machiavelli. A Catholic Machiavelli is not possible, nor an Alexander the Sixth, a Caesar Borgia, nor a Julius the Second; but if one is possessed of the sense of compromise, difficulties can be removed, and Gill’s alembicated mind soon discovered that it was possible to conceive Machiavelli with all that great statesman’s bad qualities removed and the good retained. As he walked it seemed to him all the learning of his time had sprung up in him. He found himself like the great men of the sixteenth century, well versed in the arts of war and peace, a patron of the arts and sciences.
But at that moment reality thrust itself forward, shattering his dream. Gill had been an active Nationalist — that is to say, he had driven about the country on outside cars, occasionally stopping at crossroads to tell little boys to throw stones at the police; in other words, he had been a campaigner, and had felt that he was serving his country by being one. But since he had set eyes on his new beard the conviction quickened in him that he would be able to serve his country much better by dispensing his prodigal wisdom than by engaging in the rough-and-tumble fights of party politics. The inside of gaols were well enough for such simple minds as Davitt and O’Brien, but not for a mind grown from a Henri Quatre beard; and remembering the celebrated saying of him who had worn the beard four hundred years ago — Paris vaut bien une messe-Gill muttered in his beard, Ma barbe vaut mieux que le plan.
About the time of Gill’s beard Horace Plunkett was engaged in laying the foundations of what he believed to be a great social reformation in Ireland. But Plunkett, Gill reflected as he walked gaily, with an alert step and brightening eye, did not know Ireland. A Protestant can never know Ireland intimately. Such was Gill’s conviction, and there was the still deeper conviction that he was the only man who could advise Plunkett, and save him from the many pitfalls into which he was sure to tumble. All that Plunkett required was something of the genial spirit of the Renaissance. Again beguiled by the delicious temptation, Gill paused in his walk. Plunkett could not associate himself with one who had been engaged in the Plan of Campaign. The Plan had faded with the trimming of his beard; and he could hardly believe that he had been connected with it, except, indeed, as a romantic incident in his career. The only difficulty — if it were a difficulty — was to find a means of explaining his repudiation of the Plan satisfactorily. The Irish atmosphere is dense, and to tell the people that it had all gone away with the shaggy ends of his beard would hardly satisfy them. But in Ireland there is always Our Holy Mother the Church, and the Church had quite lately condemned the Plan. Gill is a faithful son of the Church. Of course, of course. The error into which he had fallen had gone with the shaggy beard, and with his trimmed beard, and his trimmed soul, Gill appeared in Dublin, henceforth known to his friends as Tom the Trimmer.
An excellent story that probably started from some remark of Gill’s, and was developed as it passed from mouth to mouth. A piece of folk. If a story be told three or four times by different people it becomes folk. You have, no doubt, stories of the same kind about everybody?
This last remark was injudicious, for I seemed to frighten my neighbour, and I had some difficulty in tempting him into gossip again.
Are there any other contributors to the Express present?
Yes, he said, yielding again to his temptation to talk. T. W. Rolleston. Do you see that handsome man a head above everybody else, sitting a little way down the table?
Yes, I said. And what a splendid head and shoulders! Byron said he would give many a poem for Southey’s, and Southey’s were not finer than that man’s.
As if guessing that somebody was admiring him, Rolleston looked down the table, and I saw how little back there was to his head.
He lacks something, my neighbour said; and I was told how Rolleston came down every evening to write his leader in a great cloak and in leggings if it were raining, bringing with him his own pens and ink and blotting-pad, all the paraphernalia of his literature.
A man like that writing leaders! I said. Nothing short of an Odyssey, one would have thought —
So many people did think. He was a great scholar at Trinity, and in Germany he translated, or helped to translate, Walt Whitman into German. When he came back, the prophet, the old man, John O’Leary, whom you told me you knew in France, the ancient beard at the end of the room, accepted him as Parnell’s successor.
And now he is writing leaders for the Express! How did the transformation happen?
O’Grady tells a story —
Who is O’Grady? I asked, enjoying the gossip hugely; and my neighbour drew my attention to a grey, round-headed man, and after looking at him for some time I said: How lonely he seems among all these people! Does he know nobody? Or is he very unpopular?
He is very little read, but we all admire him. He is our past; and my neighbour told me that O’Grady had written passages that for fiery eloquence and energy were equal to any that I would find in Anglo-Irish literature. Only —
Only what? I asked.
And he told me that O’Grady’s talent reminded him of the shaft of a beautiful column rising from amid rubble-heaps. After a pause, during which we mused on the melancholy spectacle, I said:
Rolleston — you were going to tell me about Rolleston.
O’Grady tells that he found Rolleston a West Briton, but after a few lessons in Irish history Rolleston donned a long black cloak and a slouch hat, and attended meetings, speaking in favour of secret societies, persuading John O’Leary to look upon him as one that might rouse the country, going much further than I had ever dreamed of going, O’Grady said. His extreme views frightened me a little, but when I met him next time and began to speak to him about the Holy Protestant Empire, he read me a paper on Imperialism.
And when did that happen?
About ten years ago, a Messiah that punctured while the others were going by on inflated tyres ... poor Rolleston punctured ten years ago.
And we talked of Messiahs, going back and back until we arrived at last at Krishna, the second person of the Hindoo Trinity, whose crucifixion, it is related, happened between heaven and earth.
Two beautiful poems and a great deal of scholarship which he doesn’t know what to do with. How very sad! And looking at him, I said: A noble head and shoulders. What a good tutor he would make if I had children!
So from one remark to another I was led into saying spiteful things about men whom I did not know, and who were destined afterwards to become my friends.
Tell me about some of your other contributors — about the professor who writes Latin and Greek verses as well as he writes English. He reviews books for you, doesn’t he?
Yes; but I beg of you to speak a little lower, or he’ll hear you.
No, no; he’s talking with Gill and Yeats.
Gill is terrified, my young friend said, lest Yeats should speak disrespectfully of Trinity College. He has taken a great deal of trouble about this dinner, and believes that it will unite the country in a common policy if Yeats doesn’t split it up on him again.
At that moment the professor turned to me, and asked me to lunch the following day at Trinity, impressing upon me the necessity of coming down a little early, in time to have just a glass of wine before lunch. His doctor had forbidden him all stimulants in the morning, and by stimulants he understood whisky. But a bottle
of wine, he said, was a tenuous thing, and he would like to avail himself of my visit to Dublin to drink one with me. I could see that we had now struck upon his interest in life, and with a show of interest which he had not manifested in Virgil’s poetry, he said:
Just a glass of Marsala, the ancient Lilybaeum. You know, the grape is so abundant there that they never think of mixing it with bad brandy.
At that moment somebody spoke to me, and when I had answered a few questions I heard the professor saying that he had gone down for lunch to some restaurant. Nothing much today, John. Just a dozen of oysters and a few cutlets, and a quart of that excellent ale.
Again my attention was distracted by a waiter pressing some ice-pudding upon me, and I lost a good deal of information regarding the professor’s arduous day. As soon, however, as I had helped myself I heard a story, whether it related to yesterday or some previous time I cannot say.
After that I had nothing at all, until something brought me to the cupboard, and there, behold! I found a bottle of lager. I said: Smith has been remiss. He has mixed the Bass and the lager. But no. They were all full, twelve bottles of Bass and only one of lager; so I took it, as it seemed a stray and lonely thing.
It appears that the professor then continued his annotations of Aristophanes until the light began to fade.
I thought of calling again on Lilybaeum. Really, the more I drink of it the more honest and excellent I find it. When the bottle was finished it was time to return home to dinner, and I learned that the professor’s abstinence was rewarded by the delight he took in the first whisky and soda after dinner.
An excellent old pagan he seems to be, Quintus Horatius Flaccus of Dublin, untroubled by any Messianic idea. Now Hyde — I’ve heard a good deal about him. Can you point him out to me?
