by George Moore
As my neighbour was about to do so Gill rose up at the head of the table.
Speech time has come, I said.
Gill read a letter from W. E. H. Lecky, who regretted that he was prevented from being present at the dinner, and then went on to say that the other letter was from a gentleman whose absence he was sure was greatly regretted. He alluded to his friend, Mr Horace Plunkett, who was, if he might be allowed to say so, one of the truest and noblest sons that Ireland had ever begotten.
I’ve noticed, I said to my young friend, even within a few days I have been in Ireland, that Ireland is spoken of, not as a geographical, but a sort of human entity. You are all working for Ireland, and I hear now that Ireland begets you; a sort of Wotan who goes about —
Somebody looked in our direction, somebody said Hush! And Gill continued, saying they had had an exciting week in Ireland, one that would be memorable in the history of the country. For the first time Ireland had been profoundly stirred upon the intellectual question. He said he regarded the controversy which Yeats’s play had aroused as one of the best signs of the times. It showed that they had reached at last the end of the intellectual stagnation of Ireland, and that, so to speak, the grey matter of Ireland’s brain was at last becoming active.
Ireland’s brain! Just now it was the loins of Ireland.
Gill’s soul set free flowed on rejoicing in journalistic vapidities that had a depressing effect upon Yeats, who seemed to sink farther and farther into himself. But continuing unabashed his gentle rigmarole, Gill talked on. He for one had always regarded Yeats, broadly, as one who held the sword of the spirit in his hand, and waged war upon the gross host of materialism, and as an Irishman of genius who had devoted a noble enthusiasm to honouring his country by the production of beautiful work.... What should he say of Mr Martyn? There was no controversy about him. Their minds were not occupied by controversy, but with that which must be gratifying to Mr Martyn and to all of them — the knowledge that he had produced a great and original play, and that Ireland had discovered in him a dramatist fitted to take rank among the first in Europe.
I think everybody present thought this eulogy a little exaggerated, for I noticed that everybody hung down his head and looked into his plate, everybody except Edward, who stared down the room unabashed, which, indeed, was the only thing for him to do, for it is better when a writer is praised that he should accept the praise loftily than that he should attempt to excuse himself, a mistake that I fell into at the St James’s Theatre.
Gill continued in the same high key. This gathering of Irishmen, which he thought he might say was representative of the intellect of Dublin, and included men of the utmost differences of opinion on every question which now divided Irishmen, was, to his mind, a symbol of what they were moving towards in this country. He thought they had now reached the stage at which they had begun to recognise the profundity of the saying:
The mills of God grind slowly,
Yet they grind exceeding small.
They all felt, instinctively now, that the time for the reconstruction of Ireland had begun. They stood among the wreckage of old society and felt that out of the ruins they were called upon to build a new Ireland. No matter what their different opinions on various questions might be, they all felt within them a throb of enthusiasm for their new life, their own country, and a determination that, irrespective of different views, they would give their country an intellectual and a political future worthy of all the sufferings that every class and creed of the country had gone through in the past.
You’re disappointed, my young friend said, but if you stay here much longer you’ll get used to hearing people talk about working for Ireland, helping Ireland, selling boots for Ireland, and bullocks too. You’ll find if you read the papers that Gill’s speech will be very much liked — much more than Yeats’s. The comment will be: We want more of that kind of thing in Ireland.
My young friend’s cynicism now began to get upon my nerves, and turning upon him rudely, I said:
Then you don’t believe in the language movement?
His reply not being satisfactory, and his accent not convincing of his Celtic origin, I grew suddenly hostile, and resolved not to speak to him again during dinner; and to show how entirely I disapproved of his attitude towards Ireland, I affected a deep interest in the rest of Gill’s speech, which, needless to say, was all about working for Ireland. Amid the applause which followed I heard a voice at the end of the table saying, We want more of that in Ireland.
My neighbour laughed, but his laughter only irritated me still more against him, and my eyes went to Yeats, who sat, his head drooping on his shirt-front, like a crane, uncertain whether he should fold himself up for the night, and I wondered what was the beautiful eloquence that was germinating in his mind. He would speak to us about the Gods, of course, and about Time and Fate and the Gods being at war; and the moment seemed so long that I grew irritated with Gill for not calling upon him at once for a speech. At length this happened, and Yeats rose, and a beautiful commanding figure he seemed at the end of the table, pale and in profile, with long nervous hands and a voice resonant and clear as a silver trumpet. He drew himself up and spoke against Trinity College, saying that it had always taught the ideas of the stranger, and the songs of the stranger, and the literature of the stranger, and that was why Ireland had never listened and Trinity College had been a sterile influence. The influences that had moved Ireland deeply were the old influences that had come down from generation to generation, handed on by the story-tellers that collected in the evenings round the fire, creating for learned and unlearned a communion of heroes. But my memory fails me; I am disfiguring and blotting the beautiful thoughts that I heard that night clothed in lovely language. He spoke of Cherubim and Seraphim, and the hierarchies and the clouds of angels that the Church had set against the ancient culture, and then he told us that Gods had been brought vainly from Rome and Greece and Judaea. In the imaginations of the people only the heroes had survived, and from the places where they had walked their shadows fell often across the doorways; and then there was something wonderfully beautiful about the blue ragged mountains and the mystery that lay behind them, ragged mountains flowing southward. But that speech has gone for ever. I have searched the newspapers, but the journalist’s report is feebler even than my partial memory. It seemed to me that while Yeats spoke I was lifted up and floated in mid-air.... But I will no longer attempt the impossible; suffice it to say that I remember Yeats sinking back like an ancient oracle exhausted by prophesying.
A shabby, old, and woolly-headed man seated at the head of the second table rose up and said he could not accept Yeats’s defence of the ancient beliefs — Ireland had not begun to be Ireland until Patrick arrived; and he went on till everybody was wearied. Then it was my turn to read the lines I had dictated to the typist.
After some words hastily improvised, some stuttering apology for daring to speak in the land of oratory (perhaps I said something about the misfortune of having to speak after Demosthenes, alluding, of course, to Yeats), I explained the reason for my return to Ireland: how in my youth I had gone to France because art was there, and how, when art died in France, I had returned to England; and now that art was dead in England I was looking out like one in a watch-tower to find which way art was winging. Westward, probably, for all the countries of Europe had been visited by art, and art never visits a country twice. It was not improbable that art might rest awhile in this lonely Northern island; so my native country had again attracted me. And when I had said that I had come, like Bran, to see how they were getting on at home, I spoke of Yeats’s poetry, saying that there had been since the ancient bards poets of merit, competent poets, poets whom I did not propose they should either forget or think less of; but Ireland, so it seemed to me, had no poet who compared for a moment with the great poet of whom it was my honour to speak that night. It was because I believed that in the author of The Countess Cathleen Ireland had recovered her anci
ent voice that I had undertaken the journey from London, and consented to what I had hitherto considered the most disagreeable task that could befall me — a public speech. I told them I would not have put myself to the inconvenience of a public speech for anything in the world except a great poet — that is to say, a man of exceptional genius, who was born at a moment of great national energy. This was the advantage of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, as well as of Yeats. The works of Yeats were not yet, and probably never would be, as voluminous as those of either the French or the English poet, but I could not admit that they are less perfect. I pointed out that the art of writing a blank-verse play was so difficult that none except Shakespeare and Yeats had succeeded in this form.
The assertion, I said, seems extravagant; but think a moment, and you will see that it is nearer the truth than you suppose. We must not be afraid of praising Mr Yeats’s poetry too much; we must not hesitate to say that there are lyrics in the collected poems as beautiful as any in the world. We must, I said, be courageous in front of the Philistine, and insist that the lyric entitled Innisfree is unsurpassable.
And I concluded by saying that twenty years hence this week in Ireland would be looked back upon with reverence. Then things would have falled into their true perspective. The Saxon would have recovered from his bout of blackguardism and would recognise with sorrow that while he was celebrating Mr Kipling, Marie Corelli, Mrs Humphry Ward, and Mr Pinero, the Celt was celebrating in a poor wayside house the idealism of Mr Yeats.
My paper irritated a red-bearded man sitting some way down the table. He wore no moustache, but his beard was like a horse’s collar under his chin, and his face was like glass, and his voice was like the breaking of glass, and everybody wondered why he should speak so sourly about everybody, myself included. Now that Mr Moore thinks that Ireland has raised herself to his level, Mr Moore has been kind enough to return to Ireland, like Bran.
Who is he? I asked Yeats.
Bran is one of the greatest of our legends.
Yes, I know that. But the man who is speaking?
A great lawyer, Yeats answered, who has never quite come into his inheritance.
And the gritty voice went on proclaiming the genius of the Irish race.
But, Yeats, I said, he is talking nonsense. All races are the same; none much better or worse than another: merely blowing dust; the dust higher up the road is no better than the dust lower down.
Yeats said this would be an excellent point to make in my answer, and Gill said that I must get up; but I shook my head, and sat listening to my speech, seeing it quite clearly, and the annihilation of my enemy in every stinging sentence, but without the power to rise up and speak it.
Who would care for France, I whispered to Yeats, if it only consisted of peasants, industrious or idle? The race is anonymous, and passes away if it does not produce great men who do great deeds, and if there be no great contemporary writers to chronicle their valour. What nonsense that man is talking, Yeats! Do get up and speak for me. Tell him that the fields are speechless, and the rocks are dumb. In the last analysis everything depends upon the poet. Tell him that, and that it is for Ireland to admire us, not for us to admire Ireland. Dear me, what nonsense, Yeats! Do speak for me.
Yeats tried to push me on to my feet.
No, no! I said; I will not. My one claim to originality among Irishmen is that I have never made a speech.
Gill waited for me, and looking at him steadily, I said, No; and he answered:
Then I will call upon Hyde.
Hyde, I said; that is the man I want to see.
He had been sitting on my side of the table, and I could catch glimpses only of his profile between the courses when he looked up at the waiter and asked him for more champagne, and the sparkling wine and the great yellow skull sloping backwards had seemed a little incongruous. A shape strangely opposite, I said, to Rolleston, who has very little back to his head. All Hyde’s head seemed at the back, like a walrus, and the drooping black moustache seemed to bear out the likeness. As nothing libels a man a much as his own profile, I resolved to reserve my opinion of his appearance until I had seen his full face. His volubility was as extreme as a peasant’s come to ask for a reduction of rent. It was interrupted, however, by Edward calling on him to speak in Irish, and then a torrent of dark, muddied stuff flowed from him, much like the porter which used to come up from Carnacun to be drunk by the peasants on midsummer nights when a bonfire was lighted. It seemed to me a language suitable for the celebration of an antique Celtic rite, but too remote for modern use. It had never been spoken by ladies in silken gowns with fans in their hands or by gentlemen going out to kill each other with engraved rapiers or pistols. Men had merely cudgelled each other, yelling strange oaths the while in Irish, and I remembered it in the mouths of the old fellows dressed in breeches and worsted stockings, swallow-tail coats and tall hats full of dirty bank-notes which they used to give to my father. Since those days I had not heard Irish, and when Hyde began to speak it an instinctive repulsion rose up in me, quelled with difficulty, for I was already a Gaelic Leaguer. Hyde, too, perhaps on account of the language, perhaps it was his appearance, inspired a certain repulsion in me, which, however, I did not attempt to quell. He looked so like a native Irish speaker; or was it? — and perhaps it was this — he looked like an imitation native Irish speaker; in other words, like a stage Irishman.
Passing without comment over the speeches of the various professors of Trinity, I will tell exactly how I saw Hyde in the ante-room from a quiet corner whence I could observe him accurately. He was talking to a group of friends. Is he always so hilarious, so voluble? I’m so delighted, I could hear him saying to some new-comer, so delighted to see you again. Well, this is really a pleasure.
His three-quarter face did not satisfy me, but, determined to be just, I refused to allow any opinion of him to creep into my mind until I had seen him in full face; and when he turned, and I saw the full face, I was forced to admit that something of the real man appeared in it: I sat admiring the great sloping, sallow skull, the eyebrows like blackthorn bushes growing over the edge of a cliff, the black hair hanging in lank locks, a black moustache streaking the yellow-complexioned face, dropping away about the mouth and chin.
Without doubt an aboriginal, I said.
He spoke with his head thrust over his thin chest, as they do in Connemara. Yet what name more English than Hyde? It must have some to him from some English ancestor — far back, indeed, for it would require many generations of intermarriage with Celtic women to produce so Celtic an appearance.
At this moment my reflections were interrupted by Hyde himself. A common friend brought him over and introduced him to me, and when I told him of my interest in the language movement, he was vociferously enthusiastic, and I said to myself: He has the one manner for everybody.
Some of his writings were known to me — some translations he had made of the peasant songs of Connaught — and I admired them, though they seemed untidily written, the verse and the prose. I had read some of his propagandist literature, and this, too, was of a very untidy kind. So the conclusion was forced upon me that in no circumstance could Hyde have been a man of letters in English or in Irish.
The leader has absorbed the scholar. So perhaps the language movement is his one chance of doing something.
Our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of AE. I had read his articles in the Express, and looking at him I remembered the delight and the wonder which his verse and prose had awakened in me. It had been just as if somebody had suddenly put his hand into mine, and had led me away into a young world which I recognised at once as the fabled Arcady that had flourished before man discovered gold, and forged the gold into a ring which gave him power to enslave. White mist curled along the edge of the woods, and the trees were all in blossom. There were tall flowers in the grass, and gossamer threads glittered in the rays of the rising sun. Under the trees every youth and maiden was engaged in some effusive moment of pe
rsonal love, or in groups they wove garlands for the pleasure of the children, or for the honour of some God or Goddess. Suddenly the songs of the birds were silenced by the sound of a lyre; Apollo and his Muses appeared on the hillside; for in these stories the Gods and mortals mixed in delightful comradeship, the mortals not having lost all trace of their divine origin, and the Gods themselves being the kind, beneficent Gods that live in Arcady.
The paper had dropped from my hands, and I said: Here is the mind of Corot in verse and prose; the happiness of immemorial moments under blossoming boughs, when the soul rises to the lips and the feet are moved to dance. Here is the inspired hour of sunset and it seemed to me that this man must live always in this hour, and that he not only believed in Arcady, but that Arcady was always in him. While we strive after happiness he holds it in his hand, I said, and it was to meet this man that I had come to Ireland as much as to see the plays.
He had refused to dine with us because he did not wish to put on evening clothes, but he had come in afterwards, more attractive than anybody else in the room in his grey tweeds, his wild beard, and shaggy mane of hair. Some friends we seem to have known always, and try as we will we cannot remember the first time we saw them; whereas our first meetings with others are fixed in our mind, and as clearly as if it had happened no later than yesterday, I remember AE coming forward to meet me, and the sweetness of his long grey eyes. He was more winning than I had imagined, for, building out of what Yeats had told me in London, I had imagined a sterner, rougher, ruder man. Yeats had told me how a child, while walking along a country road near Armagh, had suddenly begun to think, and in a few minutes the child had thought out the whole problem of the injustice of a creed which tells that God will punish him for doing things which he never promised not to do.
The day was a beautiful summer’s day, the larks were singing in the sky, and in a moment of extraordinary joy AE realised that he had a mind capable of thinking out everything that was necessary for him to think out for himself, realising in a moment that he had been flung into the world without his consent, and had never promised not to do one thing or to do another. It was hardly five minutes since he had left his aunt’s house, yet in this short space his imagination had shot up into heaven and defied the Deity who had condemned him to the plight of the damned because — he repeated the phrase to himself — he had done something which he had never promised not to do. It mattered nothing what that thing was — the point was that he had made no promise; and his mind embracing the whole universe in one moment, he understood that there is but one life: the dog at his heels and the stars he would soon see (for the dusk was gathering) were not different things, but one thing.
