by George Moore
There is but one life, he had said to himself, divided endlessly, differing in degree, but not in kind; and at once he had begun to preach the new gospel.
I had heard how, when earning forty pounds a year in an accountant’s office, he used to look at his boots, wondering whether they would carry him to the sacred places where the Druids ascended and descended in many-coloured spirals of flame; and fearing that they would not hold together for forty long miles, he had gone to Bray Head and had addressed the holiday folk. I could hear the tumult, the ecstasy of it all! I could see him standing on a bit of wall, his long, thin, picturesque figure with grey clothes drooping about it, his arms extended in feverish gesture, throwing back his thick hair from his face, telling the crowd of the sacred places of Ireland, of the Druids of long ago, and their mysteries, and how much more potent these were than the dead beliefs which they still clung to; I could hear him telling them that the genius of the Gael, awakening in Ireland after a night of troubled dreams, returns instinctively to the belief of its former days, and finds again the old inspiration.
The Gael seeks again the Gods of the mountains, where they live enfolded in a mantle of multitudinous tradition. Once more out of the heart of mystery he had heard the call Come away; and after that no other voice had power to lure — there remained only the long heroic labours which end in the companionship of the Gods.
The reason I have not included any personal description of AE is because he exists rather in one’s imagination, dreams, sentiments, feelings, than in one’s ordinary sight and hearing, and try as I will to catch the fleeting outlines, they escape me; and all I remember are the long, grey, pantheistic eyes that have looked so often into my soul and with such a kindly gaze.
Those are the eyes, I said, that have seen the old Celtic Gods; for certainly AE saw them when he wandered out of the accountant’s office in his old shoes, into Meath, and lay under the trees that wave about the Druid hills; or, sitting on some mountain-side, Angus and Diarmuid and Grania and Deirdre have appeared to him, and Mannanan MacLir has risen out of the surge before him, and Dana the great Earth Spirit has chanted in his ears. If she had not, he could not have written those articles which enchanted me. Never did a doubt cross my mind that these great folk had appeared to AE until he put a doubt into my mind himself, for he not only admitted that he did not know Irish (that might not be his fault, and the Gods might have overlooked it, knowing that he was not responsible for his ignorance), but that he did not believe in the usefulness of the Irish language.
But how, then, am I to believe that the Gods have appeared to you? I answered. That Angus and Diarmuid, Son of Angus, have conversed with you? That Dana the Earth Spirit has chanted in your ears?
The Gods, he answered, speak not in any mortal language; one becomes aware of their immortal Presences.
Granted. But the Gods of the Gael have never spoken in the English language; it has never been spoken by any Gods.
Whatever language the Gods speaks becomes sacred by their use.
That is begging the question. I can’t accept you as the redeemer of the Gael; and I turned from him petulantly, let it be confessed, and asked somebody to introduce me to John Eglinton. I’m vexed, AE, I said, and will go and talk with John Eglinton. For not having ever communed with the Gods he is at liberty to deny their speech.
And John Eglinton told me that it was not from the Gods that he had learned what he knew of the Irish language; that his was only a very slight knowledge acquired from O’Growney and some of Hyde’s folk-tales.
So you’ve learned Irish enough to read it? And I grew at once interested in John Eglinton, and pressed him to continue his studies, averring that I had not time to learn the language myself. And now what is your opinion about it as a medium of literary expression?
Before he could answer me I had asked him if he did not think that English was becoming a lean language, and all I remember is that in the middle of the discussion John Eglinton dropped the phrase: The Irish language strikes me as one that has never been to school.
Of course it hasn’t. How could it? But is a language the worse for that?
We began to argue how much a language must be written in before it becomes fitted for literary usage, and during the discussion I studied John Eglinton, wondering why he had said that the Irish language had never been to school. There was something of the schoolmaster in his appearance and in his talk. The articles he had published in the Express were written in a style of his own; but he had no valiant ideas like AE, and AE had cast a spell, and only his eloquence could appeal to me. John Eglinton had seemed to me dryly a writer, and I could only regard as intolerable that an editor should be found so tolerant as to allow John Eglinton to contravene AE, and remembering all this, I noticed a thin, small man with dark red hair growing stiffly over a small skull; and I studied the round head and the high forehead, and the face somewhat shrivelled and thickly freckled.
A gnarled, solitary life, I said, lived out in all the discomforts inherent in a bachelor’s lodging, a sort of lonely thorn tree. One sees one sometimes on a hillside and not another tree near it. The comparison amused me, for John Eglinton argued with me in a thorny, tenacious way, and remembering his beautiful prose, I said: The thorn breaks to flower, and continued to discover analogies. A sturdy life has the thorn, bent on one side by the wind, looking as if sometimes it had been almost strangled by the blast. John Eglinton, too, looked as if he had battled; and I am always attracted by those who have battled, and who know how to live alone. Looking at him more attentively, I said: If he isn’t a schoolmaster he is engaged in some business: an accountant’s office, perhaps; and the tram takes him there every morning at the same hour. A bachelor he certainly is, and an inveterate one; but not because all women appeal to him, or nearly all; rather because no woman appeals to him much, not sufficiently to induce him to change his habits. He sits in the tram, his hands clasped over his stick, and no flowered skirt rouses him from his literary reverie.
So did I see him in my thoughts going into Dublin in the morning, without a feminine trouble in his life. If there had ever been such a trouble, it must have been a faint one, a little surprise to himself as soon as it was over. A woman must feel as if there was a stone wall between them. Many will think that this seems to imply a lack of humanity, for the many appreciate humanity in the sexual instinct only, an instinct which we share with all animals and insects; only the very lowest forms of life are epicene. Yet, somehow, we are all inclined to think that man is never so much man as when he is in pursuit of the female. Perhaps he is never less man than at the moment. We are apt to think we are living intensely when we congregate in numbers in drawing-rooms and gossip about the latest publications, social and literary, and there is a tendency in us all to look askance at the man who likes to spend the evening alone with his book and his cat, who looks forward to lonely holidays, seeing in them long solitary walks in the country, much the same walks as he enjoyed the summer before, when he wandered through pleasantly wooded prospects, seeing hills unfolding as he walked mile after mile, pleasantly conscious of himself, and of the great harmony of which he is a part.
The man of whom I am dreaming, shy, unobtrusive and lonely, whose interests are literary, and whose life is not troubled by women, feels intensely and hoards in his heart secret enthusiasms and sentiments which in other men flow in solution here and there down any feminine gutter. I thought of Emerson and then of Thoreau — a Thoreau of the suburbs. And remembering how beautiful John Eglinton’s writings are, how gnarled and personal, like the man himself, my heart went out to him a little, and I wondered if we should ever become friends. I hoped we should, for I felt myself inclining to the belief that the hard North is better than the soft, peaty, Catholic stuff which comes from Connaught.
V
WHILE STROLLING WITH him, or sitting beside him smoking cigars, listening to him talking about the success of The Heather Field, the thought often crossed my mind that his life had flowered
in the present year, and that after it all would be decline. He was to me a pathetic figure as he sat sunning himself in the light of Ibsen and Parnell, his exterior placid as a parish priest’s; for knowing him from the very beginning of his life, and having seen the play written, I was not duped like the others. He is thinking that his dreams are coming to pass, and believes himself to be the Messiah — he who will give Ireland literature and her political freedom; and I wondered how far he would go before puncturing like the others.
He was talking about his new comedy, The Tale of a Town. Politicians were satirised and things were said in it that might create a riot, and the riot in the theatre might spread to the streets, and a flame run all over Ireland. We cannot afford, Edward, to have the Gaiety Theatre wrecked. A shadow used to come into his face when he thought of the moral responsibility he was incurring by writing The Tale of a Town; but heresies frighten him more than the destruction of property; he was prepared to risk the play, and took refuge in generalities, saying he was no good at telling a plot. A doubt rises up in my mind always when I hear an author say he cannot tell his plot, for if there be one, a baby can tell it, and it is the plot that counts; the rest is working out, and can be accomplished if one is a writer. All I could learn from him was that the play was nearly finished. He was going down to Galway to work over the dialogue for the last time, and then the manuscript would be sent to Yeats, and when it was read it would be sent to London to me, for the rules of the Irish Literary Theatre were that no play could be performed without the approval of the three directors.
You may expect it in about three weeks.
And a memorable morning it was in Victoria Street when I received the parcel and cut the string, saying:
We shall be able to talk about this comedy, and to discuss its production, on our way to Bayreuth, when we have said all we have to say about Wagner and his Ring.
The first half-dozen pages pleased me, and then Edward’s mind, which can never think clearly, revealed itself in an entanglement; which will be easily removed, I said, picking up the second act. But the second act did not please me as much as the first, and I laid it down, saying: Muddle, muddle, muddle. In the third act Edward seemed to fall into gross farcical situations, and I took up the fourth act sadly. It and the fifth dissipated every hope, and I lay back in my chair in a state of coma, unable to drag myself to the writing-table. But getting there at last, I wrote — after complimenting him about a certain improvement in the dialogue — that the play seemed to me very inferior to The Heather Field and to Maeve.
But plainer speaking is necessary. It may well be inferior to The Heather Field and to Maeve, and yet be worthy of the Irish Literary Theatre.
So I wrote: There is not one act in the five you have sent me which, in my opinion, could interest any possible audience — Irish, English, or Esquimaux. There you have it, my dear friend; that is my opinion. But perhaps we shall be able to straighten it out on our way to Bayreuth, and on our way home.
After posting such a letter one is seized with scruples, and I walked about the room asking myself if a pinch of human kindness but not worth more than a cartload of disagreeable truths. Edward was my friend, the friend of my boyhood, and I had written to say that the play he had been working upon for the last two years was worthless. Why not have saddled Yeats and Lady Gregory with the duty? One looks at the question from different points of view, worrying a great deal, coming back to the point — that lies would not have saved our trip abroad. Be that as it may, my letter had probably wrecked it.
We were to meet at Victoria Station, and if Edward were to turn rusty what would happen? The theatre tickets would be lost. No Bayreuth for me that year; impossible to travel in Germany when one doesn’t know a word of German. I regretted again the letter I had written, and watched the post. Letters came, but none from Edward. This was a good sign, for if he were not coming he would let me know. All the same, the quarter of an hour before the train started was full of anxiety.
Ah, there he is! We’re going to Bayreuth after all!
There he was — huge and puffy, his back to the engine, his belly curling splendidly between his short fat thighs, his straw hat perched on the top of his head, broader at the base than at the crown, a string dangling from it. We sat embarrassed; Edward did not seem embarrassed, but I suppose he must have been; I was embarrassed enough for two. The play would have to be talked about. But who would open the conversation? Edward did not seem inclined to speak about it, and for me to do so before Clapham Junction would be lacking in courtesy. Ask him for a cigar! But one cannot talk of the quality of a cigar beyond Croydon, and when we had passed through the station the strain became unbearable. Besides, I was anxious to aestheticise.
I am sorry I didn’t like your play, but you see you asked my opinion, and there was no use my giving you a false one.
I dare say you are right. I’m no critic; all the same, it was a great disappointment to me to hear that you didn’t like it.
I had expected a note of agony in his voice, and was shocked to find that he could enjoy a cigar while I gave him some of my reasons for thinking his play unpresentable. If he were a real man of letters it would be otherwise — so why should I pity him? And the pity for him which had been gathering in my heart melted away, and suddenly I found myself angry with him, and would have said some unpleasant things about his religion if he had not dropped the remark that my letter had entirely spoilt the pleasure of his trip round the coast of Ireland in a steamer with a party of archaeologists. I begged for an account of this trip, and he told me that they had visited pagan remains in Donegal and Arran, and many Christian ruins, monasteries and round towers, and my naturally kind heart was touched by the thought of Edward lagging in the rear, thinking of his unfortunate play and the letter I had written him, his step quickening when Coffey began his discourses, but proving only an indifferent listener.
One would have to lack the common sympathies not to feel for Edward, and to myself I seemed a sort of executioner while telling him that the play would have to be altered, and extensively altered. It was not a matter of a few cuts; my letter must have made that clear; but he had not been told the whole truth. He probably suspected it would be forthcoming, if not on board the train, on board the boat. A courageous fellow is Edward before criticism, perhaps because art is not the great concern of his life; and he would have listened to the bitter end; but it seemed to me that it would be well to allow my criticism to work down into his mind. The subject was dropped; we talked about The Ring all the way to Dover, and on board the boat he whistled the motives, looking over the taffrail until it was time to go to bed. His manner was propitious, and it seemed to me that in the morning he would listen to the half-dozen alterations that were of an elemental necessity, and turning these over in my mind, I fell asleep, and awoke thinking of them, and nothing could have prevented me from telling Edward how the third act might be reconstructed the moment we got on deck but the appearance of the foreland as we steamed into Holland.
A dim light had just begun to filter through some grey clouds, like the clouds in Van Goyen’s pictures; and the foreland — sand and tussocked grass, with a grey sea slopping about it — was drawn exactly as he would have drawn it.
The country has never quite recovered from his genius and the genius of his contemporaries though two hundred years have passed away, I said, mentioning, as we climbed into the train, that painting was no longer possible in Holland.
Edward wished to know why this was, and I kept him waiting till breakfast for an answer, saying then: The country is itself a picture. See! A breeze has just awakened a splendid Ruysdael in the bay. A little farther on we shall pass a wood which Hobbema certainly painted. We did, and we had not got many miles before we came upon some fields with cattle in them. Dujardin and Berghem. And afterwards the train sped through flat meadows intersected by drains, for the country, once marish, had been redeemed by the labour of the Dutchmen — indefatigable labour, I said. When they
drove the Catholics out of Holland, art and Protestantism began together. Look! See those winding herds. Cuyp! Look into the mist and you’ll see him in his leathern jerkin, and his great beaver hat with a plume in it, stalking the cattle, drawing bits at a time — heads and hind quarters. I don’t like Holland; it looks too much like pictures — and pictures I have weared of.
It seemed to me that we were wasting time. What was important was The Tale of a Town, for another alteration had come into my mind; and anxious to know how it would strike Edward, I asked him to give me his attention.
Don’t look at those fields any more; forget Dujardin and Berghem, forget Cuyp; let us think of The Tale of a Town.
His lack of eagerness was discouraging; all the same I began my serious criticism, to which was given an excellent but somewhat stolid attention.
There is no growth in the first act, and very little in the second, and the scene of the meeting in which Jasper Dean makes his great speech must come in the middle of the play, and not at the beginning of it.
I waited for some acknowledgment from Edward, but was unable to get from him either assent or dissent.
