by George Moore
She came into the room quickly, with a welcoming smile on her face, and I set her down here as I see her: a middle-aged woman, agreeable to look upon, perhaps for her broad, handsome, intellectual brow enframed in iron-grey hair. The brown, wide-open eyes are often lifted in looks of appeal and inquiry, and a natural wish to sympathise softens her voice till it whines. It modulated, however, very pleasantly as she yielded her attention to Yeats, who insisted on telling her how two beings so different as myself and Whelan had suddenly become united in a conspiracy to deceive Edward, Whelan because he could not believe in the efficacy of a Mass performed by an anti-Parnellite, and I because — Yeats hesitated for a sufficient reason, deciding suddenly that I had objected to hear Mass in Gort because there was no one in the church who had read Villiers de l’Isle Adam except myself; and he seemed so much amused that the thought suddenly crossed my mind that perhaps the cocasseries of Connaught were more natural to him than the heroic moods which he believed himself called upon to interpret. His literature is one thing and his conversation is another, divided irreparably. Is this right? Lady Gregory chattered on, telling stories faintly farcical, amusing to those who knew the neighbourhood, but rather wearisome for one who didn’t, and I was waiting for an opportunity to tell her that an heroic drama was going to be written on the subject of Diarmuid and Grania.
When my lips broke the news, a cloud gathered in her eyes, and she admitted that she thought it would be hardly wise for Yeats to undertake any further work at present; and later in the afternoon she took me into her confidence, telling me that Yeats came to Coole every summer because it was necessary to get him away from the distractions of London, not so much from social as from the intellectual distractions that Arthur Symons had inaugurated. The Savoy rose up in my mind with its translations from Villiers le l’Isle Adam, Verlaine and Maeterlinck; and I agreed with her that alien influences were a great danger to the artist. All Yeats’s early poems, she broke in, were written in Sligo, and among them were twenty beautiful lyrics and Ireland’s one great poem, The Wanderings of Usheen — all these had come straight out of the landscape and the people he had known from boyhood.
For seven years we have been waiting for a new book from him; ever since The Countess Cathleen we have been reading the publisher’s autumn announcement of The Wind among the Reeds. The volume was finished here last year; it would never have been finished if I had not asked him to Coole; and though we live in an ungrateful world, I think somebody will throw a kind word after me some day, if for nothing else, for The Wind among the Reeds.
I looked round, thinking that perhaps life at Coole was arranged primarily to give him an opportunity of writing poems. As if she had read my thoughts, Lady Gregory led me into the back drawing-room, and showed me the table at which he wrote, and I admired the clean pens, the fresh ink, and the spotless blotter; these were her special care every morning. I foresaw the strait sofa lying across the window, valued in some future time because the poet had reclined upon it between his rhymes. Ah me! the creeper that rustles an accompaniment to his melodies in the pane will awaken again, year after year, but one year it will awaken in vain.... My eyes thanked Lady Gregory for her devotion to literature. Instead of writing novels she had released the poet from the quern of daily journalism, and anxious that she should understand my appreciation of her, I spoke of the thirty-six wild swans that had risen out of the lake while Yeats and I wandered all through the long evening seeking a new composition for The Shadowy Waters.
She did not answer me, and I followed her in silence back to the front room and sat listening to her while she told me that it was because she wanted poems from him that she looked askance at our project to write a play together on the subject of Diarmuid and Grania. It was not that the subject was unsuited to his genius, but she thought it should be written by him alone; the best of neither would transpire in collaboration, and she lamented that it were useless to save him from the intellectual temptations of Symons if he were to be tossed into more subtle ones. She laughed, as is her way when she cozens, and reminded me that we were of different temperaments and had arisen out of different literary traditions.
Mayo went to Montmartre, and Sligo turned into Fleet Street.
Suspicious in her cleverness, my remark did not altogether please her, and she said something about a man of genius and a man of talent coming together, speaking quickly under her breath, so that her scratch would escape notice at the time; and we were talking of our responsibilities towards genius when the door opened and Yeats came into the room.
He entered somewhat diffidently, I thought, with an invitation to me to go for a walk. Lady Gregory was appeased with the news that he had written five and a half lines that morning, and a promise that he would be back at six, and would do a little more writing before dinner. As he went away he told me that he might attain his maximum of nine lines that evening, if he succeeded in finishing the broken line. But S must never meet S; for his sake was inadmissible, and while seeking how he might avoid such a terrifying cacophony we tramped down wet roads and climbed over low walls into scant fields, finding the ruined castle we were in search of at the end of a long boreen among tall, wet grasses. The walls were intact and the stair, and from the top we stood watching the mist drifting across the grey country. Yeats telling how the wine had been drugged at Tara, myself thinking how natural it was that Lady Gregory should look upon me as a danger to Yeats’s genius. As we descended the slippery stair an argument began in my head whereby our project of collaboration might be defended. Next time I went to Coole I would say to Lady Gregory: You see, Yeats came to me with The Shadowy Waters because he had entangled the plot and introduced all his ideas into it, and you will admit that the plot had to be disentangled? To conciliate her completely I would say that while Yeats was rewriting The Shadowy Waters I would spend my time writing an act about the many adventures that befell Diarmuid and Grania as they fled before Finn. Yeats had told me these adventures in the ruined castle; I had given to them all the attention that I could spare from Lady Gregory, who, I was thinking, might admit my help in the arrangement of some incidents in The Shadowy Waters, but would always regard our collaboration in Diarmuid and Grania with hostility. But for this partiality it seemed to me I could not blame her, so well had she put her case when she said that her fear was that my influence might break up the mould of his mind.
The car waited for me at the end of the boreen, and before starting I tried to persuade Yeats to come to Tillyra with me, but he said he could not leave Lady Gregory alone, and before we parted I learnt that she read to him every evening. Last summer it was War and Peace, and this summer she was reading Spenser’s Faerie Queene, for he was going to publish a selection and must get back to Coole for the seventh canto.
Goodbye, and springing up on the car, I was driven by Whelan into the mist, thinking Yeats the most fortunate amongst us, he having discovered among all others that one who, by instinctive sympathy, understood the capacity of his mind, and could evoke it, and who never wearied of it, whether it came to her in elaborately wrought stanzas or in the form of some simple confession, the mood of last night related as they crossed the sward after breakfast. As the moon is more interested in the earth than in any other thing, there is always some woman more interested in a man’s mind than in anything else, and willing to follow it sentence by sentence. A great deal of Yeats’s work must come to her in fragments — a line and a half, two lines — and these she faithfully copies on her typewriter, and even those that his ultimate taste has rejected are treasured up, and perhaps will one day appear in a stately variorum edition.
Well she may say that the future will owe her something, and my thoughts moved back to the first time I saw her some twenty-five years ago. She was then a young woman, very earnest, who divided her hair in the middle and wore it smooth on either side of a broad and handsome brow. Her eyes were always full of questions, and her Protestant high-school air became her greatly and estranged me from he
r.
In her drawing-room were to be met men of assured reputation in literature and politics, and there was always the best reading of the time upon her tables. There was nothing, however, in her conversation to suggest literary faculty, and it was a surprise to me to hear one day that she had written a pamphlet in defence of Arabi Pasha, an Egyptian rebel. Some years after she edited her husband’s memoirs, circumstances had not proved favourable to the development of her gift, and it languished till she met Yeats. He could not have been long at Coole before he began to draw her attention to the beauty of the literature that rises among the hills and bubbles irresponsibly, and set her going from cabin to cabin taking down stories, and encouraged her to learn the original language of the country, so that they might add to the Irish idiom which the peasant had already translated in English, making in this way a language for themselves.
Yeats could only acquire the idiom by the help of Lady Gregory, for although he loves the dialect and detests the defaced idiom which we speak in our streets and parlours, he has little aptitude to learn that of the boreen and the market-place. She put her aptitude at his service, and translated portions of Cathleen ni Houlihan into Kiltartan (Kiltartan is the village in which she collects the dialect); and she worked it into the revised version of the stories from The Secret Rose, published by the Dun Emer Press, and thinking how happy their lives must be at Coole, implicated in literary partnership, my heart went out towards her in a sudden sympathy. She has been wise all her life through, I said; she knew him to be her need at once, and she never hesitated ... yet she knew me before she knew him.
XI
WHILE EDWARD REVISED his play Yeats and I talked of The Shadowy Waters, and the Boers crossed one of our frontiers into Cape Colony or Natal — I have forgotten which; but I remember very well my attitude of mind towards the war, and how I used to walk every day from Tillyra to Ardrahan, a distance of at least two Irish miles, to fetch the newspaper, so anxious was I to read of a victory for our soldiers.
Before starting I would pay Edward a visit in his tower, and after a few words about the play, I would tell him that the way out of our South African difficulties was simple — the Government should arm the blacks; and this would make Edward growl out that the English Government was beastly enough to do it; and I remember how I used to go away, pleased that I had always the courage of my morality. Other men do what they know to be wrong, and repent, or think they repent; but as it would be impossible for me to do what I believe to be wrong, repentance is for me an idle word; and, thinking that to raise an army of seventy thousand blacks would be a fine trick to play upon the Boers, I often returned through the park full of contempt for my countrymen, my meditations interrupted occasionally by some natural sight — the beauty of the golden bracken through which the path twisted, a crimson beech at the end of it, or the purple beauty of a line of hills over against the rocky plain freckled with the thatched cabins of the peasantry. Nor do I remember more beautiful evenings than these were; and, as the days drew in, the humble hawthorns shaped themselves into lovely silhouettes, and a meaning seemed to gather round the low, mossy wall out of which they grew, until one day the pictorial idea which had hitherto stayed my steps melted away, and I became possessed by a sentimental craving for the country itself. After all, it was my country, and, strangely perturbed, I returned to the castle to ask Edward’s opinion regarding the mysterious feeling that had glided suddenly into my heart as I stood looking at the Burran Mountains.
It is difficult for anybody to say why he loves his country, for what is a country but a geographical entity? And I am not sure that Edward was listening very attentively when I told him of a certain pity, at variance with my character, that had seemed to rise out of my heart.
It would be strange if Cathleen ni Houlihan were to get me after all. That is impossible ... only a passing feeling; and I sat looking at him, remembering that the feeling I dreaded had seemed to come out of the landscape and to have descended into my heart. But he was so little interested in what seemed to me transcendental that I refrained from further explanation, concluding that he was thinking of his play, which had gone to Coole yesterday. I was led to think this, for he was sitting at the window as if watching for Yeats. We were expecting our poet.
Here he is. I wonder what he thinks of your revisions?
And to save Edward from humiliation I asked Yeats as soon as he came into the room if he liked the new third act.
No, no; it’s entirely impossible. We couldn’t have such a play performed. And dropping his cloak from his shoulders, he threw his hair from his brow with a pale hand, and sank into a chair, and seemed to lose himself in a sudden meditation. It was like a scene from a play, with Yeats in the principal part; and, admiring him, I sat thinking of the gloom of Kean, of the fate of the Princes in the Tower, headsmen, and suchlike things, and thinking, too, that Yeats, notwithstanding his hierarchic airs, was not an actual literary infallibility. The revised third act might not be as bad as he seemed to think it. He might be mistaken ... or prejudiced. Yeats’s literary integrity is without stain, that I knew. But he might be prejudiced against Edward without knowing it. The success of The Heather Field had stirred up in Edward, till then the most unassuming of men, a certain aggressiveness which, for some time past, I could see had been getting on Yeats’s nerves. Nor am I quite sure that myself at that moment would not have liked to humble Edward a little ... only a little. But let us not be drawn from the main current of our resolution, which is entirely literary, by a desire to note every sub-current. Yeats looked very determined, and when I tried to induce him to give way he answered:
We are artists, and cannot be expected to accept a play because other plays as bad, and nearly as bad, have been performed.
Saints, I said, do not accept sins because sins are of common occurrence.
He did not answer, but sat looking into the fire gloomily.
He takes a very determined view of your play, Edward. It may not strike me in the same light. If you will give me the manuscript I’ll just run upstairs with it. I can’t read it in front of you both.
There was no reason why I should read the first two acts; Edward had not touched them. What he had engaged to rewrite was the last half of the third act, and a few minutes would enable me to see if he had made sufficient alterations for the play to be put forward — not as a work of art — that is as something that would be acted fifty years hence for the delight of numerous audiences, as proof of the talent that existed in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century — but as a play to which literary people could give their attention without feeling ashamed of themselves afterwards. There was no reason why we should ask for more than that; for the subject of the play was merely one of topical interest, and it is a mistake — I pointed this out to Yeats — to be very particular about the literary quality of such a play. All the same it would have to be put right, and this Edward could not do. It was more a matter for a cunning literary hand than for a fellow like Edward with a streak of original genius in him, and very little literary tact.
On these reflections I sat down to read, but the play was so crude, even in its revised form, that I fell to thinking that Yeats’s thoughts must have wandered very often from the page. He should have remembered, however, whilst we discussed the play with Edward, that Edward was a human being after all, and not made it apparent that he looked upon the play as something the local schoolmaster might have written, and of all, should have kept looks out of his face which said as plainly as words could: Your soul is inferior, beneath my notice; take it away. He did not even seem to apprehend that Edward was torn between love of self and love of Ireland. Abstract thinking, I said, kills human sympathies, and Yeats is no longer able to appreciate anything but literary values. The man behind the play is ignored ... Yeats can no longer think with his body; it is only his mind that thinks. He is all intellect, if that isn’t too cardinal a word. And seeing before me quite a new country of conjecture, one which I had neve
r rambled in, I sat thinking of the cruelty of the monks of the Middle Ages, and the cruelty of the nuns and the monks of the present day. Their thoughts are abstracted from this world, from human life — that is why; and Yeats was a sort of monk of literature, an Inquisitor of Journalism who would burn a man for writing that education was progressing by leaps and bounds. Opinions make people cruel — literary as well as theological. Whereas the surgeon, whose thought is always of the flesh, is the kindliest of creatures. It is true that one sometimes hears of surgeons who, in the pursuit of science, willingly undertake operations which they know to be dangerous, and we know that the scientists in the laboratory are indifferent to the sufferings of the animals they vivisect. Even so, Nature thinks like the surgeon who risks an operation in order that he may discover the cause of the disease. The knowledge he gathers from the death of the patient is passed on, and it saves the life of another. But the artist cannot pass on any portion of his art to his pupil; his gift lives in himself and dies with him, and his art comes as much from his heart as from his intellect. The intellect outlives the heart, and the heart of Yeats seemed to me to have died ten years ago; the last of it probably went into the composition of The Countess Cathleen.
Yesterevening, when we wandered about the lake, talking of The Shadowy Waters, trying to free it from the occult sciences that had grown about it, Fomorians beaked and unbeaked, and magic harps and Druid spells, I did not perceive that the difficulties into which the story had wandered could be attributed to a lack of human sympathy. But Yeats’s treatment of Edward proved it to me. The life of the artist is always at difficult equipoise; he may fail from lack of human sympathies, or he may yield altogether to them and become a mere philanthropist; and we may well wonder what the choice of the artist would have been if he had to choose between the destruction of Messina and Reggio or of Herculaneum and Pompeii. Were he to choose the ancient ruins in preference to the modern towns, he might give very good reasons for doing so, saying that to prolong the lives of a hundred thousand people for a few years would not be, in his opinion, worth a bronze like the Narcissus. A very specious argument might be maintained in favour of the preservation of the bronze, even at the price of a hundred thousand lives. Perhaps he might let the bronze go, but if all Greek art were added he would hesitate, and when he had let one hundred thousand men and women go to their doom he would probably retire into the mountains to escape from sight of every graven thing. To write a play our human and artistic sympathies must be very evenly balanced, and I remembered that among my suggestions for the reconstruction of The Shadowy Waters, the one that Yeats refused most resolutely was that the woman should refuse to accompany the metaphysical pirate to the ultimate North, but return somewhat diffidently, ashamed of herself, to the sailors who were drinking yellow ale.
