by George Moore
He comes to see me every day between two and three, riding his old bicycle through the gateway; I run to the wicket to let him in, and we walk together to the great apple-tree and sit there talking of Manet and the immortality of the soul. It is pleasant to remember these weeks, for I was very happy in these first conversations; but the reader knows how impossible it is for me to believe that any one likes me for my own sake, and at the end of a week — my happiness may have lasted half-way into the second week — at the end of eight or nine days I was trying to find sufficient reason why AE should seek me out in my garden every afternoon, saying, and saying vainly, that he was attracted by something in me he had been seeking a long while and thought he had found at last. And this seeming to me a very unsatisfying explanation, I began to cast about in my mind for another, coming to the belief, or very nearly to it, that AE recognised me as the spiritual influence that Ireland had been waiting for so long. And the fact that he was the only one in Dublin who had shown no surprise at my coming fortified me in the belief, and I dreamed on until his voice called me out of my dream of himself and myself; and, as if he had been aware all the time that I had been thinking about him, he said:
As soon as you had lived as much of your life as was necessary for you to live in Paris and in London you were led back to us through Yeats?
No, AE, not through Yeats. At most he was an instrument, and it is possible to go further back than him. Martyn was before Yeats. But, like Yeats, he was no more than an instrument, for neither of them wanted me to come back. You did, and somehow I can’t help feeling that you knew I was coming back. You had read my books, and it was my books, perhaps, that made you wish for my return. Wish — not as one wishes to smoke a cigarette, but you really did want to have me here?
I certainly did wish that England would return to us some of our men of talent.
But this wasn’t the answer that I wanted.
What I would like to know, AE, is did you wish to have me back for my own sake, because you felt that something was lacking in my books? Or was it merely for the sake of Ireland? I’m afraid the questions I’m putting to you make me seem very silly and egotistical, yet I don’t feel either.
Perhaps Ireland needs you a little.
I wonder. I suppose Ireland needs us all. But there is something I have never told you — something I have never told anybody.
AE puffed at his pipe in silence, and I strove against the temptation to confide in him the story of the summons I had received on the road to Chelsea, for his idea of me was not of one that saw visions or heard spirit voices. I felt that to be so, without, however, being able to rid myself of the belief that he had discovered in me the spiritual influence that Ireland was waiting for. How complicated everything is!... Nothing will be gained by telling him. I won’t tell him. The conversation took a different turn; I felt relieved; the temptation seemed to have passed from me, but a few minutes after my story slipped from my lips as nearly as possible in these words:
You know that I came over here to publish an article in the Freeman’s Journal about the Boer War, and the article attracted a great deal of attention? AE nodded, and I could see that he was listening intently. If it hadn’t been for that article all the Boers would have been murdered and England would have saved two hundred million pounds. Providence has to make a choice of an instrument; you are chosen today, another tomorrow; that day I was the chosen instrument, and on the road to Chelsea, thinking of this great and merciful Providence, I heard a voice bidding me back to Ireland. It is difficult to know for certain what one hears and what one imagines one has heard; one’s thoughts are sometimes very loud, but the voice was from without. I am sure it was, AE. Three or four days afterwards I heard the same words spoken within my ear while I was lying in bed asleep. And the voice spoke so distinctly that I threw out my arms to retain the speaker. Nor is this all. Very soon afterwards, in my drawing-room in Victoria Street about eleven o’clock at night, I experienced an extraordinary desire to pray, which I resisted for a long time. The temptation proved stronger than my power to resist it; and I shall never forget how I fell forward and buried my face in the armchair and prayed.
What prayer did you say?
One can pray without words, surely?
When the hooker that was taking Yeats over to Arran or taking him back to Galway was caught in a storm Yeats fell upon his knees and tried to say a prayer; but the nearest thing to one he could think of was Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit, and he spoke as much of Paradise Lost as he could remember.
But, AE, you either believe or you don’t believe what I say.
I can quite understand that you’re deeply interested in the voice you heard, or think you heard; but our concern isn’t so much with it as with the fact that you have been brought back to Ireland.
A cloud then seemed to come between us, and out of this cloud I heard AE saying that if he were to tell people that all his drawings were done from sittings given to him by the Gods, it would be easy for him to sell every stroke he put on canvas, and to pass himself off as a very wonderful person.
But your drawings are done from sittings given to you by the Gods. I remember your telling me that three stood at the end of your bed looking at you one morning.
Three great beings came to my bedside, but I cannot tell you if I saw them directly, as I see you (if I see you directly), or whether I saw them reflected as in a mirror. In either case they came from a spiritual world.
A vision was vouchsafed to you. Why not to me?
I don’t dispute the authenticity of your vision, my dear Moore. Why should I? How could I even wish to dispute it? On what grounds?
But you seem to doubt it?
No. A vision is the personal concern of the visionary.
No more! Who sent the vision? Whose voice did I hear? An angel’s?
Angels are Jehovah’s messengers and apparitors. And this I can say: the Gods that inspired your coming were not Asiatic.
The Gods to whom the English are praying that strength may be given them to destroy the Boers quickly and at little cost — a poor little nation, no bigger than Connaught! The lust for blood was in everybody’s face. I had to leave. If the news came in that five hundred Boers were taken prisoners faces darkened, and brightened if the news were that five hundred had been killed. England has made me detest Christianity.... Born in the amphitheatre, which it didn’t leave without acquiring a taste for blood, and the newspapers are filled with scorn of Kruger because he reads the Bible. Think of it, AE! Because he reads his Bible!
But don’t think of it, my dear Moore.
It would be better not, for when I do life seems too shameful to be endured.... The Bishops of York and Canterbury praying to Jesus or to His Father — which?
Probably to His Father. But go on with your story.
What story?
The message that you received didn’t come round to you by way of Judaea.
No, indeed, the Gods that inspired me are among our native divinities. Angus seems to be kind and compassionate, and so far as I know, his clergy never ordered that any one should be burnt at the stake for holding that it was not the kisses but the songs of the birds circling about his forehead that created love. All the same, the Druids —
No one may speak ill of the Druids in AE’s presence, and he told me that he did not know of any mention in Irish legends of human sacrifices, and if there had been, the Christian revisers of the legends would not have failed to mention them.
You love the Druids, I said, looking into his calm and earnest face. When you were earning fifty pounds a year in Pim’s shop you used to go to Bray Head and address a wondering crowd! Standing on a bit of broken wall, all your hair flowing in the wind, you cried out to them to return to the kind, compassionate Gods that never ordered burnings in the market place, and I don’t see why, AE, we should not go forth together and preach the Danaan divinities, north, south, east, and west. You shall be Paul. Barnabas quarrelled with Paul. I�
��ll be Luke and take down your words.
It would be your own thoughts, my dear Moore, that you would be reporting, not mine; and, though Ireland stands in need of a new religion —
And a new language. One is no good without the other.
We fell to talking of the Irish language, I maintaining that it would be necessary to revive it, AE thinking that the Anglo-Irish idiom would be sufficient for literature, until the thought emerged that perhaps it might have been Diarmuid that bade me to Ireland.
I’d like to see the cromlechs under which the lovers slept, but I don’t know where to find them.
AE answered that at Whitsuntide he would have three or four days’ holiday, and proposed to visit the sacred places with me.
We’ll seek the ancient divinities of the Gael together. AE pulled out his watch and said he must be going, and we strolled across the greensward to the wicket. The ash will be in leaf the day we start. I hope, AE, that nothing will happen to prevent us; and I jumped out of bed every morning to see if the promise were for a fine or a wet day.
I had arrived in Ireland in March; it was raining then, but the weather had taken a turn in the middle of April; the fifteenth was the first fine day, and ever since the days had played in the garden like children, shadows of apple-trees and lilac-bushes moving over the sweet grass with skies of ashen blue overhead fading into a dim, creamy pink in the South and East. The hawthorns were in full leaf, and among the little metallic leaves white and pink stars had just begun to appear, and the scent of these floated after us, for no sinister accident had happened. AE called for me as he had promised, and we went away together on bicycles — myself on a new machine bought for the occasion, AE on an old one that he has ridden all over Ireland, from village to village, establishing co-operative creameries and banks. And side by side we rode together through the early streets to Amiens Street Station, where we took second-class tickets to Drogheda — an hour’s journey from Dublin. At Drogheda we jumped on our bicycles again; two tramps we were that day, enjoying the wide world, and so intoxicating was the sunlight that it was with difficulty I kept myself from calling to AE that I felt certain the Gods would answer us. I would have done this if a river had not been passing by, and such a pretty river — a brook rather than a river.
AE, AE, look and admire it!
A few minutes afterwards our brook or river acquired such a picturesqueness that perforce he jumped from his bicycle and unslung his box of pastels which he wore over his shoulder.
Trees, he said, emerging like vapours, and while he discovered the drawing of a brook purling round a miniature isle between low mossy banks, I lay beside him, forgetful of everything but the faint stirring of the breeze in the willows and the song of a bird in the reeds — a reed-warbler no doubt; and while I lay wondering if the bird were really a warbler, AE finished his pastel. He leaned it against a tree, looked at it, and asked me if I liked it.... It was a spiritual seeing of the world, and I told him that no one had ever seen Nature more beautifully. He put his picture into his portfolio, I put mine into my memory, and we went away on our bicycles through the pretty neglected country until we came to a grey bridge standing thirty, perhaps fifty, feet above the shallow river; the beauty of its slim arches compelled me to dismount, and, leaning on the parapet, I started this lamentation:
No more stone bridges will be built, and it has come to this, that a crack in one of those arches will supply a zealous county councillor with a pretext for an iron bridge. The pleasure of these modern days is to tear down beautiful yesteryear.
No arch will fall within the next ten years, he answered. Admire the bridge without troubling yourself as to what its fate will be when you are gone.
AE’s optimism is delightful, but, while approving it, I could not keep back the argument that a mountain fails to move our sympathies, for it is always with us, whereas a cloud curls and uncurls and disappears. We cling to life because it is for ever slipping from us. Don’t you think so? It is strange that, although you know more poetry by heart than any one I ever met, I have never heard you repeat a verse from Omar Khayyám. You love what is permanent, and believe yourself immortal. That is why, perhaps, Shelley’s Hymn of Pan is for you the most beautiful lyric in the world. Do say it again — Sileni and Fauns and that lovely line ending moist river lawns. One sees it all — something about Tempe outgrowing the light of the dying day. Say it all over again.
He repeated the verses as we ascended the hill.
Look at that hound!
He came towards us, trotting amiably, gambolling now and again for sheer pleasure. The loneliness of the road had awakened the affection that his nature was capable of. He leaned himself up against me; his paws rested upon my shoulders; I fondled the silken ears and he yawned, perhaps because he wished me to admire his teeth — beautiful they were and skilfully designed for their purpose, to seize and to tear.
Yet his eyes are gentle. Tell me, is his soul in his eyes or in these fangs?
My dear Moore, you’ve been asking me questions since eight o’clock this morning; and we all three went on together till we reached a farmhouse in which the hound lived with an old woman.
The dog put his long nose into her hand, and she told us that he had been brought to her very ill. It was distemper, but I brought him through it, and now they’ll soon be taking him from me. And you’ll be sorry to leave me, won’t you, Sampson?
At the end of September, I said, he’ll be taken away to scent out foxes with his brethren in the woods over yonder, and to lead them across the green plains, for he is a swift hound. Don’t you think he is? But you won’t look at him. If he were called Bran or Lomair —
We hopped on our bicycles and rode on till we came to a great river with large sloping banks, covered with pleasant turf and shadowed by trees, the famous Boyne, and AE pointed out the monument erected in commemoration of the battle.
The beastly English won that battle. If they’d only been beaten!
We rode on again until we came to a road as straight as an arrow stretching indefinitely into the country with hedges on either side — a tiresome road and so commonplace that the suspicion entered my mind that this journey to Meath was but a practical joke, and that AE would lead me up and down these roads from morning till noon, from noon till evening, and then would burst out laughing in my face; or, perhaps, by some dodge he would lose me and return to Dublin alone with a fine tale to tell about me. But such a trick would be a mean one, and there is no meanness in AE. Besides, the object of the journey was a search for Divinity and AE does not joke on sacred subjects. We rode on in silence. A woman appeared with candles and matches in her hand.
But why should we light candles in broad daylight? There isn’t a cloud in the sky.
He told me to buy a candle and a box of matches and follow him across the stile, which I did, and down a field until we came to a hole in the ground, and in the hole was a ladder. He descended into it and, fearing to show the white feather, I stepped down after him. At twenty feet from the surface he went on his hands and knees and began to crawl through a passage narrow as a burrow. I crawled behind him, and after crawling for some yards, found myself in a small chamber about ten feet in height and ten in width. A short passage connected it with a larger chamber, perhaps twenty feet in width and height, and built of great unhewn stones leaned together, each stone jutting a little in front of the other till they almost met, a large flat stone covering in the vault. And it was here, I said, that the ancient tribes came to do honour to the great divinities — tribes, but not savage tribes, for these stones were placed so that not one has changed its place though four thousand years have gone by. Look at this great hollowed stone. Maybe many a sacrificial rite has been performed in it. He did not answer this remark, and I regretted having made it, for it seemed to betray a belief that the Druids had indulged in blood sacrifice, and, to banish the thought from his mind, I asked him if he could read the strange designs scribbled upon the walls. The spot, he said, within
the first circle is the earth, and the first circle is the sea; the second circle is the heavens, and the third circle the Infinite Lir, the God over all Gods, the great fate that surrounds mankind and Godkind. Let us sit down, I said, and talk of the mysteries of the Druids, for they were here for certain; and, as nothing dies, something remains of them and of the demigods and of the Gods. The Druids, he answered, refrained from committing their mysteries to writing, for writing is the source of heresies and confusions, and it was not well that the folk should discuss Divine things among themselves; for them the arts of war and the chase, and for the Druids meditation on eternal things. But there is no doubt that the Druids were well instructed in the heavens; and the orientation of the stones that surround their temples implies elaborate calculations. At the same hour every year the sun shines through certain apertures. But, AE, since nothing dies, and all things are as they have ever been, the Gods should appear to us, for we believe in them, and not in the Gods that men have brought from Asia. Angus is more real to me than Christ. Why should he not appear to me, his worshipper? I am afraid to call upon Mananaan or on Dana, but do you make appeal.
