by George Moore
How is that? he asked, becoming interested at once.
You’ve forgotten that I told you I had an important matter to speak to you about.
No, I haven’t. But I’m waiting for you to speak about it.
And all this while —
Come now, no fussing. What have you got to say?
Feeling the uselessness of being angry with him, I told him of my interview with the secretary. Apparently the touring company is all off; and though you were in favour of it a fortnight ago, you weren’t enthusiastic when it came up for discussion. You were asleep.
Who told you I was asleep? You’d fall asleep, too, if you were kept out of your bed till three o’clock in the morning, listening to them saying the same things over and over again.
Well, when you woke up you voted against me with Father Riley. Deny it if you can.
It wasn’t till Father Riley brought out the point —
But you were asleep.
No, I wasn’t asleep. I followed the argument very closely, and I agree with Father Riley that it would be a very serious thing, indeed, to persuade four or five girls to leave their mothers, and cast them into the promiscuous current of theatrical life without proper chaperons.
A breath of theology blows you hither and thither. You’d have yielded to the persuasion of the learned friar to throw out The Countess Cathleen, if you hadn’t found a backing in Father Barry and Father Tom Finlay. Your own play would have had to go with it; even that sacrifice would not have stopped you; and because we wouldn’t produce your play, The Tale of a Town —
I don’t know that anybody else would have acted as I did. When you sided with Yeats against me, I gave you my play to adapt, to cut up, to turn inside out, for I had always preached unity, and was determined that nobody should say I didn’t practise what I preached when my turn came.
We produced Maeve instead of The Tale of a Town. You didn’t expect that we were going to produce two plays by you in one year, did you? We preferred Maeve. All the same you threw us over. Your agreement with Yeats was to provide money for three years, and when you backed out we had to go to Benson. He agreed to produce Diarmuid and Grania, else the Irish Literary Theatre would not have completed its three years.
There was a great deal in Diarmuid and Grania which I didn’t approve of — many coarse expressions, and a tendency to place Pagan Ireland above Christian Ireland. I’m not taken in — I’m not taken in by you and Yeats and ... the old proselytiser in the background.
The long loose mouth tightened; a look of resolution came into the eyes; the woollen gloves grasped the umbrella, and the step grew quicker. I lagged a little behind to obtain a better view of the great boots. Years ago, in London, I had asked him to come and see the Robinsons with me, not noticing the size of his boots until he was seated in their drawing-room; on the hearthrug at Earl’s Terrace they seemed to take up so much room that I felt obliged to tell Edward that he would do well to get himself a pair of patent leathers, which, I am bound to say, he ordered at once, and in Jermyn Street, presenting on his next visit a more spruce appearance. But he had always felt out of his element in drawing-rooms, and had long ago returned to the original boots and to the black overcoat, in which he wraps himself in winter as in a blanket. Under the brim of the bowler hat I could just catch sight of the line of his aquiline nose — a drop hung at the end of it; it fell as we entered Leeson Street, at the moment when he was telling me of the agreement he would draw up if he succeeded in persuading the Archbishop to accept his ten thousand pounds for the support of the polyphonic choir. Edward is shrewd enough in business, and I admired the scrupulosity of the wording of the bond which would prevent the clerics from ever returning to Gounod’s Ave Maria.
My money will be tied up in such a way that there will be no setting aside of Palestrina for Verdi’s Requiem when I’m out of the way.
It amused me to think of the embarrassment of the Archbishop fairly caught between the devil and the deep sea, reduced to the necessity of refusing ten thousand pounds, or entering into the strictest covenant for the performance of sixteenth-century polyphonic music for ever and ever. On one point, however, Edward was inclined to yield. If some great composer of religious music should arise, the fact that he was born out of due time should not exclude his works from performance at the Dublin Cathedral.
But as that possibility is very remote, it is not probable that my choir will ever stray beyond Palestrina, Vittoria, Orlando di Lasso, and Clemens non Papa.
His appearance seemed so strangely at variance with his tastes that I could not help smiling; the old grey trousers challenged the eye at that moment, and I thought of the thin decadent youth, very fastidious in his dress, writing Latin, Greek, or French poems, that one would have naturally imagined as the revivalist of old polyphonic music. An old castle would be the inevitable dwelling of this youth; he would have purchased one for the purpose. But Edward had inherited the castle. He is, as his mother used to say, the last male of his race. A very old race the Martyns are, having been in Ireland since the earliest times. It is said that they came over with William the Conqueror from France, so Edward is a descendant of ancient knights on one side, the very lineage that the Parsifal side of Edward’s nature would choose, but the Parsifal side is remote and intermittent, it does not form part of his actual life, and he is prouder of the Smiths than the Martyns, attributing any talent that he may have to his grandfather, John Smith of Masonbrook, a pure peasant, a man of great original genius, who, without education or assistance from any one, succeeded in piling up a great fortune in the county of Galway. He had invested his money in land when estates were being sold in the Encumbered Estates Court, and so successful were his speculations that he was able to marry his daughter to old John Martyn of Tillyra, to whom she brought a fortune of ten thousand pounds. She had inherited from her father some good looks, a distinguished appearance, many refined tastes, and the reader has not forgotten altogether her grief at Edward’s celibacy, which would deprive the Gothic house he built to please her of an heir.
My recollections of mother and son go back to the very beginning of my life, to the time when Edward returned from Oxford, writing poems that I admired for their merit, and probably a little for the sake of my friend, in whom I discerned an original nature. I am too different from other people, he used to say, ever to be a success, and the poems were ultimately burnt, for they seemed to him to be, on reflection, in disagreement with the teachings of his Church. So he was in the beginning what he is in the end, I said, and a great psychologist might have predicted his solitary life in two musty rooms above a tobacconist’s shop, and his last habits, such as pouring his tea into a saucer, balancing the saucer on three fingers like an old woman in the country. Edward is all right if he gets his Mass in the morning and his pipe in the evening. A great bulk of peasantry with a delicious strain of Palestrina running through it.
I must be getting my dinner, he said.
But won’t you come home and dine with me? There are many other points —
No, he said, I don’t care to dine with you. You’re never agreeable at table. You find fault with the cooking.
If you come back I swear to you that whatever the cook may send me up —
The last time I dined at your house you made remarks about my appetite.
If I did, it was because I feared apoplexy. Several parish priests have died lately.
His great back disappeared in the direction of a tavern.
VIII
AS IT SEEMED easier to tell Willie Fay the bad news than to write a letter I left a message with one of his friends asking him to call at my house. Any evening except Saturday would suit me. On Saturday evenings I received my friends, and it would be difficult to discuss the matter freely before them. So Willie Fay came to see me one Thursday night, and perching himself on the highest chair in the room in spite of my protests, he fidgeted in it like a man in a hurry, anxious to get through an interview which had no longer any intere
st for him, answering me with a yes and a no, receiving the suggestion very coldly that in a few months new members would be elected to the Coisde Gnotha.
Men, I said, who will take a different view from Father Riley. I suppose you wouldn’t care to wait?
They’ll go their way and I’ll go mine, he answered, and with such a grand air of indifference that I began to suspect he had already heard of my failure to persuade the Gaelic League to accept him as the manager of a touring company and had gotten something else in view. The acoustics of Dublin are very perfect. But when I questioned him regarding his plans he gave a vague answer and took his leave as soon as he decently could.
A secret there certainly was, and I thought it over till AE mentioned on Saturday night that the Fays had come to ask him to allow them to perform his Deirdre.
Your Deirdre!
And forthwith he confided to me that one morning, about six weeks before, as he rose from his bed, he had seen her in the woods, where she lived with Levarcham. I saw the lilacs blooming in the corner of the yard, and herself running through the woods towards the dun. She came crying to her dear foster-mother, half for protection, half for glee — she had seen a young man for the first time, Naisi, who, in pursuit of a deer, had passed through the glen unperceived, though it was strictly guarded by the king’s spearmen.
And what happens then? I asked, interested in the setting forth of the story.
A love-scene with Naisi, who begs Deirdre to fly with him to Scotland, for only by putting a sea between them can they escape the wrath of Concubar. And it was while returning home over Portobello Bridge that he saw Naisi in his Scottish dun mending a spear, a memory of the chivalry of the Ultonians having kindled in him during the night.
So far have I written, AE said, and as soon as I get another free evening I shall finish the act for the Fays.
But he had to wait a long while for his next inspiration, and in great patience the actors and actresses continued to chant their parts through the winter nights until the third act was brought to them.
It was then discovered that AE’s play was too short for an evening’s entertainment, and Yeats was asked for his Cathleen ni Houlihan; he had met her last summer in one of the Seven Woods of Coole — in which, a future historian will decide; for me it is to tell merely that the two plays were performed on April 15 in St Teresa’s Hall, Clarendon Street, before an enthusiastic and demonstrative crowd of men and women. A later historian will also have to determine whether AE took the part of the God Mananaan Mac Lir at this performance, or whether he only appeared in the part at the preliminary performance in Coffey’s drawing-room. All I know for certain is that none will ever forget the terrible emphasis he gave to the syllables Man-aan-nawn MacLeer in Coffey’s drawing-room. He very likely had something to do with the bringing over of Maud Gonne from France to play the part of Cathleen ni Houlihan. Or did she come for Yeats’s sake? However, she came, and dreaming of the many rebel societies that awaited her coming she gave point to the line since become famous:
They have taken from me my four beautiful fields,
a line which I have no hesitation in taking from Lady Gregory and attributing to Yeats.
An Irish audience always likes to be reminded of the time when Ireland was a nation, and the Fays determined that some organisation must be started to keep the idea alive; the Presidency of the National Theatre Society was offered to AE, but he seemed to have considered his dramatic mission over, and contented himself with drawing up the rules and advising the members to elect Yeats as their President. He may have noticed that Yeats had been seeking an outlet for Irish dramatic genius ever since the break-up of the Irish Literary Theatre, and for sure the fact was not lost upon him that Yeats’s ears pricked up only when the word play was mentioned, and that his eyes were never lifted from the ground in his walks except to overlook a piece of waste ground as a possible site for a theatre. He could not but have heard Yeats mutter on more than one occasion, Goethe had a theatre ... Wagner had a theatre; and he had drawn the just conclusion that Yeats was seeking an outlet for Irish dramatic talent, and would bring courage and energy to the aid of the new movement. Oh, the wise AE, for Yeats as soon as he was elected President took the Fays in hand, discovering almost immediately that their art was of French descent and could be traced back to the middle of the seventeenth century in France. Some explanation of this kind was necessary, for Dublin had to be persuaded that two little clerks had suddenly become great artists, and to confirm Dublin in this belief the newspapers were requested to state that Mr W. B. Yeats was writing a play for Mr William Fay on the subject of The Pot of Broth.
Well, the best of us are sometimes short-sighted and superficial, and let it be freely confessed that it seemed to me at the time disgraceful that the author of The Wanderings of Usheen should stoop to writing a farce, for the subject Yeats had chosen was farcical, and the word represented to me only the merely conventional drolleries that I had seen on the London stage. My excuse for my blindness is that I have spent much of my life in France among French writers: folklore was unknown in Montmartre in my time, and no French writer that I know of, except Molière and George Sand, has made use of patois in literature; we are only beginning to become alive to the beauty of living speech when living speech is fast being driven out by journalists. But to return to Yeats, whose claim to immortality is well founded, for he knew from the first that literature rises in the mountains like a spring and descends, enlarging into a rivulet and then into a river. All this is clear to me today, but when he spoke to me of The Pot of Broth, I asked him if he weren’t ashamed of himself; and when he proposed that I should choose a similar subject and write a farce for Willie Fay, I rose from my chair, relying on gesture to express my abhorrence of his scheme. But not liking to be left out of anything, I consented, at last, to write half a dozen plays to be translated into Irish.
It may not be necessary to have them translated. Wouldn’t it do you as well if Lady Gregory put idiom on them?
We shall get the idiom much better, I answered, by having the plays translated into Irish. I will publish the Irish text, and you can do what you like with the brogue.
The stupid answer of a man intellectually run down; but next day I was down at the Gaelic League unfolding my project to the secretary, who thought it a very good one for the advancement of the Irish language, and as soon as the plays were written the Coisde Gnotha would decide.
My good man, do you think that I came over from England to submit plays to the Coisde Gnotha?
And we two stood looking at each other until the futility of my question began to dawn upon me; and then, to pass the matter over, I asked him if he knew of any Irish writers who could clothe the skeletons which I would supply with suitable dialogue. He said that Taidgh O’Donoghue was very busy at present, but a Feis was being held in Galway, and he suggested that I should go down and seek what I wanted among the prize-winners.
Mr Edward Martyn is one of the judges of traditional singing; you’ll see him. Mr Yeats and Lady Gregory are certain to be there. So I am going to interview the ancient Irish language in the historic town of Galway, I said to myself as the train rattled westward, and the pretty weather in which Ireland has attired herself is in keeping with the occasion. And on alighting from the train my thoughts ran on to the same tune, that the old grey city lay in the sun seemingly stirred in her sleep by the sound of her language, the remnant having come from the islands beyond the bay. The remnant surely, I repeated as I passed into a long low room pleasantly lighted by four square shining windows. A peasant sang uncouth rhythms, but Edward, the old melomaniac, sat with his hand to his ear.
How are you, Edward?
A traditional singer, he answered, come from the middle island. Listen to him.
And to please Edward I listened to the singer, but could catch only a vague drift of sound, rising and falling, unmeasured as the wind soughing among the trees or the lament of the waves on the shore, something that might go on
all day long, and the old fellow thatching his cabin all the while. The singer was followed by a piper, and the music that Michael Fluddery, a blind man from Connemara, drew from his pipes was hardly more articulate, and I began to think that the doleful pipes, now and again breaking into a jig tune, represented the soul of the Irish people better than any words could do, music being more fundamental. A long wail from the pipes startled me, and I was awake again in the long low room with May sunlight streaming through the square windows; Edward’s hand was still at his ear, just as if he was afraid of missing a note; and at a little distance away Yeats and Lady Gregory sat colloguing together, their faces telling me nothing. Dancers rushed in, hopped up and down, round about and back again, the women’s petticoats whirling above grey worsted legs, the tails of the men’s frieze coats flying behind them, their hobnails hammering a great dust out of the floor, and as soon as the jig was over the story-teller came in, and, taking a chair, he warmed his hands over an imaginary peat fire, and began to tell of a man lost in a field, who had to turn his coat inside out to rid himself of the fairy spell; and, glancing round the audience, I could see the eyes of the Irish speakers kindling (it was easy to pick them out), the wandering Celtic eye, pale as their own hills. Creatures of marsh and jungle they seemed to me, sad as the primitive Nature in which they lived. I had known them from childhood but was always afraid of them, and used to run into the woods when I saw the women coming with the men’s dinners from Derrinanny (the name is like them), and the marsh behind the village and the dim line of the Partry Mountains were always alien from me.
Edward, let’s get away. We’re losing all the sunlight.
He could not leave the Feis just then, but if I would wait till the story-teller had finished he might be able to get away for an hour.
We’re expecting a piper from Arran, the great piper of the middle island —
And a great number of story-tellers, Yeats added.
