by George Moore
Is that so? I didn’t know. And he puffed at his pipe in silence. But do you think Ned Carmody would bother?
You think it introduces a streak of Sir Frederick Leighton? But who can say that an aesthetic aspiration may not break out even in a Celt, who is but a herdsman, the finest in the world, and I launched my epigram. But it met with no response. Edward’s face deepened into monumental solemnity, and I understood that the proposition that the Irish race was not destined to rise above the herdsman was too disagreeable to be entertained. Shutting our eyes to facts will not change the facts.
In the eighth and ninth centuries —
The decline of art was coincident with the union of the Irish Church with Rome; till then Ireland was a Protestant country.
A Protestant country! St Patrick a Protestant!
Protestant in the sense that he merely preached Christianity, and the Irish Church was Protestant up to the eleventh or twelfth century; I don’t know the exact date. I crossed the room to get myself another cigar; and returned, muttering something about a peasant people that had never risen out of the vague emotions of the clan.
We were talking about a very interesting question — that as soon as the Irish Church became united to Rome, art declined in Ireland. That isn’t a matter of opinion, but of fact.
Edward spoke of the Penal Laws.
But the Penal Laws are not hereditary, like syphilis, and Father Tom admits that Irish Catholics have written very little.
Edward was curious to hear if I still went for bicycle rides in the country with Father Tom, and smoked cigarettes with him in his bedroom.
What can it matter how intimate my relations may or may not be with Father Tom? We are talking now on a serious subject, Edward, and I was about to tell you, when you interrupted me, that one evening, as I was walking round the green with Father Tom, I said to him: It is strange that Catholics have written so little in Ireland. It is, indeed, he answered, and Maynooth is a case in point; after a hundred years of education it has not succeeded in producing a book of any value, not even a theological work.
I don’t know that Father Tom has produced anything very wonderful himself.
Very likely he hasn’t. Father Tom’s lack of original literary inspiration is a matter of no importance to any one except to Father Tom. The question before us is, Which is at fault — the race or Catholicism?
Edward would not admit that it could be Catholicism.
Don’t you think that yourself have suffered? I said, as I went down the stairs. You burnt a volume of poems, and if Father Tom had not abandoned The Psychology of Religion he would have found himself up against half a dozen heresies before he had written fifty pages.
It seemed to me that I was on the threshold of a great discovery.
XI
HIGHLY FAVOURED, INDEED, am I among authors, I said, pushing open the wicket; but before many turns had been taken up and down the greensward, I began to fear that my reading had been too particular. My heart sank at the prospect of the years I should have to spend in the National Library, for a knowledge of all the literature of the world was necessary for the writing of the article I had in my mind. Then with a rising heart I remembered that I could engage the services of some poor scholar — John Eglinton knew for certain many who had read everything without having learnt to make use of their learning. My quickest way will be to lay the nose of one of these fellows on the scent; he will run it through many literatures, and with the results of his reading before me I shall be able to deal Catholicism such a blow as has not been dealt since the Reformation.
A light breeze rustled the lilacs, and I stood for a long time, forgetful of my idea, seeking within the long, pointed leaves for the blossom breaking into purple and white, thinking that the tranquil little path under the bushes was just the one Peter would choose for philosophic meditation; but, feeling that the sunlight beguiled my mind into thought, I wandered round the garden, still thinking, but noticing all the while the changes that had come into it within the last few days. The great ash by the garden gate seems to be making some progress. The catkins are gone, and in about three weeks the plumy foliage will be fluttering in the light breezes of the summer-time. The laburnum blossom is still enclosed in grey-green ears about the size of a caterpillar, I added, with here and there a spot of yellow. And pondering on Nature’s unending miracles, I walked under the hawthorns, stopping, of course, to admire the hard little leaves like the medals that Catholics wear, I said, on my way to the corner where the Solomon-seal flourishes year after year, and the blooms of the everlasting pea creep up the wall nine or ten feet, to the level of the street, hard by the rosemary, which should perfume the whole garden, but the smoke from Plunkett’s chimney robs the flowers of their perfume. The little blossom freckling the dark green spiky foliage held me at gaze. Above the rosemary is thick ivy; it was clipped close a few years ago, but it is again swarming up the wall, and Gogarty, the arch-mocker, the author of all the jokes that enable us to live in Dublin — Gogarty, the author of the Limericks of the Golden Age, the youngest of my friends, full in the face, with a smile in his eyes and always a witticism on his lips, overflowing with quotation, called yesterday to ask me to send a man with a shears, saying, Your ivy is threatening my slates. A survival of the Bardic Age he is, reciting whole ballads to me when we go for walks; and when I tell him my great discovery he will say, Sparrows and sweet-peas are as incompatible as Literature and Dogma; and you will cut the ivy, won’t you?
And wandering across my greensward, I came to my apple-trees, now in bridal attire; not a petal yet fallen, but tomorrow or the day after the grass will be covered with them, I said. Gogarty told me yesterday how the poet rose early to see the daisy open. He describes himself a-kneeling always till it unclosed was upon the softë, sweetë, smallë grass. But if he liked the grass so much, why did he love the daisy? For if sparrows and sweet-peas are incompatible, it may be said with equal truth that the daisy is the grass’s natural enemy; and worse than daisies are dandelions. A few still remain, though poison was poured upon them last year. My flower-beds are a sad spectacle; wallflowers straggling — sad are they as Plunkett’s beard. Sweet-peas once grew there; the first year a tall hedge sprung up, despite the College of Science; for the soil was almost virgin then, and it sent forth plenty of canterbury bells, columbine, poppies, and larkspur; but year by year my flowers have died, and the garden will now grow only a few lilies and pinks, carnations, larkspur, poppies. At that moment a smut fell across my knuckles, and, looking up, I saw a great black cloud issuing from the chimney of the College of Science. Isn’t it a poor thing that all my flowers should die, so that a few students should be allowed the privilege of burning their eyelids for the sake of Ireland?
My garden is but a rood, and the only beauty it can boast of is its grass and its apple-trees — one tree as large as a house, under whose boughs I might dine in the summer-time were it not for the smuts from Plunkett’s chimney. One of its great boughs is dying, and will have to be cut away lest it should poison the rest of the tree. My garden is but a rood, and following the walk round the square of glad grass, I am back again in a few minutes, admiring tall bushes flourishing over the high wall, and, as if to greet me, the robin sings the little roundelay that he utters all the year — a saucy little bird that will take bread from my hand in winter, but now it is easy to see he is thinking of his mate, whose nest is in the great tangle of traveller’s-joy that covers the southern wall, somewhere near the bush where a thrust is sitting on her eggs — not so bold a bird as the robin. My curiosity last year drove her from her eggs; and it will be well for me to walk the other way.
Now, which will my countrymen choose — Literature or Dogma?
It is difficult to think in a garden where amorous birds are going hither and thither, so amorous that one cannot but be interested in them. If one had to think about books, one would choose to think of Gogarty’s extravagances, or Gogarty’s remembrances of the poets; and these would be es
pecially pleasant while a blackbird is singing the same rich lay that he sang by a lake’s edge a thousand years ago. A blackbird delighted the hermits of old time, those that were poets, and we are grateful to one for having recorded his pleasure in the bird’s song, and for the adjective that defines it, and to Kuno Meyer, who discovered the old Irish poem and translated it.
My garden is an enchantment in the spring, and I sit bewitched by the sunlight and by my idea.
A man of letters goes into a garden with an idea; he and his idea spend happy days under apple-boughs in the sun; he plays with his idea as a mother with her child, chasing it about the lilac-bushes; sometimes the child cries with rage, and the mother cannot pacify her baby, but, however naughty her baby may be, she never wearies; her patience is endless, and the patience of a man of letters is endless too. His idea becomes unmanageable, but he does not weary of it; and then his idea grows up, just like the child, passing from blue smock and sash into knickerbockers, in other words into typewriting, and as every mother looks back upon the days of smocks and sashes, we authors look back upon the days when our ideas were meditated in a garden within hearing of amorous sparrows in the ivy, the soft coo — for it is nearly a coo — of the jackdaw as he passes to some disused chimney where he nests, the shrill of the starling, and the reiterated little rigmarole of the chaffinch. The swallows arrive in Dublin in the middle of May; they fly over my garden in the June evenings, and I continued to think of them coming hither over the sea — like my thoughts, I said. And while listening to the breeze in the apple-boughs, my thoughts drift unconsciously across the centuries to the beginning of Christian literature. It began well, I said, with the Confessions of that most sympathetic of saints, Augustine, who was not all theology, but began his life, and began it well, in free thought and free love; his mistress and his illegitimate child endear him to us, and the music of his prose — those beautiful pages where he and Monica, his mother, stand by a window overlooking the Tiber! We are all spirit while we read the flight of his soul and Monica’s Godward, each sentence lifting them a little higher till he and she seem to dissolve before our eyes in white rapture.
I have read that Augustine owed something of the ecstasy of his style to the Alexandrian mystics — and this is not unlikely, for he came from Africa and saw the end of paganism and the beginning of Christianity.... He was Julian’s contemporary, a thing which never struck anybody before. Augustine and Julian — how wonderful! Landor should have thought of the learned twain as a subject for dialogue, or Shakespeare might have taken Julian for hero. The ascetic Emperor was a subject for him ... but I am thinking casually. Shakespeare could not have done much with Julian. So perhaps it is well that one day the sudden interruption of his secretary, Ben Jonson, jerked his thoughts away from Julian, leaving the Emperor for Ibsen — two rather clumsy dramas, Emperor and Galilean, containing, however, many splendid scenes. But there was more in Julian than the bleak Norwegian could understand, and Ibsen does little more than follow the bare outline that history gave him, including, of course, the story of the old priest sitting on the steps of a fallen temple with a goose in his lap — the only trace of ancient worship that the Emperor could discover in the countries he passed through while leading his army against the Persians.
Were Gogarty here he would tell me the verses in which Swinburne includes the Emperor’s last words; unable to remember them, I loiter, amused by the paraphrase of the lines from the Hymn to Proserpine that the circumstance of the moment had put into my head:
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galileo, the world has moved on since thy death, We cared hardly tuppence for Leo and on Pius we waste not our breath.
The last line is weak, I said — so weak that I must ask Gogarty to alter it, but I like The world has moved on since thy death.
I should like Ibsen’s Julian better if some reason for the Emperor’s opposition to Christianity were given; a mere caprice for the ancient divinities is not enough for a philosopher who might have foreseen the Middle Ages. A vision for him would have been a procession of monks, and over against them the lights of the Renaissance beginning among the Tuscan hills. I should like him to have foreseen Borgia. But which would he have liked — Alexander or Caesar? Neither. Their paganism was not at all of the kind that appealed to Julian, and the revival of Christianity with Luther at its head would have shocked him more than the gross materialism into which it had declined. He would have hated the Christian monk who said that every man likes a wife with rosy cheeks and white legs, which is true of every man except Julian, who chose for wife one whose age might be pleaded for his abstinence from her bed. Julian is one of Nature’s perversities; none but Nature herself would have thought of setting up an ascetic mystic to oppose Christianity — a real believer, for he prayed at the ancient shrines, looking on the Gods not merely as symbols, like many of his predecessors, but as Divine entities.
But after his death the belief nourished like a grain of mustard seed that the secret of life and death had been discovered in a monastery; and men no longer went to the academies of arts but into the wilderness to interpret the fable according to their temperaments. Christianity was soon split up into sects, all at variance one with the other; texts which could not be explained by common sense were disputed by the theologians, till the founding of a town became less important than the meaning of a text: that one, He knew her not till she had brought forth her first-born Son, was the cause of much perplexity and comment, the opinions of the theologians being divided, many going further than the strict letter of the text, averring that nothing had ever happened under the quilt in Galilee before or after the birth of the Saviour, Joseph being a virgin even as Mary. And battles were fought and many slain because men could not agree about the meaning of the word Filioque. The world went clean mad about the new God just come over from Asia. Gods had been coming for some seven hundred years. The first, or one of the first, was Mithras, and he had obtained a very considerable following; none can say why he failed to capture Europe. He brought the Trinity with him, I think — certainly the sacraments, but he forgot the pathetic story of the Passion. Mark wrote it well, and his excellent narrative turned the scale. Mithras was many hundred years before Jesus, and he was succeeded by —— my scholar would come in useful here. He would furnish me with a list of Gods, whereas the only names that come up in my mind at the moment are Adonis, Cybele, Attis, Isis, Serapis; but there were many more. Christian heresies came like locusts from the desert — Arians, Nestorians, Donatists, Manicheans. A century or a century and a half later the Mohammedans poured out of Arabia, crying, Allah, Allah, all round Persia and Asia Minor, fighting their way along the North of Africa, crossing the Straits into Spain, getting through the Pyrenees and the South of France as far as Tours.
The French seem to have been especially created to save us from Asiatics; they defeated Attila at Châlons two hundred years before; his God would not have plagued us with theology; he was plain Mr Booty. But if it had not been for the defeat of the Arabs at Tours we might all have been Mohammedans, and the question arises whether the succeeding centuries would have been crueller under Allah than they were under Jesus. The Middle Ages were the cruellest of all the centuries, and the most ignorant. It would be difficult to choose between Byzantine mosaics and arabesques; literature disappeared after the death of Augustine. Catholicism claims the cathedrals; the claim is a valid one, and it claims Dante, born in 1265, the great anti-cleric, he, who walks before men’s eyes like a figure risen from a medieval tomb pedantic, cruel, unclean, like the Middle Ages, venting his hatred on Popes, Cardinals, Bishops, priests, and on his own countrymen, hating them with the hatred of his own Asiatic God. But Dante is likewise the tremulous lover. There is the poet of the Vita Nuova and the poet of The Divine Comedy. Landor reveals both to us. The first in a love-scene in a garden between Dante and Beatrice. The lovers have wandered from some fête in progress, in the garden itself or in an adjacent house, to some quiet marble seat shaded by myrtles, and i
n this dialogue we see Dante pale and tremulous with passion, and Beatrice admonishing him with grave eyes and the wisdom of the seraphic doctor whom Dante met in the Paradise. One thinks of Tristan (the second act), when Beatrice begs her lover not to take her hands violently; she recognises him as heir to all eternity, and her own mission to inspire him to write the poem which will outlast all other poems and make them and their love wander for ever among the generations. Not in this dialogue, but in another, Landor sets Petrarch and Boccaccio discoursing on their great contemporary — Petrarch only saw Dante once, Boccaccio never saw him, but they talk about him as a contemporary. Landor does not seek to differentiate between Boccaccio’s criticism of Dante and Petrarch’s; ideas are impersonal, and every wise remark about Dante might have been uttered by either speaker. But would Petrarch have accepted the statement that less than a twentieth part of The Divine Comedy is good, as representing his own opinions? And would Boccaccio admit that he loved The Divine Comedy merely because it brought him happier dreams? It is Petrarch who says that the filthiness of some passages in The Divine Comedy would disgrace the drunkenest horse-dealer, and that the names of such criminals are recorded by the poet as would be forgotten by the hangman in six months. A little later in the dialogue Boccaccio reminds Petrarch that the scenes from the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso are little more than pictures from the walls of churches turned into verse, and that in several of these we detect the cruelty, the satire, and the indecency of the Middle Ages. Yes, and Boccaccio adds that he does not see the necessity for three verses out of six of the third canto of the Inferno, and he does not hesitate to say that there are passages in which he cannot find his way, and where he suspects the poet could not show it to him. Petrarch answers quickly that Dante not only throws together the most opposite and distant characters, he even makes Jupiter and the Saviour the same person, and in a prose lofty and hallowed the Italian poets continue their ingenious fault-finding page after page, but neither doubts the justice of placing Dante higher than any of the Latin poets.
