by George Moore
Moore is thinking of Millais’s Ophelia, said AE.
Yes, and I was thinking of Evelyn Innes. The most literary end for her would be to have drowned herself in the fish-pond.
I’m sorry it didn’t occur to you.
It did occur to me many times, and I could see and hear the nuns coming down in the morning and finding her floating.
A body doesn’t float, AE said, till nine days after. He can’t shake himself free from the memory of Ophelia.
Conan, who had been left out of the conversation for a long time, was getting irritated, and he jumped into it as an athlete jumps into the arena.
Moore is wondering what thought, what fear, what scruple of conscience may have sent her down to that pond, as if it were not quite obvious what drove her down there. She was in love with John, who would not listen to her, and one night, finding that he had put bars on his window, she walked towards the pond, as Moore would say, like one overtaken by an irreparable catastrophe.
AE and I laughed. John looked a little puzzled and a little vexed, as he always does at any allusion to himself. The wicket-gate clanged, and Teresa came across the greensward, saying, Please, sir, you’re wanted on the telephone, and Conan disappeared quickly in the darkness.
We all wished — or perhaps it would be more exact if I said that I wished — to discuss Conan now that he had left us, and, seeking for some natural transition, I watched a moth buzzing round the globe of the lamp, and thought of the desire of the moth for the star. Conan would be able to repeat the poem, but that transition would be too obvious. It was the moon that gave me one — the yellow sickle rising on a leaden sky among the arches and chimneys of the convent.
We have heard what Conan thinks of the nuns; now I wonder what the nuns would think of Conan?
AE spoke of his reckless imagination and his power of perceiving distant analogies, connecting the capon and the priests with Yeats’s line, The unlabouring brood of the skies; and, better still, the house of symbols, the antique coffin, and the disconsolate dealer standing at the end of Kingstown Pier watching the furniture departing under a smoke pall.
I wonder what he will become?
I was much struck, John Eglinton said, at Meyer’s prophecy. Do you remember it? He said that he had known many young men like Conan, all very defiant until they were thirty; and every one, after thirty, had developed into commonplace fathers of families, renowned for all the virtues.
I wonder will that be the end of Conan?
A deep silence followed, and then, half to myself and half to my companions, I said:
Do you think he has shaken himself free from Catholic superstitions?
John Eglinton was not sure that he had done this.
Merely telling stories about the avarice of priests is not enough; a man must think himself out of it, and I’m not sure that Meyer isn’t right. Catholics are Agnostic in youth, quiescent in middle age, craw-thumpers between fifty and sixty.
Then we began to talk, as all Irishmen do, of what Ireland was, what she is, and what she is becoming.
There is no becoming in Ireland, I answered; she is always the same — a great inert mass of superstition.
Home Rule, said AE, will set free a flood of intelligence.
And perhaps the parish priest will drown in this flood.
AE did not think this necessary.
Do you think the flood of intelligence will penetrate into the convents and release the poor women wasting their lives?
I’m not thinking of nuns, John Eglinton said; those who have gone into convents had better remain in them; and Home Rule will be of no avail unless somebody comes with it, like Fox or like Bunyan, bringing the Bible or writing a book like the Pilgrim’s Progress — Moore is too much of a toff.
The Messiah will not wear the appearance that you expect him to wear. Salvation always comes from an unexpected quarter. It may come from AE, it may come from me, it may come from you.
John laughed scornfully at the idea that he should bring anybody anything.
It was against my advice, John, that you named your magazine after the goddess; you should have called it The Heretic.
You are quite right, AE. We want heresy in Ireland, for there can be no religious thought without heresy. Spain declined as soon as she rid herself of her heretics, if one can call Mohammedanism a heresy; at least, it was a competitive religion; the persecution of the Protestants in France was followed by the expulsion of the Jesuits and the confiscation of their lands. No country can afford to be without heretics, and, in view of the tendency of Catholic countries to rid themselves of their clergy, wouldn’t it be a good thing for the Irish Bishops to send Logue to the Vatican so that he might explain to His Holiness the necessity of Protestantism? You needn’t look further than Ireland for an apt illustration, holy Father. If, on the passing of the Home Rule Bill, we are set to work to persecute the Protestant minority, the terrible fate of exile may be mine. We must look ahead, holy Father.
Logue may beg His Holiness to withdraw the Ne Temere decree, said John Eglinton.
I wouldn’t advise Logue to be too explicit. The decree can be politely ignored by the Irish Bishops. When a Catholic girl who is going to marry a Protestant approaches the priest to learn in what religion her children shall be brought up, he will answer her: In the religion of your husband. But my husband is a Protestant. My dear daughter, we do not know if he’ll remain a Protestant; we rely on you to use every effort to persuade him from the errors of Protestantism, so that your children may be brought up in our Holy Church. And to the young man who wishes to marry a Protestant girl the priest will say: Your children will be brought up in the religion of their mother. But their mother is a Protestant. We do not know, my dear son, that your wife will remain a Protestant; if you will do all in your power to bring her into the one true fold, I am confident that you’ll succeed.
The idea is an ingenious one, said John Eglinton, and Teresa came across the sward to tell me that Mr Osborne, Mr Hughes, Mr Longworth, Mr Seumas O’Sullivan, Mr Atkinson, and Mr Yeats, were waiting in the dining-room.
Will you have coffee in the house or out here, sir?
We had better have it in the house. The table has to be cleared. And Teresa, please place a lamp at the wicket, for if you don’t you’ll certainly break my dessert service and hurt yourself. Come, AE, I’ve got a cigar for you that I think will please you, and afterwards you can smoke your pipe.
XX
IN WHAT PART of London do you think of settling? John Eglinton asked, as we passed out of the Library.
I haven’t given the matter a thought, I answered.
The fireman accosted John in the vestibule, and we waited till the last stragglers had passed out and the great doors were closed.
Would you care for a walk down the Pembroke Road and back by Northumberland Road over the canal bridge before going to bed?
Of course I should; I haven’t been out all day, but —
You’re tired?
No, I’m not tired; and in the hope that he would not speak again of my departure from Ireland, I fell into his step, a little annoyed with myself, however, for I had not spoken truthfully when I said: I haven’t given the matter a thought. I had even written to Tonks asking him to look out for a house for me, and he had found a house that would suit me in Swan Walk; his letter was in my pocket, and during my walk with John I could read in my thoughts: You had better come over and see it at once, for it is one of those houses that do not remain long without a tenant. I remarked whenever the conversation dropped: I shall have to warn all my friends in London of my coming, and when John bade me good night I returned to Ely Place determined to answer Tonks’s letter before going to bed. But something held me back, and turning from the writing-table I said: Tomorrow morning; and every morning after breakfast from that day on I was held back whenever I approached the writing-table with the intention of writing to Tonks. And it may have been to get the house in Swan Walk behind me that I wrote to Dujard
in, who is always looking forward to seeing me in an appartement in Paris with five or six rooms and enough wall space for my pictures, and pleasant armchairs in which we could sit smoking cigars and discussing The Source of the Christian River. A few weeks later he wrote saying he had discovered the needed appartement and would I come over at once? My trouble, said I to myself, has been transferred from London to Paris. I must write to the landlord of number four, Ely Place, telling him that I intend to give up the house at the end of the lease. But half-way across the carpet on my way to the writing-table I was stopped by an inexplicable apathy, and feeling a little scared went out for a walk and brooded on Rome and Canterbury.
There are past moments that retain the sensual conviction of a present moment, and one of these is the September evening of which I am speaking; a dark evening it was under the trees at the corner of the Appian Way. I must have come through the Clyde Road, admiring as I passed the tall pillared porticoes which give the villas a certain elegance, and the lofty trees, elms, beeches, dense chestnuts, and dark hollies, amid which the villas stand. In my humour it was a sort of solace to stop and to remember Auteuil. The rue de Ranelagh exists, doesn’t it? Elle donne sur la rue de l’Assomption, n’est-ce pas? Some such random association of names may have caused me to keep to the left in the direction of Upper Leeson Street, or it may have been that I kept on that way because the Tyrrells lived there before they went to live in Clonskeagh. I am aware of that dark September night at the corner of the Appian Way as I am of the moment I am now living, the sky grey above the trees and a sycamore leaf fluttering down from a great bough to my feet, and myself, yielding to a vague feeling of apprehension, stepping aside to avoid treading on it, and it was immediately after the fall of that leaf that temptation rose again, coming up, as it were, out of my very bowels; yet the temptation was not of a woman or any part of a woman, but a desire to enter the Irish Church in the sense of identifying myself with it.
Hitherto my desire had been merely to dissociate myself from a Church which I deemed shameful, whereas I was now conscious of a desire of unity with a Church in sympathy with my religious aspirations ... to some extent. But I had promised the Colonel not to declare myself a Protestant, meaning thereby that I would not write to the papers on the subject, nor call Dublin together to hear a lecture on the incompatibility of Literature and Dogma. But my promise to the Colonel, I said, keeps me out of St Patrick’s every Sunday. For me to be seen there every Sunday would be equivalent to a declaration of Protestantism. And to be kept out of my Cathedral is a great privation, for I should like to go there occasionally and to pray with the congregation; to pray to whom I know not, but I should like to pray. A little later I found myself standing before a tall iron gate peering through the bars, admiring some golden tassels. Golden rod, I said, and the borders, I am sure, are blue with lobelia. A sudden scent of honey warned me that arabis was there in plenty, and I walked on thinking of a dense cushion of pure white flowers till my steps were again stayed, and this time it was by the sight of — . The tree seemed like a quince, but the quince does not bear pink and white blossom, a bell-shapen blossom like a mallow. But neither tree nor shrub flowers at the end of August, and I walked on in a dream, awakened by another garden gate over which a syringa had flourished two months ago. Has heaven a more delectable scent than the remembrance of a syringa in bloom? I asked, and it was on my way home from Clonskeagh that I said to myself: Now if I go to London to see the house that Steer and Tonks have found in Swan Walk, or to Paris to view the appartement in the Boulevard St Germain that Dujardin has discovered, I shall not be able to declare my Protestant faith. Why not? I asked. Why not? And the answer came quickly: for there is nobody in London or Paris interested in such questions. So that is why I hesitate to write to my friends to announce my departure from Dublin, and the source of the lie that I told John on the night he invited me to walk with him down the Pembroke Road and back to Northumberland Road over the canal bridge before going to bed. How little do we know of ourselves! I muttered, and again I walked on, this time my mind awake and myself not a little frightened, for it seemed certain that I was prompted by an unworthy motive to declare myself a Protestant. Can I accept Protestantism wholeheartedly? I asked, and I remembered John Eglinton’s words: The Archbishop will certainly ask you if you can accept the divinity of our Lord. He will ask, too, if I can accept the resurrection of the body; and till I reached Ely Place I did not cease to seek in my memory for the passage in Corinthians, in which St Paul is at pains to elucidate the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. The apostle is anxious to convince his converts and himself. He is troubled by doubts, doubts that my Archbishop does not share for reasons he has discovered, and his reasons he will lay before me fully. All will then be well. Hereupon I walked to the writing-table and wrote:
Your Grace: For the last three years, since I came to live in Ireland, my thoughts have been directed towards religion, and I have come to see that Christianity in its purest form is to be found in the Anglican rather than in the Church of Rome. I am anxious to become a member of your Church, and shall be glad to hear from your Grace regarding the steps I am to take.
After addressing the letter I stood for a long time admiring it and trying to collect my thoughts sufficiently to decide whether I should take the letter to his Grace’s house and drop it into his box myself, or post it in the pillar. It should come to him through the post, I said, and after posting it I returned home and slept easier that night. And after breakfast my thoughts went at once to the Book, and by midday many spurious passages had been discovered — for instance, that very commonplace, reeking-of-Bishop passage: Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven, — a passage so obviously needful for the founding of a Church that the policeman round the corner, if one were to bring him in, would say, Well, sir, it doesn’t look much like the genuine article, do it? We’d call it fake up at the station. Yes, of course, fake — and the most blatant fake. It was necessary to have Christ’s authority for an apostolic succession and the right to collect money, to lay down the law, to judge others — all the things that Christ expressly declared should not be done; and in my indignation I compared the ordinary Christians, who accept this piece of ecclesiasticism as Christ’s words, to the artistic people we meet every day who admire equally Botticelli, Burne-Jones, Corot, Sir Alfred East, Turgenev, and Mrs Humphry Ward. The common man, I said, makes the same mess of pottage out of religion as he does out of art.
This sad thought caused me to drop into a long meditation, and I remembered, on awaking, that the passage from Matthew, the utility of which the policeman round the corner could not fail to see, had been improved upon by the Bishop who wrote about one hundred and fifty years after the Crucifixion. The need for a more explicit text than the one from Matthew had begun to be felt, and the Bishop supplied, Whosoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; whosoever sins ye retain, they are retained. And, so disturbed was I by the retouching of the text by ecclesiastics that I resolved to compile for my own use and benefit a list of the authentic sayings, and, calling Miss Gough, I dictated them to her, adding as a little appendix all the words that had obviously been inserted by the Fathers; for instance, Be not angry with thy brother without just cause.
Without just cause degrades Christ. These three words turn him into a reasonable and commonplace person. It will be interesting, Miss Gough, to have the Archbishop’s opinion upon these texts when I go to the Palace.
She answered that it would be indeed interesting, and I began to wonder why Dr Peacock had delayed to answer my letter; my letter was one that needed an answer by return of post. For his Grace cannot be without knowledge of the anxiety of mind that religious questions cause those who are sincerely religious, anxious at all costs t
o themselves to arrive at the truth. Miss Gough’s explanation was that his Grace might not be at the Palace, and this seeming to me not unlikely, for we were in September and the month was a fine one, I opened my Bible, and turning to the Acts, which is probably the earliest Christian document, I read: But a certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold a possession, and kept back part of the price, his wife also being privy to it, and brought a certain part, and laid it at the apostles’ feet. But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land? Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? Why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart? thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God. Whether Peter was ever Bishop of Rome is a matter on which ecclesiastical authorities are undecided, but there can be no doubt that he was, and is, and ever will be, Parish Priest in the county of Galway. Stephen was stoned in the streets of Jerusalem, and Paul standing by, I said, and rushed on to the story of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. It was not, however, until Paul bade goodbye to his disciples and friends at Ephesus that he won all my admiration and instinctive sympathy. In this most beautiful farewell, one of the most moving and touching things in literature, Paul takes us to his bosom; two thousand years cannot separate us — we become one with Paul and glorify God in him.
And these noble verses are not Paul’s single contribution to the Acts; he is so evident in these narratives of adventure that it is difficult to imagine how they came to be attributed to Luke. The narrative of the shipwreck and the journey to Rome could only have been written by a man of literary genius, and there are never two at the same time. The trial at Caesarea is Paul’s own rendering of his defence. Of course it is, and I wondered how any one could have entertained, even for a moment, the notion that Luke made it up. How did he make it up? From hearsay? Blind men and deaf knowing nothing of the art of writing! Luke may have edited Paul’s manuscripts, and his recension may be the farewell at Ephesus, the trial at Caesarea, and the journey to Rome. But it is certain that Paul’s voice, and no other voice, is heard in these narratives; and it is a voice that is always distinguishable from every other voice. We do not hear it in the Epistle to the Hebrews, nor do we hear it in the thirteenth chapter of 1st Corinthians, a chapter which I have no hesitation whatever in taking from Paul and attributing to a disciple of John’s. But I do not know if any other exegetist has rejected this chapter. Many have rejected the Epistles to the Ephesians, the Philippians, the first and second Corinthians, but it seems to me that I hear Paul’s voice in all of these. The Archbishop will no doubt be surprised that I should admit so much. All will go well if he doesn’t press upon me the Epistle to the Hebrews.
