by George Moore
Not only undignified, he said to me one day, but a very selfish course which I never should have suspected. Our common child is the Department, he muttered savagely in his beard as we leaned over Baggot Street Bridge, and as the boat rose up in the lock he added: And he has no thought for it, only for himself. The words, an unworthy parent, rose up in my mind, but I repressed them, and applied myself to encouraging Pecuchet to unfold his soul to me.
So long as the Department, he said, is represented in Parliament it takes its place with the Admiralty, the Foreign Office, and the other Departments of State, but unrepresented in Parliament it sinks at once —
I understand. It sinks to the level of the Board of Charitable Bequests, to the Intermediate Board, or to any of the other Irish boards on which it was your wont to pour your wrath when you were a Nationalist and a Plan of Campaigner.
Our joint efforts created the Department, and if he were to retire now like a man instead of clinging on and embarrassing the Government — So he is embarrassing the Government, I interjected. But without noticing my interruption Pecuchet continued: If he were to retire, I say, now, like a man, the Liberal Government, the Conservative Government, any Government worthy of its name, would seize the first opportunity to pick Bouvard out as a distinguished Irishman, who, irrespective of party or of creed, should be allowed to serve his country. It seemed rather shabby of Pecuchet to round like this on his old pal, but not feeling sure that I should act any better in like circumstances, I said: The Government asked Bouvard to stay on, and it was to oblige the Government — But the Government did not promise to keep him on indefinitely; if it did, the Department, as you have yourself admitted, would sink to the level of the Board of Charitable Bequests. He should resign, and not wait to be kicked out.
But he is engaged on a pamphlet on the economic man and the uneconomic holding, and the uneconomic man and the economic holding, and is convinced that his work should be published during his Presidency. He sits up till four in the morning. He has reverted to the Balzac method.
Why doesn’t he send for Rolleston? If not for Rolleston, why not Hanson? If not Hanson, why not Father Finlay? If not Father Finlay, why not Bond?
Bond is in Munich, I answered.
Weeks and months went by, and we were never sure that the morrow would not see Bouvard flung out of Merrion Street; he did not behave with much dignity during these months, complaining on every occasion and to everybody he met that the Government was treating him very badly, and darkly hinting that Roosevelt had asked him to go to America, and apply his system to the United States; and that if the Government were to go much further he might be induced to accept Roosevelt’s offer. But the Roosevelt intrigue, though it found much support in The Homestead, failed to impress anybody, and suddenly it began to be rumoured that Bouvard was locking himself in, and we were disappointed when about two o’clock the newsboys were shouting: Resignation of Misther Bouvard, and we all began to wonder who would take his place in Merrion Street, a beautiful street that had been bought up by the Department, and was about to be pulled down to make way for public offices, and mayhap the destruction of Merrion Street was Bouvard’s real claim to immortality.
In Flaubert’s book Bouvard and Pecuchet become copying clerks again, but Nature was not satisfied with this end. She divided our Bouvard from our Pecuchet. Bouvard returned to The Homestead dejected, overwhelmed, downcast, believing his spirit to be irreparably broken, but he found consolation in AE’s hope-inspiring eyes, in Anderson’s manliness and courage, fortitude and perseverance, and the prodigal was led to a chair.
Far happier, said Anderson, than the miserable Pecuchet, who never will get free from the toothed wheel of the great State machine that has caught him up; round and round he will go like a rabbit in the wheel of a bicycle.
AE looked at Anderson, who had never used an image before, and he took up the strain.
You have come back, he said, to a particular and a definite purpose, to individual effort, to economics. Bouvard raised his eyes.
We have not been idle, Anderson said, progress has been made; and he picked up a map from the table and pointed to five-and-twenty more creameries.
The co-operative movement, AE said, has continued; the farmers are with us.
That is good, said Bouvard.
Whereas with all its thousands the Department is effecting nothing. A cloud came into Bouvard’s face, for he hoped one day to return to the Department, and seeing through that cloud AE said: No, Bouvard, no, never hope to return again to that dreadful place where all is vain tumult and salary.
I hear, said Anderson, that Pecuchet is making arrangements to bring the School of Art under the management of the Department; he believes that by co-ordination —
I have heard nothing else but co-ordination since I left you; it has been dinned into my ears night, noon, and morning, how one must delegate all detail to subordinates, and then, how by the powers of co-ordination —
Yes, Anderson added, the man who is to take your place comes with a system of the reafforestation of Ireland, and Pecuchet agrees with him that by compromise —
The last we heard of Pecuchet, AE said, was from George Moore, who met him at the Continental Hotel in Paris one bright May morning, and Pecuchet took him for a drive, telling him that he had an appointment with the Minister of Agriculture. The appointment, however, was missed that morning, or perhaps it was delegated to the following morning; be that as it may, George Moore describes how they went for a drive together, stopping at all the book-shops, Pecuchet springing out and coming back with parcels of books all relating to horse-breeding.
He has spoken to me about the Normandy sires, said Bouvard.
George Moore said he was after Normandy sires, and went to Chantilly to view them next day.
And it seemed from Bouvard’s face that he could hear the braying of the vicious scarecrow ass that awaited him on his return to Foxrock.
X
I CANNOT THINK that any two men ever bore names more appropriate to their characters than Bouvard and Pecuchet, not even Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Are not the vanity and kindliness and stupidity of Bouvard set forth in the two heavy syllables? And do not the three little snappy syllables represent with equal clearness Pecuchet’s narrow intellect ... and cunning on occasions? Again, the dissyllable Bouvard evokes indistinct outlines, pale, perplexed eyes, and a vague and somewhat neglected appearance, whereas we naturally associate Pecuchet with a neat necktie, a pointed beard, and catchwords rather than ideas. Bouvard has tried to think out one or two questions, but Pecuchet was content from his early youth with words. He began with Nationalism, and when he met Bouvard he picked up Co-operation — the word; and when he got into the Department he discovered Delegation; and Heaven only knows how the word Co-ordination got into his head; but it stuck there, and he could not get it out of his talk, bothering us all with it. But nothing lasts for ever, and when he wearied of Co-ordination he happened to meet the word Compromise; and this word must have been a great event in his life, for it revealed to him the Pecuchet of his dreams, the statesman which he always believed to be latent in him, and which more fortunate circumstances would have realised. It was a great treat to hear him on the subject of statesmanship the day that Sir Anthony MacDonnell found himself forced to resign. I led him round Merrion Square and Fitzwilliam Square, over many bridges, through Herbert Street, round again, and on again; and on leaving him I should have rushed to the scrivener’s, but could not resist the temptation to run up the steps of Plunkett House to tell AE all about it, regretting all the while that my weakness would cost me many admirable pages. I shall never be able to improvise it all again. My memory is wonderful, I admit, but Pecuchet’s slumberous phrases, tall, bent weeds, and matted grasses, with the snapping of an occasional aphorism, a dead branch, should be dictated at once and to the nearest scrivener. I am paying dearly for the pleasure of your company.
I can see you, AE answered, his imagination enabling him to see us
in our walk, and his wit putting just the right words into his mouth — I can see you stopping at the pavement’s edge asking Pecuchet to repeat one of the dead branch aphorisms; I can see you hanging on his words with a sort of literary affection; and I could listen to you for a good deal longer, but I am due tonight at the Hermetic Society, and must get home. Won’t you walk a little way with me?
The proposal that we should walk a little way together reminded me that the old bicycle that had carried Bouvard’s ideas all over Ireland so valiantly was now enjoying a well-earned rest in some outhouse or garden shed. AE would not like to sell it for scrap-iron or to buy another; or it may be that he thinks bicycle riding unsuited to a fat man. He has fattened. A great roll of flesh rises to his ears, and his interests have gone so much into practical things that we think the AE of other days is dead. We are mistaken, the AE of our deepest affection is not dead, but sleeping; an unexpected word tells us that he has not changed at all. Relieve him, we say to ourselves, of his work at The Homestead, loose him among the mountains, and in a few weeks he will be hearing the fairy bells again. And happy at heart, though sorry to part with him, I returned home to a lonely meal, hoping to find courage about eight to do some reading.
A lecture was stirring in me at that time — a lecture showing that it is impossible to form any idea of the author of the plays. We can see Virgil, I said to myself, Dante, and Balzac, but Shakespeare is an abstraction, and as invisible as Jehovah. We know that somebody must have written the plays; but of one thing only are we sure — that Sidney Lee is always wrong. But I will think no more, I will read. I took down the dreaded volume, and a smile began to trickle round my lips as a picture of the dusty room at the end of many dusty corridors rose up before me, with AE sitting at a small table teaching that there is an essential oneness in all the different revelations that Eternity has vouchsafed to mankind.
I returned to my chair, and, falling into it, listened, hearing his voice getting calmer every minute, solemn and awe-inspiring when he commended toleration to the Hermetics. You need not be, he said, too disdainful of the essential worshippers of lacchus-Iesus, better known in Dublin under the name of Christ.... He, too, was a God. There were moments when it seemed to me that I could hear his voice refuting Colum, who had ventured to remind him of Diocletian. It was not for its Christianity that the ancient creed had persecuted the new, but for its intolerance and profanity.
There never was anybody like him, I said, and my thoughts melted into a long meditation, from which I awoke, saying: His conversion, or whatever it was, gave him such an iron grip on himself that, when Indian mysticism flourished in No 3, Upper Ely Place, he submitted his genius to the directors of the movement, asking them if they would prefer his contributions to the Theosophical Review in verse or in prose. The directors answered: In verse, and AE wrote Homeward Songs. But even these would not have strayed beyond the pages of the review if his friend, Weekes, had not insisted that the further publication of these poems would bring comfort and peace to many, and it appears that these poems consoled the beautiful Duchess of Leinster in her passing as no other poems could have done. AE could have been a painter if he had wished it; but a man’s whole life is seldom long enough for him to acquire the craft of the painter; and, setting life above craftsmanship, he had denied himself the touch that separates the artist from the amateur, and he had done well. Accomplishment estranges from the comprehension of the many, and for the first time in the world’s history we get a man stopped midway by a scruple of conscience or love of his kindred — which? If he had devoted all his days to art, his Thursday evenings at the Hermetic Society would have had to be abandoned, and the editing of The Homestead too. He could not be a painter and write eight or nine columns of notes and a couple of articles on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday. A man must have a terrible hold on himself to pursue the routine of The Homestead week after week without hope of reward, and it is this uncanny hold that he has on himself that makes him seem different from other men, for though in many ways more human than any of us, he wears the air of one that has lived before and will live again. How shall I word it? A demonic air, using the word in the Goethian sense, a Lohengrin come to fight the battle of others. One day he announced to us that he was going to publish the verses of his disciples, with a preface by himself, and we muttered among ourselves: Our beloved AE is going to stumble. But the volume was received by the English press as a complete vindication of Celtic genius. Contrairy John answered all the effusive articles that appeared with one sentence: The English have so completely lost all standard of poetic excellence that any one can impose upon them. A very materialistic explanation which we were loath to accept, preferring to attribute the success of the volume to the demonic power that AE inherits from the great theosophical days when he sat up in bed with his legs tucked under his nightshirt.
He was offered some hundreds of pounds by Lord Dunsany to found a review, but he had not time to edit it, and proposed the task to John Eglinton. Contrairy John wanted to see life steadily, and to see it whole; and Yeats came along with a sneer, and said: I hear, Lord Dunsany, that you are going to supply groundsel for AE’s canaries. The sneer brought the project to naught, and Yeats went away laughing, putting the south of Ireland above the north and the east and the west, saying that Munster was always Ireland’s literary portion. The first harpers of Ireland and the first story-tellers were Munstermen, and his own writers came to him from Munster. He had gotten nothing from Dublin. Murray and Ray and Robinson had all begun by writing for the Cork Examiner and the Constitutional. And AE may search the columns of Sinn Fein for ever and ever without finding, I said, a blackbird or thrush, skylark or nightingale.
The portentous critic giggled a little in his stride down the incline of Rathmines Avenue, and was moved to change the conversation from Sinn Fein, that journal having spoken of him disrespectfully since he had accepted a pension from the English Government. Griffith, the editor of Sinn Fein, or Ourselves Alone, had butted him severely in several paragraphs — butted him is the word, for in appearance and mentality Griffith may be compared to a ram. He butts against England every week with admirable perseverance, and while he butts, he allows all the poets of Rathmines to carol.
A pretty banner, I said as we crossed the bridge, for Sinn Fein would be a tree full of small singing birds carolling sonnets and rondeaux, ballades and villanelles, with a butting-ram underneath, and this for device: Believe that England doesn’t exist, and it won’t.
Yes, there is an element of Christian Science in our friend Griffith, Yeats answered, and we crossed the bridge.
You don’t think that AE will ever discover any one in Sinn Fein comparable to Synge?
Yeats threw up his hands.
It would be better, he said, if all his little folk went back to their desks.
When this remark was repeated to AE, he said: Colum was earning seventy-eight pounds a year when he was at his desk at the Railway Clearing House, and now he is earning four or five pounds a week. So Willie says that I shall never find anything that will compare with Synge. Well, we shall see.
And every Thursday evening the columns of Sin Fein were searched, and every lilt considered, and every accent noted; but the days and the weeks went by without a new peep-o-peep, sweet, sweet, until the day that James Stephens began to trill; and recognising at once a new songster, AE put on his hat and went away with his cage, discovering him in a lawyer’s office. A great head and two soft brown eyes looked at him over a typewriter, and an alert and intelligent voice asked him whom he wanted to see. AE said that he was looking for James Stephens, a poet, and the typist answered: I am he.
And next Sunday evening he was admitted to the circle, and we were impressed by his wit and whimsicality of mind, but we thought AE exaggerated the talents of the young man. True that all his discoveries had come to something, but it was clear to us that he was anxious to put this new man alongside of Synge, and this we could not consent to do. He was a little distr
essed at our apathy, our unwillingness, our short-sightedness, for he was certain that James Stephens was a new note in Irish poetry. Our visions were not as clear as his. I was conscious of little more than harsh versification, and crude courage in the choice of subjects. Contrairy John was confused and round about, and at the end of many an argument found himself defending the very principles that he had started out to controvert. It was clear, however, that he did not think more of James Stephens than we ourselves. Yeats was the blindest of us all, and it was with ill grace that he consented to hear AE read the poems, giving his opinion casually; and when AE spoke of the advantage the publication of a volume would be to Stephens, he answered: For me, the aesthetical question; for you, my dear friend, the philanthropic. AE was hurt, but not discouraged; and to interest us he told us stories from the life of the new poet, who was a truer vagrant than ever Synge had been. Synge had fifty pounds a year; but Stephens, a poor boy without education or a penny, had wandered all over Ireland, and would have lost his life in Belfast from hunger had it not been for a charitable apple-woman. AE was delighted at the thought of the material that his pet would have to draw upon later on when he turned from verse to prose, for AE divined that this would be so.
James Stephens has enough poetry in him, he said to me, to be a great prose-writer.
But when he left the apple-woman? I answered, always curious.
AE could not tell me how Stephens had picked up his education, or had learnt typewriting and shorthand and got employment in a lawyer’s office at five-and-twenty shillings a week — well enough for a girl who has a home, but a bare sufficiency for a man whose head is full of dreams and who has a wife and child to support. His life must have been very hard to bear, without the solitude of a room in which to write his poems or intellectual comradeship, until he met AE, a friend always ready to listen to him, to be enthusiastic about his literary projects. What a door was opened to him when he met AE! Of what help AE was to him in his first prose composition (no one can help another with poetry) none knows but Stephens himself; AE forgets what he gives, but it is difficult for me to believe that Stephens did not benefit enormously, as much as I did myself. How much that was I cannot tell, for AE was always helping me directly or indirectly. Shall I ever forget the day when, after three weeks’ torture trying to write the second chapter of Ave, I went down to Plunkett House to see if he could help me out of my difficulty?
